The person who should write such a thread is @BobbyChesney, who did pioneering studies of how conspiracy and material support law changes pushed the criminal law further and further to the left of boom.
https://twitter.com/kathleen_belew/status/1316149211830931457
But the bottom line as pertains to this case is threefold: (1) conspiracy law is very broad. If you agree with one other person (or 12) to commit a serious felony and take a single overt act in furtherance of that agreement, you are guilty.
(2) under case law, the FBI is legally allowed to get deeply involved in facilitating your conspiracy by way of investigating it without getting anywhere near the line of entrapment, which requires that they induce you to commit the crime.
And (3) while the material support for designated terrorist groups is not available in these situations, I believe the related statute—which prohibits material support for terrorist activity—is available. @BobbyChesney will correct me if I’m wrong on this.
That means that you can, at least theoretically, be charged with conspiring with someone who turns out to be an FBI agent to provide material support for terrorist activity. Which is to say the violence can be pretty damn inchoate and the activity still unambiguously criminal.
And while I have seen cases in which I think this power has been stretched in ways that make me deeply uncomfortable (thinking about one mentally ill Muslim American man whom I don’t believe posed a real threat, in particular), I very much agree with @kathleen_belew that we...
...need these laws. It’s important for the FBI to be able to get to the left of boom—and this case is a good example of why.
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