For all of the smart people (including some lawyers who follow me!) who keep saying that they have unanswered questions about problems with the election, please read this. washingtonpost.com/politics/us-at…
Whatever questions or concerns you have are simply not based in fact.
I understand that Fox News and various conservative websites keep insisting that there are real questions that remain unanswered.
But they are misleading you.
They're aren't real questions. Just misleading statements and flat out lies meant to create doubt in your mind.
Even the acting US Attorney in Atlanta was surprised that there was nothing to the allegations of voter fraud in that state.
I'm sure he watches the same news programs and reads the same websites you do.
But know he knows that all of those stories are false.
And it's not just this single federal prosecutor.
Bill Barr publicly stated that there was no credible claim of voter fraud that could have affected the election.
And he did that *after* making it easier for DOJ to investigate those claims.
He *wanted* to find fraud and didn't
Even the Trump campaign isn't willing to stand behind claims of fraud when it would actually matter--in court.
Giuliani told a federal judge in PA that the campaign wasn't alleging fraud.
More recently, the campaign voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit in GA before trial.
Lawyers will know why Giuliani may say one thing at a press conference and another thing in court:
If you lie to a judge, you can lose your license to practice law.
If you lie at a press conference, you are just another politician.
Now, I've had a few lawyers point out to me that the big claims of election fraud--the ones being peddled by Sidney Powell--haven't been tested in court. Those lawsuits keep getting thrown out for jurisdictional problems like standing.
But this is a really bad argument.
Those claims *would* get tested in court if the Trump campaign had brought them, rather than letting Powell and random other MAGA types bring them (think of the Texas lawsuit).
But the campaign isn't adding itself as a plaintiff in these cases. Why not?
It's not because the campaign doesn't know about the claims or the lawsuits.
Sidney Powell has been in the Oval Office to meet with the President herself.
It's more likely that Trump's lawyers don't want to get sanctioned for frivolous claims.
But there is an alternative, more nefarious explanation for why Trump's lawyers aren't bringing these fraud claims to court:
They don't want a definitive legal ruling that the election was, in fact, accurate and fair.
That ruling would expose their big lie.
The Trump campaign want smart people to question the election and to assume that there must be a fire under all of the smoke.
But, if you think about it, there's no fire. If there were, Trump's lawyers would have done more than press conferences--they would have litigated.
If there were something to these fraud claims, Bill Barr would have filed indictments and given press statements about how his worst fears of voter fraud--fears he talked about *before* the election--were true.
The old and new federal prosecutors in GA would have done the same.
I know that this country is full of people with different levels of legal knowledge and critical thinking skills.
But the comments that I've gotten from a handful of conservative lawyers over the past couple months about this election have been disheartening.
Some of them may have stopped following me at this point because, since Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol last week, my tweets have gotten a lot more political.
But if they're still hanging around, I hope they'll think about this & reconsider whether they're being fooled.
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So strange that Law & Crime article questioning whether the Capitol rioters could be prosecuted for felony murder and it *never discusses* the most obvious predicate felony—burglary
As I will be teaching my first year criminal law students later this semester, felony murder is often a question of charging strategy for prosecutors. The defendant has often multiple felonies, some of which trigger felony murder and some of which don’t.
This article makes the classic mistake of analyzing only one possible underlying felony—sedition—and not the other, more mundane felonies, including burglary.
It’s the sort of error that loses students a lot of points on their final exam!
I was very glad to see so many GOP officials condemn the violence and damage caused when Pres Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol.
But I am troubled to see how many continue to either equivocate about--or even explicitly support--false claims of election fraud.
If Republicans want to push for legislation that would make it more difficult to vote, they are free to do so in Congress and statehouses.
But they need to clearly and forcefully denounce false claims that Joe Biden won the presidency because of fraud.
The only reason that Pres Trump was able to rally his supporters and tell them to march to the Capitol on Wednesday was because the GOP failed to denounce his false claims about a stolen election.
Many members of Congress supported his claims even after the Capitol was stormed.
I have seen so many people (including folks on #lawtwitter) comparing what happened at the Capitol yesterday with the violence and property damage that happened in some cities during protests last summer.
Let me explain what is wrong with that analogy . . . . .
To clarify -- my disagreement is not with those who are pointing out that law enforcement didn't respond with the same level of force and arrests at the capitol as it did during BLM protests.
That comparison deserves to be drawn and it raises some very important questions.
My disagreement is with those who are saying that what happened at the Capitol yesterday is so similar to what happened during protests this summer, that people's reactions ought to be similar--a suggestion that those reacting more strongly now are hypocritical.
David has a great point--a lot of people's intuitions about whether DAs have a duty to bring all plausible charges are often bound up in their policy preferences about the particular types of charges/defendants.
To be clear, people often draw a distinction between a prosecutor's decision not to bring charges in an individual case and a decision not to charge a certain category of cases.
These arguments are reminiscent of the arguments we saw in the debate over Obama's DACA policy.
The argument essentially boils down to the idea that prosecutors' executive power gives them discretion in individual cases, but decisions not to prosecute entire categories of cases are akin to decriminalization and so they infringe on the legislative power.
Let’s talk about this story. It discusses a NJ bill that is designed to make sentencing less harsh. The bill is being held up because a lawmaker introduced an amendment that would eliminate the mandatory minimum for one type of corruption. nytimes.com/2020/12/17/nyr…
First, let's talk about the framing of the story. The lede is about how the lawmaker who introduced the amendment has a girlfriend whose son is facing corruption charges. The story minces no words: It says the amendment was added specifically to help that man.
The idea of powerful people helping each other escape punishment is a powerful one. It is the stuff of headlines and outrage, and so I'm not surprised that this is how the story is being framed.
The President is on Fox News right now saying that maybe the FBI and the Department of Justice were involved in the supposed election fraud in the 2020 election.
When will this nightmare end?
Update: He says "people keep asking" DOJ whether they are looking into all of the fraud allegations, and they have been told "yes, we are looking"
But "no one" has told him that they've arrested anyone who has done anything wrong.
Now Trump's asking why DOJ still hasn't done anything to prosecute Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, and John Brennan.
I'm no fan of Bill Barr's, but this bizarre interview suggests that he has been resisting an awful lot of pressure from this president to persecute political enemies.