5/29/2023 0 Comments People press political party quizI suppose the committee has dangled the latter a little bit. Is your sense that the crimes we would likely see regarding Trump would be more related to the certification than the actual physical destruction of property and assault of police? The mob may have been a tool to put the first scheme into effect, but there were also laws broken by the mob itself, such as invading the Capitol and assaulting police officers. And the second is the law-breaking that occurred from the mob on January 6th. The first is Trump trying to obstruct the certification of Biden as the next President. There are two connected but separate things. And, by interfering with that in a way that is fraudulent, that could be a violation of that obstruction statute. That could be an obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress. It could be proved, again, just by pressuring Mike Pence to refuse to certify. That would be one way, but I think that’s much harder than you need. Again, it could be proved by a number of different methods. That would relate specifically to the certification effort on January 6th. Any of those things could suffice for conspiracy to defraud the United States.Īnd what about a conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding? Alternate slates of electors, or trying to persuade Georgia to change the outcome in that one state. It could be that they’ve got seven different ways that they’re going to try to show conspiracy to defraud the United States, but any one of them is enough to obtain a conviction. Liz Cheney said there are seven different schemes that they’re going to try to prove in the next few weeks. And that would be an obstruction of an official proceeding. But it could also simply be his efforts to pressure Mike Pence to refuse to certify the vote. And that could do it, because that was one way that the certification was obstructed. Sometimes people think about the big picture, that you have to tie Trump to the physical attack on the Capitol. And it could be as simple as getting Mike Pence to refuse to certify the vote when he had a duty to do so. And so, in this instance, it would be something like, Trump and others conspired to defraud the American people and interfere with the proper transfer of Presidential power. It is frequently used in cases of tax violations, but what it means is that someone with a fraudulent intent did something to obstruct or impede the official functioning of government. It is sometimes referred to as the Klein Conspiracy, after a case named United States v. The statutory citation is Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 371. What does that mean, “conspiracy to defraud the United States”? But, with that in mind, it seems to me that some potential crimes here are: first, conspiracy to defraud the United States and, second, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. And the Justice Department will be the first to tell you that it investigates crimes and not people. It would require a full investigation to see if you can mount sufficient evidence. If a case is made against Trump, what precisely would it be for? (She resigned from her position, which she’d held since 2010, in the early days of the Trump Administration.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump’s mind-set is so important to any criminal case, the arguments he might make to defend himself, and whether the Justice Department is too concerned about the optics of charging a former President. If the former President is charged, what exactly would the charges be, and how tough would the case be to prosecute? To talk about this, I recently spoke by phone with Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into January 6th, but this is not the first time that Trump has appeared to be in the crosshairs of prosecutors. The biggest question hanging over the hearings is whether they will contribute to a criminal case against the former President. Nevertheless, Trump continued to encourage protests against the election’s certification, and expressed sympathy for the view that Vice-President Mike Pence deserved to be killed. The House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has begun to hold public hearings, laying out, in explicit detail, how Donald Trump was repeatedly told by key advisers that he fairly lost the 2020 election, among other revelations.
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