Politics

Okay so there's an aspect of law that's really needs to be considered when we talk about this 3rd indictment. Motive. So Trump's lawyers are asking the public to simply look at the actions that were taken. Which are questionable, needs a judge to iron out, but not massively culpable for the particular crimes Trump is being indicted on.

But when we look at what the DA is submitting before the judge, we see Trump talking, having arguments about knowing that what they are doing is questionable, and still continuing those things to elicit a much larger plan of delaying the counting of votes. This is where the conspiracy sets in.

It isn't that the actions themselves warrant the greatest concern, it's the underlying motive Trump had for doing the things he did that moves it into potentially criminal actions.

Like filing a lawsuit isn't any kind of bad thing. But if you file a lawsuit knowing that you're just doing it to enact some other aspect outside of justice for a perceived wrong, that's a frivolous lawsuit or can be a violation of the False Claims Act. Say your former boyfriend or girlfriend accuses you of some crime because you broke up. Filing the lawsuit isn't wrong in of itself, but when you consider the background details for why this lawsuit exists, oh boy are you in trouble now.

And that's where we are at with Trump. His angry speech is just that, a speech, but when there's emails going around indicating that Trump needs to fire up the group so they'll go marching on the Capitol, and that during that invasion of the Capitol Trump will start calling key people to try and get different slates accepted to be counted. Well now all that combined, that's the problem. No one thing in isolation is some massive "Oh no", but all together and it begins to become clear that the entire point was to "convince by any means necessary" any hold outs to Trump's idea of how the election should progress. That is a violation 18 USC §§ 1512(c)2.

From Trump's lawyer:

What’s the unlawful means? There was an effort to get alternate electors, which is a protocol that was used in 1960 by John Kennedy. And it was a protocol that was constitutionally accepted

And the thing is, it isn't that he just tried that. It's that there is a stack of emails and text indicating that the people attempting to work with Trump to do that thing knew that they were doing something that wouldn't be accepted by Congress, were told by members of Congress that they wouldn't accept it, and that a "plan" to "convince them" that they should accept it was needed to get them to accept it. That's the massive difference. It isn't the action in isolation that's at issue, it is Trump's team indicating that they will need to, in broad terms, help convince members of Congress to accept that new slate. That's interference. If you've cannot accept the answer and then motivate yourself to do things to change that answer you've already gotten, that's interference. Just like you cannot just keep on, keeping on in a courtroom after a Judge has ruled. It's over with, you got your answer.

So yeah, there's an attempt by Trump's lawyers to grossly simplify the conspiracy their client is currently facing. This is a pretty age old tacit of being a lawyer. It's like those bad videos where people jump out of nowhere on purpose to be hit by a car, then attempt to sue the driver, and then they fail at their act. Yeah, you can simplify that as "oh well they're just trying to cross the street..." But it's the motive that drove them to do the thing they did, they were motivated to do something in the commission of highly questionable conduct for monetary gain. So maybe they we're able to successfully convince the insurance you hit them or you had a dashcam. So technically speaking, they didn't get away with it. But just because they didn't actively defraud your insurance does not mean they did not still commit a crime.

That's the really important aspect of these new charges. All of the actions in of themselves aren't gross violations of the law, but they are manifest of a something deeper that was being carried out to defraud the US Government and overturn an election. That deeper part is what this indictment points out.