Preponderance of evidence against Trump guilty of conspiracy to defraud the US

What Donald Trump’s Trial Might Look Like- Echo essay published in The New Yorker by Amy Davidson Sorkin.

Presidents have been impeached, but none has ever been asked, after leaving office, to turn himself in for arraignment. The January 6th committee’s final actions could help to change that.

On October 14th, the day after the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol voted to subpoena Donald Trump, in response, released a long letter of “anger, disappointment, and complaint.” 

He said, the committee had “perpetuated a Show Trial the likes of which this Country has never seen before,” with “no Due Process, no Cross-Examination, no ‘real’ Republican members, and no legitimacy.” (And, he added, it got “very poor television ratings.”) The committee, of course, was not staging any sort of trial; it was conducting an inquiry into a series of events that culminated in Congress members fleeing a mob. But at its final public meeting, on December 19th, it voted to send criminal referrals to the Department of Justice regarding four felonies that Trump might have committed. If he wants a proper trial, the committee may have helped him to get one.

This photograph gets my vote for being the best in her career! House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rips a copy of President Donald Trump's State of the Union address at the Capitol on Feb. 4, 2020.

One of the referrals is for violating a statute in the U.S. criminal code that deals with inciting, assisting, or giving aid or comfort to an insurrection. The others are for obstruction of an official proceeding (namely, the counting of electoral votes), conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy to make a false statement. Referrals like these do not oblige the D.O.J. to begin a prosecution, or to pursue the exact charges that they specify. Initially, those choices lie with Jack Smith, who, in November, was named special counsel for the department’s investigation into January 6th, with a focus on Trump. (His remit also includes the question of whether Trump improperly kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.) If Smith recommends that Trump be charged, Attorney General Merrick Garland would have to sign off, and a grand jury would have to approve an indictment.

There is no exact model for what such a trial might look like. Presidents have been impeached, but none has ever been asked, after leaving office, to turn himself in for arraignment, with the prospect of arrest if he failed to comply. No judge has had to consider the question of cash bail for a billionaire who once lived in the White House, or asked the former head of state to turn over his passport. The voir dire of potential jurors would be an unprecedented spectacle; so would the mug shot.

Trump, however, would not be alone in facing trial as a result of January 6th. The D.O.J. has charged some nine hundred defendants, and has successfully prosecuted several members of the Oath Keepers on charges that match or parallel some of those in the committee’s referral. Trump, unlike the Oath Keepers, did not enter the Capitol on January 6th. 

From the White House, though, to take one example from an executive summary of the committee’s final report, he “repeatedly and unlawfully pressured” Vice-President Mike Pence to reject several states’ electoral votes in favor of fraudulent ones. (John Eastman, the former law professor who helped Trump devise what became known as the “fake electors” scheme, was the subject of committee referrals, too.)

The committee’s nine members—including the Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger—ran a tightly managed process. In televised hearings, they were able to play the snippets of videotaped testimony that they judged most effective. Prosecutors at trial, by contrast, have to deal with the live testimony of the witnesses before them. The rules of discovery mean that Trump’s lawyers would have access to full transcripts of depositions and to any exculpatory material the prosecutors possess. Evidentiary disputes, such as the one over whether Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that a Secret Service agent told her about an altercation in a Presidential vehicle counted as inadmissible hearsay, would be addressed not by tweets but by litigation. Another point of contention would be whether Trump knew that he’d lost the election and was thus acting corruptly. Witnesses such as Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, and Greg Jacob, Pence’s counsel, could speak to that. But Trump could call witnesses, too—and prosecutors could cross-examine them. He would also get to decide whether to take the stand himself, a decision in which his vanity would surely be a factor.

Trump has made many frivolous claims of executive privilege, including one, involving a document request from the January 6th committee, that the Supreme Court rejected. A trial would no doubt bring new objections and appeals, some of which might be more substantive. All of this would take time, and the first Republican primaries for 2024 are fast approaching. An indictment and a trial would not legally bar Trump from running for President again. (Indeed, any attempt to block him from office if he’s convicted would face what are almost certainly insurmountable constitutional challenges.) And whoever is sworn in as President in January, 2025, would have the option of pardoning Trump.

But a Presidential pardon would be limited to federal crimes. The first indictment of Trump related to January 6th may come at the state level, in Fulton County, Georgia, where District Attorney Fani Willis appears to be in the late stages of her own investigation. Willis has a repertoire of Georgia laws to draw on, including a statute on criminal solicitation of election fraud, which would seem to describe the phone call in which Trump demanded that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” him more than eleven thousand votes. A special grand jury has been sitting for months, and has heard testimony from a range of witnesses, including Governor Brian Kemp. Georgia would likely be the focus of any federal trial as well, because the Trump team’s attempts to overturn the election there were especially blatant. In addition to the Raffensperger call, which was recorded, the effort to advance the fake-elector scheme in Georgia left a rich paper trail. Incidentally, Georgia trials, unlike federal ones, can be televised.

Trials inevitably have uncontrollable aspects, even when the defendants are more predictable than Trump. They are rightly harder and riskier for prosecutors than hearings are for members of Congress. What’s at stake for Trump is his freedom, not just his television ratings: the charges that the January 6th committee referred carry sentences of up to twenty years in prison. But the adversarial nature of the process can be highly productive. The committee came up with a good deal of evidence; a trial is where it can be tested. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 2 & 9, 2023, issue, with the headline “Trump on Trial?.”

Trump knew he lost: Dereliction of duty

Echo opinion letter published in the The Repository 

CantonRep.Com, an Ohio newspaper.

The House committee investigating the January 6, riot did what the Republicans opposed.

A screen above the committee reads "Trump knew he lost" as the panel summarizes its various findings about the January 6 insurrection.

On December 31, 2020, members of the Oath Keepers planned to supply and store weapons in the Washington area. Led by Edward Vallejo, one of the members of the Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy, they coordinated a “Quick Reaction Force,” which consisted of Oath Keeper members armed with weapons in the areas just outside Washington. A hotel in Arlington, VA, was used as the base for the “Quick Reaction Force.” Weapons were stored at this hotel and members of the Oath Keepers stayed there.

The Democrats, along with two GOP members, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, brought forth evidence, witness testimony, video footage of what happened before, during and after the Capitol assault to overturn the 2020, election. Former President Donald Trump said it was a political witch-hunt, that the committee members were thugs.

It was historic and symbolic; never in the history of the U.S. government had a sitting president incited a violent insurrection on democracy to stay in office. Everyone who testified before a live audience did their due diligence, as well as those who testified behind closed doors.

The evidence gathered, the testimony painted a road map to Mark Meadows and ex-president Donald Trump. Does Trump get charged by the Department of Justice or do they give him a pass? The laws were equally written; the rich will be treated as the poor are treated in a court of law, and that no one is above the law.

Dahnaad Ahshaad, Canton,Ohio

On January 6, 2021, a right-wing mob stormed the U.S. Capitol at the urging of President Donald J. Trump in an attempt to prevent the certification of presidential election results. But the attack didn’t come from nowhere. It was the culmination of a year of increasingly radical activity by a slew of extremists around the country. They mobilized against racial justice protests, COVID-19 prevention measures, and voting rights for all Americans, and were goaded on by the president and politicians on the right.

Matthew Pottinger appears to be the highest-ranking White House official to resign that day, although Cabinet secretaries also resigned in response to January 6.

Rep. Liz Cheney swears in Sarah Matthews and Mathew Pottinger on July 21: 

How did the evil January 6th rioters plan? More chronology is revealed.

Echo opinion: What were the Capitol rioters thinking?
By Byron York published in the Texas Lubbock Avalanche-Journal newspaper. 

January 6th white domestic terrorism - QAnon and Oath Keepers: 

It's one of the most basic questions of the U.S. Capitol riot investigation: What was the rioters' plan? What did they think was going to happen when they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6th, as Congress certified the results of the 2020 election Electoral and College votes?  (President Joe Biden = 302/ former guy = 232)

For the rioters, who are alleged to have committed serious criminal acts, more information is coming out in court papers filed in the Justice Department cases against them. And now, specifically, there is a new indictment against nine people who are said to be members or associates of the Oath Keepers militia.

It's a revealing document. The Oath Keepers are visible in many photos from the riot. They were dressed in military-style outfits and pushed their way up the Capitol steps in what is called a "stack" formation. (They were not the ones who initially broke into the building.)

The indictment shows what they were saying to each other on social media in the days and weeks before the riot. Read together, their social media posts suggest people living in a kind of fantasy world in which they could take the Capitol -- while carefully obeying Washington D.C.'s strict gun control laws and carrying no firearms -- and change the course of U.S. history, and then head home.

The social media posts suggest that some of the Oath Keepers thought Trump was specifically calling on them to storm the Capitol. For example, on Dec. 19, 2020, when Trump tweeted, "Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!" it appears they took that as Trump telling them specifically to make it "wild" through paramilitary action.

"He wants us to make it WILD that's what he's saying," defendant Kelly Meggs wrote on Facebook on Dec. 22, 2020. "He called us all to the Capitol and wants us tomakeitwild!!!!" (All the quotations from the Oath Keepers' social media posts include their original punctuation, capitalization and spelling.)

The Oath Keepers discussed among themselves whether they should bring guns to the event. On Dec. 25, Meggs wrote on Facebook: "We are all staying in DC near the Capitol we are at the Hilton garden inn but I think it's full. Dc is no guns. So mace and gas masks, some batons. If you have armor that's good."

A few days later, on Dec. 31, Meggs wrote: "You guys gonna carry? Ok, we aren't either, we have a heavy QRF 10 min out though." By QRF, Meggs apparently meant a "quick reaction force" that would be stationed nearby and be ready to support the Oath Keepers whenever needed.

On Jan. 3, defendant Jessica Watkins wrote to another defendant, Bennie Parker: "We are not bringing firearms. QRF will be our law enforcement members of Oathkeepers." Parker responded: "Good to know." So the Oath Keepers would take the Capitol basically unarmed. Indeed, the indictment states that on Jan. 6, the group "prepared themselves for battle before heading to the Capitol by equipping themselves with communication devices and donning reinforced vests, helmets and goggles."

It does not allege that they took weapons to the Capitol, and certainly not guns. The Oath Keepers' idea, apparently, was that if there was trouble, they would be backed up by the quick reaction force. But it is unclear what that force would be. In the government's memo seeking to jail Watkins, prosecutors wrote that on Dec. 30, Watkins messaged Thomas Caldwell, another defendant, about the plan.

Caldwell mentioned "a quick reaction force bringing the tools if something goes to hell. That way the boys don't have to try to schlep weps on the bus." In another exchange, Watkins said that, "If it gets bad, they QRF to us with weapons for us." If there was no problem, "we can have mace, tasers, or night sticks. QRF staged, armed, with our weapons outside the city."

But who was going to be in the force? There was vague talk of buses full of Oath Keepers arriving outside Washington to back up the small group at the Capitol. But nothing was specific. At one point, Caldwell mentioned a person, not charged and referred to as "Person Three" in the indictment, who was trying to book a room at the Comfort Inn in Ballston, Virginia, right across the Potomac from the District of Columbia.

Caldwell wrote that Person Three chose the hotel, with its easy access to town, "because he feels 1) he's too broken down to be on the ground all day and 2) he is committed to being the quick reaction force and bringing the tools if something goes to hell."

That was the QRF (Quick Reaction Force)? A guy who wasn't up to spending all day in Washington, so he was going to hang around the Comfort Inn in Ballston unless he was needed to overthrow the U.S. government? Taken together, the court papers portray the Oath Keepers as a ragtag group living in a delusional world, planning a delusional operation to bring about some sort of delusional outcome.

They imagined themselves saving the country with their reinforced vests, helmets and goggles. It would be the understatement of the year to say that they had not thought things through. Still, their cases are critical to understanding the U.S. Capitol riot. Was Trump responsible for their actions? Did he incite them? Or did they hear something other than what he actually said?

Were they like the unbalanced characters in history who have taken violent actions in the false belief that some charismatic figure, say a rock star or a religious leader, had ordered them to do it? There's still much more to learn about the riot.

Indeed, with the Capitol Police refusing to release even the most basic information about the event, it is difficult to understand much of what went on. But, the criminal cases are picking up steam, and through them, we can finally get a better idea of what happened.

(Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.)