In the hours since special counsel Jack Smith announced charges against Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Trump’s allies and the right-wing media have been pushing a weird theory that the special counsel wants to punish Trump with either hundreds of years in prison or … death.
Yes, death.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Making A Martyr”On Tuesday evening, nearly three years after President Trump launched a sweeping attempt to reverse his loss in the 2020 election, criminal charges were brought against him.
Trump is the only President in U.S. history to refuse to accept his loss, and to try to marshal the forces of the government to stay in power. In 2020, that involved months of lies and baseless legal efforts which culminated in the violent storm at the Capitol building on January 6.
Now, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has brought charges against Trump in connection with the plot. The charges, returned in an indictment on Tuesday by a D.C. grand jury, include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
Trump faces four counts — one for each charge. His first court appearance is scheduled for Thursday at 4 p.m. before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Smith is trying to hold Trump accountable for a scheme that, TPM has emphasized, extended far beyond the mayhem on January 6. Through fake electors, false affidavits, misleading lawsuits, bogus claims of voter fraud, and much more, Trump led a campaign to con the nation into believing that victory in the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
I mentioned this in my conversation with Josh Kovensky in our special edition of the podcast this morning. But I want to expand on it here. Jeff Clark comes off as a bit of a dweeb. And yes, I’m talking about his physical appearance. Some of my best friends are dweebs, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In most cases I wouldn’t mention a person’s physical appearance. But I do so in this case because I think it’s shaped people’s reaction to this part of the story. Because he’s a bit nebbishy looking and because the whole plan was so crazy many people have looked on Clark as a kind of ridiculous figure.
Yet this comment about the Insurrection Act is a reminder that there’s nothing funny about the guy. He had a plan and was fairly cavalier about his plan to … let’s be direct about it, murder countless numbers of Americans who weren’t willing to let their Republic be torn away from them.
This was their plan: stop the count, allow Trump to remain President and then when everyone freaks out declare martial law and kill a bunch of people in order to overawe the civilian population and force people to accept it. That’s really the plan. This is a dark, evil, degenerate mindset, all for the purpose of retaining power against Constitution and law.
The Senate office buildings on Capitol Hill were locked down and staff were ordered to shelter in place Wednesday afternoon for about an hour and a half in response to what Capitol Police called “an internal security threat.”
No suspicious activity was ultimately identified.
In an initial email sent at 2:46 p.m. EST to Capitol Hill staff and credentialed reporters, Capitol Police advised staffers to move into the nearest office, stay away from external doors and windows, remain quiet, and silence electronics.
Videos posted to Twitter from the Hill showed people evacuating the cluster of three Senate office buildings located on the north side of the Capitol complex. The Senate office buildings house offices for individual senators and committee meeting rooms.
Capital Police said at the time that they were responding to a report of an active shooter but cautioned that “we do not have any confirmed reports of gunshots.”
There were some early indications that it was a false alarm, as reported by Politico Hill reporter Nicholas Wu:
Despite the indications that the incident was a false alarm, Capitol Police continued to urge staffers to shelter in place.
About an hour after the first shelter in place email, House Sergeant at Arms put out an update, saying, “access and operations to the U.S. Capitol Building, CVC, and House Office Buildings will continue as normal,” while the Capitol Police continued to respond to a security incident in the area of the Russell Senate Office Building. The House Sergeant at Arms also said there are “no confirmed reports of gunshots” as of 3:52 p.m. EST Wednesday.
At 4:19 p.m. EST, the House Sergeant at Arms said Capitol Police conducted sweeps of all Senate Office Buildings and surrounding areas and found “no suspicious activity nor persons of interest.”
Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of former President Donald Trump details a sweeping criminal conspiracy to reverse his loss in the 2020 election. Smith described a marked shift away from legitimate election challenges toward a strategy in which the President and those close to him used “knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function.” And Smith identified one day as the key turning point when the plot veered from political gamesmanship into deliberate falsehoods: November 13, 2020.
Continue reading “Newly Revealed Text Messages Show GOP Officials At Ground Zero Of Election Conspiracy Outlined By Trump Indictment”Tucked 81 paragraphs into the election crimes indictment of Donald Trump, there’s a reference to a plot even more sinister that was never fully carried out.
Continue reading “Jeff Clark’s Insurrection Act Remark Was Even Worse Than It Sounds”I wanted to note two points about possible Trump defenses that haven’t so much been ignored by legal experts as perhaps simply assumed and thus left unstated. It’s worth stating them explicitly.
Continue reading “Was That Wrong? And Other Improbable Trump Defenses”In recent weeks I’ve written a number of posts looking at the possible schedule of Trump’s various criminal trials next year. (We now have three cases of the four we’ve expected. The fourth in Atlanta is likely to come this month.) In those posts either I or readers have suggested either that the January 6th case is likely to come after the Mar-a-Lago documents case or that neither trial is likely to be held prior to the 2024 presidential election. But several recent events — most but not all of which we learned about yesterday — throw those assumptions into some doubt.
Continue reading “Could the J6 Trial Go First?”From the legal theories to the obscure characters, much of what was in Jack Smith’s January 6 Trump indictment is stuff readers may have seen over the last three years at TPM. That, of course, is why you’re a member. (Unless maybe you’re not a member. In which case you should absolutely become a member!)
Some examples:
Continue reading “You Read It Here First”We’re going to have two episodes of the podcast out today. Kate Riga is on vacation this week, so last week we recorded this week’s episode with the expectation that the indictment would come down before it aired today. That episode is looking at the full range of criminal and civil cases that will be unfolding for Donald Trump in 2024. Again, we recorded it assuming this indictment was going to happen. Because it has happened, Josh Kovensky and I recorded a special instapod this morning about the new indictments themselves. That episode will show up first in your podcast feed and be followed later in the day by the regular pod with Kate and me.
