The thing I'm going to be focusing on, reading the indictment, is: *Does the legal theory of the indictment suggest it is illegal interference for a candidate to publicly claim after an election that the election was stolen?* Because it feels like buying into that idea will backfire if/when in future conservatives steal elections. It seems tho like they have lots of options for *specific* interference, EG, pressuring officials and whatnot, without going there. We'll see

Here's the indictment text, by the way. 45 pages, 4 counts. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.1.0_1.pdf

This certainly is an interesting paragraph to read in a federal court filing.

This section implies (I! Am! Not! A! Lawyer!) they are trying Trump in part for acts undertaken not only while President but *acting as* President. Does this blow a hole in, or require a judge to rule on the accuracy of, the Clinton memo https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/sitting-president%E2%80%99s-amenability-indictment-and-criminal-prosecution usually used to claim you can't prosecute a President, only impeach them? (Obvs this will be no protection for the co-conspirators.)

For the zillionth time I am yanking at my hair that the Democrats went out of their way to end Trump's second impeachment trial as quickly as possible and *not* call witnesses. Then again, maybe by having flubbed that so hard they bolster the case for this indictment, as this case seems to be evidence-grounded and the 2-year process of information gathering that made the indictment possible would plainly not be possible in the context of a Congressional impeachment trial?

I got several responses to this post to the effect that this rule, even if it exists, does not apply to *former* presidents, only *sitting* presidents. I read part of the 2000 memo and discovered it has this *extremely* interesting sentence in a footnote:

Repeating: I am not a lawyer, this is not analysis, this thread is me asking questions because I don't understand and I want to understand.

Reading through this I can't stop remembering these two tweets I made on Jan 6, when I was following livetweets/livestreams of the crowd (as far as I know, the same crowd that walked there from Trump's speech) outside the Capitol. The posts were made 46 minutes apart and the first was made just after an early event where the crowd surged forward but then was pushed back.

https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1346887471062282243

"I asked exactly the right question at exactly the right time, and it was of absolutely zero help or importance"

For different reasons than above, but this is also a remarkable sentence to read in a Federal court filing

*Deep breath*

Okay.

O…okay.

I think I'm a pretty cynical person, and I was mainlining anti-Trump news all of 2021, but there were still a couple headkick moments in that indictment for me. The indictment is a rollercoaster if you actually read it. It starts with basically a list of Trump's tweets, and the very end is well-known facts about Jan 6, but in between it gets batshit, in a way that precisely validates the most cynical people between December and February 2021

The question I asked upthread– "does the indictment suggest it's illegal to claim an election stolen?"— if it comes up at all, comes up only in that first section of the narrative, "The Defendant's Use of Deceit to Get State Officials to Subvert the Legitimate Election Results and Change Electoral Votes". The way they seem to sidestep first amendment questions is by repeatedly emphasizing that the various claims Trump made during this time were intentional lies. (1/2)

I'm (again) not a lawyer, so I don't know how in a court you establish someone is lying & not just wrong. The indictment doesn't seem to think this is hard. Their tack (section "The Defendant's Knowledge of the Falsity of His Election Fraud Claims", which is short and actually a pretty funny read) is to rattle off a LONG list of people, all of whom were strongly incentivized to help Trump, who told him the claims were wrong. I don't know how you defend against that. (2/2)

No longer concerned about precedent/1A, I now have a separate thing I wonder about the "merely claiming" parts: *Which tack* will Trump take to defend against this in court? Specifically, *will he attempt to still contend the claims* (section 12, a - f) *are true*? If he *does*, the prosecution will rip him to shreds. But if he *doesn't*, that's a huge humiliation in front of his MAGA followers, the kind of humiliation Trump's politics are usually about visiting on others

But never mind that. This first part of the indictment isn't the interesting part. The two things that stand out to me about this first part, the "Trump told a lot of public lies about the election", are just, one: I will be *shocked* if Giuliani isn't also charged; and two: it's simply *fascinating* how much this part of the conspiracy just looks like a bunch of grandpas working themselves up in a e-mail forward thread, sending escalating nonsense back and forth.

(That they're engaging in Racist Grandpa Behavior of course doesn't make it any less dangerous, given Rudy Giuliani has a law degree and Trump was held out to be mentally competent to be President of the United States of America and command nuclear weapons. And of course that the indictment documents both of them had been by this point in the narrative corrected in their email forward nonsense by roughly the best legal counsel available in the United States.)

Moving onto what I'd think of as "Part two", sections 53-69, the "fraudulent elector" scheme, this is where it gets really interesting. A lot of this has been reported but this is an unusually well-formed narrative. It would be easy to assume (I think much of America does) that because the entire Jan 6 scheme failed so completely there mustn't have been much to it. 53-69 shows it was an organized conspiracy that was *really trying to do this*. It wasn't a half-formed wish

Put a pin in that. "Part three" according to me, sections 70-85, the part about the Justice department, is the part with the headkicks I mentioned. I really can't stress enough that you just not bother reading this thread of mine, go up to the PDF, & read sections 53-105. A guide to the cast of characters: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/01/politics/co-conspirators-trump-indictment/index.html

Staying with me? Okay. so here's a question:

On Dec. 23, 2020, William Barr resigned and Jeffrey Rosen became acting attorney general.

Why?

I would like an explanation of that, preferably one the length of a book. Because that was *really weird*, & should have been treated as more weird back then. What it really *looked* like at the time was Trump wanted Barr to try to use the DOJ to overturn the election, Barr wouldn't, so Barr either quit or got pushed out and replaced with a guy Trump hoped would be more pliable.

The indictment doesn't address this question. Here's what the Indictment (§70-85) does cover:

*The indictment covers in meticulous detail a set of events where when Jeffery Rosen would not have the FBI put out public messaging calling the election into question, Trump tried to have "his guy" in the DOJ, "Co-conspirator 4" Jeffery Clark, installed as DOJ head, and was stopped literally only at the last second by threats of mass resignations of White House staff.*

To repeat: He tried to install a new Attorney General *just to get the DOJ to say election lies* (1/2)

Now note this *was* reported, as early as Jan. 23 2021. It was also covered in the Congressional Jan. 6 hearings, with witnesses, not anonymous sources (eg: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/23/1107217243/former-doj-officials-detail-threatening-resign-en-masse-trump-meeting ). I don't know if the prosecutor has *new* info here, though some of it is new to me. This still seems significant to me because this is the clearest, most narrativized version of this story I've seen. And that narrative is in service of charging Trump with a crime. So that's something. (2/2)

Parts 2 and 3 in this narrative (these have names not numbers in the document but they're too long to inline in this thread) are there to support part four, §86-105 , about Pence. The prosecutor describes a scheme leading to a point, and the entire scheme hinged on Pence. Pence, presiding the Senate on Jan. 6, was expected to [Part 3] point to the FBI letter (which didn't happen) to claim a controversy, and so accept the fake electors [Part 2] instead of the real ones.