Loose Lips 👄

What is an apartment block, if not a human shield for a city? https://t.co/Cj4m2ewVaH

— Tie Crimes (@TieCrimes) March 3, 2022

"Human shields" is in the category of "The gun went off." A way of denying responsibility, in other words, which credulous people find credible.

Dear everybody talking about what the 1/6 Committee has learned about Trump’s state of mind:

Different criminal statutes have different state of mind requirements, and it’s impossible to say “this shows he had criminal intent” in the abstract. 1/

— StandWithUkraineHat (@Popehat) March 3, 2022

IOW, stay away from "legal analysis" on Twitter. You know those ads for cancer treatment that mention, in a rush of words, the drug advertised is for "non-small cell squamous amorphous multi-valent stereophonic cancer with no T-cell consequences and RH-negative implications except on alternate Tuesdays as recorded on on a sliding scale of quantum measure"? Yeah, same thing applies to the law. It's complicated, and best left to those who understand it. If you want to think Trump is a bad guy, be my guest. If you want to think that finally the future includes a sure conviction and incarceration of Trump, I advise you to live more in the present. You know as much about the future as you do about the kind of cancer those TeeVee ads are describing.

Here is @JasonMillerinDC providing testimony to the Jan. 6 committee that Trump was told *by his own campaign* that he lost, and had been given a detailed breakdown.

So when Trump continued pushing his lies that he had won, he was knowingly trying to obstruct the certification. pic.twitter.com/ToF5NgKtlc

— S.V. Dáte (@svdate) March 3, 2022

"Knowingly" is a legal term of art which depends on a lot more than a "gotcha!" you can post on Twitter. This is the wrong understanding of “knowingly,” too.

For that to be a crime, Trump had to know that there was no lawful basis for Pence to do what he was demanding. Lawyers in WH (and pretty much everywhere) agree there was no such lawful basis. Problem: John Eastman told Trump that Pence did have that authority./3

— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) March 4, 2022

That’s not the defense Savage thinks it is. “A patch of ice doth not a winter make,” and a single ill founded legal opinion does not an absolute defense to a crime make, either. Let me make the abstract concrete:

Experts fear Wisconsin faces a dark future as Republicans push to undermine democratic norms https://t.co/yjVFSxMWyQ

— Raw Story (@RawStory) March 4, 2022

The videos, which were not presented with evidence that these nursing home residents had been declared incompetent by a judge and therefore had their voting rights revoked, are only supposed to give Republican voters and legislators the “feeling” that something bad happened.

 “Look no further than what Gableman does on the nursing home residents,” Rocco says. “These people are being asked questions in an absurd situation and they’re being asked questions that millions of voters in the United States might have trouble answering, and then this is evidence these people are not qualified to vote.” 

 “Leave aside the fact that this is not a decision that Gableman is allowed to make,” he continues. “Declaration of mental incompetence can only be made by a court after a thorough review of evidence, and he knows that, he’s a judge. And he knows the committee knows it and he knows they know he knows it. The only thing you can conclude from that is that this is intended to be a spectacle that, while there’s no credibility to the evidence that’s presented, creates the feeling that there’s some evidence there.”

Most of the “legal analysis” out there is similarly “intended to be a spectacle” to create a feeling that something, anything, is Justice. We have a system for that. Imperfect as it is, it’s better than leaving the nutters and those who think they know. Unless you like daily frustrations and being misled by people who have their own agendas, leave this to the prosecutors who know what they’re doing.