FR Jan6 post
For anyone who lived through Election Night 2020, and watched Trump winning comfortably at 11:00 P.M. EST, only to lose that massive lead by the following morning, skepticism about the election will always remain intense. (And it seems more people are getting skeptical by the day.)
That skepticism is hardened by stories of municipalities that actually stopped counting during the night and reopened with large Biden pluralities.
Seems 570 Jan6 people are still held in D.C.’s jails (when post was written).......incarcerated for so long.......without trial.
The 570 were mostly kept in “restricted housing,” which translates to solitary confinement or other extreme denials of privileges normally granted to the general prison population.
So a large number of Americans are being held without trial under conditions that the Geneva Conventions would object to. Moreover, they violate the Constitution’s promise of both a speedy trial and the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment (especially before a trial is carried out with the proper due process and an actual conviction).
cnbc.com
Kevin Breuninger, Dan Mangan
8/1/23
Trump sought to ‘exploit the violence and chaos’ of Jan. 6 with lies, indictment says
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump was criminally charged Tuesday with illegally conspiring to overturn his election loss to President Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump was indicted on four federal felony charges that centered on his alleged efforts to discount legitimate votes in the 2020 presidential race and subvert the election itself.
The first charge alleges a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. “by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit to obstruct the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election,” according to the Justice Department.
The second details “a conspiracy to impede” the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional proceeding where the election results were certified.
The third was “a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have that vote counted,” said DOJ in a statement.
The charges mark the unprecedented third criminal indictment against the former president since he launched his latest bid for the 2024 Republican nomination. No other U.S. president, current or former, has ever faced criminal charges.
The election probe was led by special counsel Jack Smith, who also oversaw a separate investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at his resort home Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House in 2021.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in that case, which is set to go to trial in May.
An attorney who is representing former President Donald Trump in his latest federal criminal indictment vowed to use the charges to “re-litigate every single issue in the 2020 election in the context of this litigation.”
The case gives Trump “an opportunity that he has never had before, which is to have subpoena power since January 6 in a way that can be exercised in federal court,” attorney John Lauro said in a Fox News interview.
Trump is charged with conspiring to overturn his election loss in the 2020 presidential race by pushing fraud claims he knew were false, which prosecutors say amounted to an effort to obstruct the electoral process.
Lauro’s comments suggest that the former president’s legal strategy in this case could include an attempt by his lawyers to portray Trump’s myriad false claims of widespread election fraud in late 2020 as legitimate concerns at the time, regardless of whether or not they were correct.
— Kevin Breuninger