January 6th - Related Articles
Should a citizen of the United States, even a former President, be eligible for election if said citizen committed acts which appear to conflict with the 14th Amendment's "Insurrection" clause?
Are the Congress and Judiciary branches of the United States government able to put aside partisan politics, thirst for power and scare tactics to ensure that the principals put forth by the Founding Fathers are adhered to?
.... If not, could this democratic republic be headed toward autocracy or worse?
Appeals Court Rejects Trump’s Immunity Claim
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismissed Trump’s arguments that his efforts during the final months of his presidency to undo his loss, including by promoting false claims of voter fraud, fell within the ambit of his official duties.
“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the unanimous panel wrote in a 57-page opinion. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.”
Source:
The Wall Street Journal online
By Sadie Gurman and C. Ryan Barber
Updated Feb. 6, 2024 10:47 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/appeals-court-rejects-trumps-immunity-claim-0ef2d636?mod=mhp
Trump paid me to find voter fraud. Then he lied after I found 2020 election wasn't stolen.
Can a steady diet of lies and innuendo overcome the truth?
In November 2020, former President Donald Trump asserted that voter fraud had altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The day after the election, his campaign hired an expert in voter data to attempt to prove Trump’s allegations and put him back in the White House.
This article was written by that expert.
In-depth analysis indicated that there was "no evidence of voter fraud sufficient to change the outcome of any election".
The findings detailed in depositions taken by the Senate Select Committee investigating January 6th. The findings were also subpoenaed by both Federal Special Investigator Jack Smith and District Attorney Fani Willis. Results were also shared with Mr. Trump's White House Chief of Staff.
However, repeated cries, lies, speeches, and lawsuits have hardened "hearts and minds" against the truth....
Source:
USAToday online / Opinion (via Yahoo! News)
By: Ken Block; Tue, January 2, 2024 at 5:17 AM EST
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-paid-voter-fraud-then-101742863.html
The charges facing Trump in the Jan. 6 investigation, explained
This article from NPR online provides a brief overview of the federal charges brought against Mr. Trump by Special Federal Prosecutor Jack Smith in Washington, DC.
Source:
npr.org online
By Jaclyn Diaz ; Updated August 2, 202312:37 PM ET
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/01/1191493880/trump-january-6-charges-indictment-counts
Retired conservative federal judge urges Supreme Court to disqualify Trump from office
A former conservative federal appellate judge is urging the Supreme Court to keep Donald Trump off the ballot, arguing the ex-president’s effort to cling to power after his 2020 election loss was “broader” than South Carolina’s secession from the US that triggered the Civil War.
Source:
CNN online
By Devan Cole,
Updated 9:31 AM EST, Tue January 30, 2024
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/politics/luttig-conway-supreme-court-trump-insurrection/index.html
January 6 Is Exactly What the Fourteenth Amendment Was Talking About
The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, concerning his role in the January 6 coup attempt, began on February 9, 2021. Almost exactly three years later, on February 8, 2024, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over whether that last, desperate effort to illegally hold on to power might now disqualify Trump from returning to the Oval Office.
Many commentators have argued that the nine justices should overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision barring Trump’s candidacy for reasons of prudence alone. But these arguments ignore that keeping Trump on the ballot is also a choice—one forced by Trump’s own actions—and that just as there are risks to barring him, there are also risks to disregarding the clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Source:
The Atlantic/Ideas
By: Quinta Jurecic; January 12, 2024, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/january-6-14th-amendment/677098/
How Seditious Conspiracy Figures into the Jan. 6 Attack on the US Capitol
Seditious conspiracy is "the official name in federal law for sedition — the organized encouragement of rebellion or civil disorder against the authority of the state. The rarely used, Civil War-era statute invoked in the Jan. 6 cases requires prosecutors to prove a defendant conspired to use force to oppose US government authority or to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any US law. "
"Treason is more serious [than seditious conspiracy], defined in the US Constitution as actively making war against the US or giving “aid and comfort” to its enemies"
"Six men convicted at trial of seditious conspiracy, and three more who pleaded guilty to the crime, are members of the Oath Keepers, which the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] describes as a large, loosely organized anti-government militia involving many current and former law enforcement officials and military veterans." The leader of the Proud Boys, a Yale Law School graduate, was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Additionally, "four men convicted of seditious conspiracy at a trial in May and one who had pleaded guilty in October are from the Proud Boys, a far-right neo-fascist organization". One of the Proud Boys was sentenced in August to 17 years in prison. Another received a 15-year term".
Source:
The Washington Post online.
Analysis by Peter Blumberg | Bloomberg
September 1, 2023 at 10:09 a.m. EDT
After the passage of the first Enforcement Acts, written to protect the civil rights of the formerly enslaved, Congress created a bipartisan committee in 1871 to investigate reports of vigilante violence against freed people and their white allies in the states of the former Confederacy. The men and women who spoke to the committee attested to pervasive violence and intimidation. There were innumerable reports of whippings and beatings and killings.
“[F]or much of the last 150 years, Reconstruction’s critics trivialized Black witnesses’ testimony in the Klan report and used it instead to discredit the period’s democratic possibilities.”
It is difficult to look at this episode [vigilante violence during Reconstruction], which transpired a little more than 150 years ago, and not think of the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, which compiled a similarly painstaking record of fact on the effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Thousands of pages of testimony. Tens of thousands of hours of video footage.
[D]ispite unambiguous evidence of insurrection, there is a concerted effort — out of either skepticism or denial — to present the events of Jan. 6, including the schemes that led up to the attack on the Capitol, as something else. The legitimate protest of an exuberantly disappointed group of ordinary American voters, perhaps, or — in the rendering of Trump’s most devoted apologists — a last-ditch effort to save the Republic itself from the illegitimate grasp of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
Source:
The New York Times online / Opinion
By: Jamelle Bouie, Jan. 19, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/opinion/jan-6-trump-memory.html