#Trump plutocracy series

Debs, a Socialist, ran for President from a prison cell in Atlanta, after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, for speaking against military recruitment efforts. There are good reasons that this is so: one can only imagine the mischief local prosecutors would get up to otherwise. He is not done with the last election and is expected to declare his candidacy in the next one soon polls indicate that, if the Republican primaries were held now, he would win the nomination.Ī criminal conviction in itself, though, would not block Trump from returning to the White House. The real source of anxiety may be not Garland’s tactics but Trump’s. Last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters that “no person is above the law in this country,” a remark he repeated when asked if it applied to a former President. (A related criminal investigation is under way in Georgia.) And yet there is some discontent among Democrats at the pace of the D.O.J.’s work Representative Adam Schiff, a committee member, recently depicted the department as being woefully behind. In late June, the department issued subpoenas in connection with an investigation of the Trump team’s “fake electors” scheme. More than eight hundred and fifty people have been charged so far. It’s not news to the D.O.J., of course, that laws were broken. The committee itself cannot file criminal charges, though it can refer its findings to the Department of Justice. A greater area of contention is how he might be held accountable. It has already done much to establish Trump’s personal culpability in an illegal scheme to disrupt the electoral tally and commit fraud, and possibly in witness tampering and other crimes.

(The last thing a staff member recalled Trump saying before he retreated to the White House residence on the evening of the sixth was “Mike Pence let me down.”) The committee is still collecting evidence-including by enforcing subpoenas served on unwilling witnesses, such as Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, who on Friday was convicted of contempt of Congress.

#Trump plutocracy series

(There are plans for a new series in September.) The testimony and documentary evidence presented in the hearings made clear that what Trump expected-and pressured-Pence to do was to take part in a coup by claiming that he had the power to reject states’ electoral votes. The hearing was the eighth and final installment in a series that began on June 9th. (He called Rudy Giuliani, his lawyer, too.) He also fended off pleas from various officials to stop the violence, and instead put out what the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, described in videotaped testimony as a “terrible tweet” targeting Vice-President Mike Pence, who was being hunted by the mob. The answer: he sat in a dining room near the Oval Office, watched Fox News, and called senators to tell them that they should object to the election results-in other words, they should concede to the mob’s demands. By then, the assault had been going on for more than three hours the Thursday hearing focussed on what he did during that time. In that video, he told his rioting supporters to go home, but he also said that the election had been “stolen from us” and that he loved them. Trump’s staff apparently saw the video as a sort of do-over of one he had released at 4:17 P.M. He’s still not ready: a week and a half before the hearing, Trump allegedly called Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin legislature, to demand that he retroactively take the state’s electors away from Joe Biden. All he was willing to say was that “Congress has certified the results” it had done so at close to four o’clock that morning, in a building still littered with debris from the attack. But, as indicated by outtakes from the filming which were shown last Thursday, at a hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6th, Trump wasn’t ready to send that message. The video was meant to calm his supporters and to reassure the country that the election was, indeed, over.

He’d been given a script for a video statement on the events of the previous day, when, at his prompting, a mob had assaulted the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the electoral-vote tally.

“I don’t want to say, ‘The election is over,’ ” Donald Trump said on January 7, 2021.