The same question came up with Trump's phone calls to the Georgia AG when the President was essentially threatening the AG to 'do something'. There is apparently a lot of materiality to the notion of how much the President actually believed the issue of fraud.
Which is an altogether amazing new line of defence: "If you believe the lie thoroughly, you're literally less culpable!"
It's entirely plausible that people 'get things wrong' in the real world.
But once you have a guy who will believe everything that's to his benefit, and claim that everything not to his credit is a lie ... well then you have a problem.
It's really, really worrisome how many intelligent people do not see quite obviously the game he is playing.
It's one thing for people who watch Judge Judy every day to maybe have difficulty with a lie so forcefully presented, but most people should know better.
It's also interesting how it's viewed from outside the bubble of the US where the ration of 'believers' is vastly lower, and yet, at the same time there are even die-hard cohorts of them outside the border as well.
There was a 'Stop The Steal' min-march in Montreal Canada of all places.
You can’t kill someone because you think you are acting in self-defense. You have to actually be acting in self-defense. Moreover, pressuring officials to manufacture fake evidence, or act as if they had evidence they don’t have, surely ought to be illegal even if would have been possible to find real evidence.
That's not true at all. The bar is typically whether a reasonable person would believe that they are at risk of grave bodily harm. It obviously depends on the jury, but there have been a number of shootings where the shooter believed they were acting in self-defense, but were not, and they were ultimately acquitted.
We're talking about a different kind of crime.
The law states someone has to 'knowingly try to interfere etc' but the challenge is that you'd have to prove that Trump knew he lost.
If he truly believed he had won, well, then he'd just be trying to fix the election, not rig it, right?
The call was along the lines of how Mafia bosses talk, so that they don't implicate themselves.
Here are some details [1]
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-s-call-g...
I think they ought to adjust the laws here. Elected officials should maybe be able to provide evidence for review, but that's it.
But surely he was knowingly try to interfere even if he had in fact won.
In any case I think it’s unlikely that Rudi will be claiming insanity.
I think the funniest part of this is that there are columns here that contain "[number] [sentence]" formats, as if the person who built it doesn't quite get the idea of a spreadsheet.
Actually the same people, or at least political faction, did. Over the idea of looking into and correcting the mistakes, of course, not over the idea of letting a potentially mismanaged election stand without further review.
Google “Brooks Brothers riot” for one example.
Agreed on adults that somehow are now missing or more concerned with their Twitter feeds than their responsibilities.
Yes. This is airtable is used on a number of websites that claim to show Biden cheated. It's a form of gish galloping - look closer at any of these, there's a reason why no court seriously entertained them. But when presented with so many items, it seems like there is something to it(of course, there's not).
This is false on several levels. One, several cases went through trial to a verdict. Second, of those that did not, several were thrown out on grounds that while perhaps “procedural”, include as part of their standards review of the actual and proferred evidence in the light most favorable to the party to be ruled against.
For instance, where cases were dismissed for “failure to state a claim”, this was not usually a finding that the Trump (or allied) party failed to enumerate the legal elements of an offense, but that they failed at the step beyond that which is required, to enumerate specific more detailed facts that actually would satisfy each of those elements, and proffer evidence which would make a prima facie case for each required point. (That is, which would suffice to prove the case in the absence of any counterevidence from the other side.) When cases are, as many of the Trump & allied cases were, thrown out for this reason, the court is making a finding on the merits: it is finding that the party being ruled against would lose on the merits if the case went to trial, all the evidence the moving party has offered were accepted at face value, and the other party just chose not to present anything at all to counter it.
(Now, its true that in many cases the same lawsuits dismissed on this grounds were also dismissed on a other grounds – standing and laches, particularly – but it is misleading to say that the merits of the claims and the value of the evidence the plaintiff’s had was not considered.)
That's not the way lawyers use the term "on the merits". See, e.g., [0].
> The distinction between decisions that rest on the merits rather than on procedural grounds is important because a decision on the merits is considered final and is thus bound by res judicata... Decisions that do not rest on the merits, however, are not bound by res judicata because the claims were not properly heard. Thus, these claims may be brought forth in a subsequent case, excluding dismissals due to a failure to state a claim.
In addition, from Federated Department Stores, Inc. v. Moitie [0]:
> The dismissal for failure to state a claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) is a "judgment on the merits." See Angel v. Bullington, 330 U. S. 183, 330 U. S. 190 (1947); Bell v. Hood, 327 U. S. 678 (1946).
Your comment appears to imply otherwise. Did I misread it?
> conflating "on the merits" with determining facts by considering evidence.
Do you mind elaborating on the difference?
My comment wasn't very clear. Sorry about that. Usually we think of a judgment "on the merits" as one that occurs after considering both the law and facts of a case.
> Do you mind elaborating on the difference?
In the case of a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, the judge in theory assumes that the facts alleged in the complaint are all true. If he dismisses the case, it is because as a matter of law the plaintiff cannot win. In such a case it is incorrect to say that the evidence was found to be lacking because the evidence was never considered.
I feel like now the disputable phrase is "considering the evidence". Is the judge not considering the evidence when deciding that the presented facts/evidence are insufficient to support the complaint, even when assumed to be true? How would such a ruling differ from a hypothetical one where the case goes to trial and the defense does literally nothing? Is the evidence considered in the latter case but not the former?
I'm fully aware of how lawyers use the term, but that's immaterial to the import being given to the term in this discussion. To the extent that whether a case was decided “on the merits” is being used as a proxy for the argument that the probative value of the evidence actually in the Trump campaign’s hands in claims of election fraud has not been evaluated, it is only valid if you consider any decision (even of “procedural” rather than “on the merits” in traditional legal categorization) where, in fact, that evidence was weighed by a standard at least as favorable as it would be at trial and nevertheless found wanting.
Edit: I think we're in agreement that "on the merits" here is being conflated with a trial that considers the probative value of evidence. They are not the same thing.
It is also true that most of these were tossed for things like standing. But the idea that courts "refused to hear the evidence" is exactly the kind of fake news / Big Lie argumentation that spawned the cases to begin with.
Court cases contesting elections are routine and normal. We deal with them in every close election. These failed because they were bad cases, not because of any technical machination or deep conspiracy.
In the ones I’ve read that were tossed for standing or laches, most of them (possibly all, I don’t remember a specific counterexample) were also tossed for failure to state a claim, because while the plaintiffs did usually recite the textbook elements of a cause of action, they either failed to allege specific factual claims that would establish each of those elements, or the evidence that they proferred to support those specific fact claims was insufficient to make a prima facie case.
Such a dismissal, while “procedural” in a sense, is also a decision on the merits – it is literally exactly a finding that if the plaintiff proved everything the evidence they claim to have could support regarding the claims they made, and the other party just let it all pass without challenge or counterevidence or presenting their own case, then the plaintiff would still lose on the merits.
That part seems bizarre. Surely he ought to still be culpable is he said false things with the intention to damage Dominion, even if he can convince the court that he believed the things he said. Unless, of course, you're talking about an insanity defense or a claim of provocation, but those a very different matter, and I highly doubt that's a viable route.