The Trump Crime Family - Legal Issues

[finnbow]

Originally Posted by whell

You couldn't have picked a worse analogy. You're comparing speech that is protected under the first amendment with an "act" that ended up killing people.

My point was that an overt act (including speech), even if legal, is something that supports the conspiracy and telling lies can most certainly support a fraud conspiracy. Indeed, lies are an integral element of criminal fraud (defined as "wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain"). In short, telling lies may well be "protected speech" (i.e., you may have the right to lie) but a lie in the furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud is not "protected speech," it's evidence. Similarly, perjury, witness tampering, threats of bodily harm, and bilking seniors out of their savings (all things Trump does too) involve speech, but they're still crimes.

If you're going to claim that protected speech was part of an intention to change the outcome of an election, then you have to set a whole bunch of competing evidence aside and conclude that Trump's state of mind - beginning on election night - was intending to further a conspiracy to "knowingly and willfully join a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump".

Seems like a pretty big hill for the prosecution to climb.

Again, speech used as an integral part of a fraud scheme is not "protected speech." It's a element of the crime.

I'll defer to Fani's words in the leading paragraph of the indictment.

Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.

As I noted above, 161 overt acts were provided that supported the conspiracy, 40 of which were illegal acts. All Fani has to do is prove 2 of the 40 to make the RICO charges stick and she doesn't need to prove a single one of the 121 overt acts that weren't illegal, just illustrative/supportive. They just help tell the story.