Jonathan Turley: That Trump Indictment Could End up Backfiring on Joe Biden
By Nick Arama | 9:09 AM on August 09, 2023
We’ve written a little about what George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has had to say about the latest indictment against former president Donald Trump. He talked about how flawed it was, an indictment based on Trump’s free speech and “alleged disinformation.” When people are raising questions about whether what’s being alleged in an indictment even qualifies as a crime, you know there’s a big problem.
Turley has now expanded on that thought and he’s talking about how the indictment could end up backfiring on Joe Biden.
As he noted, the indictment wasn’t for sedition or incitement. It was largely about Trump’s statements he made about the 2020 election, his beliefs about the election – the apparent criminalizing of his speech. As Turley notes, it’s based on “little new evidence and even less established law” and it “faces a major threshold challenge under the First Amendment.” Smith was criminalizing alleged “disinformation” about the election. He wants to convict him for “lying” about the election and raising doubts.
Previous challenges have been made to certification of presidential elections with little basis (including by Democrats) and even alternative sets of electors have been submitted without criminal charges.
This criminal intent is based on Trump being told by many people that the election was not stolen and he could not stop its certification. I was one of those who maintained that Trump was wrong on the election, Vice President Pence’s authority to void the results, and the Trump team’s challenges. However, Trump followed the advice of a second, albeit smaller, set of lawyers who told him there was a basis for challenging the election.
That is not a crime. It is, in my view, protected political speech.
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https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2023/08/09/jonathan-turley-that-trump-indictment-could-end-up-backfiring-on-joe-biden-n789803
