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.
Turley said criminalizing political “lies” is “a slippery slope that vests unprecedented power in the Justice Department.”
Indeed. Why is what Trump did a “crime,” yet not what the Democrats did regarding the 2016 election? Why were the efforts at that time to suborn electors and convince them to throw over duly elected Trump cool?
Further, when Turley talks about a slippery slope, what this can lead to is the criminalizing of anything that goes against the prevailing narrative, if you start down this road.
But the “wicked twist” here is that Turley warns Biden that this effort can all come back to backfire on him, particularly if they launch the impeachment inquiry they have been batting around.
Not dissimilarly, Biden has long been accused of knowing disregard for constitutional limitations as his administration has pushed unconstitutional measures. For example, Biden conceded that his own White House counsel and trusted legal advisers uniformly told him that renewing a national eviction moratorium would be unconstitutional — but he listened instead to a Harvard law professor who reportedly assured him he had the authority. His eviction-ban order was quickly found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
Far more serious are the accusations facing Biden over his response to a growing corruption scandal allegedly involving his son and others. It now seems clear that Biden has lied to the public for years on critical details of the scandal. Indeed, his denial of any knowledge or involvement in his son’s overseas business deals go back to the 2020 presidential debate.
Biden also denied that Hunter Biden received any money from China, which the Washington Post now declares to be manifestly untrue. For years, Biden has allowed his staff, including White House officials, to repeat his denials while opposing any further investigation.
Biden has to know that a lot of the things he was saying were false, and this is being done as Congressional inquiries and investigations are ongoing into his son and the family scandal.
Can we talk obstruction and what about Biden’s administration slow-walking requests for Treasury records? There are a lot more questions when it comes to Biden, and an impeachment inquiry could probably have a field day.