It's absurd to me that he has yet to actually go to jail for literally any of the crimes he's committed. Dude incited a mob, kept top secret documents and invited Saudi Arabia to his golf course where they were kept, and generally commits treason any chance he gets yet somehow is allowed to run for fucking president again and isn't in prison or executed.
This country has no spine.
"The gears of justice grind slowly but finely."
He's attempting to outrun those gears by stalling with lengthy appeals and getting back to the presidency before they catch him. The appeals process ostensibly exists (in theory) to prevent cavalier judges and vigilantism; at the same time, Trump is a career veteran of stalling the courts, and the rich have the luxury of being able to afford doing so.
I agree that he's an obvious criminal and has gotten the lightest treatment possible so far, but it's also worth recognizing that he's functionally a mob boss with tens of millions of followers, all with a tenuous grasp of reality and an undying love for their demigod.
Even if the judges aren't afraid (and some assuredly are), they have to perform this delicate balancing act so his followers don't cause a mistrial through their sheer stupidity.
This country has no spine.
Yet you don't want to just lock up any old person without all the proof and due process in the world. That's what's going on here--he has that right, just the same as you. The difference is that he has a lot of money, which can allow him to grad this out longer than the average person can get away with. He won't get away from it forever--even Jeffery Epstein went down.
In 1871 Congress passed section 1983 of the federal code.
In 1872 President Ulysses Grant was pulled over, for the third time in his life for "speeding on a horse while in the city limits of Washington DC." The previous two times were in 1866 and he was only a general at the time. When the police officer tried to let him go, he said no, Congress just passed a law about this, even a sitting president isn't above the law. He made the officer write him the ticket, and paid it.
In 1874 the law was illegally revised by an unnamed secretary, removing the clause that specified that any previous immunity given by the states was also illegal, which would later cause Qualified Immunity to even become a concept when the 1982 SCOTUS ruled on Harlow V Fitzgerald
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
Trump has no immunity if they are presented with the lawful wording of section 1983.
If someone could give me the archive link to that article, I'd appreciate it.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1983
This one?
Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable. For the purposes of this section, any Act of Congress applicable exclusively to the District of Columbia shall be considered to be a statute of the District of Columbia.
(R.S. § 1979; Pub. L. 96–170, § 1, Dec. 29, 1979, 93 Stat. 1284; Pub. L. 104–317, title III, § 309(c), Oct. 19, 1996, 110 Stat. 3853.)
or this one?
https://www.acludc.org/en/news/happy-150th-anniversary-section-1983
On April 20, 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed one of the most important civil rights laws in U.S. history: the Ku Klux Klan Act. Section 1 of that law – known today as 42 U.S.C. § 1983 – empowers individuals to sue state and local government officials who violate their federal constitutional rights. The law was aimed at protecting Black Americans from white supremacist violence and murder in the postbellum South.
Section 1983 was invoked by the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education (you can see the Act cited by its date) when they challenged school segregation 70 years ago. ACLU offices nationwide continue to use Section 1983 today to defend and advance the rights of all people.
I believe it was the latter, but I'm not a lawyer. I also cannot copy paste the text from that article, because it's been locked behind a paywall
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON — Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday asked the Supreme Court to immediately step in to decide whether former President Donald Trump has immunity from prosecution for his actions seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
"This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office," Smith wrote in the court filing.
More recently, the court has on several occasions taken up cases at an early stage of litigation to decide issues of national importance, such as the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for businesses and its plan to forgive student loan debt.
But since he left office in January 2021, the court has not been receptive to filings brought by the former president, including over his separate legal fight concerning presidential documents he stored at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
Trump’s lawyers argue that his role in questioning the result of the election was within the “outer perimeter” of his official responsibilities as president, a phrase that appears in a 1982 Supreme Court ruling, also involving Nixon, about presidential immunity.
Trump was indicted after a sprawling investigation that included testimony from dozens of White House aides and advisors ranging in seniority up to former Vice President Mike Pence.
The original article contains 627 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
OK so he's getting away with it.