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Federal Case Against Donald Trump
There is a great deal of speculation as to whether former president Donald Trump will eventually be indicted for crimes allegedly committed while he was the president. Well, in what might prove to be the most serious blow yet to Trump’s effort to stay out of jail, on March 28th, a federal judge ruled that both former president Trump and Atty. John Eastman who had advised him on how to overturn the 2020 election had most likely committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States. The ruling represents a highly significant breakthrough for the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Judge David O. Carter found that the actions taken by Trump and Eastman amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
The judge’s ruling may be the House committee’s biggest win to date, as it suggests that the investigators have already built a case strong enough to convince a federal judge of Trump’s culpability in the January 6th insurrection.
Specifically, the ruling means that the House committee will now receive more than 100 emails related to the legal strategy proposed by Eastman to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify electors from swing states when Congress convened on January 6, and thus to not certify the electoral vote. In making his ruling Judge Carter said, “Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history.”
Just how significant is this federal court ruling? What would a federal prosecutor need to show a judge and jury to be able to hold Trump liable for his actions around January 6th? And what about other actions by the former president while in office that many criminal law experts claim were illegal? And, of course, what role will politics ultimately play in determining whether Trump ever stands trial and is convicted by a jury?
Guest – Attorney Michael Tigar. Michael Tigar has been acting professor of law at UCLA, the Jos. D. Jamil Chair of Law at the University of Texas, and the holder of an endowed professorship at Washington College of Law. He is the author of numerous books, including Thinking About Terrorism: The Threat to Civil Liberties in Times if National Emergency and most recently, Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change. He has also represented such notable clients as The Washington Post, Rep. Ron Dellums, and Lynne Stewart.
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Russia, Ukraine War Analysis
And now to the matter of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the role of a free press in war time. Today, much is made of the fact that in Putin’s Russia, little or no accurate news of the war is reaching the Russian people. Instead, what they read in their newspapers or hear on their radios and see on their televisions is no more or less than what Putin wants them to read or see or hear. Meanwhile, here in the United States, the American people are provided with virtually non-stop newspaper and live eve-witness television coverage of the war in Ukraine; “coverage” that comes from reporters and others, often in real time, and on the ground in the middle of Putin’s war. Surely the dramatically contrasting way in which the Russian people and the American people are experiencing the war via the media must play a major role in how the two peoples feel about the war. So, too, how the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were covered by the US media must have played a role in how we, the American people, felt about those wars. Well, today we look at the role a nation’s media can play in shaping public support for or against a war that is being fought by that nation.
Guest – Norman Solomon is truly one of America’s true champions of a free and honest press, free and honest in war time as well as in peacetime. Mr. Solomon is one of the founders of F.A.I.R., or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which has proved to be a powerful watchdog of the US media. Norman Solomon is also the co-founder of the internet news and opinion source, RootsAction.org. He is, of course, the author of too many articles to recite here. He is also the author of a number of books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death;” and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”
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