To Which Criminal Acts Are You Referring?
To Which Criminal Acts Are You Referring?
The January 6th Committee's move is symbolic but not insignificant
Quick housekeeping note: This is going out later than usual because Substack crashed earlier today and ate half of my draft.
When you write it down like that it sounds bad
The January 6th Committee on Monday unanimously voted to refer four criminal charges to the Justice Department that they believe Donald Trump committed: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement, and — most notably — inciting, assisting, or providing aid and comfort to an insurrection.
The official proceeding that Trump is accused of obstructing is, of course, the congressional count of electoral votes that took place on January 6th. The conspiracy charge essentially posits that Trump did not act alone in obstructing the electoral vote count. The conspiracy to make a false statement charge revolves around the scheme to submit “alternate electors,” which would have required asserting in a legal document that those electors were legally selected, when by definition they were not. And the inciting/assisting/aiding an insurrection charge is pretty self-explanatory.
Legally speaking, as every news article on the subject hastens to mention, these referrals aren’t particularly meaningful. Anyone can refer criminal charges to the Justice Department for any crime they believe has been committed; it does not oblige the Justice Department to do anything at all. In fact, I wouldn’t expect DOJ to do much at all with these referrals, except to the extent that the evidence collected by the committee augments investigations that DOJ is already pursuing. The DOJ will decide whether to prosecute based on their own criteria and determination, not because of something a congressional committee said.
But just because these referrals are largely symbolic legally does not mean they’re insignificant culturally or politically. For one, it’s still a hell of a thing that a bipartisan congressional committee believes that a former president committed actual, chargeable crimes; such that they would put it in writing and submit it to the Justice Department. Say what you will about the origin and composition of the committee, but — at least most of — the members took the project seriously. Every witness they interviewed was a Republican, in many cases someone who worked for Trump. They didn’t put a thumb on the scale by, for example, calling Democrats as witnesses to testify hysterically about what they saw that day.
Even the evidence and testimony gathered exclusively from Republicans and Trump employees, however, still paints an incredibly damning picture. What we have here is a pile of evidence that Donald Trump was engaging in election-related conspiracy theories despite being told repeatedly that they were nonsense, and that he was pursuing extra-legal (or perhaps merely illegal) means to stay in office against the will of the people and the Constitution, all the while stoking his supporters that he knew would engage in violence and resisting calls to condemn the violence because he was enjoying it. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like the first three charges are fairly easy to prove. Trump clearly sought to obstruct the electoral vote count and enlisted the help of his cadre of scoundrels to do so, and was all-in on the fake electors scheme (which is why he’s likely to be indicted in Georgia). But it is an admittedly high legal bar to prove incitement. But even if he can’t be proven that he’s legally liable, it’s indisputable to me that he is morally liable and should therefore be politically liable. Not to beat the deadest of horses at this point, but to the extent that Donald Trump had not already completely disqualified himself from holding public office prior to January 6th, his actions leading up to and on January 6th should figuratively put him on an ice floe and push him out to sea. There are two possible explanations for Trump’s post-election behavior, and neither of them are exculpatory. Either he genuinely believes all of the conspiracies and his fake elector scheme was relatively in good faith, in which case he is untethered from reality and does not have the mental acuity; or he knows better and is saying it anyway and stoked his supporters to attack the Capitol in bad faith, in which case he is evil — wicked in the biblical sense. Regardless, in a serious political culture, such a candidate would receive zero votes.
It’s difficult to determine how much, if at all, these referrals have harmed or will harm Trump’s political fortunes. In the immediate aftermath of the search of his home — y’know, one of the other criminal cases that Trump is facing — there seemed to be, at least temporarily, something of a “rally ‘round the flag” effect within the Trump base. But perhaps the cumulative effect of all of these Trump scandals are finally exerting the political gravity that Trump had defied in 2016. That, of course, presupposes that Trump supporters will even learn about these criminal referrals. When Trump’s home was searched for illegally retaining classified documents, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the DOJ was engaging in a political witch hunt, etc. There doesn’t seem to be a comparable reaction to the criminal referrals. A cursory spin around rightwing media seems to indicate that they’re mostly quiet about it, even in opposition. It was brought to my attention that a handful of people inclined to support the former president hate-read this newsletter so as to keep fuel in their perpetual outrage machine, in which case I’m sorry you had to find out this way.
It was a combination of political cowardice and political malpractice that prevented Congress from disqualifying Trump from office after January 6th. Republicans were too afraid to cross their base in order to punish Trump, and Democrats were too content to allow Trump to remain an albatross around the GOP’s neck. Many of us who have been banging the anti-Trump drum since 2015 — or longer, if you count his cameo appearance in the 2012 election — have been wanting some sort of public reckoning about Donald Trump. Because, after all, the only thing better than being right is having people who were wrong have to admit you were right. So with every revelation about Trump’s manifest unfitness for office, we’ve been screaming like Sam Kinison at no one in particular — SAY IT! SAY IT! But on my more charitable days, I’m content to just watch people awkwardly shuffle away from Trump, leaving him as a spent political force bilking his true believers out of their Social Security checks with whatever nickel-and-dime scam he came up with that month.
The longer this goes on, the more I realize that I’m not particularly concerned with the manner in which Trump is ushered off of the political stage as long as it occurs.
It’s not the “World’s Oldest Hatred” for Nothing
I’ve mentioned before that one of the weightiest parts of parenthood for me, in addition to raising children who aren’t bad people, is educating my daughters about their genealogical and cultural heritage. Given the maternal structure of Judaism, there’s essentially an unbroken hereditary thread from Mount Sinai down through my wife, and therefore any children my daughters have will also be Jewish by birth. And I’d hate for that unbroken thread to fizzle out on account of my laziness, y’know? It’s a challenge for my wife and I because neither of us really grew up with it, but we’re trying. We’re already falling down on that job somewhat, as our older daughter is way more excited by and enamored with Santa Claus than I would prefer. Nevertheless, my mother-in-law donated her parents’ menorah, and the extended in-law’s synagogue sent our younger daughter basically a Jewish Kid Starter Kit after she was born. So for Chanukah we light the menorah and do the blessing — which we play off YouTube because neither of us knows it well enough yet. And perhaps most importantly, we joined the gentiles in the neighborhood by putting out holiday decorations — which in our case involves blue and white lights around our bushes and a giant inflatable menorah.
This year, however, I noticed myself feeling a little apprehensive about putting Jewish symbols out in the yard given the, uh, recent unpleasantness. But I only had that thought for a few fractions of a second before I realized: what the hell do I mean recent unpleasantness? I mean, sure, one of the most famous recording artists in a generation just came down from a weeks-long anti-Semitic bender which reintroduced into the mainstream several anti-Semitic tropes that usually fester on the fringes, and some of the seedier parts of our political culture have felt emboldened in recent years to really let their anti-Semitic freak flag fly, but none of that is new or worse.
And don’t misunderstand, it’s not that I felt actual fear. I have no reason to believe that anyone in our neighborhood, or anyone even passing through our neighborhood, is anything other an accepting pluralist. But it did occur to me that there’s a non-zero chance someone would see our decorations and, I dunno, spray paint something offensive on our house, throw a rock through our window, whatever such vandals do. We went to a local Chanukah celebration that was held outside at one of the shopping centers nearby, and the first thing I noticed was the multiple uniformed police officers milling around, just...y’know, being seen. And one of the speakers at the event made it a point to thank them for being there, and reminded all of us how wonderful it was that we lived in a country where we could have such a public celebration, because that’s not even the case in many parts of the world currently, much less throughout history. And while all of that is true, it was still an uneasy feeling to realize that there were uniformed police around because there was, again, a non-zero chance that some degenerate might see a gathering of Jewish people as an opportunity to harm or otherwise harass a bunch of them.
I was listening to a podcast recently with Jason Alexander, of Seinfeld fame, and he said that even though he’s not especially religious that it was important to him to educate his children about their Jewish identity because, as he put it, “there are people in the world who would kill you simply for being Jewish, you might as well know what you might be dying for.”
That resonates with me on all counts. But I struggle with the idea of educating my children — certainly not at their current ages — that there’s a sizeable number of people in the world who wish them ill simply because of who their ancestors are. And more than that, there are multiple instances throughout history where such people were successful in, well, removing many of their forbearers from the earth. What bothers me most, I think, is that there will inevitably come a time when our kids are going to have to learn that. It agonizes me because it’s going to represent a sort of loss of innocence for them. Watching my older daughter go through life, she’s just skipping through the tulips and it’s all rainbows and lollipops for her. (Not that it’s worse for my younger daughter, she’s just at an age where she’s generally less aware.) I’m doing my best to delay for as long as possible their realizations that the world has some tragic elements in it, even if I know that some day, despite our best efforts, we’re going to lose that battle. Maybe we could start small with the Santa Claus thing.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Music in Movies
Clue: The 1973 film The Sting popularized this ragtime classic by Scott Joplin.
The Entertainer
Today’s clue:
Category: Bodies of Water
Clue: Indenting the coastline of Alaska, Norton Sound and Kuskokwim Bay are inlets of this sea.
Dispatches from the Homefront
I said last week that I would report back about my older daughter’s first winter concert. It was pretty much what I expected. There’s only so much you can do with kids between the ages of two and five. The two-year-old class mostly just stood there wide-eyed at the crowd, presumably the first time they had seen that many people staring back at them.
My daughter, much to my pride, got the biggest laugh of the entire function when she came out, spotted my mother-in-law, and shouted “Nana! My Nana is here!” She apparently did not spot me, seated in the same row just across the aisle.
Her class did a medley of various holiday songs, most of them secular, like Jingle Bells, Frosty the Snowman, etc. But then they did Joy to the World, which I thought was notably religious for such a, um, diverse class. I was prepared to be vaguely put-off by it, but then they broke into the Dreidel Song and I thought “…ok fair enough.”