Written by What shall we talk about today? Hardly anything happening out there…
I’m kidding, of course.
The winner of the 2020 election got arrested the other day. No, not Joe Biden, the other guy. Trump.
It’s obviously a big story but I am oddly unfazed by it, if I’m honest. The guy was already indicted in New York, we’ve been hearing that the “walls are closing in” since he came down the escalator in 2016, and the whole Democrat apparatus has been a complete circus ever since.
And it’s not even that I think he’s going to pull through it that has me unfazed. I’ve been through a federal court a couple of times, and the idea that you’re going to get a fair trial is a foundationally preposterous notion. It’s also not entirely clear to me that a fair trial is in his best interests. If he is going to win, he’s going to win on the law, not the facts.
This is an important distinction lost on many people who are not familiar with the law. A reasonable person tends to assume that law and fact go hand in hand but that’s not actually how the law works.
To illustrate, the government says Donald Trump broke the law by retaining documents pertaining to National Defense information. That’s the most serious allegation against him, and if you’ve heard the phrase “espionage act” that is what this refers to.
I don’t get the impression that there’s any dispute whether he retained such documents. Trump’s defense is that he had every right to retain them, and that the charges are facially invalid as a matter of law.
That may be true, I certainly hope so, but that will not make a bit of difference to a jury. He won’t even be able to tell a jury this. Juries do not decide law, they decide facts. If a judge concludes that the law is being misapplied, then that charge will not be decided by a jury. The judge will throw the charge out.
If the Judge says the law does apply, then Trump will not be able to argue this legal question to the jury. He can only argue the facts, which is to say, whether or not he did what he is accused of doing. But since Trump does not dispute having done the things he is accused of, he really does not have a defense in terms of facts.
So, if Trump is put on trial, his only hope is for an unfair trial, which is to say, a trial unfair to the prosecution, in which the jury ignores the facts and the Judge’s instructions and finds him not guilty because they deviate from their role as jurors and judge the application of the law.
This is best known as jury nullification, but if he tries to encourage the jury to do this in any way, the Judge is going to shut it down.
So, this is very, very serious. And with more than thirty charges, and Trump in his 70s, he could spend the rest of his life in prison if only charge sticks.
I’ll have more to say on this when we are in the chat this evening.
I’m not sure it counts as news to say I’ve been suspended from Twitter. That was obviously going to happen at some point.
I got bombarded with nonsense by Ukrainian intelligence yesterday for speaking positively about Vladimir Putin. Then I was banned for “hateful conduct” after everything I posted got reported to Twitter.
I can get back on if I delete the Tweet, but for now I have refused to do that, and appealed the decision.
I’ll have more to say about that in our talk tonight as well.
On the tech front, exciting things are happening. I bought a newly upgraded video card and the results have been impressive. I set up my own ChatGPT style bot, and it was very different from the stuff you hear about OpenAI’s chatgpt.
I also set up my own image generator, and voice cloner. I have to test these more, and tweak them some, but the potential to do amazing things is upon us.
I look forward to seeing you tonight and every Wednesday at 9:30pm US Eastern.
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