A federal judge suggests that Trump may have to pay for January 6th

One question many people have been asking themselves daily for more than a year now is about Donald Trump will be held criminally liable for trying to overthrow the government, and given the whole coup attempt, it is a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder. Unfortunately at the moment we have no idea what the answer is. On the one hand, the public prosecutor Merrick Garland said last week that the Ministry of Justice will go after the people who caused the deadly uprising, “whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the attack on our democracy”, which seems to include the guy , who spent months lying about the election being stolen, then got his supporters agitated and told them to “fight” just before attacking the Capitol. On the other hand, Trump has a long history of getting away with it all. So there it is.

Yet Monday brought a glimmer of hope that the 45th president could at least be held accountable for the events of that dreadful day, in the sense that he might have to pay for what he did.

According to CNN:

A federal judge in Washington, DC, questions former President Donald Trump’s actions during his speech on January 6, 2021, as he considers for the first time whether Trump is immune from responsibility for his supporters attacking the US capital. . During a court hearing Monday, the judge said Amit Mehta repeatedly pointed out that on January 6, Trump asked the crowd to march to the Capitol, but that he did not speak for two hours and asked people to stop the violence. “The words are hard to go back,” Mehta said. “You have an almost two-hour window where the president does not say, ‘Stop, get out of the Capitol. That’s not what I wanted you to do.'”

“What should I do about the fact that the president did not condemn the behavior right away … and sent a tweet that probably made things worse?” asked the judge. “Is it not from a plausibility point of view that the president plausibly agreed with the behavior of the people inside the Capitol that day?”

The big hearing on Monday is part of a trio of insurgency-related trials seeking to hold Trump and other Republican figures like the Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama in charge at a time when Parliament’s select committee, which is examining January 6, has aggressively investigated the political leaders who inspired the attack, and as the Department of Justice prosecutes more than 700 perpetrators of criminal acts.

As Mehta noted, if Trump did not believe that his supporters should literally “fight” the election results at the Capitol, as his allies have suggested, he would have plenty of time to ask them to stop. “Wouldn’t someone who is a sensible person say, ‘That was not what I meant?'” Mehta asked a lawyer who argued against the rebellion lawsuits. As we now know, of course, Trump not only said something for hours when lawmakers at the Capitol were attacked, he even refused prayers, including from his children, to take action, only much later told the troublemakers to “go home,” and in the same breath: “You are very special” and “we love you” and shortly after that: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide victory in the election campaign is so unpretentiously and viciously removed from great patriots who are have been treated badly and unfairly for so long. ” Last Thursday, on the anniversary of the January 6 attack, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Trump “gladly” saw it unfold on television, noting, “Look at all the people fighting for me,” and rewind to watch again. Republican senator Ben Sasse said in an interview days after the attack that the president “walked around the White House confused about why other people on his team were not as excited as he was … He was delighted.”