No need to wonder about Trump. He’s a stupid, ignorant man. (You can fill in the long list of his other, uh, attributes, by yourselves.)
But the big question I’m now asking, the one that has succeeded the “Why did [blank] vote for Trump?”, is why would a lawyer participate in Trump’s criminal activities?
Let’s go back to the primeval muck days, 2016 and after, the days following our numb horror that this awful creature was living in the White House and doing things. How many of you, like me, without law degrees but with a general sense of right and wrong, law and order, were Googling variations on “is [blank] a crime?”
What I was doing was finding and reading federal criminal laws that answered those Googled questions. I never got entangled in the “you can’t prosecute a sitting president,” or “lawyer-client confidentiality” nonsense. They weren’t laws; they were norms or customs. Which gave me, without a law degree, an advantage: I didn’t follow Bill Barr’s stale bread crumbs and get lost in the forest. Additionally, I’ve known and worked for superlative lawyers so I knew the difference between facts and bullshit. (I also know the difference between intelligent lawyers and dimwitted ones.)
So over the past years I’ve learned the legal definitions for sedition, treason, espionage, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and…I am temporarily forgetting the many other crimes I’ve dug up and into. I’ve learned the potential punishment for these crimes. I did this without exaggeration, without explosive emotional reactions like hysteria or outrage.
And I remember clearly sitting here at my computer and murmuring to myself, “Yes, he (and they) really did that.” It was revelatory.
But now, now I keep asking myself the question up there: “What were they thinking?” And what are they thinking now?
A group of people who do have law degrees, who passed bar exams somewhere, actively tried to interfere with the vote-counting in Georgia and elsewhere. Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, et al. have legal resources far more powerful than Google. After the stupid, ignorant and demonstrably crazy Trump asked them to push the delusion — or blatant lie — that he’d won the election…
What were they thinking when they did it?
If I knew what they did was criminal, they must have known. Were they so delusional they believed our country’s laws as administered by the Department of Justice wouldn’t, couldn’t touch them?
What were they thinking?