US District Judge Aileen Cannon has canceled tentative plans to hold a hearing on August 25 on a protective order for classified evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case against former President Donald Trump.

  • chaogomu@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    There are clear first amendment actions being listed as criminal in the Georgia case, every single lawyer who has read it and publicly commented has said so.

    This podcast episode has actual lawyers, including a Georgia lawyer familiar with Georgia RICO law, talking about it.

    If you don’t want to listen to 20 minutes, there’s this breakdown.

    Jack Smith was careful with making sure that all the overt acts he picked were meant to stay away from protected first amendment speech. Fani Willis was not as careful. This lead to a quirk of Georgia law, the General Demurrer. This motion challenges the indictment to be more clear about what is and is not a crime. Basically the defendant says “I did these things, but they aren’t a crime” and some of the items used in the Georgia indictment are not crimes, ever. Some other things are very much criminal. It’s a mess.

    The fact of the matter is that State DAs are often sloppy and arrogant when filing charges. Fani Willis uses RICO to drag out cases, strong arming defendants and their lawyers into accepting the convictions, because she’s more interested in show trials and headlines than doing the job correctly.

    Contrast Jack Smith, who is a Federal prosecutor and held to a much higher standard, and you can see how weak the Georgia case is. The really sad part is, there’s enough in the Georgia case that it could be a very strong case, but the way it’s written, it just isn’t.