https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-appeal-contempt-congress-jail-1842666
Top Trump ally is trying to overturn his 2022 contempt of congress conviction, citing executive privilege defense.
"It is a very dangerous proposition to hold someone criminally culpable and send them to prison without a finding that he or she ever acted in any way that he or she believed was against the law or wrong. That is what happened here," Schoen said.
What utter and complete garbage. Ignorance doesn't make you immune to punishment.
"It was illegal to murder the victim, but the defendant didn't believe it was illegal, therefore no crime was committed."
—This logical fallacy brought to you by the best lawyers MAGA could muster.
As soon as this defense works, a manifesto should appear that says something along the lines of "Extermination of MAGA traitors is a righteous cause, just like the elimination of NAZIs."
Then see how they react when a MAGA rally gets bombed. Surely they'll understand the bomber just thought they were doing what is right?
I mean I fell you 100% and your logic is not flawed unless you're the Supreme Court which has found police can enforce laws that don't exist if the officer "thinks" it exists. So what I gather is that the backwards logic will work for govt actors. It is not awesome.
Pretty sure islamic terrorist believe they've got a holy duty to murder innocent people.
So... They're off the hook too I guess.
The defense isn't simply arguing that Bannon was ignorant. I think they're arguing that (1) the law is unclear and (2) Bannon's reasonable interpretation of the law was that he was legally obligated to act the way that he did. I'm not saying that's what actually happened, but it's a much more reasonable argument than simply saying "ignorance of the law is an excuse" would be.
Ones interpretation doesn’t matter, if I believed murder was ok because I was justified and my interpretation of the law was that it didn’t apply to me or was not applicable to what I did, that doesn’t give me a free pass. Obviously intent alters the charge, but it does not remove culpability.
Every day that this man and his allies walk free is a day that proves there are two tiers of justice in this country.
And if you're rich, you can do things like walk around as a free man while your appeals all play out while us plebs would be rotting in jail.
And what about the whole notion of "ignorance of the law is not a defense for violating the law."? If his argument were to stand, what's to stop an unscrupulous lawyer from saying "My client was acting under the advice of his legal team" as if it were a get-out-of-jail-free card?
"I was acting under the advice of counsel" isn't a free license to do what you want and get away with it. It just means that you got bad advice.
Yeah check out Alex Jones for another example. The guy is making and spending to the tune of 100k per month, and yet he's crying poor to the courts and getting away with it.
He also admitted from the day the judgements came down against him that he was planning to use this exact strategy, and that he had every intention of hiding his wealth so the victims will never touch it.
he's crying poor to the courts and getting away with it.
Ehhhhh yeah not so much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/us/politics/alex-jones-sandy-hook.html
I literally posted the article with an order that he cannot "get away with it." He isn't. There is a timetable for payment on the damages.
Doubling-down on cynicism derived from ignorance in spite of having just received information is fucking INFURIATING.
Unless he's living in a one bedroom apartment in a shitty neighborhood, there is no equal justice there. Any one of us would have been wrecked and forced to pay right away, and have our wages garnished, which isn't being done to him clearly.
No, you wouldn't because you wouldn't have an incompetent layer failing to exhaust all avenues of appeal. Also you WOULDNT have a media empire to fucking argue over. You know nothing about how any of this works.
This is fairly old (1961), but Advice of Counsel is a legitimate defense in some cases.
What's at issue, especially with Trump, is that if he relies on Advice of Counsel as a defense, it's elementary to show that many legal advisers told him "No, you can't do that," and he chose to listen to the advisers who said he could. IANAL, but it would seem that that personal choice of which counsel to take advice from ("This is what I want to do; I'm going to find a lawyer who tells me I can.") would make an Advice of Counsel defense void.
Right, but my point was the "advice of counsel" defense isn't the get out of jail free card that Trump and Bannon are trying to portray it as. There's a whole ordeal that has to occur for that defense to be valid. It's much more than the "Hey, my lawyer said it was OK, so I went with it. We're good now, right?" argument that they're trying to make.
That's actually the defense they're trying to use in Trump's NY civil fraud case, and you can use "advice of council" as a viable defense if you can prove:
Right. And it works if you can prove you had good faith reasons to believe the advice you were given was sound and otherwise had no criminal intent. But Trump isn't arguing that. Neither is Bannon. Both are using "advice of counsel" as if it were a do-whatever-you-want certificate.
If Trump or Bannon's arguments were allowed to stand, it would usher in a whole new breed of unscrupulous lawyers willing to help their clients get away with crimes by just saying "My client was acting under the advice of counsel". Imagine what someone like Trump and his team of crony lawyers would be getting away with if they were allowed to make that argument.
It's laughable on its face, but it's scary that it's not out of the realm of possibility if people like them ever come close to the levers of power again.
The fact that I can't dismiss that possibility out of hand is terrifying.
When the bottom tier no longer believes the foundation is working, they'll start to work against it. When it collapses, the top tier will fall.
No one wants this outside of a fringe set of people. But it may have to happen.
After watching him and his cronies repeatedly do crime and get pardons and get kid glove treatment from the law, and knowing full well that if a poor or brown person did half of what he's done, just once, they'd be held in jail awaiting trial, assuming they survived the arrest process, it's plain we live in a country with 2 tiers of justice
...and that ain't justice.
His lawyer said:
"It is a very dangerous proposition to hold someone criminally culpable and send them to prison without a finding that he or she ever acted in any way that he or she believed was against the law or wrong." (emphasis on “believed” is mine)
So, if I genuinely believe that banks have so much money it’s fine if I take a tiny bit, then it’s not illegal? Yeah, right.
If they ever decide that's a viable defense, I suspect we'd have a lot more bank "traffic."
I want this guy to go to prison even more than baby hands. And I want baby hands in prison very, very much.
It's the extra polo shirt between the t-shirt and the dress shirt. You could get away with three layers, but what are you trying to hide with the extra polo shirt? Do you just want to keep your options open?
I know it's not a new observation, but the fact that everybody has pointed out it's weird and he keeps doing it just doubles down on the weirdness.
The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they still turn. The trial date comes eventually. The appeal gets decided eventually. Defenses to crime that lack evidence tend to fall apart eventually, then it’s time to serve your sentence.
He wouldn't have to. There's not an inmate on this planet who is desperate enough for a few extra servings of commissary junk food that they'd be willing to put his dick in any orifice of their body.
He may have to avoid giving a blow in prison, if he's put in general population, but his celebrity status may mean he'd be in protective custody as he would be a target.
I’d bet some of the J6 offenders would be down. He’s a great Patriot after all and knows Trumpy in person.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon's hopes of appealing his contempt of Congress conviction have been dealt a major blow after a judge questioned the top Donald Trump ally's key line of defense.
Bannon's legal team argued before a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Thursday that he should have his 2022 conviction for defying a congressional subpoena issued to him by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack thrown out.
This led to Bannon relying on advice from his then-attorney, Robert Costello, that he could not waive the privilege, which keeps information from the executive branch from becoming public.
"The underlying point here, though, is that there is no limitation on the invocation of executive privilege or its presumption of validity such that it only applies so long as the person with whom the communications were conducted is employed by the White House as an adviser.
Justice Department Attorney Elizabeth Danello argued that Bannon was warned multiple times that the executive privilege defense would not stand up as a reason to not comply with the subpoena.
Prior to the hearings, Schoen told Newsweek that "no matter where anyone stands" on Bannon, they should hope his contempt conviction gets reversed on appeal.
The original article contains 688 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I wanted to call him Goebbels-like, but Bannon is really more of an American Julius Streicher.