Many Happy Returns
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I don’t care about the tax crimes of the former guy who used to be president of the United States, any more than I care about the size and shape of his tiny little Stormy Daniels fan club member. So I wasn’t that excited when the Supreme Court, in a one-sentence order today, threw his “under audit” IRS returns into the same imaginary category as his Vietnam bone spurs.
They are maybe the least of his crimes and anatomical peculiarities anyway, even though he spread so many of them around and inflicted them on so many.
I do care about the greatest of his crimes, his last as president. I believe he should be held accountable for it — not by conviction after impeachment from an office he’d already been kicked out of, or by even tamer Congressional censure. He should be held accountable by a federal criminal court. Because on 6 January Donald Trump committed treason against the United States of America.
Treason is defined by the Constitution itself as levying war against the United States. He summoned to Washington an army of Proud Boys, Confederate fancy pants, and other impressionable idiots, fanned a fury already stoked by months of lies he told about the election, and set loose those dogs to tear the Capitol apart in hopes they would at least stop the vote count. If they had to kill a few Congress members, maybe hang a vice president to do it, well, he did fancy himself a wartime president.
One of the last of his endlessly graceless acts was to bring back federal executions — with an enthusiasm that fast-tracked thirteen lives including one just five days before he laid his last slime trail back to Mar-a-Lago. There hadn’t been a federal execution in seventeen years before Trump turned full Sweeney Todd his last year in office, overseeing more of them than any president in more than one hundred twenty years.
Turns out the first enumerated U.S. Code punishment for treason is death.
It’s unlucky to leave a streak at thirteen.