Why has Trump not yet been charged with insurrection? Could it be because everyone knows he never committed such a crime?
From National Review. You know insurrection is a crime, right?
Just to recap, under Section 2383 of the federal criminal code, a person is guilty of a felony, punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment, if he
incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto.
Who is praying on the wall?
And why do we need a refresher on this? Because the Department of Justice has been investigating Donald Trump and the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot for nearly three years, yet no insurrection charges have ever been brought against Trump or anyone else. …
The Justice Department — the arm of the United States government vested with responsibility to enforce the insurrection law — has not charged Trump with insurrection because it can’t prove Trump committed insurrection. …
It’s not that Biden-DOJ-appointed special counsel Jack Smith hasn’t been trying. And it is obviously not that Smith is unwilling to stretch federal criminal laws to the breaking point to make a January 6 case against Trump. The insuperable hurdle is that the evidence does not support a charge of insurrection. …
After years of investigating, Smith and the Biden Justice Department brought a January 6 indictment against Trump in the District of Columbia, which has the most Trump-hostile jury pool in the country. They then hit the jackpot by drawing an anti-Trump judge out of central casting — Obama appointee Tanya Chutkan, who, in a courthouse where the bench teems with Democratic appointees who’ve meted out harsh sentences to January 6 defendants, manages to stand out as the scourge of the Capitol riot. …
Nevertheless, gifted with this greatest home-field advantage of all time, Smith and his team haven’t charged Trump with insurrection. That’s because they don’t have a case. They desperately want to bring one, but they know that nothing would explode the Democrats’ January 6 myth-making like an acquittal of Donald Trump. And even with Judge Chutkan presiding and a Washington, D.C., jury, that’s what they’d get. …
It is not enough to say that Trump was not charged or named as an unindicted coconspirator in the Justice Department’s seditious-conspiracy cases. Those cases themselves do not charge sedition — the wellspring of insurrection.
In the relevant statute (Section 2384), the word seditious appears only in the title, not in the charging language. That language prescribes five distinct conspiracy objectives, the commission of any one of which is a crime punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment.
The two most serious of these are akin to sedition as connoted by the Democratic narrative of the Capitol riot: (1) conspiracy “to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States,” and (2) conspiracy “to levy war against” the United States. But while the Biden Justice Department’s cheerleaders like to tout the “sedition” convictions, the Justice Department did not charge anyone with conspiring to overthrow the government or wage war against our nation. That’s not what even the worst of the rioters were up to. …
Thus, the Justice Department had to resort to two of the three less serious, albeit condemnable, conspiracies codified by Section 2384: conspiracy (3) “to oppose by force the authority” of the United States government, and (4) conspiracy “to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” (The fifth conspiracy criminalized by Section 2384 is conspiracy to forcibly seize government property.)
These are serious offenses, but they are not sedition, let alone insurrection. It is noteworthy, moreover, that the Justice Department’s rationale for invoking these Section 2384 provisions in January 6 cases could also have rationalized seditious-conspiracy charges against radical leftists who were stirred by the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren to occupy the Capitol during the 2018 Kavanaugh-confirmation hearings, as well as, say, the radical leftists who firebombed the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., in 2021. …
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(Excerpt from National Review. Photo Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)