Maryland’s Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin powerfully countered former President Donald Trump’s freedom of speech argument in light of his recent charges pertaining to the events of January 6th.
Raskin appeared on MSNBC’s live coverage on Tuesday evening discussing the breaking news that former President Donald Trump had been indicted by a grand jury led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. This was in relation to Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election on and leading up to January 6, 2021.
During his lengthy appearance, Raskin effectively dismantled the free speech argument that Trump’s new lawyer, John Lauro, had proposed on CNN just a few minutes prior.
We know that our friends across the aisle are trying to mobilize some big free speech defense of Donald Trump here, which is just comical because, of course, you have a right to say, for example, oh, I think that the meeting of the House and the Senate in joint session to count Electoral College votes is a fraud or is taking away, you know, Donald Trump’s presidency. You can say whatever you want, but the minute you actually try to obstruct the meeting of Congress, you’ve crossed over from speech to conduct.
It’s like, you know, you can say, well, I think the currency is phony and everybody should be allowed to make up their own money. You can say that. But the minute you start printing your own money now, you’ve run afoul of the counterfeit laws. And it’s the exact same thing with the Electoral College.
They can say, well, we don’t think that Joe Biden really won in these states, even though every federal and state court rejected all of their claims of electoral fraud and corruption. But the minute they start manufacturing counterfeit electors and trying to have them substitute for the real electors that came through the federal and state legal process, at that point, they’ve crossed over from speech to conduct.
And so I think that the indictment is really tight in terms of focusing just on the conduct. And in fact, they left out one charge that the January 6 committee had put in there, which was about aiding and abetting and giving aid and comfort to insurrectionists. And I suppose they did that because it’s a statute that has not been prosecuted much before. Donald Trump. You know, everything in his world is a case of first impression, pretty much. But they tried to stay away from that because I think they didn’t want that debate about freedom of speech, even though I think it’s clear that Donald Trump did give aid and comfort to the insurrectionists, calling them great patriots and telling them never to forget this day and egging them on in the middle of the insurrection, saying that Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what needed to be done.
