House Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) explained why Special Counsel Jack Smith could be considering seditious conspiracy charges against Trump.
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On MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki, Psaki asked Rep. Raskin if Jack Smith could be conceivably considering seditious conspiracy charges against Trump.
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Raskin replied:
Absolutely. I mean, that’s not a defense. If you are accused of conspiracy to overthrow the government or put down the government of the United States, which is what seditious conspiracy means, it’s not a defense to say somebody else told me to do it or somebody else was involved in the conspiracy. Trump could very much have been part of the proud boys or the oath keepers conspiracy, he might have been involved in an overlapping concentric ring conspiracy with those conspiracies.
We don’t have a system of justice, I hope, as I said at the January six hearings, where the footsoldiers and the ringleaders down below go to jail and the ringleaders above get a free pass and get to continue their insurrectionist assault on democratic institutions. So, you know, we’ve seen a lot of justice take place here, the Department of Justice has been doing an excellent job, more than 1000 arrests, hundreds of convictions have taken place, more than a dozen people have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, completely refuting those who said, well, how could this be an insurrection if nobody was trying to overthrow the government? Well, now, they have their answer, more than a dozen people have been convicted of that
. And Donald Trump of course, was impeached by 232 vote margin in the House for inciting insurrection against the union. And 57 of the 100 senators agreed that he had incited the men’s direction against the union. We did not reach the magic two-thirds number to convict the president. Yet, we have a concurrent majorities of both houses of Congress declaring that that is precisely what he did as a matter of constitutional fact.
It is publicly known that Jack Smith is investigating Trump for potential 1/6 crimes. Smith also has vast amounts of evidence that he has collected. Unless there are witnesses or communications that the Special Counsel has in his position, it would appear to be difficult to get a seditious conspiracy conviction against Trump.
A seditious conspiracy indictment would wreck Trump’s 2024 hopes and it would also make the Republican Party look more like a domestic terror cell than a political party./
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
