Yesterday I was so glad to see that Ted Lieu and Mondaire Jones had teamed up tp send a letter to Jorge Dopico, head of the New York State Bar Association's disciplinary Committee, asking them to look into Giuliani's role in the terrorist riots at the Capitol Wednesday. They clearly showed why he needs to be disbarred for committing 3 federal crimes:
18 U.S.C. § 2101 – Inciting a riot
On Wednesday, January 6, 2020, Mr. Guliani spoke at the “Save America” rally to a group of Trump supporters whose goal was to overturn the valid results of the 2020 presidential election by interfering with the constitutionally mandated certification process. Mr. Guliani told the crowd, “Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent. And if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail.” Then, to roaring cheers, he said, “So – let’s have trial by combat!” Per 18 U.S.C. § 2102, a “riot” means “a public disturbance involving an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons, which act or acts shall constitute a clear and present danger of, or shall result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual.” Immediately following his speech, a crowd of thousands descended upon the Capitol and assaulted U.S. Capitol Police, forcibly entered the building, and threatened to assault or kill elected officials. These events left five people dead and many more injured.
18 U.S.C. § 2383 – Rebellion or insurrection
The purpose of the “Save America” riots was to disrupt through violence the certification process of the 2020 presidential election, whereby the House and Senate meet in joint session to certify state electors and pronounce the victor. The “authority of the United States or the laws thereof” – rebellion against which constitutes insurrection – clearly includes the authority granted to the United States Congress by the Constitution to certify the presidential election. Violence in service of disrupting this process amounts to insurrection against the authority of the United States, leaving the Congress unable to carry out its constitutional duty and the People without a vote.
18 U.S.C § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy
By traveling to and directing a crowd to engage in “combat” at an event specifically designed to protest the results of the 2020 election, Mr. Giuliani “conspire[d] to… by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.”
Over the weekend, Juan Cole wrote Vanilla ISIL noting that social media companies have been forced to treat Trump and his crowd like terrorists. He wrote that "Not everyone who mobbed the Capitol on 1/6 was a terrorist, but there were many terrorists among them. Some people came armed, or with ties for taking congressional representatives and senators hostage. Some were desperately looking for Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi in order to assassinate them for, in their fevered minds, stealing the election and giving Trump’s victory treacherously to Joe Biden. Although the Capitol police had a major failure when they did not stop the breach of the building by the mob, they were remarkably successful at spiriting the politicians down to the basement and its tunnels that led to nearby offices. Otherwise the sinister events of that day, in which one policeman was deliberately crushed to death by a massed crowd in a doorway, would have claimed many more lives. The goal of the Trump-inspired insurrection was to stop Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden as president. Trump moved on several levels to accomplish that goal. He conspired with senators to have them object to the Arizona and Pennsylvania vote counts. In fact, he was trying to convince senators to join this effort by telephone even after the Capitol had been breached and senators were being escorted to the basement, according to Mike Lee. He also tried to disrupt the proceedings by encouraging the breach of the Capitol by a flashmob and by cadres. He may have stopped security forces from being deployed, as part of his coup, to ensure that the insurrection was not stopped prematurely. When the governor of Maryland sought authorization to send that state’s National Guard, he was stonewalled for a crucial 90 minutes, during which Pence, Pelosi and others could have been killed. If they had been, it is not clear Biden’s election could have been certified in a timely manner. Trump spent December moving his ideologues into key positions at the Pentagon, likely hoping to use them to make sure the military could not be deployed at the capitol. That is, the insurrection was in part a coup."
He concluded that "Significant blows have been dealt to the Trump terrorist network in the past two days, but the vast well of support it has built up among less violent supporters, and among media enablers like Fox, Breitbart and Newsmax, will make it very difficult to root out."
It's Sunday. John Pavlovitz's sermon from yesterday, The White Terrorism in Jesus’ Name, will do absolutely fine for this morning's shared national consciousness. "The Scriptures," he wrote, "say that the truth will set you free. Right now, millions of white Christians in America are in a fortified prison of our own design; the impenetrable walls fashioned from decades of privilege and self-denial, the bars made of false stories our parents and grandparents told us about how the world works, the perimeter wrapped by jagged layers of white supremacy and nationalism, and closely guarded by a fierce self-preservation that when all else, fails, will fight to allow us escape. Tens of millions of us have spent decades of our lives in a whitewashed faith story, starring a Caucasian male creator and a lily white American savior, preached by male pastors who usually shared our pigmentation. We were raised to believe that God and guns were natural bedfellows, that the world outside our borders was a danger, that the good guys always resembled us. It’s why millions of us inexplicably mistook this president for a Christian, despite every evidence to the contrary. It’s why many of us were able to reconcile his words about grabbing women by the genitalia, his caging of small children, his relentless attacks on healthcare, his repeated onslaught against truthfulness-- and still profess undying affinity to him. It’s the reason the incendiary sermons and fabricated FoxNews farces and anti-immigrant rhetoric and nonsensical conspiracy theories, all went down so easily. And it’s why so many of us watched a lawless mob, assailing the halls of our Capitol, assaulting law enforcement, defecating on memorials to our forebears, and murdering people on live television-- and may still not be able to admit the reality because we have been conditioned to believe that people who look like us are always the righteous heroes... White American Christians, it is long past time we said it without mincing words:
What we’re witnessing in our nation is not protesting, it is not fighting for freedom, it is not a defense of life-- and it is certainly not reflecting Jesus.
This is white domestic terrorism that was born in the Church and was been weaned on a theology of supremacy, and it needs to be destroyed.
That is the truth that sets people free.