Fine, fine. If the overwhelming majority of the American news media insist that the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump is the biggest event going on in the country right now, we can talk about the trial. But arguing about Donald Trump’s responsibility for the riot on January 6 — spoiler alert, he’s heavily responsible — already feels like debating history. Meanwhile, at least one WHO official is talking up the notion that SARS-CoV-2 originated from someplace outside Wuhan, China, and the Biden administration’s early moves are sending mixed signals to Beijing.
Perhaps a Different Jury Should Judge Trump’s Actions
At some point, the comparison of impeachment to a jury trial in a criminal case obscures or muddles more than it illuminates. In a criminal trial, the defendant doesn’t have the ability to end or influence the political careers of the jurors. The jurors ideally have no connection to the defendant at all; they certainly can’t have a professional connection to the defendant. Criminal trials call plenty of witnesses. The jury is usually sequestered and instructed to avoid media coverage of the case; jurors certainly don’t go out and give comments to the media about how they think the case is going.
If Trump’s actions leading up to and on January 6 were not merely unpresidential or reckless but criminal — and if more than 33 Republicans believe that impeachment and conviction is an inappropriate consequence because he’s no longer in office — then perhaps the better option for accountability is for the feds or the District of Columbia to pursue criminal charges against him for inciting a riot.
District of Columbia law states:
A riot in the District of Columbia is a public disturbance involving an assemblage of 5 or more persons which by tumultuous and violent conduct or the threat thereof creates grave danger of damage or injury to property or persons.
. . . Whoever willfully incites or urges other persons to engage in a riot shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than 180 days or a fine of not more than the amount set [elsewhere in the criminal code] or both.
. . . If in the course and as a result of a riot a person suffers serious bodily harm or there is property damage in excess of $5,000, every person who willfully incited or urged others to engage in the riot shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than 10 years or a fine of not more than the amount set forth [elsewhere in the criminal code], or both.
Prosecutors would have a really difficult time securing a conviction, as Jonathan Turley and others argue. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio set a particularly high bar for criminal incitement. Prosecutors would need to prove beyond a doubt that Trump intended to incite the crowd to violence and that illegal activity was imminent and likely. Trump did say, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” That by itself might be enough to create a reasonable doubt.
The U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and the D.C. district attorney both said they would not rule out investigating Trump and filing criminal charges, but didn’t indicate that path was likely.
But if Trump had his day in court — not the Senate — before a jury of his peers, or at least twelve Washington, D.C., jurors who had minimal preexisting opinions about his post-election actions — perhaps that would be the best way to resolve the issue, as the impeachment process is too tied up in partisanship and loyalty to or animosity against Trump.
Keep in mind, Trump is being investigated for criminal activity by the Fulton County district attorney in Georgia, at least two separate investigations by the Manhattan DA, and the state attorney general of New York. A lot of people seem convinced that Trump will be the overwhelmingly dominant force in Republican politics for many years to come. One wonders if that remains the case if Trump becomes a convicted felon.
WHO in China Believes This?
Peter Ben Embarek, member of the WHO’s team in China, is now floating the theory that the virus did not originate in Wuhan in late November or early December of 2019. This is the same guy who yesterday linked to a report in the Beijing-friendly South China Morning Post, called U.S. intelligence “frankly wrong on many aspects,” and then complained that the American government didn’t trust WHO’s judgment enough. Look, pal, if you don’t want to trust the U.S. intelligence community, fine. Just don’t turn around later in the day and tell me to trust the Chinese government’s assessments. We already know Beijing lied about the contagiousness of this virus for weeks!
What’s particularly wild is that Embarek is now sort of disagreeing with the Chinese government, touting a theory that Chinese authorities deem unlikely.
Liang Wannian, head of the Covid-19 expert panel for China’s National Health Commission, said Tuesday that Chinese authorities had tested blood samples for antibodies, and checked medical records from 233 hospitals and clinics, but hadn’t found evidence of the virus spreading around Wuhan before early December 2019.
There had been no unexpected fluctuations in mortality levels from pneumonia or other illness in the preceding months, he said, and sales of cough and cold medicine didn’t provide useful indicators either.
Remember that in June, a research team revealed the results of a study of satellite photographs and “observed a dramatic increase in hospital traffic outside five major Wuhan hospitals beginning late summer and early fall 2019.” That’s intriguing, but we don’t know for certain that those cars parked outside the hospital were necessarily patients or that that the people who were being treated inside were suffering from COVID-19-like symptoms. In fact, the notion SARS-CoV-2 could have been floating around for months and months — at least in this contagious and virulent form — and no doctor treating any of those patients in any of those hospitals noticed that it was a novel virus for months and months feels particularly unlikely. Think about how quickly the doctors in Wuhan warned their colleagues in December.
The one caveat I would make to that point stems from Lee Smith’s excellent essay in Tablet, where he observes that residents of Wuhan held turbulent protests against an incinerator project and air pollution . . . in July 2019. If the air quality in Wuhan has been terrible for years, maybe coughs and lung problems are so commonplace that a novel respiratory virus such as SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t get noticed as quickly as it would elsewhere.
Speaking of China . . .
The “ready from Day One” president is asking the Pentagon to review “the national security aspects of the administration’s China strategy,” and the report should be done by summer. The Biden administration is dropping the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict TikTok and halting the sale of TikTok from a Chinese company to an American one. The Biden administration withdrew a Trump administration rule that would require American schools and universities to disclose partnerships with Confucius Institutes and Classrooms.
And in a recent interview, Biden said of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, “I’ve said to him all along, that we need not have a conflict.”
Biden isn’t completely soft on China. In his call with Xi yesterday, the White House said Biden communicated “his fundamental concerns about Beijing’s coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.” The Biden team is, so far, largely keeping the Trump approach to Taiwan in place. And a few days ago, the Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz aircraft carrier strike groups conducted a military exercise in the South China Sea.
But it looks as if the Biden approach is the carrot and the stick. So what will the Biden team do if and when Beijing takes the carrot and ignores the stick?
ADDENDUM: The good news:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that people who have been vaccinated are no longer required to quarantine after exposure to someone with the coronavirus, as long as they have received both doses of the vaccine and at least two weeks have passed since the second shot.
The bad news: This means that within weeks, if not sooner, we’re going to have a two-tiered society of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, where the vaccinated can live their lives normally and the unvaccinated can’t. And if you thought we were an angry and divided society before, just wait until people who want to get vaccinated and who can’t get one for weeks and months are told they can’t get on flights, gather in groups in arenas and concert halls, go into sections of bars and restaurants, etc., while other people can.