In a rather ominous and unflattering Truth Social post, defendant and Republican Party leader Donald Trump threatened: “If you f*ck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”
Given what Trump has *already* done, including trying to use the force of his violent supporters to overtake an election, which resulted in what Director Wray called a domestic terrorist attack on this country, these should not be taken as empty threats.
Trump posted this just two days after announcing he was a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s probe into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. This means he is likely to be charged with federal crimes in the next few weeks.
There are three statutes that Trump could be charged with according to the target letter, including: pertaining to deprivation of rights; conspiracy to commit an offense against or defraud the United States; and tampering with a witness, according to multiple news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal.
Asha Rangappa said “The big thing that I am waiting to see if Jack Smith is going to go there, is whether they’re going to charge Trump with any crime related to incitement or insurrection, which would really go to directly to his words and his intent to rile up the the crowd to enrage in violent behavior.”
The former president has also already been charged in two separate criminal cases with thirty-seven felony counts in Miami and the thirty-four felony criminal counts in New York.
In New York, Trump has been indicted related to a hush money payment made to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress. In Florida, Trump was indicted for taking and keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, including sharing them with others and leaving them accessible to the many people who visit the club.
The former Republican President and current Republican 2024 presidential front-runner has pleaded not guilty in both of the criminal cases in which he’s already been indicted. Trump’s defense never wavers from his claim that he is a victim and that Democrats are doing this to keep him out of office.
However, President Joe Biden already beat Donald Trump in 2020 and Trump has proven himself a very effective motivator and get out the vote tool for the Democratic Party, meaning that Democrats would likely be happy to face off with Trump again were it not for the damage to democracy his candidacy has caused in the past.
Furthermore, the FBI is run by a Republican and these alleged crimes are all crimes for which other people would be charged — and certainly in the classified documents case, we have historical evidence that they would have been charged much sooner.
Donald Trump is doing his best mob boss intimidation tactic in this video. Not only is he putting out what, given his history of incitement, could fairly be described as a stochastic terrorism call to any unhinged lone wolf supporters, but he is also potentially poisoning the jury pools and vaguely intimidating them.
Although traffic at Trump’s social media company surged after his indictment in April, the head of engineering at Truth Social resigned several days ago.
With calls to violence like this video, Trump should not be welcome on mainstream social media sites. However, both Meta and Twitter have welcomed Trump back to their platforms. So, no matter what happens with Truth Social, Trump might well be posting things like this on other more popular sites any day now.
This is the man whom a judge just told a jury found committed rape. This is the man who endangered U.S. troops and our intelligence assets. This is also the man who endangered public safety. This is also the man who has cheated his own supporters. This is also the man who threatens and intimidates to get what he wants, including trying to coerce Republicans in Georgia to “find” votes for him.
And this is also the man the Republican Party won’t quit.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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