Friday Round Up! 4/7/23

What to make of the NY indictment and why Elon Musk sucks.

So I went to put together my round up yesterday — which typically involves me plugging in clips from Twitter — only to find that I was getting error messages every time I tried to paste a link to a tweet into this post. It turns out that Elon Musk disabled tweets being able to appear on Substack because Substack just unveiled a new feature called “Notes,” which will compete with Twitter. He also disabled engagement and amplification features for Substack posts shared on Twitter, as well as, it seems, any post that even mentions Substack. You couldn’t even share Substack’s own Twitter post explaining that they were trying to work on the tweet problem on their platform.

As I often say, when you think it can’t get any dumber, it does. It looks like Musk has either changed things up again or Substack found a workaround, because I can post tweets again here, as I have in some of my clips below.

Before we get to those, though, the big news this week was the unveiling of the 34-count indictment against Donald Trump in New York. On first read, it seemed a bit underwhelming — I expected a lot more detail in the indictment, kind of like the “speaking indictments” issued by Mueller in the Russia investigation, or the recent seditious conspiracy indictments against the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, which laid out a play-by-play of damning facts before listing the counts. Instead, this was a pretty skeletal document, accompanied by a more specific, though still relatively short, statement of facts. The big question after reading both was: What are the underlying crimes justifying the “bump up” of the charges from a misdemeanor to a felony? (Remember that falsifying business records is only a misdemeanor unless the falsification is being done to commit or conceal another crime.) Renato Mariotti and I discussed this question during our late night recording of our podcast last Tuesday:

I was still mulling over our conversation on Wednesday, and got inspired to sketch out a couple of possible legal theories of the case. One is a theory using only state crimes as the predicate (conspiracy to promote a candidate in an election using unlawful means, and some type of false statement crime regarding the inflated income), and one adding a federal crime predicate, i.e., campaign finance violations:

Since drawing these diagrams, though — which I think correctly reflect the general “story” that Bragg will tell the jury — I learned an interesting thing about New York law. Bragg does not have to specify the specific crime that Trump intended to further or conceal — in other words, he doesn’t have to cite to a statute to show Trump’s intent to commit another crime. Not only that, but the jury doesn’t even have to agree on what other crime Trump intended to commit in order to convict him on the “bump up”! It’s surprising, counterintuitive, and frankly a little concerning, but stay tuned as Renato and I will likely be unpacking that aspect of the case on this week’s podcast.

Pieces worth reading this week

• I don’t have any new pieces this week, but given Musk’s shenanigans with Twitter, this older post I wrote about his “marketplace of [selective] ideas” on Twitter may be of interest

• This Politico piece with Renato Mariotti’s due process concerns about the Trump indictment

Noteworthy clips from this week

On Good Morning America Wednesday, with my initial reaction to the indictment and thoughts on Trump’s incendiary comments about the judge and his family

ABC News Live Tuesday night on how I think of the Manhattan charges in the context of the other cases looming over the horizon

ABC News Live @ABCNewsLive

.@AshaRangappa_ breaks down the similarities between former Pres. Trump's indictment and other investigations: "I kind of think of these as serial election crimes." trib.al/jrZYgmc

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