Local legal commentator Barbara McQuade suggests that the U.S. Justice Department -- her past employer -- use an imaginative approach to charge President Trump with a street-level offense.
In 10 tweets, she describes "a crime I have not yet heard discussed much: manslaughter."
Barb McQuade: "A strong case can be made." (Photo: "Sisters in Law" podcast)McQuade was U.S. attorney in Detroit from 2010-17, now teaches at her alma mater, University of Michigan Law School, and is a MSNBC commentator. Her provocative social media thread is retweeted nearly 28,000 times in under a day.
Excerpts:
Under District of Columbia law, manslaughter occurs when a person recklessly causes an unintentional death. Under the federal Assimilative Crimes Act, state (or D.C.) law can be charged federally when it occurs on federal property.
For manslaughter, it's not necessary to show that the defendant intended the deaths to occur. That’s what makes it different from murder.
As president, Trump has a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. His failure to call up the National Guard or even to call off the mob could be described as "causing" the five unintentional deaths at the Capitol.
The latest hearing Tuesday in Congress. (Photo: U.S. House)
The Ann Arbor resident gives unsolicited advice, in effect, for Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland's staff:
To prove Trump acted recklessly, prosecutors would need to show he was aware of a risk and chose to ignore it. Here, he knew the crowd was armed and angry. And he could see on TV that they were engaging in violence. The death of an officer or member of the mob was a very real risk.
Of course, he himself was the one who set this risk in motion by summoning the mob and then lighting the fuse with his Ellipse speech urging them to march to the Capitol, but that conduct raises some sticky First Amendment concerns. His inaction in stopping the violence does not.
Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone said they would have blood on their hands if they didn’t act to call off the mob. And yet Trump watched the violence for three hours.
While maintaining that "a strong case can be made that Trump committed five counts of manslaughter ... by recklessly causing the unintended deaths of others," McQuade adds that he still should face "wider charges of attacking our democracy by engaging in a conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruct an official proceeding or commit sedition."
