It has been several weeks since I’ve posted anything, primarily because we have had family visiting here or in Vermont for the last several weeks. We returned from Vermont Saturday, and spent most of Sunday taking my brother in law to the Providence airport as he began his trip back to Paris.
We spent a week in Vermont, experiencing the still lingering effects of the flooding that took place in July. We actually own a little house in Chester, Vermont, but that’s currently occupied by one of my sons, his wife and their two kids. Every summer we rent a lake house for a week, cram it full of relatives and have a good time. This year was no exception, though the lake was full of detritus from the floods and had a brown cast to it, so both boating and swimming were discouraged. As we normally do little of either, we didn’t much care.
One thing I did do a lot of was biking, so I saw a lot of the Vermont roads. Several major roads were shut down completely, and it was often impossible to know whether a minor road was completely passable. The lake is in Ludlow, which was among the hardest hit areas, so we saw a lot of closed businesses and flood damage.
But, we had a good time. Especially fun was a dinner on the porch of the Fullerton Inn in Chester on Thursday, the 3rd. The concert scheduled for the green, which abuts the Inn, was moved indoors due to predicted bad weather that never came, but that was minor compared to the fact that we were able to celebrate yet another Trump indictment.
So now this post finally gets around to politics. The indictment itself made fun reading, though I think I can honestly say there was very little in it that I didn’t know already. The only thing that jumped out as new was Trump telling Pence he was “too honest”, with subsequent events seeming to establish that Pence has concluded he’s not going to be president, so he no longer has a reason to hold back on criticizing Trump.
I did almost no criminal law when I practiced, but even I know that the defenses proffered by Trump’s lawyers should not get them anywhere. Maybe Aileen Cannon would buy into the “free speech” defense, but the judge he drew in DC will give it short shrift. Just as a hypothetical, I’m fairly sure that a person who directed an accomplice to shoot someone would be found guilty of some felony. In fact, he or she would likely be found guilty if it was just a strong suggestion. But maybe I’m wrong. If John Eastman were to get his way, future law students will be told that Justice Holmes was simply wrong when he said that “you can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”.
Okay, I promise the next post will be a little more coherent.
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