(A traitorous savage,) Donald Trump vows to lock up political enemies if he returns to White House | Donald Trump | The Guardian

(A traitorous savage), Donald Trump vows to lock up political enemies if he returns to White House

"Former president tells Glenn Beck he would have ‘no choice’ but to lock up opponents ‘because they’re doing it to us’

Martin Pengelly

Donald Trump promised to lock up his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in 2016 but did not carry out the threat while in office. Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

Donald Trump says he will lock up his political enemies if he is president again.

In an interview on Tuesday, the rightwing broadcaster Glenn Beck raised Trump’s famous campaign-trail vow to “lock up” Hillary Clinton, his opponent in 2016, a promise Trump did not fulfill in office.

Beck said: “Do you regret not locking [Clinton] up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?”

Trump said: “The answer is you have no choice, because they’re doing it to us.”

Trump has encouraged the “lock her up” chant against other opponents but he remains in considerable danger of being locked up himself.

Under four indictments, he faces 91 criminal charges related to election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments to a adult film star. He denies wrongdoing and claims to be the victim of political persecution. Trials are scheduled next year.

Earlier this month, Politico calculated that Trump faced a maximum of 641 years in jail. After the addition of 13 racketeering and conspiracy charges in Georgia, Forbes uppedthe total to more than 717 years.

Trump is 77.

Both sites noted, however, that if convicted, the former president was unlikely to receive maximum sentences. Nor would convictions bar Trump from running for president or being elected. On that score, Trump dominates national and key state polling regarding the Republican presidential nomination.

In his Tuesday interview on BlazeTV, Trump also said he “never hit Biden as hard as I could have” while in office.

Trump’s first impeachment concerned attempts to find dirt on rivals including Biden, related to politics and business in Ukraine. Now, in Congress, Trump’s Republican allies are threatening to impeach Biden over unsubstantiated allegations connected to his surviving son, Hunter.

Trump told Beck that Biden was behind the indictments against him. In fact, all were brought by prosecutors independent of the White House: 44 by the justice department special counsel Jack Smith, 34 by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and 13 by Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia.

Trump also claimed “the woman that I never met, that they accused me of rape, that’s being run by a Democrat, a Democrat operative, and paid for by the Democrat [sic] party”.

That was a reference to civil claims brought by E Jean Carroll, a writer who says Trump sexually assaulted her in New York in the 1990s. Earlier this year, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation and fined about $5m. A second trial is due next year. The judge in the case has said Trump has been adjudicated a rapist.

Also facing investigations of his business affairs, Trump said Democrats and other opponents were “sick people … evil people”.

The twice impeached, four times indicted, 91 times charged ex-president also told Beck he “always had such great respect for the office of the president and the presidency”.

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Donald Trump vows to lock up political enemies if he returns to White House | Donald Trump | The Guardian

Nigeria Arrests Dozens Over Same-Sex Wedding - The New York Times

Nigeria Arrests Dozens Over Same-Sex Wedding

Incredibly Ignorant and backward.

"A 2014 law makes such unions illegal in the country. Anyone found guilty of taking part can also face up to 10 years in prison.

Aug. 30, 2023, 9:30 a.m. ET

Some of the Nigerians being tried in 2019 on charges of public display of affection with members of the same sex. That case was later dismissed.Temilade Adelaja/Reuters

The police in Nigeria have arrested over 60 people who were in attendance at what the authorities claimed was a same-sex wedding, reinforcing a crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. people in Africa’s most populous nation.

The police also broadcast the identities of some of those arrested on social media and encouraged members of the public to help “uphold the moral standards of the society” by providing relevant information — moves that raised concern that those who attended the event would be subjected to stigma or violence.

Under a 2014 law, anyone entering a same-sex marriage or civil union in Nigeria can be imprisoned for up to 14 years. Those who administer or witness such a ceremony can face up to 10 years in prison. At the time it was enacted, the U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry, said the law violated basic human rights protections.

Bright Edafe, a police spokesman in Delta State in southern Nigeria, said the arrests were a sign that the country was going to use an iron fist against gay unions.

“We are in Africa, and we are in Nigeria. We cannot copy the Western world, because we don’t have the same culture,” he said at a news conference on Tuesday in front of the dozens who were arrested.

Same-sex weddings are rare in Nigeria, with many such couples opting to hold their ceremonies in countries where it is legal to do so, Mr. Edafe said in a telephone interview. “It is not common, and we don’t even want to get to that level,” he said. “That is why we are taking the action we are taking now.”

In a video that the Nigerian police published on Facebook on Tuesday, one of those charged told reporters that he was wearing a skirt and crop top for a fashion show. Asked whether he was gay, he said that he was not and that the event had been a party rather than a wedding ceremony.

In 2020, a case in Lagos in which 47 men had been charged with public displays of affection with members of same sex was dismissed, with the judge citing prosecutors’ failure to appear in court and call witnesses.

The latest arrests occurred after police officers raided the Teebilos Hotel in Warri, a city in southern Nigeria.

The police said on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, that on Sunday night they had stopped a person whom they identified as “a male cross-dresser” who said that he was an actor and that he belonged to “a certain gay club.” He said that he was going to a same-sex wedding, the police wrote.

In a video that the police published on the social media platform, a couple — one wearing a white dress with a veil and one in a white suit — stood beside a swimming pool surrounded by guests and balloons as a master of ceremonies introduced a performer on a stage.

Mr. Edafe said in a telephone interview that the those arrested were being held and that they may be charged at the end of an investigation. It was not immediately clear who was legally representing those in custody.

Isa Sanusi, Amnesty International’s country director for Nigeria, said that homophobia had been an issue in the country even before the 2014 law was passed, but that the legislation had become a way to put added pressure on L.G.B.T.Q. people.

“That law emboldened homophobia,” he said. “It’s given people the ground to carry out human rights violations in Nigeria.”

Mr. Sanusa also denounced the police’s decision to publish photos and videos of those arrested at the gathering, a move that he said put those accused at risk of violence.

“This parading like yesterday,” he said, “is a complete violation of human rights.”

Many of the approximately 60 countries around the world that criminalize homosexuality are in Africa, and in recent years some have passed or vowed to introduce harsher penalties for same-sex relations.

In Uganda, a draconian law passed in May includes the death penalty for some kinds of homosexual acts, and life imprisonment for anyone who engages in gay sex. Two men in the country have been charged with “aggravated homosexuality” this summer, a crime punishable by death.

Ismail Alfa Abdulrahim contributed reporting from Maiduguri, Nigeria."

Nigeria Arrests Dozens Over Same-Sex Wedding - The New York Times

After Jacksonville, Tensions Flare Between DeSantis and Black Floridians - The New York Times

After Jacksonville, Tensions Flare Between DeSantis and Black Floridians

"At a vigil for the shooting victims, Mr. DeSantis had to speak over loud boos from a largely Black crowd. His agenda in Florida has earned him few Black allies.

Aug. 30, 2023Updated 10:07 a.m. ET

Gov. Ron DeSantis’s conservative policies have angered the African American community in Florida, particularly one regarding how slavery is taught in schools.Malcolm Jackson for The New York Times

Days after being sworn in as Florida’s governor in 2019, Ron DeSantis pardoned the Groveland Four, a group of Black men who had been wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting a white woman decades earlier.

At the time, Mr. DeSantis’s decision seemed like it could serve as a vital olive branch to Florida’s wary African American community. Accusations of racism had trailed him throughout a bruising general election, which he had begun by warning voters not to “monkey this up” by voting for his Democratic opponent, who was Black. The case of the Groveland Four, who all died before having their names cleared, had received national attention, and Mr. DeSantis said their treatment represented a “miscarriage of justice.”

Four years later, Mr. DeSantis’s relationship with Black Floridians could hardly be worse. As he moved increasingly to the right ahead of his run for president, Mr. DeSantis pushed an agenda that cemented his status as a rising conservative star nationally but that has outraged many Black voters and leaders in his home state.

Those policies include changing how slavery is taught in schools, cutting funding for diversity and inclusion initiatives and redistricting a Black-led congressional district in northern Florida out of existence. Some Black professional groups have stopped holding conferences in the state, while several Black leaders have condemned Florida — and Mr. DeSantis — as an example of racism in policymaking.

Now, a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville that killed three Black people over the weekend has escalated those tensions to new heights.

At a vigil on Sunday for the victims, Mr. DeSantis had to speak over loud boos from the largely Black crowd. He condemned the murders and called the killer, a white man who the authorities said intentionally targeted Black people before killing himself, “a major-league scumbag.”

Mr. DeSantis was confronted with loud boos at the vigil for the shooting victims.John Raoux/Associated Press

Jeffrey Rumlin, a pastor who spoke after Mr. DeSantis, offered a correction. “Respect for the governor,” Mr. Rumlin, who is Black, told the crowd, but “he was not a scumbag. He was a racist.”

Shevrin Jones, a state senator from South Florida, said Mr. DeSantis’s reception at the vigil was telling.

“The response from Jacksonville’s Black community was the response from the Black community across the state of Florida,” said Mr. Jones, a Black Democrat. “We’ve never had a relationship with the governor.”

Mr. DeSantis’s office, which is preparing for a major hurricane, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did his campaign.

Kiyan Michael, a Republican state representative from the Jacksonville area, defended Mr. DeSantis. Far from being racist, she said, his support for policies like universal school choice and efforts to crack down on the employment of undocumented immigrants, had helped African Americans. The governor made modest gains with Black voters in his re-election last year, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Ms. Michael, who is Black, also praised Mr. DeSantis for attending the Jacksonville vigil.

“He could have sent somebody in his place. He didn’t,” she said. “He knew that he was going into a hornet’s nest, but he came himself to show his heart, his concern, his compassion.”

The list of policies that Mr. DeSantis’s critics describe as harmful to African Americans is long, and many have been challenged in court.

As governor, Mr. DeSantis sought to restrict enacting a popular referendum to restore the voting rights of many felons. After the George Floyd rallies, he signed legislation that many civil rights activists said criminalized political protests, as well as laws eliminating diversity and inclusion spending from state universities and restricting the teaching of the academic framework known as critical race theory. He also set up a new state police force to enforce election laws that arrested mainly Black people in a high-profile sweep and has seen many of its cases stumble in court. And he removed two elected state attorneys from office. Both were Democrats who supported criminal justice reform. One was Black.

Perhaps the biggest backlash was early this year, when Florida education officials rejected an Advanced Placement course on African American studies and subsequently adopted new standards that said students should be taught how enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The line was widely denounced, with a number of Black conservatives, including Mr. DeSantis’s 2024 rival Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, criticizing its inclusion.

In the presidential race, Mr. DeSantis has leaned on his “war on woke,” aiming to eliminate liberal viewpoints on race and gender from many parts of public life.Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald, via Associated Press

A backlash came when Florida education officials said students should be taught how enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat, via Associated Press

Mr. DeSantis defended the changes, saying on Fox News this month that the standards overwhelmingly showed the “injustices of slavery,” while also demonstrating that “people acquired skills in spite of slavery, not because of it, and then they used those when they achieved their freedom.”

As a young man, Mr. DeSantis taught American history at a private boarding school in Georgia. There, The New York Times previously reported, some students said he offered lessons on the Civil War that seemed slanted, factually wrong and sometimes presented in ways that sounded like attempts to justify slavery.

On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has leaned on his record leading Florida, particularly his “war on woke,” which seeks to eliminate liberal viewpoints on race and gender from many parts of public life. Republican primary voters have generally responded well, although Mr. DeSantis is still polling far behind the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.

A general election, however, could be a different story. Mr. DeSantis’s status as a lightning rod for racial issues could galvanize Black turnout against him. Black voters are a key part of the Democratic electorate and their participation at the polls is vital. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost to Mr. Trump as Black turnout declined in a presidential election for the first time in 20 years, according to the Pew Research Center. Four years later, Joseph R. Biden Jr. won as Black voters came back to the polls in higher numbers.

Angie Nixon, a Democratic state representative from Jacksonville, said in an interview that the harms of Mr. DeSantis’s policies were not just limited to Black voters.

“He attacks marginalized communities in general because his base doesn’t like them,” Ms. Nixon said. “Because that’s low-hanging fruit for him to gain even more points politically among a base of voters. That’s all he’s ever done — is to try to appeal to a base of people.”

Black leaders in Florida described their relationship with Mr. DeSantis as strained at best. In his five years as governor, Mr. DeSantis has held no formal meetings with the state’s legislative Black caucus, according to its members. In contrast, his predecessor, Rick Scott, did sit down with the Black legislators, although the meetings grew contentious and were eventually canceled after the caucus members said they were not being listened to.

“I worked with Jeb Bush. I worked with Martinez. I worked with Rick Scott,” said the former congressman Al Lawson, referring to several past Republican Florida governors, including Bob Martinez. “None of them disenfranchised Blacks as much as this governor, DeSantis.”

Mr. Lawson’s former district — once heavily Black and Democratic — is now held by a Republican, a product of a redistricting process in which Mr. DeSantis took the unusual step of putting forth his own maps, rather than leaving it entirely to the Legislature, where he enjoys significant support with G.O.P. supermajorities. (A legal challenge asserting that the changes harmed Black voters could restore Mr. Lawson’s district.)

This summer, Black national organizations have shunned the state or encouraged their members to travel elsewhere. The National Association of Black Engineers said it would move its 2024 convention, originally set for Orlando, to Atlanta. Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black fraternity, said it would no longer hold its 2025 convention in Orlando. Both organizations cited recent policies in Florida that they felt posed a threat to Black Americans.

In May, the N.A.A.C.P. released a travel advisory to Black Americans considering visiting Florida, calling the state “openly hostile” to members of racial minorities and L.G.B.T.Q. people.

Carol Greenlee, 73, pushed for decades for the pardon and eventual exoneration of her father, Charles Greenlee, one of the Groveland Four, over the 1949 crime in Central Florida. She saw the pardon as a moment of hope and reconciliation, especially after the previous governor, Mr. Scott, had declined to take up the case, despite the urging of the Legislature.

“It felt like we were moving forward,” she said. “It felt like the pendulum was swinging toward justice.”

Ms. Greenlee, who lives in Tennessee but has followed Mr. DeSantis’s path as governor, said his subsequent actions had left her baffled and angry.

“I have to shake my head and wonder what happened with some of the stances he has taken,” she said. “It’s almost like a 180-degree turnaround.”

Maya King is a politics reporter covering the South. Prior to joining The Times, she was a national political reporter at Politico, where she covered the 2020 presidential election. More about Maya King"

After Jacksonville, Tensions Flare Between DeSantis and Black Floridians - The New York Times

Giuliani Is Liable for Defaming Georgia Election Workers, Judge Says - The New York Times

Giuliani Is Liable for Defaming Georgia Election Workers, Judge Says

"The ruling means that a defamation case against Rudolph W. Giuliani, stemming from his role in seeking to overturn the 2020 election, can proceed to a trial where damages will be set.

Aug. 30, 2023Updated 12:23 p.m. ET

Rudolph W. Giuliani outside the Fulton County jail in Atlanta last week.Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Rudolph W. Giuliani was liable for defaming two Georgia election workers by repeatedly declaring that they had mishandled ballots while counting votes in Atlanta during the 2020 election.

The ruling by the judge, Beryl A. Howell in Federal District Court in Washington, means that the defamation case against Mr. Giuliani, a central figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after his election loss, can proceed to trial on the narrow question of how much, if any, damages he will have to pay the plaintiffs in the case.

A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani declined to comment.

Judge Howell’s decision came a little more than a month after Mr. Giuliani conceded in two stipulations in the case that he had made false statements when he accused the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, of manipulating ballots while working at the State Farm Arena for the Fulton County Board of Elections.

Mr. Giuliani later sought to explain that his stipulations were solely meant to get past a dispute with Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss about discovery evidence in the case and move toward dismissing the allegations outright. But Judge Howell, complaining that Mr. Giuliani’s stipulations “hold more holes than Swiss cheese,” took the proactive step of declaring him liable for “defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy and punitive damage claims.”

The lawsuit filed by Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss in December 2021 was among the first to be brought by individual election workers who found themselves dragged into the alternate universe of right-wing politicians and media figures who claimed that Mr. Trump had won the election. The two women had originally sued other defendants, including the One America News Network and some of its top officials, but ultimately settled the case against everyone except Mr. Giuliani.

Last year, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss appeared as witnesses at a public hearing of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 and told the story of what happened after Mr. Giuliani amplified the false claims that they had pulled thousands of fraudulent ballots from a suitcase in their vote-counting station and illegally fed them through voting machines.

Although Fulton County and Georgia officials immediately debunked the accusations, Mr. Giuliani kept promoting them, ultimately comparing the women — both of whom are Black — to drug dealers and calling during a hearing with Georgia state legislators for their homes to be searched.

Mr. Trump invoked Ms. Freeman’s name 18 times during a phone call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021. In the call, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to help him “find” nearly 11,800 votes — enough to swing the results in Georgia from the winner, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” Ms. Freeman testified to the House panel, adding as her voice rose with emotion, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

Giuliani Is Liable for Defaming Georgia Election Workers, Judge Says - The New York Times

Arizona Prosecutor has MAJOR DEVELOPMENT in NEW Trump Criminal Investiga...

MUST-SEE: Prosecutor on a Trump CONVICTION in federal court

The Forgotten Radicalism of the March on Washington

Aug. 29, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET

Warren K. Leffler, via Library of Congress

“As remembered and commemorated by most Americans, the 1963 March on Washington — its 60th anniversary fell on Monday — represents the essence of the civil rights movement, defined in our national mythology as a colorblind demand for neutrality and fairness in the face of discrimination, embodied in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Less well remembered, in our collective memory at least, is the fact that both the march and King’s speech were organized around much more than opposition to anti-Black discrimination. It was officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with a far more expansive vision for society than formal equality under the law. The march wasn’t a demand for a more inclusive arrangement under the umbrella of postwar American liberalism, as it might seem today. It was a demand for something more — for a social democracy of equals, grounded in the long Black American struggle to realize the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the potential of Reconstruction.

Consider the 10-point list of demands issued by the organizers of the march. They wanted “Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation” to guarantee all Americans “access to all public accommodations, decent housing, adequate and integrated education” and “the right to vote.” They wanted “a massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.” They wanted “a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living.” They wanted federal legislation to protect workers from exploitation and a federal government that brought its full power to bear on discrimination and disenfranchisement.

Or, better yet, consider the labor leader A. Philip Randolph’s opening speech to the assembled marchers. “We want a free, democratic society dedicated to the political, economic and social advancement of man along moral lines,” said Randolph, for whom the 1963 March on Washington was the fulfillment of a call made more than two decades earlier, in the midst of World War II, to “Let the Negro masses speak with ten thousand Negroes strong, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Capital of the nation.”

“The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality,” Randolph said in his speech. “It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values, because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property.” We know, he continued, that “we cannot expect the realization of our aspirations through the same old anti-democratic social institutions and philosophies that have all along frustrated our aspirations.”

The chief organizer of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, had a complicated relationship with his allies in the movement. His youthful communism, wartime objection to the draft and unapologetic sexuality — Rustin was openly gay — rendered him an outsider among civil rights leaders and a target for rivals and opponents. Nonetheless, he spoke on the day of the event, delivering the demands of the march direct to the viewing public, and gave a clear account of the social democratic vision behind the march in a memo written for others in the movement:

We believe that the Negro community has an especially important role to play. For the dynamic that has motivated Negroes to withstand with courage and dignity the intimidation and violence they have endured in their own struggle against racism, in all its forms, may now be the catalyst which mobilizes all workers behind demands for a broad and fundamental program of economic justice.

Bayard Rustin, speaking at the march.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Much if not most of the civil rights movement has been subsumed into the mythology of Martin Luther King Jr. That is, it has been subsumed into the image of a King who stands for little else than colorblindness, nonviolence and moral suasion. That doesn’t represent the full King, of course, and in the same way, that doesn’t represent the March on Washington as it was actually conceived and carried out.

The real march, through the paramount influence of Randolph, Rustin and others, was an expression of the democratic and egalitarian aspirations of the Black freedom struggle as voiced and articulated throughout the previous decades, by activists, intellectuals and laborers alike. As the liberal journalist Murray Kempton wrote of the event for The New Republic, “No expression one-tenth so radical has ever been seen or heard by so many Americans.”

Living now, as we do, in a period of anti-democratic retrenchment at the hands of powerful reactionaries, it is as important as ever to remember and commemorate the radicalism of both the March on Washington and the entire civil rights movement. Not just as inspiration, but as a reminder that the struggle for democratic freedom — whether we look to the enslaved Americans who claimed the Declaration of Independence as their own or their descendants who stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial nearly two centuries later — has always been a struggle against the privileges of caste and class.

Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie“

There’s a Good Chance Trump Will Be Found ‘Willfully Blind’

Aug. 28, 2023

Karlotta Freier

By Burt Neuborne

“Mr. Neuborne is a professor emeritus at New York University Law School, where he was the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice.

More than a decade ago, a divided Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Alvarez that an elected member of a district water board in California could not be prosecuted criminally for lying to an audience about winning the Medal of Honor. The court ruled that efforts to criminalize mere lying, without linking the lie to an attempt to gain a material advantage, posed an unacceptable threat to robust exercise of First Amendment rights.

Given that decision, Jack Smith, the special prosecutor investigating former President Donald Trump, was right in concluding that Mr. Trump has a First Amendment right to lie to the general public.

So, where’s the legal beef in the indictment arising from the events that culminated in the storming of the Capitol brought by Mr. Smith against Mr. Trump? It’s in the fact that Mr. Smith isn’t merely charging the former president with lying; he is contending that Mr. Trump lied to gain an unlawful benefit — a second term in office after voters showed him the exit. That kind of speech-related behavior falls comfortably within what the justices call “categorical exceptions” to the First Amendment like true threats, incitements, obscenity, depictions of child sexual abuse, fighting words, libel, fraud and speech incident to criminal conduct.

As the court put it in 1949 in the case of Giboney v. Empire Storage and Ice Co., “It rarely has been suggested that the constitutional freedom for speech and press extends its immunity to speech or writing used as an integral part of conduct in violation of a valid criminal statute.”

That is why Mr. Smith will most likely seek to prove that the former president was engaged in “speech incident to criminal conduct” when he and his co-conspirators lied to state legislators, state election officials, gullible supporters, Justice Department lawyers and Vice President Mike Pence in an illegal effort to prevent Joe Biden from succeeding him as president. Since Mr. Trump is charged with, among other crimes, conspiracy to defraud the United States and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted, Mr. Smith would clearly be right in arguing that the Alvarez decision doesn’t apply.

Characterizing Mr. Trump’s words as “speech incident to criminal conduct” would neatly solve Mr. Smith’s First Amendment problem but at a substantial cost to the prosecution. To win a conviction, the government must persuade 12 jurors to peer inside Mr. Trump’s head and find beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew he was lying when he claimed to be the winner of the 2020 election. If Mr. Trump actually believed his false assertions, his speech was not “incident to criminal conduct.”

How can Mr. Smith persuade 12 jurors that no reasonable doubt exists that Mr. Trump knew he was lying? The prosecution will, no doubt, barrage the jury with reams of testimony showing that he was repeatedly told by every reputable adviser and administration official that no credible evidence of widespread electoral fraud existed and that Mr. Pence had no choice but to certify Mr. Biden as the winner.

But there also will probably be evidence that fervent supporters of Mr. Trump’s efforts fed his narcissism with bizarre false tales of result-changing electoral fraud and frivolous legal theories justifying interference with Mr. Biden’s certification as president-elect. Those supporters could include Rudy Giuliani; Sidney Powell, a lawyer and purveyor of wild conspiracy theories; Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, who apparently plotted with Mr. Trump to unseat the acting attorney general and take control of the department; and John Eastman, the lawyer who hatched the plan that Mr. Pence refused to follow to keep Mr. Trump in power.

Maybe Mr. Trump himself will swear to his good faith belief that he won. With all that conflicting testimony, how is a conscientious juror to decide for sure what was really going on inside his head?

The answer lies in the Supreme Court’s doctrine of willful blindness. A dozen years ago, in the case of Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for all but one justice, ruled that proof of willful blindness is the legal equivalent of proving guilty knowledge.

As Justice Alito explained it, “Many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the circumstances.”

In other words, when a defendant, like Mr. Trump, is on notice of the potential likelihood of an inconvenient fact (Mr. Biden’s legitimate victory) and closes his eyes to overwhelming evidence of that fact, the willfully blind defendant is just as guilty as if he actually knew the fact. While this argument is not a slam dunk, there’s an excellent chance that 12 jurors will find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Trump hid from the truth by adopting willful blindness.

Burt Neuborne is a professor emeritus at New York University Law School, where he was the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice. He was the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1981 to 1986.“