The Arizona civic organization Davos in the Desert hosted a “Get Trump” virtual conference on lawfare Tuesday, featuring some of the country’s top lawfare experts.
Linda Denno, an associate dean and associate professor at the University of Arizona who hosts a podcast with Berkeley constitutional law professor John Yoo, spoke about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump for taking home documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence. Brian Lupo, an investigative journalist who runs a podcast focusing on election corruption and lawfare, spoke about the unfair prosecutions of the January 6 protesters.
Speaking in her personal capacity, Denno relayed that her non-MAGA conservative friends tell her the documents case is the strongest case for prosecution against Trump. She said they point to him not being completely “compliant” with every demand from the Department of Justice and National Records and Archives Administration. She went over why they are wrong and pointed out that the law authorizes Trump as president to declassify all the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago.
Denno said Smith violated the documents law he’s prosecuting Trump over. Smith’s prosecution team jumbled up the documents in the boxes they seized from Mar-a-Lago, transferring some to other boxes and allowing a third party to examine them.
“How do we know classified documents weren’t planted in those boxes?” she asked.
She told a joke to put it into perspective. If a police officer pulls someone over and asks how fast they are going, the speeder could respond, “The same speed you were.”
Denno said she believes that Judge Aileen Cannon may call to dismiss the case due to the mishandling. Cannon is the only non-progressive judge hearing the Trump cases; she was appointed by Trump.
Lupo began his talk about the “Fedsurrection,” noting how unfair it is that the mainstream media keeps using the word “insurrection,” considering not a single January 6 protester has been charged with insurrection.
“Fedsurrection” refers to the federal government’s alleged role in the January 6 protests. At a hearing in January, Louisiana Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA- 03) accused the Department of Justice of “withholding exculpatory evidence from police video and audio recordings that reveal hundreds of undercover law enforcement officers were among the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and helped incite the attack,” according to The Washington Times.
Also, Lupo added that it is tainting the jury pool, making it even worse in Washington, D.C., where the juries already tilt to the Left.
Much of his talk focused on two targets, Jeremy Brown and Alfredo Luna. Brown never entered the parts of the U.S. Capitol building that were off-limits; he merely attended the event as security for the speakers. Afterward, the FBI raided his home, shutting off his video cameras while doing so. Brown said he believes they planted evidence on him, such as two grenades, which he is now being prosecuted for having.
Luna, a police officer who co-hosts with Lupo on his podcasts, wasn’t even at January 6, but he had his home raided due to his posts on social media. Luna said one of the FBI agents told him he knew his posts did not violate the law.
Lupo explained how the January 6 protest escalated from peaceful protesting to clashes with the police. He played a clip from a video showing an “overzealous officer” telling another officer to shoot tear gas up the scaffolding. The round misfired; it was a dud that went only 40 to 50 feet, so the officer ended up “gassing the entire police line.” Since all the officers were forced to walk away gassed, the protesters were able to move forward, he said.
Lupo ridiculed the use of the word insurrection, stating that there must also have been two similar insurrections previously involving rioting by progressives. One was violent rioting during Trump’s inauguration, where cars were burned. There were 234 arrests, with 214 indicted. However, alluding to corruption, he said no rioter was convicted in the Washington D.C. courts.
Lupo discussed how 300 January 6 protesters were charged with 18 USC 1512(c)(2), which makes it a felony punishable by 20 years in prison if someone “corruptly … obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” He said initially, a trial court dismissed the charge as not applicable. However, the government appealed. An appeals court sided with the government, but one of the justices dissented, stating it was overly broad.
Lupo said the statute was intended to apply to corporate and accounting fraud. The case has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which recently heard oral arguments. If the nation’s highest court rules that the statute does not apply, many January 6 protesters in prison will likely be released.
Lupo pointed out that two of the prosecutors, Smith and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is prosecuting Trump in the porn star “hush money” case, may have violated section (c)(1) of that statute themselves by mishandling documents. Bragg’s paralegal admitted that the office deleted three pages of phone transcripts. That section makes it a felony also punishable by 20 years in prison if someone “corruptly … alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.”
Talks by Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman, constitutional attorney and podcaster Robert Barnes, and Arizona criminal defense attorney and podcaster Robert Gouveia were covered here. The entire conference can be purchased for $25 at Davos in the Desert.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “January 6 Protesters” by Tyler Merbler. CC BY 2.0.
