Raskin: Trump Supporters Claiming that What Trump Was Doing Was Just Free Speech ‘Is Silly’

EXCERPT:

RASKIN: "The indictment overall is a very powerful vindication of the rule of law in American democracy. The one charge that the special counsel has that we didn’t have strikes me as extremely compelling, which is conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the people, specifically the right to vote. It rang a bell in my mind immediately from what Abraham Lincoln said about insurrection, which he said was an assault on the first principle of government, which is the right of the people to choose their own elected officials. So I was very pleased with it. I can understand why they shied away from the count that we recommended about aiding and abetting insurrection and giving aid and comfort to insurrectionists. This statute has not been tried very much. Of course, no president certainly has ever put the people of the United States through what Donald Trump put us through. But I think that the special counsel avoided a whole conversation about the First Amendment and how far you can go in inciting insurrection and giving aid and comfort. We felt that it was clear that Trump had done so when he called them great patriots in his tweet and told them to remember this day forever and he inflamed them by saying that Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what needed to be done. But I think that he avoided a legitimate First Amendment controversy there. Now, of course, Trump supporters are going to claim that everything that Trump was doing was just free speech, which is silly because he is being charged with a whole series of actions of conduct that ended up amounting to a conspiracy to obstruct a federal proceeding, that amounted to a conspiracy to defraud the American people of the real election, superimposing counterfeit electors over the electors who were chosen according to federal and state law."