Here Are the 12 Tweets That Helped Get Trump Indicted

Flying Squid@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 264 points –
Here Are the 12 Tweets That Helped Get Trump Indicted
gizmodo.com
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The Tweets:

Caused to be tweeted from... Ah, legalese...

I guess the wording would cover him having an intern do the actual tweeting so he can’t claim it wasn’t him actually typing.

Yes, that is the only reason I can think of for this curious wording. Amusing (if it weren't also so terrible).

I hope the verb "tweeted" dies soon. It sounds so childlike. "Posted" is a perfectly good word to describe publishing a message online.

And the service isn't even called Twitter anymore. I don't want to live in a future where news anchors start saying a celebrity "X'ed" in response to this or that.

I kinda just hope we all decide one day that the past tense of "tweet" is "twat". Doubly so now that it would mean that legal documents about the most important political issue of my lifetime would now have to include the phrase "...DONALD JOHN TRUMP caused to be twat..."

If they're tweets now then they would be Xeets, pronounced shits.

His fingers should be sentenced to prison!

Legalese like this is really important in terms of being precise. Say Trump tweeted it, and they can prove he didn’t (he got an assistant to do it) and that evidence may get thrown out

No rephrasing allowed, huh...

Nope, no rephrasing. That’s literally what the double jeopardy rule is about. The government gets a monopoly on violence, and we expect them to use that monopoly only within certain limits. Without those limits you get authoritarian dictatorships and really scary stuff such as found in the Catholic/Protestant wars in England’s history.

An example of how rephrasing is not allowed:

A number of years back, there was some outrage over a case where a rapist got off “on a technicality” that was headlined in various places as “the judge ruled it wasn’t rape because the severely mentally disabled victim could have objected”. The real issue was that the prosecutor decided, as a strategy to get more jail time for the guy, that they would charge him under a law against raping an unconscious person, but the truth was that the victim was not unconscious. The government is only allowed one shot at trying you for a crime though. If the prosecutor applies the wrong law, they don’t get a do over. The guy absolutely was a disgusting rapist, but he didn’t rape an unconscious person in this instance, and so he gets off scot free.

It’s vitally important that a prosecutor applies exactly the right words, because they are only allowed one shot. If a not-guilty verdict comes back for any reason, including for technicalities, that’s it. Not guilty (for that crime) forever.