Criminal law

• LAS VEGAS, Aug. 29, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Annual BSA/AML Gaming Conference is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, September 12th, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas Nevada.
• This event, organized and hosted by the BSA-AML Compliance Group, is the premier anti-money laundering compliance conference for the gaming industry, featuring over a dozen government officials and other experts in gaming, sanctions, anti-money laundering, and compliance.
• The Main Conference will open on Tuesday morning with a Welcome Address from Dr. Brittnie Watkins of the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
• The Control Board oversees Nevada's gaming industry, and protects the stability and integrity of the gaming industry through investigations, licensing, and enforcement of laws and regulations.

• LONDON, Aug. 23, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Follow Up mechanism of the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) has issued a report concluding that Spain has failed to implement the Committee's decision in the case of Garzón v. Spain.
• The report, which was sent to Helen Duffy of Human Rights in Practice as international legal representative of Baltasar Garzón on 15 August, concerns the implementation of the ground breaking decision of 25 August 2021.
• Two years on, Spain has shown blatant disregard for the authority of the UN Human Rights Committee and its binding international obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
• Baltasar Garzón has repeatedly requested sought to engage the Government to secure compliance with the decision, directly and through the UNHRC monitoring mechanism.

• Peaceful transfers of power between different political parties, or even ruling families or authoritarian regimes, are also exceptional.
• Trump’s rhetoric and communication tactics in his refusal to admit defeat and follow American legal and cultural norms are tools in an ongoing attempt to end the American democratic experiment.
• Read more:
  The most serious Trump indictment yet – a criminal law scholar explains the charges of using ‘dishonesty, fraud and deceit’ to cling to power

Support to increase?

• He has struggled since leaving office, especially after he initially lost his Twitter account, to command the attention of the news media.
• These trials will be a spectacle and Trump will be at centre stage.
• The combination of attention and repetition is a dynamic and effective mechanism for political persuasion, and so the indictments and trials will fuel Trump’s re-election campaign.

Heroes and villains

• Trump also communicates in overly simplistic and puerile narratives, constantly using ad hominem attacks, to map a world in which there are heroes and villains and dramatic tensions between so-called forces of good and forces of evil.
• The narrative of Trump — and his followers — that he’s the victim of a corrupt liberal elite will be reinvigorated.
• Of course, that narrative also drives media attention, and we will all be sucked into the competing narratives around the trial.

What lies ahead

• It’s unlikely that detailed, careful legal arguments will speak to or persuade Trump’s base.
• We have already seen Trump’s willingness to leverage this faith for violent ends.
• They were also aimed at allowing citizens to live peacefully together without resorting to violence as the means for co-ordinating action.

The allure of rhetoric

• Tribalism, the cult of personality, fervour and hyperbole are intentional components of authoritarian rhetoric.
• It’s been a common tool over the course of human history; rhetoric has precipitated violence and citizens often succumb to its allure.

• The charges are groundbreaking and not just because a former president is facing multiple criminal charges.
• The indictment charges that all of Trump’s many claims of election irregularities “were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.” I am a scholar of criminal law and procedure.
• While Trump is facing multiple other charges, this indictment contains the most serious charges he has faced thus far.
• This indictment, by contrast, alleges that Trump knowingly worked to hold on to an office he knew he was not entitled to.

Breaking down the charges

• Trump allegedly did this, for example, by asking legislative leaders to call the legislature back into session and approve a resolution that Trump, not Joe Biden, had won.
• But all state legislatures certified the election results by December 2020.
• Third, Trump and his allies allegedly attempted to have Justice Department officials communicate with states whose electoral votes Trump wanted.

Ties to Jan. 6

• And finally, the indictment accuses Trump of being responsible for some of the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, and exploiting the riot at the Capitol by urging members of Congress to delay the electoral vote count proceedings that day.
• So, even though Trump is the only person named and indicted in this case, a wide range of evidence from others’ actions will be available against him.

Potential time served

• The indictment’s first count, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., has a five-year maximum sentence.
• Counts 2 and 3, obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, carry 20-year maximum sentences.
• The issue came up in the 1970s, but was rendered moot when President Gerald Ford pardoned former President Richard Nixon.
• This case places Trump in a much deeper kind of new legal trouble, and the U.S. in a murky, unexplored political and legal landscape.