Former president Donald Trump should be charged with two federal crimes based solely on publicly available information, according to former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade.
McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, appeared on MSNBC on Tuesday night to discuss her 26-page "model prosecution memo" for Trump published by Just Security.
McQuade said that based on public reporting and Jan. 6 documents, "I think there's a strong case both as to what Donald Trump did, and what his intent was."
"If you look at this, it seems to me that there's very strong evidence that Donald Trump sought to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the election, and that he knew, because of all the information he had, that it was based on a false premise that the election was stolen," McQuade said.
"So what the prosecution memo does is it amasses all that evidence, it puts it in one document, and then it analyzes it," McQuade added. "What are the elements of the offenses, and does the set of facts satisfy the elements of those offenses? And I submit that these two charges that I've laid out here — conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of an official proceeding — are met by the evidence e of Donald Trump pressuring Mike Pence to overturn the election as he did in private meetings, as he did in pubic remarks, as he did on Twitter."
"And, importantly — and I'm not sure it's been gathered in one place — all of the information that Donald Trump had that should have led him to believe that he knew that the election was not stolen," she said. "You know, he has said repeatedly it was stolen, but at some point, when enough people tell you it wasn't, at what point is it a reasonable inference to believe that he never believed it at all? He made it up out of full cloth. A person can say all day, 'The sky is green, the sky is green, the sky is green.' But after dozens of people tell you the sky is blue, and there's not a wit of evidence that the sky is green, I don't think a reasonable juror in America would think that he believe the sky is green."
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