/4 But wait! What does "corruptly persuade" mean? It means "with an improper motive." You're welcome! That will be $1,500.
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/5 No, seriously, what "corruptly persuade" means is one of those oft-disputed touchy-feely areas of law. In fact, the circuits -- the various United States Courts of Appeal -- disagree on its meaning.
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/6 Specifically, the circuits are split over whether it's "corrupt persuasion" to try to persuade someone to do something they have the right to do, like take the Fifth.https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/17-1325/17-1325-2018-09-12.html …
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/7 The President isn't tampering if he's genuinely just saying "hooray for Roger Stone telling the truth." The statute has a specific affirmative defense in 1512(e) if the defendant’s sole intention was to encourage, induce, or cause the other person to testify truthfully.
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/8 (I mean, if you merely negate an element of the offense, that's not really an affirmative defense, is it, and this serves to make the requisite mental state less clear, but who am I to tell the drafting geniuses in Congress how to write a statute?)
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/9 So. Though I certainly understand why anyone would interpret the President's tweet as encouraging Roger Stone to continue being Roger Stone, and why we may think he knows Stone is lying, it would be an extraordinarily difficult tampering cause to prove......
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/10 ...because you'd have to prove that he intended to influence Stone not to testify against him truthfully, knowing that Stone had harmful things to say he hadn't said yet, and not that he was merely thanking him for telling the truth. Damn tough case.
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/11 Let us not bother with 18 U.S.C. 1503, the generic "influencing" statute, which has language making it a crime to "corruptly . . . obstruct or impede" justice, because that collapses back into the same "corruptly" definition analysis. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1503 …
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/12 Though it's very hard to prove this is witness-tampering, it's absolutely norm-violating, and if a CEO or mob boss or other authority figure did it, the feds would absolutely crawl up their ass and look for a way to charge them for it.
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/13 And, of course, Congress (or at least a majority of the new House) might view it as obstruction or tampering, and could include it in an article of impeachment. They might not me wrong. /endhttps://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/lrc-presents-all-the-presidents-lawyers/the-i-word …
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I'm going to take "me wrong" as a Freudian slip!
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