Anybody who says there is no connection, I think is saying it for political or ideological reasons.” “A fourth-grader could see the connection. “I think it’s laughable that people are trying to separate the two things in saying there is no relationship between what the president urges his supporters to do and what his supporters then do,” Glenn Kirschner, a former federal homicide prosecutor, told me. But to many experts on hate groups and former Homeland Security, law enforcement, and counterterrorism officials, there is unquestionably a correlation. Trump and his allies have argued that the president bears no responsibility for the acts of deranged individuals. In the past weeks, the United States has been rocked by a series of vicious hate crimes, including a mail-bombing spree targeting Democrats and Trump critics the racially inspired killing of two black patrons at a Kentucky grocery store and, most recently, the massacre of 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue believed to be the work of an avowed neo-Nazi. The filing made national news in part because Pratt was willing to argue publicly what many in Washington are saying in private. “The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful, and contentious presidential elections in modern history,” attorney Jim Pratt wrote, “driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president.” Stein, his lawyer argued, should receive a more lenient sentence because he was inspired by then-candidate Donald Trump. On Monday, an attorney representing Patrick Eugene Stein, one of three men convicted of plotting to bomb Somali refugees, filed an explosive memo in U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
