Murder, he wrote
Before I invoke a particularly villainous person as today’s exemplar, I must issue a strong disclaimer. New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the man Oliver Stone disingenuously transformed into an undeserving hero for the movie “JFK,” was an awful, corrupt and thoroughly evil human being. While he was active in the 1960s several investigative reporters for national news outlets uncovered this about him. People who worked for him reported as much. He is notorious today for ruining the life, health and fortune of an innocent man named Clay Shaw, whom he corruptly prosecuted for the death of John F. Kennedy. Even JFK conspiracy theorists acknowledge this. He’s an embarrassment even to their low, low standards.
But Garrison made famous a power peculiar to district attorneys across the country. It turns out that any DA anywhere in the United States can prosecute any other American citizen for any crime, provided that crime impacted someone in his or her jurisdiction, or one of the alleged criminals lives there. Garrison didn’t discover this power, he just made it famous.
Which brings me to a particularly useful service that virtually any district attorney in the United States can perform for the American people. Thanks to a recent revelation from the final report of the January 6 Committee, we are reminded that virtually any district attorney is free to prosecute Jared Kushner, Donald Trump and Mike Pence for murder. Because virtually every jurisdiction in the United States contains at least one person who died of Covid-19, and that death can be traced back to the criminal irresponsibility of those three men.
First a word about murder. Different states in the US have different names and different definitions for the various categories of murder. But they all break down, more or less, to three. The worst is first degree murder. That’s premeditated murder with intent to kill. Then there’s second degree murder, where murder was not intended but bodily harm was, or the murder was committed in a split second of weakness or passion. Then there’s third degree murder or manslaughter, the one we are concerned with today, where the death of another human being is caused by criminal negligence.
Again, these are oversimplifications because there are slightly differing definitions for each kind of murder between states. But they will do for the purposes of our discussion today.
It’s murder by criminal negligence that concerns us today, of course. Testimony from the J6 committee reminded us that many of the more than one million American deaths from the coronavirus pandemic are directly traceable back to the criminal negligence of Trump, his son-in-law and his Vice President. Had those three men behaved differently, many of those American lives could have been saved.
A released transcript of the J6 committee with a woman named Alyssa Farah Griffin recently came to light. Griffin was a Trump administration communications director. She was asked questions by the committee concerning the shadow Coronavirus Task Force that was headed up by Jared Kushner, created as a second task force to the official one headed up by Mike Pence. The question concerned the post-election conduct of Kushner and the handoff of the task force’s duties and responsibilities to the Biden administration.
At one of the post-election task force meetings that included Griffin and Kushner, Dr. Deborah Birx raised the question of whether or not the incoming Biden administration should be looped in so they could hit the ground running in the fight against coronavirus. Kushner’s response was, “Absolutely not.”
Kushner was only interested in punishing the incoming Biden administration for winning the election. He couldn’t have cared less whether or not it would have helped make a smooth and safe transition — and thereby help save more American lives. Like his father-in-law, Kushner only cared about political vengeance. How that greed for revenge tragically impacted the American people was never a consideration.
Recall this was happening at a time when 3,000 Americans a day were dying of Covid. This callous behaviour reminds us that Trump, Kushner and Pence were all culpable for America’s incompetent response to coronavirus, and they were all deeply criminally negligent in that response.
We know, for example, that Donald Trump promoted insane “treatments” for coronavirus, everything from hydroxychloroquine to bleach. He mocked Joe and Jill Biden and several reporters for wearing masks. We know from taped interviews with Bob Woodward that Trump lied to the American people when he minimised the severity of the coming pandemic. Trump also promoted and encouraged people who ignored safe conduct, and encouraged the people of Virginia to rebel against mask mandates in the interest of “freedom.” Trump also promoted and attended several super-spreader events.
Meanwhile Trump’s dybbuk Vice President headed up the official White House Coronavirus Task Force. Pence never contradicted anything Trump said or did about the coronavirus. With gross and criminal negligence Pence rubber stamped every idiotic thing Trump said about coronavirus.
One of the most evil things to come out of the Trump administration’s gross mishandling of the pandemic came from Jared Kushner. It was reported that Kushner deliberately shied away from a national solution to coronavirus because he believed that blue states were being hit the hardest. In other words, he was okay with Americans getting sick and even dying as long as those Americans were Democrats.
There are three elements that need to be proven in order to prosecute someone for third degree murder, or manslaughter, or whatever the statute of any of the 50 states happens to use. First, someone must be grossly negligent or have a duty to act. Second, that conduct must be reasonably likely to result in the death of a human being. Third, that conduct must actually be demonstrated to result in the death of a human being. I think those criteria are met, and virtually every district in the United States has an American who died because of the negligence of Trump, Pence and Kushner.
The beauty of all this is, virtually any DA anywhere in the country can file these charges against Trump, Kushner and Pence and go to work on their respective cases. Their work will not interfere with the work being done by Jack Smith or anyone else in Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice. So district attorneys of America, you have your marching orders. Go to work. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.