Why do terror lawyers think Trump voters are more likely to sympathize?
Are Trump voters really more likely to side with the three Kansans charged with plotting to bomb a mosque? It isn’t, as you might expect, the president’s political adversaries who are claiming the bias that implies as a given.
Instead, it’s lawyers for the men accused of trying to start a war against American Muslims who seem awfully sure that Trump voters are more likely to be sympathetic to their clients. They’ve argued in a motion that more conservative jurors from rural Western Kansas should be included in their jury pool.
Because, they say outright, Kansans in that part of the state are more likely to have voted for Donald Trump in last year’s presidential race than those Kansans who live nearer to Wichita’s federal courthouse, where the case will be tried in March.
Those in the area already included in the juror pool went for Trump, too, with 61 percent of voters there choosing him over Hillary Clinton. But in the even redder area the lawyers want to pull from, Trump took 75 percent of the vote.
Since when does being more rural and more conservative translate into looking more kindly on accused domestic terrorists, you ask? Though we find regularly find fault with the president, that’s quite a leap.
And quite a statement, too, that juries are now assumed to be pulling for either the red or blue team rather than just trying in good faith to weigh the evidence and the facts.
Of course, even the most basic facts are now disputed, and even consumer goods are increasingly seen through the lens of political affiliation.
But here are the facts as laid out by the government: Gavin Wright, Patrick Stein and Curtis Allen, members of an offshoot of the militia Kansas Security Force known as the Crusaders, were indicted in October of last year and charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy against civil rights.
A former lawyer for Stein said his client had become convinced that if Trump won the presidential election, President Barack Obama would refuse to give up the office or recognize the election, and would declare martial law.
A wiretap transcript quotes Wright as saying he hoped the planned attack, on a mosque and an apartment complex where Somali refugees live, would “wake people up.”
The plan, federal prosecutors say, was to inspire not just copycat bombings but a war of religion. They say the three were planning to set off truck bombs in the town of Garden City the day after the November presidential election. All of the men have pleaded not guilty.
Their defense lawyers wrote that the case “is uniquely political because much of the anticipated evidence will center around, and was in reaction to, the 2016 presidential election.”
Which does not sound like a compliment to the president. Nor does their point that “this case will require the jury to evaluate and weigh evidence regarding whether the alleged conduct constitutes the crimes charged or whether it was constitutionally protected speech, assembly and petition, and/or the right to bear arms.”
Hate speech is protected speech, of course, unless it incites violence. Either way, we regret that the president’s own rhetoric may have played a role in inspiring their alleged conspiracy.
This story was originally published December 14, 2017 at 4:41 PM with the headline "Why do terror lawyers think Trump voters are more likely to sympathize?."