Your Honor, members of the jury, Secretary Truman —
I will begin with the bare facts of the case.
Timeline:On 17 March, 2018, President fhtagn, as a concerned citizen, posted a question to the members of the Lincoln Assembly in the thread
L.10.7.3 Act to Repeal The Balanced Budget Requirement , asking, in good faith, about checks on the debt following a potential repeal of the regional article requiring balanced budgets. The defendant - the Speaker of the Lincoln Assembly, Ninja0428 - ignored the President’s question and announced that a vote was open that same day.
The President then reiterated her question and raised concerns about elected officials ignoring their constituents and concealing their intentions. The argument between the two continued, until the Speaker revealed the following -
The President expressed understandable confusion at this apparently blatantly untrue assertion -
The defendant then replied -
Revealing that legislators had, in contravention of federal law, conducted official public business outside Atlas Forum, specifically on the ‘Discord’ web chat app (hereafter simply ‘Discord’), thus preventing the retention of Public Records as outlined in the CJA.
I would also note the contemptuous and undemocratic attitude which the Speaker reveals in his sneering and dismissive response to the President’s honest and reasonable enquiry.
The controversy over the use of a secretive, shadowy backroom to conduct the business of the region continued in the thread
The Use Of Discord, where citizens discussed the growing unease about the revelations made by the Speaker in his insulting response to the President.
In response to the legitimate and entirely accurate point by Rep. wxtransit that not all Atlas users participate in Discord, the Speaker responded -
In this instance we have the Speaker claiming that -
1. It is his call as an elected official, not the mandates of federal statute, to decide, on a whim, whether the public has a right to know decisions undertaken by their elected officials.
2. He strives for transparency in ‘most’ aspects of government (!), presumably, again, at his sole discretion, and that, ‘everything of importance’ has been made public - again, something for which we have his word and only his word.
3. That if a citizen requests to see the business of their government they must submit a request for logs of the Discord chat which, as all jurors will doubtless be aware, have no means by which to confirm veracity and which could be easily selectively edited or manufactured.
I would quote in this case the relevant and insightful comments by citizens Mr. Reactionary and Bacon King, which I believe both show the revulsion of ordinary citizens at the conspiracy by a member of the Assembly to destroy Public Records, and provide a good summary of the absurdity of the defendant’s claims:
Members of congress can discuss bills over lunch, but itd be pretty shady if when they came back to the chamber they claimed they'd already entertained a motion to proceed at Shoney's. Floor motions are called that because they take place on the chamber floor.
Why isn't it OK to do that on Discord? Is it that important? All you have done is talk about how bad that is without giving a legitimate reason.
haha wait what you guys literally HELD A VOTE on discord???
and you don't understand why that's not appropriate for a forum government sim?? it's literally the same thing as if a group of U.S. Senators met in a bar somewhere and all started voting on legislation among themselves and deciding this was totally the same thing as passing the bills in the actual senate
Rep. wxtransit furthermore provided what I believe is a concise and accurate summation of the issues at hand in his outraged response to the Speaker’s flailing justifications -
You don't understand what an oligarchy is.
I'm done with this argument, it's useless. If Lincolnites demand that we motion for the vote on Atlas, so be it.
Ah, so those who are concerned about this disrespectful undemocratic precedent you're setting should not be able to have their concerns heard if they don't live in Lincoln, even though they'll be affected (it is precedent, after all)?
Also, Lincolnites have to demand to be able to have transparency in their government that is mandated by law in the United States? What you're doing is against the law in RL. In fact...
writes new bill
You continue to beat the drum with this me asking people if they're ready to vote in Discord is an "undemocratic precedent" without giving why it is as significant enough to give it such a harsh label.
And whether you like it or not, this is Atlasia, not the United States, and if we're going into to the RL realm then this is even less significant than it was before. [/quote]
So this is the Wild West? We should not be transparent in our government because "we're not the United States"? There's a reason what you're doing is illegal in RL. You are (intentionally or unintentionally) hiding discussion from the public. And whether it's as menial as calling for a vote or as important as voting, the people
need to know. The people should be entitled to see
every move their legislator makes that pertains to their officeholding duty. And calling for a vote falls under that.
It's undemocratic because every Atlasian should know what their officeholders are doing pertaining to their office. You're withholding that information, and doing it in secret. That's setting a dangerous precedent.
I'm not "beating my drum". I'm exposing the fact that you are, purposefully or not, acting below the standard of the office you were elected to by withholding information from the people who elected you.
[/quote]Well my apologies for saying one thing pertaining to the legislative process on Discord, which I haven't even withheld from the public, as otherwise we would not be having this conversation. It has been made publicly known. I still fully support government transparency, is some ways that some people would consider absurd. I was just acting in a manner that I found to be more efficient. If you want logs, we can provide that. And could you please not attack me after I have expressed a desire for this whole debacle to be over and a willingness to comply with your demands.
[/quote]
1. Efficency =/= always good
2. Legislative process shouldn't be on Discord in the first place, it should be in the thread that was
made for it3. Shouldn't have to request logs to see information that should be publicly visible in the first place
4. What demands? Government should be transparent in the first place
5. What attack? I'm just responding to your posts in a quite civil way. I see no attack here, unless having government transparency is an attack on you in some way
And, if I may point out, if you are so able to respond on this thread within minutes of my posting thought the past day or two with a paragraph or two of text, is it not easier to type out a sentence of text calling for a vote or recording your vote on Atlas?
Also, why do you want to get this discussion, which is raising many key details important to the framework of our democracy, "over with"? You're the one that committed the offence in the first place.
[/quote]
[/quote]
Few could have put it better - in conspiring to conceal Public Records from his constituents, Ninja0428 set a dangerous and undemocratic precedent and betrayed the faith and trust of the people he was elected to represent through secret deals and smokey backrooms. Most essentially, he conspired to subvert the provisions of our federal law.
The legal questions:The
Criminal Justice Act (2017), hereafter simply ‘CJA’ or ‘the Act’, classes as treason against the Atlasian state the Destruction of Public Records.
In §3 c.1 (e) -
The clause, originally introduced to the bill by Senator Scott in the Senate discussion on the Act, sets out clear and binding legal requirements, both explicit and implicit, on all citizens to maintain Public Records of government activity, accessible to all, to allow for an open and transparent governmental process.
Let us examine the relevant provision of the CJA in depth.
We will first take the clause at its most painfully literal and narrow interpretation. The Speaker, it is true, did not, in a literal sense, delete a thread. If that is the pitifully low standard we set for ourselves than he is not guilty. But, by actively conspiring to conduct official business of the legislature out of public view and inaccessible to the majority of Atlasians, there was, surely, no need to delete the thread.
You don’t have to delete a thread to destroy Public Records, ladies and gentlemen, if you simply subvert the provision by never creating those Records in the first instance.
Public Records of official legislative business, where the Lincoln Assembly supposedly agreed, in private and behind closed doors, to hold a vote on a motion - in order that they would ignore a concerned citizen’s humble question - do not exist. This is fundamentally identical to their brief existence and subsequent deletion, and I thus put it to the honorable jurors that the scurrilous actions of the defendant were illegal under even the most impossible strict reading of the CJA. His actions were tantamount to and functionally identical to the deletion of Public Records.
But, as all can see, the common sense, implicit reading of the CJA makes the criminal culpability of the defendant ever clearer. The CJA clearly recognises the vital importance to our democratic institutions of having publicly accessible - by all - Public Records of legislation and executive actions, hence its eminently reasonable prohibition on their destruction.
I thus put it to the jury that, whether or not he was aware of the federal prohibitions in their specifics, the defendant actively conspired to subvert the provisions of the CJA by concealing Public Records from their rightful owners, the Atlasian people, revealing a troubling contempt for democracy and a flagrant disregard for both federal statute and his solemn oath to uphold the Constitution.
These actions were only highlighted by his sneering response to the President’s questions on the use of the Discord and his continued dismissal of the honest concerns of Atlasian citizens in the subsequent discussion thread on the issue.
The defendant, and the defendant’s political allies, in a craven attempt to paint this trial as a politically motivated act, have argued that there was never any question of any illegality, merely poor judgement, on the part of the defendant.
But this argument is undercut by the apparent existence - briefly - of a pardon issued by the Governor of Lincoln, AZ, to the defendant, which was apparently deleted after minutes.
The Department is examining these allegations for the potential applicability of the same clause of the CJA to the alleged deletion of the pardon.
The evidence for its - temporary - existence are from two posts in the thread
StormTV late march coverage: The latest of Atlasian political news:
From Not_Madigan:
Its existence and subsequent deletion was then confirmed by dfwlibertlover, who I would note is an ally of the defendant -
Like astronomers discovering celestial bodies through their impact on the orbits of other planets, we can thus deduce that the Governor attempted to issue a pardon and then, for whatever reason, furtively deleted it.
It is entirely true, to pre-empt argument, that a pardon issued by the Governor would have in any event have been irrelevant, since this is a matter of federal, not regional law. Nonetheless its existence shows evidence of concerns about criminality surrounding the actions of the defendant are not manufactured from whole cloth but, quite rightly, swirled around the issue following its explosion as a topic of heated national debate.
In short, the Department of Justice believes that, based on an overwhelming cornucopia of evidence, the comments of multiple Atlasian citizens outlined above and the apparent evidence for a - destroyed - record of an attempted pardon issued by the Governor, as discussed in detail above, that the defendant, Ninja0428, Speaker of the regional Assembly, conspired to subvert the binding legal provisions, both implicit and explicit of the
Criminal Justice Act (2017) by conducting, and admitting to, actions tantamount to the Destruction of Public Records as outlined in §3 c.1 (e) of the CJA.
His actions represented both the functional equivalent of the Destruction of Public Records and an attempt to bypass the federal prohibitions on such an action. On this, given the overwhelming weight of evidence, there can surely be little doubt. There is only a question of the offences’ severity, which I will now discuss.
Conclusion, sentencing recommendation, and witnessesI am acutely aware that this case has been the subject of considerable public debate. Some of that has been in good faith. Some of that has been cynical politicking from the usual suspects. I trust that the jury will ignore the furore over the decision to bring these charges and focus on - and only on - the evidence that you hear before you today.
To that end, I wish to address one of the more emotive issues that has emerged around this trial - the question of ‘treason’. The usage of this evocative, charged word is not my choice - it is simply the section of the CJA under which the relevant provision is listed. No serious person would claim that the actions of the defendant are comparable to open sedition against the government of the nation or to shadowy dealings with hostile powers. That is thus not my contention today. I trust that the honorable members of the jury will not deliberate upon the linguistic connotations of the word ‘treason’ and instead simply consider whether, in their best estimation, the actions of the defendant amount to a conspiracy to subvert the statutory provisions on the retention of public records as outlined in the CJA.
Should the defendant be found guilty in the estimation of his peers, I would humbly advise the Court that the Department of Justice recommends a modest sentence consisting of a three-month ban on officeholding, and that the Court do not impose upon the convicted a ban on voting. We believe that while this would set a strong precedent of our democratic institutions defending themselves from assault by punishing wrongdoing, it would also be proportional to the crime committed.
I thank the Court, and would ask that the hon. Justice Blair call to the stand Mike Wells and Jimmy7812, members of the Lincoln Assembly at the time of the criminal action undertaken by the defendant, and, additionally, Governor AZ to answer questions under oath about the alleged pardon.
Should it please the Court I would also request that I retain the option following the deposition of Governor AZ to call to the stand Not_Madigan and dfwlibertylover to, if necessary, clarify the alleged existence of this pardon.
Thank you.
