But Trump Authorized Us…..

As the 800 +/- insurrectionists make their way through our criminal courts, we hear essentially the same sad refrain: “The President of the United States authorized me to do what I did.”

Of course, there is a limit to which this is mitigating, as we all learned as children when we did something wrong, and justified it to our parents with “My friend Bobby told me to do it,” followed by this response, “If Bobby told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?”

Nevertheless, if I were hearing these cases, I’d find this at least somewhat compelling.  Bobby isn’t the head of the executive branch of our American government, of which the Department of Justice is a part.