Mr. Vance, a freshman senator who has courted Mr. Trump’s help and was listed by Axios this previous week as a doable vice-presidential operating mate subsequent yr, took umbrage on behalf of the previous president. He dispatched a letter to Lawyer Basic Merrick B. Garland suggesting that Mr. Kagan be prosecuted for encouraging “open revolt,” seizing on a degree in Mr. Kagan’s essay noting that Democratic-run states may defy a President Trump.
Mr. Vance wrote that “based on Robert Kagan, the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency is horrible sufficient to justify open revolt in opposition to the USA, together with the political violence that might invariably observe.”
Mr. Kagan’s piece didn’t truly advocate revolt, however merely forecast the chance that Democratic governors would stand in opposition to Mr. Trump “by means of a type of nullification” of federal authority. Certainly, he went on to counsel that Republican governors may do the identical with Mr. Biden, which he was not advocating both.
However Mr. Vance was attempting to attract a parallel between Mr. Kagan’s essay and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. By the Justice Division’s logic in pursuing Mr. Trump, the senator wrote, the Kagan article may very well be interpreted as “an invite to ‘rebellion,’ a manifestation of prison ‘conspiracy,’ or an try and result in civil warfare.” To make his level clear, he insisted on solutions by Jan. 6.
Mr. Kagan, who adopted his essay with one other on Thursday about tips on how to cease the slide to dictatorship that he sees, mentioned the intervention by the senator validated his level. “It’s revealing that their first intuition when attacked by a journalist is to counsel that they be locked up,” Mr. Kagan famous in an interview.
