But man oh man going after anyone with means who tries to help people who the government decides looks like an illegal immigrant is hell of an escalation. Can't have people keeping government accountable.

This has led to much comment and confusion. Some of it is contrived and in bad faith, some of it reflects honest concern or confusion. The thrust of it is this: wait, some of the acts on that list aren’t crimes, are they? And aren’t some of them speech protected by the First Amendment?

Political theater and propaganda aside, there are some reasonable questions here: how can a tweet (like act 101) or statements at a press conference (Act 3) be a crime?

The answer is that they’re not crimes — or, at least, that’s not what the indictment claims. They’re overt acts. ...

So you can think of an overt act as a sort of evidentiary requirement, and overt acts as evidence of a criminal conspiracy, not as the crime themselves. These days the custom is for prosecutors to use the overt act requirement to tell the story of the case at length in the indictment. Prosecutors also use it as a gambit to make it more likely that evidence will be admitted at trial (it’s a strong case to admit evidence of something if you’ve called it out as an overt act), and often try to connect every defendant to an overt act, even though that’s not a requirement, just so the defendant can’t say at trial “look, I didn’t even commit an overt act.”

Once you view overt acts as a sort of evidence, it’s easier to see why they don’t have to be crimes themselves, and why they can even be acts that would otherwise be not only legal but protected speech.

Of course like a true principled defender of liberty, Popehat only explains this stuff to his audience when the defendants are people he considers unsympathetic.

https://www.popehat.com/p/overt-acts-and-predicate-acts-expl...