You're playing semantics, and worse you're playing semantics with people from a different country, of course they're going to use words differently than you.

With that said, I think there's a hole in your reasoning -- If the people who enacted these laws had found you breaking them they would damn well have called you a criminal for doing so.

It was quite literally a crime in the case of Boris Johnson, which is why I called it “committing crimes.” For Gavin Newsom, my understanding is that it technically was abiding by the rules because the restaurant was open air, but I’m not super familiar with the case. If it actually was against the rules, he should have resigned and let someone who shares his political views but didn’t break the regulations be the new governor. A political leader should at least be legally unimpeachable, and ideally morally too.

The problem with the CA recall is that the only major opponents had a very different political position to him, but switching the state’s political control over a personal scandal seems absurd.