Now that Donald Trump has Won

1 Like

“You cannot do a one-size-fits-all,” Buck said. “My district, the unincorporated, God bless them all, don’t want to be told what they think is consent, what they think is their curriculum, everybody has different degrees.”

well that’s a supremely unsettling statement I can’t even tell if he intended it to be interpreted as anything other than what he literally said

That Manafort sentencing. What an absolute disgrace.

Just remember that he still had to be sentenced for his DC trial. I doubt the judge in that case will be as lenient.

It’s still a disgrace based on sentencing guidelines and the statements the judge made. “Lead an otherwise blameless life” my ass.

Was a white man in my social circle.

EDIT: Also this.

2 Likes

“Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has submitted a confidential report to Attorney General William P. Barr, marking the end of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump, a Justice Department spokeswoman said.”

I’d rather just read the report.

Not what someone else said about the report. Spin is a thing and even if it isn’t so in unconscious bias.

5 Likes

They have definitively confirmed Russia interfered with the election specifically to help Trump and that they disseminated emails which Trump explicitly used as part of his campaign to besmirch Hillary, but did not find any evelidence that Trump was involved in any of these dealings

They have reviewed the evidence as to whether Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice and reached the nontraditional conclusion that it’s someone else’s job to determine if what occured was “illegal” or not

What a load of bullshit. What a completely unsurprising load of bullshit.

4 Likes

Look, I get that everyone is disappointed with what’s been released about the Mueller report so far, but let’s not overreact here and get ahead of ourselves.

It IS someone else’s job to determine what Trump did. Let’s remember here that Mueller and the Department of Justice believe that the President can’t be indicted on criminal charges. If you were expecting anything different, your expectations were vastly higher than they should have been.

What Mueller did do was to lay out the evidence for and against whether Trump obstructed justice. Because Trump can’t be indicted for obstruction of justice, from Mueller’s viewpoint, it is not his decision to make.

Trump can be impeached for obstruction of justice, and as a result it falls to Congress, not Mueller, to determine whether Trump’s actions rise to the level of being a high crime and misdemeanor. That being said, it may have been wrong for AG Barr to say that Trump hadn’t obstructed justice, but we haven’t read the Mueller report so we have no way of knowing. Hopefully when it becomes available, Congress and everyone else can weight the evidence for themselves.

The judiciary is not crumbling. The sky is not falling. Again, these types of reactions are the result of inflated and unrealistic expectations of what Mueller was going to do. He was never going to ride in on a white horse brandishing a flaming sword and slap handcuffs on Trump and perp walk him out of the White House.

Again, because Mueller and the DOJ don’t believe a sitting president can be indicted, that makes what Trump has done a political problem, not a legal one.

The problem that arises is that even if there is sufficient evidence to show that Trump obstructed justice or committed any other high crime and misdemeanor, there is no guarantee that Trump will be removed from office. In fact, Trump most likely will not be removed from office because even if the Democrats impeach him, there’s no way that 20 Republican Senators will vote to convict him.

Again, Trump, and what Trump stands for is a political problem and not a legal one. It is not Mueller’s job or responsibility to solve everything with a magic wand. It is our responsibility, as citizens, to fix this problem.

3 Likes

Not quite - Mueller’s belief is generally not stated(and our only knowledge of his opinion from the investigation is filtered through Barr, and can’t really be trusted since Barr made his stance known right off the hop). It’s Barr who wrote opinions before the report was finished, hell, before he was even AG - it’s suspected to be why he was hired - that Trump can’t be indicted for obstruction of justice.

1 Like

Well, you seem to either forget or not be aware that it’s been the DoJ’s belief and policy since Watergate in 1973 that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Mueller was a long time DoJ employee prior to his role as Special Counsel and is almost certain to be continuing to follow existing, decades-old, policy in that role, hence why it was always very unlikely that he would indict the sitting president.

Now where things could get more interesting is what the statue of limitations is for obstruction of justice or any other criminal charges Trump may or may not have committed. If the report shows significant evidence of obstruction or other high crimes and misdemeanors, Trump could still be liable for indictment and prosecution once he is no longer in office, whether by impeachment, not being re-elected, or term limits.

1 Like

That may be belief, but it’s not policy - it would be, in essence, putting the president above the law, which is not a precedent the DoJ would want to set. After all, you can cite arguments from Watergate, but the obvious counterpoint is citing arguments from Clinton’s impeachment, where republicans argued quite vigorously that the president is not above the law, and absolutely can be indicted or even prosecuted. The best you can say is that legal opinion is divided on the matter, and it has not yet been truly tested.

And since we’re bringing up Nixon-era things, fun facts - Barr was also one of the big figures in Iran-Contra, back during the first time he was AG, supporting Bush Sr’s use of presidential pardons. The Lead investigator for Iran-Contra - and much of the rest of the world, for that matter - considered it a gross miscarriage of justice.

I think you’re confusing the impeachment of Clinton with Paula Jones’s civil suit against him.

While you’re right that it’s only policy that a sitting president can’t be indicted, remember who we’re talking about here. Law enforcement officials, and especially DOJ officials like the FBI etc., are super conservative (small “c”). They’re not going to go against longstanding DOJ policty, especially when it’s something as hugely important or controversial as indicting a sitting president. A look at Mueller’s resume and history will tell you that he’s incredibly conservative when it comes to DOJ matters and is super “by the book.” That’s why Rod Rosenstein chose him in the first place.

As for Clinton, Republicans never argued that he could be prosecuted for criminal matters. Before Clinton, there was an open question as to whether a civil, not criminal, case could go forward against a sitting president. That’s what the Republican’s wanted because they wanted to embarrass and hurt Clinton politically, they didn’t care about Paula Jones at all.

The matter went up to the Supreme Court, which held in Clinton v. Jones that “a sitting President of the United States has no immunity in federal court against him or her, for acts done before taking office and unrelated to the office. In particular, there is no temporary immunity, so it is not required to delay all federal cases until the President leaves office.”

That situation doesn’t apply here at all because with Trump, we’re talking about a criminal case, not a civil one, and for acts he committed while president, and related to his office, as opposed to before he was president and unrelated to his office.

Apples and oranges.

1 Like

No, I’m not.

Ken Starr did in 1998. In fact, he said, absolutely explicitly in a 56 page memo on the topic that the NYT obtained via the FOIA, that the president - at the time, Clinton - could be prosecuted or even imprisoned for criminal matters, using the example of assaulting a heckler.

1 Like

Ken Star, while Republican by party affiliation, is not a “Republican” in the context we’re using here. He was an Independent Prosecutor, not bound by the same restrictions that Robert Mueller is. He could make whatever recommendation he wanted internally, but again, the DOJ didn’t act on his recommendation because it was against DOJ policy.

Robert Mueller is a special counsel, which doesn’t have nearly the freedom, independence, or power that an independent prosecutor has, and philosophically, Mueller would never make the kind of recommendation that Starr did, against Trump.

And again, Starr’s memo referred to “serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the president’s official duties” when he recommended that Clinton be indicted. Trump’s possible obstruction of justice goes to the very nature of the president’s official duties.

Once again, apples and oranges.

2 Likes

Also, Mueller is known as being a totally by-the-book operator. In fact, it was because he was a by-the-book operator that he was initially lauded by both sides (before the smear campaigns came in as things started to look bad for Trump’s buddies and associates with the potential to lead back to him). If the DoJ policy and guidelines say that a sitting president cannot be indicted, he will not indict him, but instead lay out the evidence for Congress to impeach him with potential for later indictments. After impeachment, well, the president is no longer a sitting president and can therefore be indicted.

1 Like