The Trump indictment and the audio: has Ahab finally caught the Great Orange Whale?
There’s a lot to digest today, all of it incomplete. So I’ll start with a little discourse on law.
No system of law can be perfect or anything close to it. In the end, justice – or any approximation of it – rests on the people who implement the law. I’m talking about those who draft statutes, judges who interpret law and make rulings, professors who teach it, students who learn it, lawyers who practice it, pundits who write about it, and juries who decide about guilt.
And, of course, prosecutors who decide which people to prosecute. That is of the utmost importance, and one of the potential weak points, because not everyone who violates a law can be prosecuted. That would take way too much time and effort, because there are so many laws on the books. As lawyer Harvey Silverglate states in his book Three Felonies a Day (from the summary at that Amazon link):
…federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and…prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.
The subtitle of Silverglate’s book is How the Feds Target the Innocent. But that’s hardly the whole story. An important part of the story is also whom among the guilty they target and whom they spare, and why.
I don’t know whether Trump is innocent or guilty of the letter of the statutes he is accused of violating, but I know that a Democrat would never be charged if he or she were in Trump’s shoes. And I know that, so far, Trump has been the target of many accusations based on lies, and Biden and so many other Democrats have not been charged despite all the evidence of their suspicious and arguably criminal behavior. For example, we have the Biden bribery allegations that the investigators have sat on for many years, including right before Biden’s election. Not to mention the coverup of the entire Hunter Biden laptop story.
It is the differential application of the legal system depending on politics, as well as the obvious willingness of government agencies to lie, that is so infuriating, outrageous, depressing, and frightening.
We have known for quite some time that Trump would probably be indicted for something connected with the supposedly classified documents at Mar Al Lago. I can’t recall when I first read it, but long ago – perhaps a month or so after the raid – but we’ve heard rumors that the documents in question were papers he had taken in order to exonerate himself in defense against some mendacious accusations against him. We also learned – and again, I’m not sure when I first heard it, but probably within the last month or two – that the DOJ had an audiotape of Trump admitting that the documents in question were classified and that he had not declassified them while he was president.
Today we got more information about both of those things (the link is to a CNN article, so make of that what you will):
Former President Donald Trump acknowledged on tape in a 2021 meeting that he had retained “secret” military information that he had not declassified, according to a transcript of the audio recording obtained by CNN.
“As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t,” Trump says, according to the transcript.
CNN obtained the transcript of a portion of the meeting where Trump is discussing a classified Pentagon document about attacking Iran. In the audio recording, which CNN previously reported was obtained by prosecutors, Trump says that he did not declassify the document he’s referencing, according to the transcript.
I’ll pause here to note that this is both very strange and difficult to interpret, perhaps because CNN means it to be. I don’t think the entire transcript is available, at least not as I write this. So, why would Trump say something as strange as “here’s a document that’s classified, and although I could have declassified it I didn’t do so”? And was he speaking in general of other documents, or of the particular one concerning attacking Iran?
More:
CNN first reported last week that prosecutors had obtained the audio recording of Trump’s 2021 meeting at his Bedminster, New Jersey, resort, with two people working on the autobiography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as aides employed by the former president, including communications specialist Margo Martin.
The transcript of the audio recording suggests that Trump is showing the document he’s discussing to those in the room. Several sources have told CNN the recording captures the sound of paper rustling, as if Trump was waving the document around, though is not clear if it was the actual Iran document.
“Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump says at one point, according to the transcript. “This was done by the military and given to me.”
So, it appears that CNN is reporting on a transcript and did not hear the audio themselves. Who prepared the transcript, and who gave it to CNN? How accurate is it? Was anything left out or changed? We’ve seen excerpts of previous conversations that seemed very bad for Trump, and yet when the full story was revealed it was not especially bad at all. Is this one of those cases? Or is this the time Ahab finally will strike Moby Trump with his harpoon?
More:
Trump was complaining in the meeting about Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. The meeting occurred shortly after The New Yorker published a story by Susan Glasser detailing how, in the final days of Trump’s presidency, Milley instructed the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern.
“Well, with Milley – uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump says, according to the transcript. “They presented me this – this is off the record, but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”
Now we have come to something that seems relevant to the rumor that Trump’s allegedly classified papers had to do with protecting himself from false allegations against him. I think what he may be saying here is that Milley had made some false accusation against him about something that was contained in the papers. This thing may have been plans to attack Iran, which he said were actually Milley’s plans and not his. So why didn’t Trump declassify the papers before he took them? Again, we don’t have a full transcript, but there’s this:
Trump continues: “All sorts of stuff – pages long, look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”
“Secret” and “confidential” are two levels of classification for sensitive government documents.
Did he fail to declassify it because he had just found it among some other papers he took? And now he knew it was too late to do so? Possibly. That at least makes a certain amount of sense.
So now we can construct a tentative timeline. Perhaps the DOJ or FBI received the audio of this meeting first. Who made the recording? Who gave it to them? Was Trump aware he was being recorded? And then I would imagine that the DOJ and/or FBI decided to subpoena the document in question – whether or not they knew exactly what it might be – and it wasn’t delivered. That’s what they were searching for, apparently.
More:
In March, prosecutors subpoenaed Trump for the document referenced in the 2021 recording. Trump’s lawyers provided some documents related to Iran and Milley in response to the subpoena, but they could not find the document itself.
Maybe it doesn’t exist, at least not exactly as described in the audio, and that’s why the documents didn’t match what they thought they were looking for. Or maybe it does exist, and Trump kept it, because he thinks it exonerates him and implicates them in wrongdoing.
It somehow makes me think of a snake swallowing it’s own tail. If I have the scenario right, they’ve tried again and again to frame Trump, and in his effort to avoid one of those attempts, he actually may have committed a criminal act for which he will be prosecuted, perhaps successfully.
What a terrible terrible mess.
[NOTE: In CNN’s earlier report on the audio recording, they wrote that they had not listened to the audio but that “multiple sources described it.” It doesn’t name those sources, although it does say that prosecutors have the audio. Who gave the information to CNN? Was it someone from the prosecution? Is that misconduct (I have no idea what the answer is to that)? And who made the recording? The article says that “multiple people were making recordings” during that period of Trump’s life.
The article also indicates that Trump said that “if he could show [the document] to people, it would undermine what Milley was saying” (Milley had been accusing him of planning to attack Iran). To me, this would suggest that Trump did not show the contents to anyone in the room but was just describing its existence in order to assert his innocence.]
And … https://thenationalpulse.com/2023/06/09/cnns-paula-reid-pushing-secret-trump-recording-is-married-to-ccp-lobbyist/
‘Three felonies a day’ seems to go back a ways:
Confucius, walking on Mount Tai, heard a woman crying. Asked why she cried, she explained ~ My father-in-law was killed by a tiger and then my husband, now, my son also. Asked by Confucius why she remained living on a mountain surrounded by deadly tigers, she answers simply: “Because here, there is no Tyrannical Ruler.”
It’s not know by me and others as the Democrats Propaganda Ministry for nothing, they get information from government officials to spread their Propaganda and been doing it for a long time.
Second, no one has looked what Barky and Hildabeast have in their possession in regards to confidentiality papers or computer records.
Skip:
That’s point of an unequal system of justice. Their actions will not be scrutinized, and if something happens to be found that might implicate them, it is buried.
This weaponization of the law will not end well, IMO.
One can imagine various outcomes ranging from a revolutionary backlash to a one party de facto dictatorship. I think most anything is on the table as the situation escalates and the spiral becomes tighter.
Extending my thoughts, I believe that we are already very near to a dictatorship by bureaucracy at the moment, and the Democrats are riding that pony hard.
I’m with Oldflyer here.
We are seriously effed. I will do what I can if it erupts to a revolution, but in the meantime , ….
Most of the people I know are just going on…nothing is happening in their minds. It will be too late when they realize what is coming after them.
How long do the crooks in the media think they can get away with continuous sympathetic reporting on Trump persecution, while not saying a word about the overwhelming evidence building against Biden?!
As soon as Biden is exposed, Trump just has to say “I told you so.”, and he is re-elected… for the third time! The media will be sitting in a smoking crater. Anything they say against him will just increase his margin!
It’s time for Navy Joan Biden’s father and grandfather be brought to justice.
i’m betting no, because the press and legal sysgy often promise more than they can deliver, and bury the actual evidence, we can go to jan 6, benghazi, the irs scam,
Trump lay in his bed and crapped himself . Again. It doesn’t matter if there are double standards-claiming he’s no worse or a little better than Clinton, biden etc should be disqualifying.for a primary voter. It’s what trump himself claimed was disqualifying about Hillary. And the legality of it is irrelevant
yes the walls are closing in again, sarc
https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1667291472616468484?cxt=HHwWiMC9pdewtKMuAAAA
Did they find Herr Schmidt in the same Beer Hall they found obergruppenfuhrer Müller?
Silverglade is a very wise man. As for Trump. Justice is NOT served by these federal actions. Of course, his mouth has gotten him in trouble before, but this is no longer a First Amendment country. We knew that when the FBI (aka Stasi) raided his home in FL at 5 am.
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1667175211496620036?cxt=HHwWiIC-ubLB_6IuAAAA
Given how much they insisted Trump literally said people should drink or inject bleach or other disinfectants and consistently report that when it wasn’t actually true I hope no one is surprised if I don’t take them at their word. (FWIW Trump was clearly describing fighting the virus in the blood. IE What he was talking about was either antibody/gamma-globulin therapy and/or antivirals, but he doesn’t have a medical education so he didn’t say it that way.)
Israel says “Trump lay in his bed and crapped himself . Again.” And equally should be disqualifying.
You obviously know neither Trump nor the law on the matter. Trump could be in prison and still be elected US President. Your wish about “primary voters” terms are, Constitutionally, irrelevant.
And in their guilt-ridden conscience, that’s why they are so afraid of him.
I read Ayn Rand 50 years ago as a teenager. I thought she was over the top with her hysterical projection of American society.
Nope, she absolutely nailed it. Almost everything she predicted has come to pass. This is amazing.
And as I recall she didn’t have a solution other than secession from society, going John Galt. Depressing. Well, we live in interesting times.
yes, it was the treatment chris cuomo’s quack doctor gave his wife,
the one man vector from atlanta to the hamptons,
When I say disqualifying, I mean in the eye of the voter. Which is why I listed the primary. As someone once said ‘I like people who weren’t captured’
they wrote that they had not listened to the audio but that “multiple sources described it.” It doesn’t name those sources, although it does say that prosecutors have the audio. Who gave the information to CNN? Was it someone from the prosecution?
This is the key point. The media is allowing itself to act as a stenographer for the government, to try the defendant in the press.
There is no way to know how much of any of it is true, but the media simply does not care.
That’s because mainstream media has been “pay to play”* for a very long time now, taking money in exchange for media coverage and always doing the government’s bidding.
*It’s instructive to look at the whole page: PR companies insert straight news articles into the New York Times, Bloomberg, Associated Press, Forbes, Money, NBC News, etc not just fashion and lifestyle magazines. There is no indication in these articles that they were paid for.
They’re lying. It’s all a lie. And once the accusation makes the rounds of the NYT, WP, AP, it becomes the truth. Accusations from five years ago that have been demonstrably proven false are still accepted as gospel.
What makes this especially damning is there is no way to prove it false. We can’t hear it for ourselves. We can’t read the transcript. But because it’s given the veneer of “proof”, gullible Americans will swallow it.
And by the time the truth comes out, it won’t matter.
The lie is the truth.
I’m no lawyer, but IMO, the charges are pretty flimsy. Smith will try to poison public opinion against Trump and the MSM will run with it. The DOJ does not care if they actually win – though I’m sure Smith would like to have such a scalp. Their main goal is to turn as many voters as possible against Trump.
The moderates who will decide the election will believe Trump is a man not to be trusted, even if he’s found not guilty. If he wins the nomination, it will be hard for him to win the election.
There is a project afoot that might save Trump if he wins the nomination. That is the “No Labels” group that is trying to field a third-party candidate such as Joe Manchin.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/us/politics/no-labels-president-manchin.html
If they get their campaign going and actually enter a candidate, it could be similar to Ross Perot in 1982. If Trump could hold onto most of his 2020 voters, he could win the election. Maybe we should hope for such an event. Seventeen months to the election. A lot can happen in that time.
Hillary wasn’t prosecuted for the classified information (including, to my recollection, stuff classified up to TS-SCI) on her anti-FOIA home server.
There are no indications that Biden will be prosecuted for the classified documents found in his garage. (If I was Speaker of the House, I’d be drawing up articles of impeachment for just that, right now. Two can play this game.)
By their reckless politicization of the justice system, the Democrats are sending us careening wildly toward the time where the only recourse is the last of the Four Boxes.
“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.” Judge Alex Kozinski, dissent to Silviera v. Lockyer
Judge Kozinski also wrote this article.
http://alex.kozinski.com/articles/Youre_Probably_a_Federal_Criminal.pdf
Anyone else remember when “Don’t make a Felony case out of it” actually meant anything?
Crossing the street with the light in red clothing is a Felony case now, in many jurisdictions. :-/
The DoD is supposed to have a plan for every contingency. Didn’t have one for Grenada, I believe, though, the likelihood being so unlikely. Some difficulties resulted.
I would HOPE they had a plan FOR the invasion of Iran, in case that became necessary.
Given the foregoing, how would you consider classified something everybody already thinks you have? Is the issue that the existence was outed, or the specific details of the
invasion?
Ayn Rand said “Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
And then former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson said the “greatest danger to justice is an unscrupulous prosecutor who targets a person and then scours the law books to find an offense he can pin on that person.”
In addition to Neo’s and other comments: Who recorded this alleged audio, and who gave it to the FBI/DOJ, and who gave it to CNN? Lots of room for improper behavior here, perhaps making the “evidence” improper in court.
The next Republican president (assuming we get one) is going to ask the DOJ to prosecute Joe Biden, if he’s still alive. We should have prosecuted Hillary for her far more egregious behavior.
we come to the actual evidence, they don’t have it, it’s as genuine as carrolls allegations, bolstered by reid hoffman’s money,
now I recall how in the early iteration, they played lawfare games to avoid real discovery, much as we saw in the dominion case,
‘this travesty of a mockery of a sham’ is just that, who would have thought woody allen, to be prophet,
*from the court room speech in bananas,
Frederick on June 9, 2023 at 8:17 pm said:
Kate on June 10, 2023 at 9:08 am said:
Who recorded this alleged audio, and who gave it to the FBI/DOJ, and who gave it to CNN?
I hope my comment here is very a very unlikely source, but the NSA stores an audio record of all of our phone calls that touch the internet. Usually, government officials who access that information get a transcript on paper, but the audio record exists for some period of time, likely years. This is your government with an exabyte (10^18) scale of storage capability.
They did this once to Trump and pretty much got away with it, in spite of it being discovered. Why not twice?
FISA authorization?? Pffft. A joke.
except they didn’t have any on carter page, all they had on guiliani was the evidence that he had gotten from jimmy lal,
Another point, from the WSJ editorial board this morning, is that these charges are brought under the old Espionage Act. Arguably for presidents and ex-presidents this Act is overridden by the Presidential Records Act, which makes it clear that presidents and ex-presidents are allowed to handle sensitive government records. There is no indication that I have heard that Trump gave sensitive national security documents to enemies or that he damaged national security by having stuff at Mar-a-Lago, surely a more secure location than Biden’s garage or the unsecured offices around DC where he left stuff after being a senator and vice president. I do not believe that Trump would have leaked national security information to enemies.
This was an administrative dispute which could have been, and should have been, handled under a non-criminal statute. Even if the administration pretends it followed all routes to resolve this peacefully, they broke all trust by raiding a former president’s house without allowing his attorneys or staff to oversee the search, and now by filing charges for clearly political reasons.
The left and the administrative state apparatus never accepted Trump’s election as legitimate. They make that clear with this indictment.
Kate:
I think you have it right. Regrettably.
Correction: Ross Perot in 1992. Sorry. My excuse is that I’m really old and partially blind.
A few points:
– A good rule of thumb on anything Trump related is to wait about four weeks before believing anything. That probably applies here to this transcript. Maybe it’s as bad for Trump as they’re making it out to be. History suggestes otherwise, however.
– I think that applies to the “Trump kept documents to protect himself against deep state attack” narrative as well. Maybe it’s true. Maybe Trump is just an over-grown manchild who wanted a souvenir. We’ll have to wait and see. The problem for Trump is that when your public behavior screams “overgrown manchild” people are inclined to believe stories based on that.
– The Hillary comparison is damning for the DOJ, but we need to remember that most of the people upset about Trump’s indictment believed that Hillary should have been indicted. The Hillary precedent should be followed, but it’s a rotten precedent. The political argument basically comes down to suggesting that Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted because the DOJ screwed up the Hillary case.
Bauxite, a major difference is that Hillary was not president, had never been president, and therefore never had any legal justification for having classified, especially top secret, materials outside of a SCIF. Same applies to Joe Biden, when he was a senator and VP. Trump was president. There’s a Presidential Records Act covering that, which doesn’t apply to Sec. State or VP.
Kate – Maybe you’re right about the Presidential Records Act. But oh my, if the allegations in the complaint are accurate, I don’t see how it matters much. The testimony of the lawyer who was compelled to testify is damning.
The only good thing about an indictment versus the normal MO of media leaks is that the prosecutor making the indictment will have to “prove it.”
Kate – You should read the indictment. The transcript is straight from the indictment. The indictment indicates that the meeting was with journalists/authors who were writing a book and that it was recorded with Trump’s permission.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf
FWIW:
“New testimony reveals senior FBI official expressed ‘strong concerns’ about Mar-a-Lago raid;
“D’Antuono noted that there were “several abnormalities” with the department’s process leading up to the raid. “—
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/new-testimony-reveals-senior-fbi-official-expressed-strong-concerns
To be sure, one should expect “Biden” to be absolutely, compulsively lawless.
+ Repost:
“Russiagate: The Scandal That Became Business As Usual”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/russiagate-scandal-became-business-usual
Bauxite, my comment was to your Hillary precedent, not to any evidential matters.
And there is: https://www.judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-clinton-sock-drawer-audio-tape-case-exonerates-pres-trump/
she was able to secure the only successful watergate era appeal
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/same_plot_different_actors.html
cb that’s an excellent reference. I had forgotten about those Clinton tapes, and the court decision, which went unchallenged, is definitive: A president has the right to take what documents he wants without restriction.
The only thing that might stick, in a fair trial, then, is the question of whether Trump actually allowed people without security clearances to review top secret documents. Waving papers in the air doesn’t seem to meet that test. They may not even be able to prove that Trump had the actual document to wave at them at the time; he may have been waving around random pieces of paper to make his point.
The case has been filed in Florida, so a rational jury is at least possible.
The Hillary comparison is damning for the DOJ, but we need to remember that most of the people upset about Trump’s indictment believed that Hillary should have been indicted.
Don’t be misled by internet commenters. Plenty of people who oppose this indictment didn’t think Clinton should have been prosecuted. Clinton deserved it. The country didn’t. It would have been a sign that Trump was going after his political opponents and that we had become a “banana republic.” There was a good case that the nation should be spared that. The present administration doesn’t worry about it. The bureaucracy, the media, and half the country want Trump to be locked up and are actually willing to act on that.
I get the feeling that Biden, or Clinton, or Pence could have been indicted if prosecutors really wanted to go after them. Maybe Obama, Bush, and Clinton’s husband too, if the DOJ had bothered to search their houses. What’s different with Trump (apart from the federal law enforcement agencies hating him) is that idea of “seemliness.” Trump was boasting and showing off and put it on tape (not so different from Biden’s boasting and showing off on video every day, but the circumstances were different). Politicians promise “transparency,” but spontaneity can get them into trouble if people who are powerful enough want to take them down. It’s tough for Trump because he built his political career on spontaneity and being original and a character. It’s hard for him to stifle his inner showman and show-off, even when it would be to his benefit.
I don’t know if anybody has said this, but after the stink of Hillary and her email problem of 2016, why on earth did Trump think it a good thing to take so many classified records. Especially in light of the democrat shills impeaching him twice. He had to know he is a big target.
Excellent deep dive on the origins of Russiagate and the latest Trump indictment by former USN intelligence analyst J.E. Dyer:
https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2023/06/10/the-never-ending-story-a-new-chapter-opens-in-the-epic-saga-of-the-trump-effect/
The indictment is the latest episode in a very long game involving a recurring cast of characters. It began under Obama and it’s aimed at crushing political opposition. That is, us.
Quotes:
“The Trump Effect has been to show us not only the permanent state, or “Deep State,” in flagrante delicto, but its handmaidens in the complacent political class, who’d rather ignore the abuses of the Deep State and focus their wrath on Trump.”
Sound familiar?
More:
“It’s a lie clung to by deluded consciences that that institutional authority has been behaving as it was supposed to. In every aspect of the series of attack campaigns on Trump, it had to lie and cheat to create the conditions it needed, whether it was plotting to defame and exploit two blameless bit players in the Trump campaign, cheating the Steele dossier into a FISA application on a train of lies, loosening rules for handling USPII inside a cone of silence as the Obama administration was on the way out the door, or changing whistleblower rules in a dark closet just in time to use the new rules to cheat with a “whistleblower” complaint that didn’t conform with the old ones.”
“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This is not lawful, ethical, moral behavior. It’s systematically vicious, and it could be turned against the American people at any time, with the full weight of the armed state behind it. Indeed, with the Biden administration’s vilification of America’s millions of school parents as “domestic violent extremists,” and the stated intention of federal law enforcement to treat them as such, that process has already begun en masse. The shoe has already dropped.”
“Deluded consciences”. “This is not lawful, ethical, moral behavior.” “Systematically vicious”. Basically, the same points that Stan, Yara, and Bruce Hayden have been making over at the Dershowitz thread.
Along the way, Dyer discusses the applicability of the Espionage Act, Turley’s take on the indictment, and Ric Grenell’s comments on Jack Smith’s history and role in this affair. Read the whole thing.
you’re kidding right, with a media that cannot be relied to tell you what day it is, with an army of disloyal and traitorous officials, who use the former as their mouthpieces
Steve Lewis – Because Trump is an edge lord. Going as far as he possibly can is the oxygen he lives on. That’s a great personality trait if your goal is to break things. If you want anything other than a steaming pile of rubble at the end of the process, though, its nuts.
Abraxas – FWIW – I don’t think that the Trump administration should have prosecuted Hillary. The Obama administration should have. It wasn’t necessary to “lock her up.” Having her plead out for probation and revocation of her clearances would have been fine, like Petreus. At a minimum they should have taken steps to deny her the Democrat’s nomination in 2016.
At some point, flagrant disregard for classified information and contempt for the judicial process reaches a level that actually does require some punishment. Hillary clearly reached that level. That she was rewarded with a major party nomination for president and subsequent whitewashing of what she actually did created a mess. Prosecuting Trump for doing the same thing doesn’t fix the mess that the Obama administration made, it just makes a bigger mess by confirming a two-tiered justice system.
(And also, following up again on Steve Lewis – Trump had to go right ahead and rival Hillary for disregarding classified information and showing contempt for the judicial process because . . . ? Why again? Tell me again why we need to run this guy again for the third cycle in a row?)
why not, because the clintons have committed treason, in the transfer of missile technology to china, other favors they secured in the 90s, what their protected gang like marc rich’s crew, kurzin and chagoury did to nigeria, part of the looting party, what other parts did to haiti,
10,000 years is barely enough for them and their entourage, but they are utterly beyond the law, the greg craigs the lanny davis’s the podestas, there isn’t one blood drenched client they don’t do favors for,
miguel cervantes – So let it all burn because of the Clintons?
cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war,
it’s just your inability to realize how they lie and cheat (and kill) and they are never held accountable, nigeria, where they allowed boko haram to grow among the corruption, haiti, libya,
https://twitter.com/IAPolls2022/status/1667889021459070977
Miguel,
This reinforces the idea that the entire charade of the classified document indictment is to help President Trump win the Republican nomination.
I think it’s way to soon to pick a candidate, especially with new candidates entering the field.
I was watching Neil Whatever on Youtube and he was interviewing North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. I’d like to see more of him. Cavuto was trying to get Burgun to condemn Trump and Burgum wasn’t having any of it. Cavuto kept badgering the Governor the entire interview– and Burgum never had an opportunity to lay out his agenda.
I’d like to see details about his trade policies. That’s a weak point of DeSantis (since he hasn’t laid out his policies in any detail. His major donors give me pause that he’ll be strong on American jobs.)
Did I say Cavuto is an idiot.
I’d also like to see more of Youngkin, even though he’s said he’s not running.
yes cavuto has removed all doubt in the last baker’s dozens of years,
he along with andrew mccarthy, fell for the last five hoaxes
of the candidates of value, trump desantis vivek, elder is a good guy, but realistically he’s not going anywhere, christie and pence just waste time,
Robert Barnes weighs in and gets outraged. Either the Deep State rules, or the Constitution does. 50 minute take and take down:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxCDVOmGPlo
Chaser: Will Biden pardon himself? And Trump in order to guarantee his non-persecution, post-Presidency. Yes.
miguel cervantes – Recognize that many of us have held our noses and voted for a man that we consider to be a repugnant fool for two cycles in a row to keep the bad guys from winning. DeSantis is my #1 choice of the current group and he’s on your list.
For the sake of not losing a decisive chunk of the party in November of 2024, may I humbly suggest that it is is finally now time to dump Trump, at least to keep the bad guys from winning. Trump is absolutely being targeted, just as he has been for years. It’s takes a special kind of blindness, however, to pretend that Trump’s own impulsiveness and lack of judgement isn’t a significant contributing factor to his own problems.
I’m tired of the three-ring circus. I’m tired of having to distinguish between Trump’s childish idiocy and the wrongs that have been done to him by the FBI, DOJ, etc. Trump has had his chance. Let someone else try. And frankly, if we don’t, we’re going to wake up on November 13 2024 to four more years of Joe Biden and monolithic Democratic control of Congress. I don’t think the republic will recover from that.
As a practical matter, too, Trump’s best chance at avoiding what will amount to a life sentence is for DeSantis (or another Republican) to win the presidency and pardon him.
If Trump wins the nomination and then loses the White House, he will spend decades in jail. There is a very good chance that they have him on the letter of the law. The whole “no one is above the law” schtick will work in front of a jury. Trump will almost certainly not be allowed to introduce evidence of selective prosecution. (No judge is going to allow Hillary’s e-mails or Biden’s corruption to be litigated in a trial about Trump’s behavior.) Also, Trump’s bloviating is on tape and will be played to the jury. Don’t underestimate how much Trump hurts himself legally every time he opens his mouth. This isn’t Alvin Bragg, it is a federal prosecutor. Federal prosecutors don’t bring cases unless they are going to win.
Yes, they played dirty to do it, but there is a very good chance that they have him dead to rights.
TJ – I can’t see Biden pardoning Trump. The hatred is too intense. I could see Biden pardoning himself and his family and to [heck] with whatever future Democrat is prosecuted as revenge for Trump. Biden probably isn’t going to live to see that anyway, and Hunter has no political future.
Besides, Democrats always have a hard time imagining any future in which they are not in power. If Trump continues to cruise to the GOP nomination, that is going to become even more difficult for them.
no, hell no, they have profaned the republic, with this act, like that lurid affair at independence hall, like having a satanic mass in the Vatican, this gang of jackals and traitors, the ones who knew this virus was a biological weapon aimed at us, in fact the son even profited from it, through one of his business ventures, in between his coked up bacchanals,
You are profoundly stupid, not to realize the import of this matter, this is crossing the rubicon in a speedboat,
she apprenticed under a al queda financier,
https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1668231256239161348?cxt=HHwWiIC29aTf36YuAAAA
her beard was given a slap on the wrist,
“…Recognize that many of us ….”
Gosh, never realized you were (practically) “Everyman”….
(Is this a great blog or what?)
File under: Jephtah
as hillary said in that fake southern drawl, she borrowed from meryl streep
‘im in no ways tired’ for trump to step down, or not be nominated, is the proof they can and will do this to anyone, with romney it was easy to beat him, he’s too busy counting the spoons, in his la jolla estate
miguel cervantes – You sound like Br’er Fox. Go ahead and throw Democrats into the briar patch by making them run against Trump again in the general election. That’ll show ’em!