CarryOn wrote:
All Presidents have claimed Executive Privilege at one time or another. President Trump has every right to claim privilege.
After he released an unprecedented number of documents and allowed testimony in the 2+ year long Mueller investigation, he has probably had enough. He gave them everything they wanted and they would still be fishing around for something .... and shifty would still be claiming/lying to have evidence of Russian collusion even though there never was any such evidence ... if Barr hadn't told him to SOGOTP.
He immediately released the transcript of the telephone conversation, too. A telephone call with a foreign leader, which is also unprecedented, in an attempt to show transparency and give the House what they wanted. But they won't stop. And if that is the case, then they can subpoena anybody. They can try to get a Court order to force testimony. They could have done all of that. Bolton told them he would follow a judge's order, but then they just dropped the subpoena and did a Roseanna Roseanna Danna and said, "Nevermind." Whatever their reasons are for not following through, I don't know, but the fact that they did not speaks to their confidence ... or lack thereof .. that they would find anything provable. That they chose to do a rushed, shoddy job of something so important speaks to major incompetence. They should all be forced to resign for the damage they have done to our government.
And anybody who trusts a report coming out of nadler's judiciary committee after this totally partisan fishing expedition and one-sided investigation must still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If they had actual proof of bribery, soliciting, wire fraud, etc. then those would be the charges against him. Obstruction of Congress means nothing except widdle biddy nadler and widdle biddy shifty got their feelings hurt because they didn't get their way. Obstruction of Justice is another thing entirely, but he was not charged with any such thing. Truth is, they got nothin' and they know it. And in a few weeks, the whole country is going to know it.
And as for attempting to claim Trump was helping putin by delaying aid, if you really believe that then all of you ought to be calling out obama for refusing to send the Ukrainians any weapons at all when they were actually under attack by putin's army. He sent them blankets instead. And I think water, too. Talk about helping putin. Trump sent real weapons. And from what I have read, the money was transferred within the timeline set out by Congress, so technically there was no delay at all.
Whatever the whole truth is, we will find out soon enough.
All Presidents have claimed Executive Privilege at... (
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do not be so damn dumb... President Obama sent plenty of weapons.. only your fish wrap media is telling you it was only blankets and pillows, and you are the few believing such crap..
release of a phone call unprecedented .... BS... what is unprecedented is to lock the phone transcript in the sealed file until testimony revealed it existed.. then the transgression was obvious to everyone in the world but the orange cult who kisses the ring to the orange mistake..
the president committed crimes. Only the fact that the Justice feels that a sitting president can not be indicted has left him out of jail.. and they are wrong, a President is not above the law..
There is no way around it. Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to clear President Donald Trump, both in his original letter and in his press conference the morning of the report’s release, are wholly unconvincing when you actually spend time with the document itself.
Mueller does not accuse the president of crimes. He doesn’t have to. But the facts he recounts describe criminal behavior. They describe criminal behavior even if we allow the president’s—and the attorney general’s—argument that facially valid exercises of presidential authority cannot be obstructions of justice. They do this because they describe obstructive activity that does not involve facially valid exercises of presidential power at all.
Consider only two examples. The first is the particularly ugly section concerning Trump’s efforts to get then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “unrecuse.”
According to Mueller, the president asked Corey Lewandowski to convey a message to Sessions. It was a request that Sessions reassert control over the special counsel’s investigation, make a speech in which he would declare that the president didn’t do anything wrong and that the special counsel’s investigation of him was “very unfair,” and restrict the special counsel’s investigation to interference in future elections. Lewandowski asked a White House staffer to deliver the message in his place; the staffer in question never did so.
A few factors are important to highlight here, all of them aggravating. Lewandowski was not a government employee, so this was not an example of the president exercising his powers to manage the executive branch. Indeed, Trump very specifically did not go through the hierarchy of the executive branch. He tried to get a private citizen to lobby the attorney general on his behalf for substantive outcomes to an investigation in which he had the deepest of personal interests. What’s more, the step he asked Lewandowski to press Sessions to take was frankly unethical. Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe because he had an actual conflict of interest in the matter. In other words, the president of the United States recruited a private citizen to procure from the attorney general of the United States behavior the attorney general was ethically barred from undertaking.
But it gets worse, because Trump did not merely seek to get Sessions to involve himself in a matter from which he was recused. Trump wanted Sessions both to limit the scope of the investigation and to declare its outcome on the merits with respect to Trump himself. This action would have quite literally and directly obstructed justice. Limiting the jurisdiction of the special counsel to future elections would have, after all, precluded the indictments Mueller later issued for Russia’s hacking and social-media operations. It would have precluded the prosecutions of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and Rick Gates, as well. Nor is there any real complexity here with respect to Trump’s intent. As Mueller reports, “Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President’s and his campaign’s conduct.”
As a criminal matter, this fact pattern seems to me uncomplicated: If true and provable beyond a reasonable doubt, it is unlawful obstruction of justice. Full stop.
Another example: Mueller reports that after the news broke that Trump had sought to get then–White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire the special counsel, Trump sought to get McGahn to deny the story. He also sought to get him to create an internal record denying the story. McGahn refused.