It’s not like Trump automatically gets impeached now because of precedent from 20 years ago.
This Congress is not going to remove the Drumpfster. Not for this technical lawyer shit. He is their guy. They don’t care. That’s not how it works.
And we can’t convict him for admitting to a crime when he literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His lawyers will say he’s just repeating random shit he saw on television and he’ll be acquitted BECAUSE IT’S TRUE.
Really? When/where? I haven’t seen anything explicitly linking trump yet. If that’s a verifiable fact, that’s the end. Frankly, I think there are already grounds for impeachment from Comey’s firing, but this would bring it to a whole different level. I can only assume this is the trajectory Mueller’s on and he knows where to push to get confessions and incriminating documents.
Holy shit, that was a monster read (not helped by Twitter being such a crap platform for things like this) but so worth it.
I really hope things are truly as bad for 45 and his entire regime as this tries to demonstrate.
Let’s just keep hoping that he chooses not to use his right to remain silent.
Him? Keep silent? In a courtroom, i.e. in front of an audience? No way.
His lawyers would have to bind and gag him.
Do those heads get polished frequently?
That’s an untested legal theory, of questionable authority. And any such attempt at indictment will eventually end up before the USSC, where it will be decided by Gorsuch et al. Facts and the law have very little influence there.
Yes, it is possible that some Trumpist underlings could be charged under state laws, where Trump’s pardon power does not extend.
This does not mean that such charges will actually occur in any substantial way, or that said underlings would be willing to voluntarily submit to such trials. I do not expect red-state administrations to cooperate with political prosecutions from blue state authorities.
Which one?
I’m guessing that you might be a middle class white dude?
The street Nazis are just the SA equivalent; they aren’t the real threat.
The Trumpists are fascists. Not just the street thugs, the party as a whole. The GOP has been a blatantly white supremacist party for a very long time. It has spent the last decade transitioning into an outright fascist party.
See also:
&
Fascism is not foreign to America. And what is happening now is not notably different to what happened then.
That description covers every US President since Truman.
I looked at a news report which outlined the circumstances of the charge as follows. On the occasion prior to the election when he contacted Sergei Kislyak, his brief was to ask the Russians to change their vote at the UN with respect to an Israel related vote. The Russians didnt do change their vote. On the occasion after the election, he was instructed to seek ways to cooperate with the Russians in seeking ways to combat ISIS.
I’m not hugely optimistic about these developments affecting Trump.
Kushner on the other hand might have trouble for the same reason that Flynn is having trouble - he may have lied to the FBI in their initial questioning.
This being Boingboing, Im about to find out if I have misread or misunderstood.
it’s explained here.
Yep, but don’t forget to include the stolen elections.
Yup.
“The GOP are fascists” is a very different thing from “most Americans are fascists”. Like everywhere else, most Americans are just decent folks trying to get by.
America has never been a true democracy.
And still can. Plea deals like these you need something else you can charge them with in case they back out. Once you plead guilty to a charge or are convicted and sentenced. That charge is pretty much done. So with Flynn cooperating they aren’t going to charge him with everything he did and give the lightest possible sentence. Critically the thing Flynn has just plead guilty to is the only charge that might apply that doesn’t have a mandatory minimum sentence. Its also why they didn’t indict him first. Apparently once you indict you can’t vacate those charges with a plea deal. So had they indicted Flynn they would not have been able to get him to flip by offering a plea deal where he pleads guilty to a lesser charge.
There’s also a fair bit of speculation and legal analysis indicating that Mueller is carefully, carefully structuring charges and indictments to leave as much as possible on the table for states to charge in an attempt to minimize the risk of Pardons nuking the whole thing.
I’m willing to bet its Kushner. A bigger fish in the case doesn’t neccisarily need to be a government official who outranks Flynn. Especially since a lot of what we’re looking at are things that took place during the campaign and transition. Kushner sits at the heart of Trumps business, and was hugely influential in his campaign. If Flynn gets you Kushner. Kushner can likely get you everyone else.
Demographic shifts are actually pushing it in the other direction. Boomers are “exiting” the electorate (by dying!). Younger generations, which tend to be a lot more liberal, are an increasing proportion of the electorate. Our non-white population is growing. And all of these people are increasingly resident in states that were once reliably GOP. That’s why all the voter suppression and gerrymandering. Just based on the current and projected demographics of our country right now. The GOP wouldn’t really be able to reliably win national level elections if voter turn out increases. So they skewed the elections to give themselves control disproportionate to their actual level of support.
See them links I posted. The president can only pardon federal crimes. If these people get charged at the state level, a pardon can’t do anything for them. Its one of the few limits on presidential pardons.
I know a lot of law enforcement officers. None of them are Trumpists. But all of them are deeply shocked and disturbed by the fact that all of their coworkers are really into Trump.
Mueller is already cooperating very closely with Eric Sneiderman the NY state AG, several other state AGs. Most of the states where these crimes are chargable are blue, NY is the big one. DC is deep blue, and the areas around Virginia where most government officials live and work are pretty damn blue these days. We also have federal law enforcement entities that are only answerable to the courts who are empowered specifically to cross state lines to grab up people outside of the normal law enforcement apparatus.
Roosevelt was part of a the progressive wing of a very different Republican Party. At that time the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow and the KKK. Roosevelt broke off from the GOP and one point. Taking its progressive wing with him and formed the Progressive party, usually called the Bullmoose party. He went back to the GOP later, but it was basically the start of the Republican party shedding its progressive block into the DNC.
Important bit being. Teddy Roosevelt (and the Roosevelt family as a whole) was an actual liberal.
At some point the electoral risks of being associated with Trump and refusing to do anything about obvious criminality outweigh the electoral risks of ignoring it all. At some point defending Trump will cause more damage to them at the polls than impeaching him does. Once it hits that point, they’ll impeach. And not before. The question is what’s that point? I’m willing to bet that it would be doing really bad in the next election. Rather than any shocking legal revelation or smoking gun. These guys aren’t going to keep backing Trump if it puts their position at risk, and they’ll keep convincing themselves that it doesn’t. Until they get a wake up call at the polls.
What I’m reading is that long-term projections have young and educated people increasingly moving out of economically dead-end rural red areas into more urban areas and states, though. Which pretty much negates them, politically, as between gerrymandering within states, and especially the lack of representation for the bigger states, they’re politically going to be worth a small fraction of what their rural red state counterparts are worth. An ever-shrinking minority of old white people will continue to have the same political power as they had when they were the majority, even as the rest of the country grows. But that’s all fairly long-term (two to three decades). Short-term, yeah, they’re definitely relying on gerrymandering and voter suppression to stay in power despite not having the numbers.
Yup.
And Cuba, Panama, etc.
Still capitalist, still imperialist, still militarist. But a bit more prone to buying off the workers rather than just blatantly crushing them.
In his latest tweetstorm Seth Abramson argues that Kushner was in a position of power over Flynn not only because of his general position and influence in the campaign but because he had got Flynn the job.
Abramson also fingers Donald Trump Jr., who was on the Executive Committee of the transition team, as the other “senior official”.
What’s happening is astounding! The evidence is pretty persuasive that Trump himself is now under investigation for abetting the election hacks (or similar crimes) and obstructing justice in an attempt to cover it up. I think we can expect to see indictments of other officials, like Kushner, that are implicated by what Flynn has to say now. And I bet Manafort will not be the only one with a criminal trial next year. Don’t misunderstand the process, though. Flynn doesn’t get a deal like this for incriminating just Kushner, or anyone else at that level. (Mueller trying to get Jared to go cooperating witness against a family member? He knows better.)
The technical question about whether a president can be indicted will, in the end, be a minor issue, I think, because the power of an indictment is in the process it initiates, and when you get down to it, if the president is to be tried for crimes, that will have to be in the Senate, following impeachment. (Note: Trump’s crimes are very clearly related to the official capacity of the office he holds.)
If the criminality is as bad as it looks today, and that gets presented to Congress in the months leading up to next year’s elections and the Republicans are sitting on it, I can’t imagine a better situation for Democrats to succeed in the midterms. Saying much more than that about how next year might shape up looks dangerous, in the midst of such tumultuous events!
Is that not our current situation?
That’s called demographic sorting. And its an issue. But a lot of it is still do to the base gerrymandering problem and the electoral college itself. And a lot of the issues with it are within states rather than nationally. The thing is that all of those young, non-white, DNC voting people aren’t neccisarily moving to urban areas in blue states. The big population growth is happening in smaller cities, and often in red states. Its part of what’s making places like Virginia, Nevada and (maybe) Texas all purple n junk.
Basically senators are elected state wide, so sorting doesn’t matter there. Representatives and usually electoral college votes are elected by congressional district. But congressional districts are supposed to be of equal population, and the number of representatives is determined by population. So with fair districts it wouldn’t matter there either. Because the denser more liberal areas, well they have more districts. And more populous states have more representatives. But the gerrymandering lets you block all those districts out as homogeneous blocks of voters, in a way that minimizes the effects of that higher population.
And that’s all happening now. Its not neccisarily a long term thing we’ll be dealing with eventually. We’re seeing that effect now and without action on gerrymandering and some way of unfucking the electoral college it’ll get worse. The base issue is still gerrymandering and the electoral college (which has a base purpose of increasing the influence of less populous states).
Yes the president known as “The Trust Buster” who gave us regulation on business, food safety rules, environmental regulations, the national parks system, fought corruption in his own administration. Negotiated with striking workers rather than breaking strikes, to the benefit of those workers. And tried to do a whole hell of a lot more, especially in regards to labor rights. Was totally just “buying off workers”.
The guys domestic policy was almost entirely based on pushing back against business and moneyed interests for the sake of regular people
Kurshner and Junior were both at that Hillary dirt meeting too right? I tend to think they’ll go after Kurshner first. Apparently he’s exposed on a lot of financial crimes right at the center the Trump family business. And he’s still directly involved with the white house. So he gives an entry point to run straight through the whole Trump circle.
Concentration camps. Genocide by mass starvation. Naked imperialist conquest.
The working class of the Phillipines also matter.
