Ever get the feeling with this dank cask of characters that we’re creeping into assassination territory?
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I know that guy looks like Manafort, but clearly Soros just hired a body double.
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Every day more so.
Heck, the fact that nobody is dead yet suggests to me how rare political assasination conspiracies really are in the US.
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[this GIF makes him look like Chief Inspector Dreyfus. Appropriate given his most prominent underling]
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Has federal pardoning for state charges ever actually been tested?
A great many assumptions we’ve relied on have failed when there’s nobody who can stop the bad guys. The Federal government has more guns than any state.
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Yes, there are plenty of cases where things work because of unwritten assumptions that the GOP and Trump have been gleefully ignoring, because they have no shame. But AFAIK, federal pardons not affecting state charges is established law, so Trump can deny it until he’s blue in the face but it doesn’t matter.
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Not since 2015 so far as I know.
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I saw some people on a political panel speculating about this. They were doing it with caveats like “we’re getting into James Bond territory here” and trying to be careful not to sound like conspiracy theorists and stuff.
But Russian agents poisoned Skripal and his daughter in the UK. Manafort’s actions may be motivated by worrying about worse things than prison.
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The limit to federal crimes is pretty firm and based on a plain reading of the Constitution.
“he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States”
Which means federal law in pretty much our entire legal system. It’s one of the few hard and fast things about Presidential pardons. But like anything in the law you could challenge that in the court. You could try to pardon a state offense and either hope the state in question doesn’t challenge it, or argue when they do that Presidential pardons cover state offenses.
But there’s very little chance that’ll fly. Manafort is likely to be charged in states that aren’t Trump friendly and have no interest in pardoning him. That’s the whole idea with planning to charge there. And there isn’t really a court that’s likely to accept any arguement for expanding the presidential pardon to cover state offenses. It would over turn one of the longest standing Constitutional traditions , one that’s less based on interpretation than plain text. And conservative judges are famously protective of state’s rights, even the Trump judges.
They also killed Litvinenko in the UK. And there have been plenty of others killed or disappeared outside Russia. But thus far Putin’s government seems to have avoided killing citizens of other countries on foreign soil.
So I dunno how realistic those fears are. Especially since Manafort is in a US jail right now. And likely to stay there.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if the real reason Assange is still holed up in that embassy is just that he’s such a shitty roommate that nobody else is willing to take him in.
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Allow me to share an observation that comes to mind whenever I hear about “progress on the Mueller investigation”:
A few years of shady financial transactions against a federal employee (the Chief) have taken years to investigate. And it’s still not done.
A lifetime of sexual misconduct against a job candidate (supreme court) took a month to investigate. Case closed, the guy was hired.
Hmmmm…
I get the following moral out of it:
- a woman can expect her male assailant to proceed with his career after a charade of an investigation
- a money launderer can proceed with his career while a charade of an investigation drags on for years
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