Time to give Trump Presidency it's own Thread.Follow

Especially when he praised him for said handling.

The GOP talking points (expect to hear them soon from you-know-who) are that Mueller's investigation didn't turn up anything so now he is trying to pursue obstruction charges. First off, even if this were true, obstruction is still obstruction and still illegal so throwing a fit because Mueller is investigating the wrong crime seems sort of weird. But it's not true anyway -- Mueller has been continually staffing up as the investigation grows and broadens into more people and financial ties to Russia. He was bringing on people as recently as last week. So it's just a plain lie to say "He didn't find anything so..." when the investigation is just getting started. Still, tools gonna tool on along.

As amusing as how often the "But Billy hit me first!" point pops up, our Voldedolt has been leaning further and further into "It's a conspiracy!" territory so I wouldn't really expect to see many of those to show up on Zam.

He's investigating himself? It's a bold strategy Cotton, lets see if it pays off for 'em.

Smart guy. Then again, he did graduate from law school.

Each lawyer associated with Trump should hire five more lawyers, etc. It'll be a law school make-work project. Who says government can't make jobs?

Gotta get in on this double-posting action.

Edited, Jun 16th 2017 10:02pm by Debalic

According to whichever layer of litigators Sekulow is on, 45 isn't actually under investigation after all. That's if you ignore the media and 45's own tweet stating that "I'm being investigated". Apparently the 140 characters just aren't enough to give all the necessary information and how it's absolutely impossible to tweet multiple times in a row.

Sekulow's comments (and Trump's tweet) were examples of reductio ad absurdum, which apparently flew right over the heads of most members of the media (including Wallace when interviewing Sekulow). In this form of argument the "if" and "then" is implied, but should be apparent in the argument itself. So "if" I'm being investigated, then I'm being investigated by the guy who told me to do what I'm being investigated for.

There's also a point to be made about an official investigation, which actually requires checking off certain boxes like who you're investigating, what crime you think was committed, etc, and what's going on right now, which is more or less a non investigation investigation. As I've stated several times now, this smells a heck of a lot like the Plame investigation, where there was no crime, they knew who was involved in the action that wasn't a crime, but they chose to go on a witch hunt in the Bush White House anyway, presumably because they could.

Honestly, while I think Trump does hurt himself with his tweeting about this, the more this goes on, the worse those pushing the investigation side of things are looking. If Bush had been able to get the words "this is all a witch hunt" to the public over and over for the couple years that the Plame investigation was going on, things might have turned out very differently. Instead, he did the normal politician thing and kept quiet. The problem with that approach is that the other "side" gets to control when things "leak" to the press, what those leaks consist of, and can use the process to accomplish the actual goal, which is to undermine the administration.

Trump's pushing this right back. And I don't think it'll matter what is found (likely nothing), or leaked (I"m sure tons of speculative stuff), it'll all be framed in the context of fake information. These sorts of things basically rely on one side being able to put out a narrative that can't be opposed. Fact's don't matter. It's what the public hears that does. We all know that what the public will hear from this is leak after leak after leak, not of facts, but speculative stuff. OMG! This person is "under investigation". That person is "being questioned". Someone said that they suspect "someone did something bad". The media gets a field day essentially writing rumors and speculation, knowing that they are covered because they aren't actually the ones making stuff up. They also know that the public largely can't tell the difference, so this will form their opinions.

So yeah, as annoying as it is, Trump is actually doing the right thing here. He knows that all he has to do is tweet "fake news" and "witch hunt" over and over, and a largish percentage of the population will interpret anything that comes of this in that context. If he doesn't, then the other side gets to frame the entire narrative. Of course, if we had a less one sided media, this wouldn't be necessary, but that hasn't been the case for decades now.

After a long and involved investigation...

An investigation into activities which were not in doubt, to determine whether said activities violated the law. I know that this may be just crazy talk, but in order to have a criminal investigation you kinda have to start with either a known crime and then try to figure out who committed it, or you have to have known actions by a known person and try to figure out if those actions are criminal.

With Clinton we know who she is and we know she maintained an email server at home which she used to conduct official state department business. The things she did were not in question, nor the fact that she was involved in doing them. The only question was whether doing this involved a violation of the law.

With this "investigation" (and yeah, I'm putting it in air quotes here), we don't have any known activities from any known person that we suspect may have been criminal as our starting point. What we have is a foreign country hacking into a political party's servers and the data from that server later being released by wikileaks, with the presumption that said foreign country obtained that data and leaked it to wikileaks. Great! That's a crime. We can investigate that. So you should be following the trail of that data, right? Find out who was involved in the hack, find out how the data got to wikileaks and see who was responsible, then figure out if you have any jurisdiction over them, and pursue whatever criminal charges you can.

That's how you investigate, right? You start with the crime and follow it to the criminals. Er... but that's not what's happening here. Here, we have this massive gap. Somehow, via what appears to be some combination of extreme speculation and wishful thinking, we've leaped to a conclusion that someone in the Trump campaign was "involved" somehow. No one seems to know what form that involvement may have taken, nor who might have done it, nor how they could have done it. But let's ignore these pesky facts and "investigate".

What are they actually investigating? What possible evidence could be found that could result in any sort of legal charge involving the original actual crime? As I've pointed out a number of times on this forum, barring finding some recording or email showing a clear conversation between someone connected to the Trump campaign discussing and planning the hack and/or release of the data, and/or promising some sort of quid pro quo in return for said hack and/or release, I'm not sure how you can *ever* obtain a prosecution related to the crime you're actually investigating.

What we have here is an investigation that isn't following a crime or a person, but rather just targeting a group of people and seeing if it can find something they did, not necessarily in any way related to a known crime, which they can be charged with, after the fact. Worse, this is 100% politically targeted. You're choosing to target that group based on its association with a single politician. This sort of thing should send chills down all our spines, and thoughts of authoritarian regimes quashing opposition politicians via abuse and misuse of government power.

A sane legal system cannot allow this form of investigation. It's a fishing expedition. You can't just target a group of people because of their political associations (well, or any reason, this just makes it worse) and just look at everything they've done to see if you can find something. This is scarily reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings. It's not about justice. It's not about following evidence. It is purely about using the investigation itself as a tool to hurt a politician and everyone near him.

I predicted this months ago. I said that the mere fact of someone "being under investigation" would be used as ammunition against them. And what are we seeing right now? Leaks that contain, not evidence of criminal activity, but that "Jared Kuchner is being investigated. OMG! There must be something here!". And "Trump's being investigated. Wow this is really getting serious guys!". Seriously. That's the extent of these leaks. Who's being questioned. Who the investigation is looking at. No context for any of this, just fuel for the speculative fire.

So yeah. It's a witch hunt. I'll ask again: Where is the crime, and how is it connected to anyone currently "under investigation"? There is no connection any of us are aware of that isn't purely speculative. Anyone could be "under investigation" because we could speculate that anyone was involved, right? That's not enough, or should not be enough, to actually investigate people's activities. You have to start with the crime and work to the people. But that's not what's going on here.