I'm making the case that Starr accomplished 14 indictments that led to convictions, not related to Lewinski. Trump fired both Manafort and Flynn, immediately after it was found out they had undisclosed ties to foreign governments.
Yes, so what? Why is that fact relevant here? Completely incorrect in the case of Flynn. He did not fire Flynn immediately. The transition team (head: Mike Pence) was warned that he had ties to foreign governments. Obama warned Trump personally. Sally Yates warned the White House. Yet Flynn was kept on as Nat. Security Advisor until the press found out. barfo
I wouldn't trust the outgoing people as far as I could throw them. When it became known that Flynn lied about his record with foreign governments, he was fired. He didn't last long at all. The real numbers of members of administrations convicted of crimes: Trump 0 Obama 1 W 5 Clinton 2 GHW Bush 1 Reagan 6, including three deputy secretaries of the armed forces. Carter 0 Ford 1 Nixon 10
I'm talking about when they commit crimes. Y'all aren't making sense. Nixon's ass should've gone to prison. MF's get pardoned and shit when they literally commit crimes against the the U.S.
Separation of powers. The FBI investigating members of congress is an Executive Branch attacking the Legislative Branch. It's written in the constitution that congress polices itself. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/16/charles-rangel-convicted-misconduct-congress Once out of office, the person can and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. That goes for the president, too. He can be sued for civil issues, but not indicted for crimes (until he's impeached or otherwise leaves office).
Impeach means "charged with high crime or misdemeanor" (basically) by the house of representatives. A trial is held by the senate with the supreme court acting as judge. If 2/3 of the senate votes to remove, the president is removed from office. Once removed, he can be indicted for crimes. Bill Clinton was to be indicted for his crimes, but reached a plea bargain with the special prosecutor in 2001, after he left office. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...001/01/what_sort_of_plea_did_clinton_cop.html
I think there is some uncertainty on that point, because no one has ever tried to indict a president. I think I read that Ken Starr drafted a legal opinion that a sitting president could be indicted. barfo
@Denny Crane This MUST be fake since it's from the NY times. You know them... Can the President Be Indicted? A Long-Hidden Legal Memo Says Yes WASHINGTON — A newfound memo from Kenneth W. Starr’s independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton sheds fresh light on a constitutional puzzle that is taking on mounting significance amid the Trump-Russia inquiry: Can a sitting president be indicted? The 56-page memo, locked in the National Archives for nearly two decades and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, amounts to the most thorough government-commissioned analysis rejecting a generally held view that presidents are immune from prosecution while in office. “It is proper, constitutional, and legal for a federal grand jury to indict a sitting president for serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the president’s official duties,” the Starr office memo concludes. “In this country, no one, even President Clinton, is above the law.” Mr. Starr assigned Ronald Rotunda, a prominent conservative professor of constitutional law and ethics whom Mr. Starr hired as a consultant on his legal team, to write the memo in spring 1998 after deputies advised him that they had gathered enough evidence to ask a grand jury to indict Mr. Clinton, the memo shows. Other prosecutors working for Mr. Starr developed a draft indictment of Mr. Clinton, which The Times has also requested be made public. The National Archives has not processed that file to determine whether it is exempt from disclosure under grand-jury secrecy rules. In 1974, the Watergate special counsel, Leon Jaworski, had also received a memo from his staff saying he could indict the president, in that instance Richard M. Nixon, while he was in office, and later made that case in a court brief. Those documents, however, explore the topic significantly less extensively than the Starr office memo. In the end, both Mr. Jaworski and Mr. Starr let congressional impeachment proceedings play out and did not try to indict the presidents while they remained in office. Mr. Starr, who had decided he could indict Mr. Clinton, said in a recent interview that he had concluded the more prudent and appropriate course was simply referring the matter to Congress for potential impeachment. As Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the latest inquiry, investigates the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia and whether President Trump obstructed justice, the newly unearthed Starr office memo raises the possibility that Mr. Mueller may have more options than most commentators have assumed. Here is an explanation of the debate and what the Starr office memo has to say. Why do some argue presidents are immune? Nothing in the Constitution or federal statutes says that sitting presidents are immune from prosecution, and no court has ruled that they have any such shield. But proponents of the theory that Mr. Trump is nevertheless immune for now from indictment cited the Constitution’s “structural principles,” in the words of a memo written in September 1973 by Robert G. Dixon Jr., then the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. This argument boils down to practicalities of governance: The stigma of being indicted and the burden of a trial would unduly interfere with a president’s ability to carry out his duties, preventing the executive branch “from accomplishing its constitutional functions” in a way that cannot “be justified by an overriding need,” Mr. Dixon wrote. In October 1973, Mr. Nixon’s solicitor general, Robert H. Bork, submitted a court brief that similarly argued for an “inference” that the Constitution makes sitting presidents immune from indictment and trial. And in 2000, Randolph D. Moss, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Mr. Clinton, reviewed the Justice Department’s 1973 opinions and reaffirmed their conclusion. What was the Starr office’s stance? In laying out his case, Mr. Rotunda played down arguments that permitting a president to be indicted would cripple the executive branch. Instead, he placed greater emphasis on immunity issues that the Nixon — and, later, Clinton — legal teams dismissed. Among them, he noted that the Constitution’s speech-or-debate clause explicitly grants limited immunity to lawmakers for certain actions. “If the framers of our Constitution wanted to create a special immunity for the president,” he argued, “they could have written the relevant clause.” He also wrote that the 25th Amendment, which allows for temporary replacement of a president who has become unable to carry out the duties of the office, created a mechanism that would keep the executive branch from becoming incapacitated if the president was on trial. And he noted that if indictments had to wait until a president’s term was up, some crimes would become untriable — such as those where the statute of limitations had run out. That could happen for crimes that do not rise to an impeachable offense, he wrote, citing the example of a president who punches an irritating heckler. “No one would suggest that the president should be removed from office simply because of that assault,” he wrote. “Yet the president has no right to assault hecklers. If there is no recourse against the president, if he cannot be prosecuted for violating the criminal laws, he will be above the law.” What has the Supreme Court said? The Supreme Court has never addressed the question of whether a sitting president can be indicted and tried. But in a landmark 1997 ruling, Clinton v. Jones, it permitted a lawsuit against Mr. Clinton for unofficial actions — accusations of misconduct before he became president — to proceed while he was in office. In his 2000 memo, Mr. Moss dismissed this ruling, emphasizing that the burdens of being a criminal defendant were greater than the burdens of being sued by a private litigant. But in the Starr office memo, Mr. Rotunda deemed the ruling far more significant for the criminal question. “If public policy and the Constitution allow a private litigant to sue a sitting president for acts that are not part of the president’s official duties (and are outside the outer perimeter of those duties), and that is what Clinton v. Jones squarely held,” he wrote, “then one would think that an indictment is constitutional because the public interest in criminal cases is greater.” Could Mueller go where no prosecutor has before? Even if Mr. Mueller were to uncover sufficient evidence to indict Mr. Trump, decide that the legal arguments in the Starr office memo were correct and conclude that he wanted to ask a grand jury for an indictment while Mr. Trump is president — all big ifs — yet another uncertainty would loom: whether he must accept the Office of Legal Counsel’s analysis, even if he disagreed with it. The Justice Department’s regulations give Mr. Mueller, as a special counsel, greater autonomy than an ordinary prosecutor, but still say he must follow its “rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies.” They also permit Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to overrule Mr. Mueller if he tries to take a step that Mr. Rosenstein deems contrary to such practices. There is no guiding precedent about whether Office of Legal Counsel memos would fall into that category, or if a special counsel is free to reach his own legal judgments. But as Mr. Mueller’s office investigates, the ambiguity about the rules could influence calculations in the Trump camp about how much to cooperate and how much to fight, said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor turned defense lawyer. “I would be surprised if Mueller indicted the president for the same prudential reasons that swayed Starr,” Mr. Mariotti said. “But the specter that he might do that could have an impact on things. If I were on the president’s team, I would say, ‘I don’t think it’s likely that he would, but it’s possible,’ depending on what the facts are.” Here's the Memo: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...-Savage-NYT-FOIA-Starr-memo-presidential.html
Starr's unpublished memo aside... https://www.forbes.com/sites/inside...-allegations-of-past-misconduct/#7a6775a0491b The Attorney General’s Office of Legal Counsel has considered this issue in depth twice in the past half-century – in 1973, in connection with President Richard Nixon’s role in Watergate, and again in 2000, after President Bill Clinton was acquitted of impeachment charges. On both occasions, federal lawyers in the Attorney General’s office apparently determined that the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President was impermissible and unconstitutional because it would undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions. The United States Constitution provides only for impeachment and is silent on the issue of whether federal officials can be criminally prosecuted while holding office. If Mueller finds some indictable offense, he would present it to the house of representatives and they would impeach, the senate would remove, and then the former president put on trial. The question of whether a president can be sued while in office was decided by the Supreme Court in the Jones v. Clinton matter.
NYTimes eats some crow. Claims the president is somehow fuming all day long, and is about to fire Mueller have been constant the past few days. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/trump-russia-charges.html In Call With Times Reporter, Trump Projects Air of Calm Over Charges President Trump projected an air of calm on Wednesday after charges against his former campaign chief and a foreign policy aide roiled Washington, insisting to The New York Times that he was not “angry at anybody” and that investigations into his campaign’s links to Russia had not come near him personally. ... He also pushed back against a report published Monday night by The Washington Post, which the president said described him as “angry at everybody.” “I’m actually not angry at anybody,” Mr. Trump told The Times. The phone call seemed intended to dispel the impression of a president and a White House under siege. The indictment of Mr. Manafort and his longtime deputy, Rick Gates, on Monday came as little surprise to Mr. Trump or his team, and they were relieved that the charges were not directly related to last year’s campaign. Instead, both were indicted on charges including money laundering, tax evasion and failing to properly disclose lobbying on behalf of foreign governments. ... Still, three advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics, said reports of a shellshocked team had been overstated, although some conceded that word that Sam Clovis, an early aide on Mr. Trump’s team, had been interviewed by Mr. Mueller’s team had caught some advisers off guard. In private moments, Mr. Trump, who is prone to venting, blows off steam about the investigation but then moves on, according to one of the advisers. The president is “annoyed” by the omnipresent Russia fever, the adviser said, but he is comfortable with the strategy adopted by Ty Cobb, a senior White House lawyer, who has insisted on cooperating with Mr. Mueller without attacking him, in hopes of a speedy resolution. There is no talk of firing the special counsel, the adviser said.
Some thoughts on the Papadopoulos guy. Another guy with weak association to the campaign also sought Hillary's emails. This was widely reported a while back (July, in fact, if not earlier). http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html These guys were seeking emails from Hillary's illegal private email server, not any emails hacked from the DNC or Podesta (those weren't HER emails). This is a really big detail to consider. These republican operatives didn't seem to know about the DNC hack, or if Clinton's illegal server was actually hacked or not. Thus they didn't collude on any hacking, according to what we know and can deduce. There's only a tiny bit of news with Papadopoulos - that there was a second guy looking for oppo research on Clinton, willing to talk to Russians. The difference between Papadopoulos and Clinton/Dossier is that Papadopolous wasn't paid, and his efforts mostly rebuffed by the campaign. It is no smoking gun, and if Mueller cannot produce something more substantial, this really is a nothingburger. Also, FWIW, collusion isn't illegal. There are no laws against collusion itself, outside of obscure financial situations. Simply talking to Russians is no crime, so if you're going to strike at Trump, you better find something that's actually legit. There are laws against conspiracy, though. That is the proper legal term that we should be talking about, should there be any evidence the campaign actively worked with hackers to hack the DNC and Podesta, or even conspired to release the emails, I would absolutely call it conspiracy and at least a violation of election laws. If republicans actually received the emails they appeared to be seeking, that would violate election laws, at least. If republicans participated (directing, suggesting, etc.) specific hacking incidents, those would be criminal acts (cybercrime laws). Clinton and DNC's direct or indirect payments to a foreign national (Steele) are absolutely criminal. Federal Election Campaign Act (52 USC 30101) prohibits foreign nationals and governments from giving or receiving money in U.S. campaigns. It also prohibits the filing of false or misleading campaign reports to hide the true purpose of the money (52 USC 30121). What she did as Secy of State and that needs a special counsel in its own right, to prove or disprove the allegations, are serious crimes. Bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud, and racketeering. The charges are not limited to the uranium deal, but rather hundreds of $millions in donations to her "charity" in exchange for what looks like favors provided using her office. Also the charity itself, which failed to provide the promised documentation of foreign donations, that was a requirement for her being allowed to become Secy of State.
