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Archive 2017-2019 Political Thread

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Matt said:
I would think a conversation Comey had with the president is privileged and not for public consumption. Even if it is about the weather.
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A conversation can't be privileged when you've already spoken about it publicly and when one party has volunteered to disclose it. Just not how it works. First and foremost, Executive Privilege primarily applies to the production of documents. Secondly, the people involved have got to be under the purview of the Executive Branch. James Comey is a private citizen. He can talk about his conversations with the President as long as he WANTS to and it doesn't involve classified material that hasn't been declassified.

A President is not a King that can unilaterally determine whether or not his subjects can speak on a matter. Trump screwed himself by firing Comey and by speaking publicly about conversations he had with Comey. He let the cat out of the bag. Even if you argued that Executive Privilege still applied, you have to assert it before the person speaks/reveals the information and get a TRO to prevent them from speaking. It isn't a law. There's no legal repercussions for violating it. It is simply a legal argument/doctorine related to the separation of powers between the different branches of government. Comey isn't in the government anymore. He doesn't report to the President. The Executive has no power to tell him what he can and cannot say as long as it doesn't violate a law, and there is no Executive Privilege law.

You can't cry when Obama is President about secrecy and then demand disparate treatment for your guy. This isn't even a controversy. Trump's attorney is simply clueless. Furthermore, the WH said in a statement they weren't going to assert privilege. This isn't grade school where you can do taksie-backsies.

Here is a simple question, Matt. Do you believe Comey is lying about what he said the President asked him? Do you believe Trump did anything improper or wrong here? I didn't say illegal... did he do anything unethical, improper, or wrong?
 
Hmm also interesting about Comey and Clinton/Lynch. I would like to know more about that. There had to be something that caused Comey to shoot a silver bullet into the back of the Wicked Warewolf of the East right before election.
 
Matt said:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017...nd-all-democratic-commentators-are-wrong.html
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So why so you have a problem with Loretta Lynch and the Clinton investigation then? I'm confused. You ranted about Obama and Lynch numerous times. If the President is a King that can do whatever he wants then how was the Clinton investigation not handled 100% appropriately? How do you know Obama didn't direct Lynch to whitewash it? According to his theory, that would be entirely OK.

That's the point you are missing. First off, I don't think anyone is arguing that Trump didn't have the authority to fire Comey or to tell him to stop an investigation. He has that legal right. As did Nixon to fire the people he fired. But, there is a political price to pay for damaging those institutions in our country.

Bill Clinton's impeachment was based on the idea that his behavior was not consistent with his oath to faithfully execute the laws of the country.

For some odd reason people have the idea that impeachment requires a crime to be committed. It absolutely does not. Impeachment is a political process and part of the balance of powers. If members of Congress believe the President is not upholding his oath to faithfully execute the laws of our country, or has engaged in certain misconduct he can be impeached.

The President can engage in entirely legal behavior that warrants impeachment. I don't know why you all are hanging your hat on he did something wrong but it was illegal.
 
Clinton Articles Of Impeachment:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/articles122098.htm

In his conduct while President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has willfully corrupted and manipulated the judicial process of the United States for his personal gain and exoneration, impeding the administration of justice, in that...

Is it a corruption of the judicial process that would personally benefit Trump if the Flynn investigation went away without being completed? Would that be manipulating the judicial process for exoneration (by making sure an associate wouldn't be called/allowed to testify about your own bad acts or behavior as you removed their legal jeopardy?) Is asking the FBI Director to quash an investigation "impeding the administration of justice" if someone is under FBI investigation for serious crimes - -some that were potentially against the security interests of the United States?

Standards for Impeachment:

"A majority of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted in early 1999 to impeach the President based upon Judge Starr's referral. The House managers argued that what the President had done was inconsistent with his sworn duty to take care that the laws of the nation be faithfully executed. "

Richard M. Nixon. He resigned from office in 1974, after a House Committee had voted to put before the full House a number of impeachment charges, the most serious of which was that he had wrongly used the FBI and the CIA in order to conceal evidence that persons connected to the White House had participated in a burglary at the Democratic Party's offices at the Watergate apartment complex. Nixon avoided impeachment, though not disgrace.

"However, the historical record of impeachments in England, which furnished the Constitution's Framers with the term "high Crimes and Misdemeanors," does not support such a limitation; at that time, the word "Misdemeanors" meant simply "misdeeds," rather than "petty crimes," as it now does. The issue was revisited at the time of the Clinton impeachment, when those who sought to remove the President from office, basing their arguments principally on the English experience and The Federalist No. 64, claimed that a President could be removed for any misconduct that indicated that he did not possess the requisite honor, integrity, and character to be trusted to carry out his functions in a manner free from corruption."

As James Iredell (later Associate Justice of the Supreme Court) opined in the North Carolina ratifying convention, impeachment should be used to remedy harm "arising from acts of great injury to the community."

http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/2/essays/100/standards-for-impeachment

The President ordering the FBI Director to end an investigation into a subordinate to avoid the negative publicity and taint of scandal -- including the potential exposure of wrongdoing if Flynn testified he lied or engaged in behavior at the direction of , or under the consent of President Trump, would certainly seem fit with what the Founders saw as misconduct showing he doesn't possess the requisite honor, integrity, and character to be trusted to carry out his functions in a manner free from corruption.

As I said earlier, this is a mixture of legal and political questions. The GOP isn't going to give up without a fight much like how Democrats didn't give up trying to protect Clinton. But, if you believe the President should be able to try to influence the investigation of a close associate by meddling with the FBI then you've basically admitted that the President isn't acting in a manner consistent to assure that the laws of our nation are being faithfully executed.

As always, it sounds like the Democrats and Republicans are both parties full of hypocrites. How about we elect someone who has character and integrity, and demand that our political parties limit their disagreements to policy instead of each trying to cover for the corruption and misbehavior of their party's President? I'm just absolutely sick of it. The President is NOT above the rule of law. He is not a King. I said it when Obama was President and I'm saying it now. I also said it when George W. Bush was President. Our President is not a ruler -- he is an ELECTED leader, and he swears an oath to WE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Not the other way around.

Trump's behavior was an abuse of power irrespective of whether or not he can legally fire the FBI Director or order him to quash an investigation. Trump could have simply pardoned Flynn if he had wanted the investigation to be over with, but he didn't want to deal with the political fallout. He chose, instead, to attempt to undermine the FBI and the DOJ, and that's absolutely in violation of his oath of office. Period.
 
ARCC said:
Hmm also interesting about Comey and Clinton/Lynch. I would like to know more about that. There had to be something that caused Comey to shoot a silver bullet into the back of the Wicked Warewolf of the East right before election.
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He's trying to do the right thing and he's made enemies of both parties because of it. You heard him say his loyalty is to the American people. He's not a partisan guy. He doesn't care if it is Trump or Lynch. He doesn't care for this type of behavior. Lynch was lucky Comey didn't believe he had a chargeable case as who knows what might have occurred if they ended up butting heads.
 
Even I have to admit this is an excellent presentation of the strongest arguments for Trump's defense:

 
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Evan, you asked if I thought Comey was lying. I have no idea but based on the fact he is now a" leaker" of government documents, created on a government computer I find it entirely plausible to believe he was not being candid. It appears Comey motivation was to harm Trump for firing him. And in a way that was humiliating to Comey. The thing Trump did wrong was not firing Comey Jan. 20, 2017. Trump is a bull in a china shop and is going to break some dishes. That I get.

Obama and Lynch were acting as protectors of Clinton. Obama may have ordered Lynch to stifle the investigation of Clinton. But, I do not see where Trump ordered Comey to do anything. I wonder if Comey is the anonymous source for many of the MSM stories that have been proven to be false ?

More later.
 
Matt said:
Evan, you asked if I thought Comey was lying. I have no idea but based on the fact he is now a" leaker" of government documents, created on a government computer I find it entirely plausible to believe he was not being candid. It appears Comey motivation was to harm Trump for firing him. And in a way that was humiliating to Comey. The thing Trump did wrong was not firing Comey Jan. 20, 2017. Trump is a bull in a china shop and is going to break some dishes. That I get.

Obama and Lynch were acting as protectors of Clinton. Obama may have ordered Lynch to stifle the investigation of Clinton. But, I do not see where Trump ordered Comey to do anything. I wonder if Comey is the anonymous source for many of the MSM stories that have been proven to be false ?

More later.
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OK, so my follow up question would be how did Comey know that Trump was going to fire him? He started creating memos of his conversations with Trump after Trump asked him to stay behind and then brought up Flynn. How could Comey have predicted the future and known that Trump was going to fire him? If C0mey's motivation for creating and leaking the memos was to harm Trump because he fired him, then are we essentially saying that Comey can predict the future?

But let's address your argument that Comey is a "leaker" of government documents. The particular statute that Trump's attorney mentioned was mentioned by him for a reason. The 4th Circuit has broadly held that statute to pretty much prohibit the disclosure of ANY confidential information related to the government. The 9th Circuit, however, has completely disagreed, and other Circuits are somewhere in between, but close to the 9th Circuit than the 4th. Notably, the DC Court has not weighed in, and is likely where such a case would end up.

http://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Lutkenhaus-J..pdf

One, no matter what, the government is going to have to be able to prove that Comey's conversation with the President was confidential. As I mentioned in previous posts, if anything the President says in a meeting is confidential, then ANYONE that meets with the President would be guilty of leaking for discussing the contents of that conversation unless the President is going to give them written permission in every single case. This is obviously a highly implausible way for a government to function and would certainly break with centuries of precedent. What the President says and thinks is constantly talked about by his advisers to the press. How else can they articulate the President's agenda and what he wants to discuss? There is a reason that Comey gave very specific reasons for how and why he wrote the memos, how and why he leaked them, his motivation, etc. He was specifically setting up a defense to charges that he did something wrong by releasing the information. Again, Comey is an attorney, former federal prosecutor, high ranking DOJ official, and Director of the FBI. He's intimately familiar with the statutes and case law pertaining to government records and work product. He was very methodical about how he went about this. The original story explaining Comey's side gave NO MENTION of memos.

http://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Lutkenhaus-J..pdf

It wasn't until after Trump tweeted that Comey better hope there were no tapes (an implied threat to release them), and told NBC in an interview that he never asked Comey for loyalty and disputed Comey's account in the New York Times that information from the memos were revealed. It was very clear in the NYTimes article that the sources were solely referring to verbal conversations they had with Comey in which he verbally explained to them that Trump asked him for loyalty. Because Trump then responded with his own recollection publicly, he lost the ability to say those conversations were confidential, EP, etc. Basically, and this is what it looks like to me, but Comey set a trap for Trump and he took the bait. Comey wasn't going to release the memos until Trump opened the door, and his original "leak" was a verbal recounting of what occurred. There's no government documents involved in that, and there's no EP that applies as Comey was a private citizen voluntarily disclosing his conversation. Once Trump took the bait and publicly discussed his meetings with Comey it gave Comey the ability to release this information. Since the information was not covered by privilege, and Trump waived any claim to confidentiality, the "government documents" no longer were confidential, and the government can no longer maintain they had an interest in keeping it confidential. Feel free to disagree, but Comey's precise recollection of the timeline of his leaking and decision making line-up exactly with the idea that he baited Trump, and Trump as usual ignoring the advice and counsel of his advisers opened the door for Comey to be able to directly refute his claims. Trump made it a fully public matter. Had he battened down the hatches and refused to comment there wouldn't even be a special counsel right now.

There also seems to be confusion that Executive Privilege applies to any information Trump doesn't want someone to release. That's not at all how it works -- EP is to prevent the media or a citizen from suing to force an adviser to involuntarily disclose information about certain conversations with the President. In other words, if the other party to the conversation wants to talk about it, and it isn't classified then there's not much the President can do to prevent its release. Essentially, the onus is on the President to assure that he only discusses appropriate information, and that he discusses it with people that see a duty not to disclose anything that he tells them. Obviously, the wheels come off when potential criminality or impropriety is concerned as Nixon saw, but also when the other party is wanting to voluntarily divulge the contents. That's the difference here. If Comey did NOT want to reveal the contents of his conversation with the President, the President didn't want Comey to, and the media or a private citizen tried to sue to get that information the Executive Branch could claim EP.

So, EP doesn't apply, and Trump's conversation wasn't confidential by the usual definition applied to government classification or documents. More importantly, had the President wished for his conversations to remain confidential, he should not have opened the door to the release of that information by tweeting about Comey, talking about his conversations with Comey in the media, and giving multiple explanations for why he fired him.

Again, feel free to disagree, but Comey certainly couldn't have been able to know in January that Trump was planning to fire him in a disrespectful way like he did, nor did he somehow know Trump would continue to try to ask him to do inappropriate things. Trump only has one person to blame and that is Trump. This is what happens when you are undisciplined, impatient, and don't listen to your advisers. It is telling that Comey never felt the need to document his conversations with Obama and with George W. Bush. Trump wanted a fight with the FBI and the intelligence community, he was warned repeatedly not to do it and he kept escalating it. I find it hard to find any sympathy for the position he's in or to believe that he didn't bring it all upon himself. If he had been patient and followed protocol and been disciplined he could've had a public statement made he wasn't under investigation and gotten back to working on his agenda. He chose poorly.
 
I find it odd that Comey memorialized a conversation with Trump where Trump supposedly said he hope he (Comey) could let the Flynn matter go away(not his words, but mine) and not memorialize a conversation with Loretta Lynch where she ordered him to refer to the Clinton email investigation as a "matter". Does not fly. Comey wanted to take Trump down.

Who was responsible for safeguard out electoral process in 2016 ? Who was president in 2016 ? Who was Secretary of State ? Who was the AG in 2016 ? Who was director of the CIA ? The FBI ? DNI ? This is where the focus and attention should be.
 
Matt said:
I find it odd that Comey memorialized a conversation with Trump where Trump supposedly said he hope he (Comey) could let the Flynn matter go away(not his words, but mine) and not memorialize a conversation with Loretta Lynch where she ordered him to refer to the Clinton email investigation as a "matter". Does not fly. Comey wanted to take Trump down.
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Why is that odd? You don't think he told the truth about Lynch?
 
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