The Repugs will never impeach him. And, it looks like the Dems may not take ever over, if the claims of nationwide Repug gerrymandering are legit.
Many of the top-tier lawyers in DC are already working for administrations officials, advisers, and assorted hangers-on who might be well-advised to throw Cheeto Tweeto under the bus to save their own skins. This creates an obvious conflict of interest that would prevent them (or anyone else in the same firm, if I understand the rules correctly) from also representing the Dotard.
Looks like the conflict usually is with their own law partners, who annoyingly and unreasonably want to both avoid embarrassment (and alienate other clients and potential clients) AND be paid.
Gerrymandering doesn’t help (and could hurt) in a wave election.
Trump’s lawyers discussed pardons with Manafort and Gates’ lawyers.
From Business Insider
The reason I think the propriety may be more nuanced than what’s suggested here is because of what’s on the other side of the table. Mueller has the complete ability to threaten life-altering consequence to potential witnesses who don’t testify to what he thinks happened, which is exactly what he’s been doing, to great acclaim.
Understood that there’s a difference between a prosecutor who is supposed to be completely neutral and bound only by the facts, and a potential defendant who is trying to save his skin (and further understood that this imbalance affects virtually all defendants, who very rarely have the power to pardon anyone). Nonetheless, I think it puts the propriety in a slightly different light.
You are claiming that Mueller will force them to lie in their testimony, and will threaten them with “life-altering consequence[s]” if they don’t?
I don’t. It’s still 24 karat impropriety. It’s impropriety to conceal impropriety. If there were no impropriety, there’d be no reason to do it.
Rick Gates communicated with a person tied to Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign. (Reuters)
Yet another likely Russian/Trump campaign connection. Hmmm.
I wonder if they’re investigating Trump yet?
Your first statement is a big steamy pile of speculative partisan horseshit.
You, sir, are a fucking idiot. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.
Do you have a cite to support that Mueller is convincing witnesses to claim they witnessed certain things regardless of whether it’s true that they did? Or is that not what you’re saying? If not, then what are you saying?
Do you have any evidence that runs counter to the “honest” and straight-forward assumption that Mueller is pressuring people to reveal what they actually witnessed and nothing more?
I haven’t said anything which runs counter to the notion that Mueller is honest and straightforward. Nonetheless, if he think some crime happened, then he’s going to give a much better deal to a cooperating witness who agrees to testify that this happened than he will to a witness who wants a plea deal but insists that such and such crime has not happened - or even just that he has no knowledge of it.
Do you disagree with this? It seemed pretty widely accepted by all sides throughout this thread, which is filled with gleeful cackling about what the consequences of this or that guy cooperating would be, and what type of bargain Mueller must be driving.
And obviously if that’s the case, then everyone who is indicted or who might potentially be indicted has an incentive to spill the beans on someone else, because that does good things for his own skin. It doesn’t necessarily make a difference whether Mueller personally believes in the truth of whatever he’s pressuring people to say. Bottom line is that he’s pressuring them to say it.
ETA: Especially since Mueller doesn’t necessarily know what happened outside of what these witnesses are saying.
I kind of do disagree with this. It’s my understanding that Mueller and his team probably aren’t operating on “maybe this happened, maybe this didn’t”, in general. For the most part, they already know (or are as close to certain as possible) what happened, based on various pieces of evidence (whatever it was – I don’t know the extent, and I don’t know if it goes to the level of Trump) they’ve gleaned through this process. Once they know what actually happened, for the most part anyway, including once they know who saw/heard what, they then put the pressure on them to testify, and rarely expect testimony that will actually tell them something new, but rather testimony that will be the most effective and compelling in telling the story they already know in court, or in telling the story that will convince another witness that it’s best to cooperate. Maybe sometimes something new comes out, and that might open another “line of attack” for the case, but in general, the cooperating witnesses are just telling them what they already know to be true, confirmed by other pieces of physical or witness evidence.
What you are saying is that they committed crimes, and now they are facing the life altering consequences of being caught for those crimes. That’s a bit different from your first claim.
So, that some of these people who committed crimes may have the consequences of those crimes reduced to some extent by assisting law enforcement in uncovering and prosecuting crimes, is to you, some sort of corruption on Mueller’s part.
Some scholarly articles on the general topic, pulled from a random google search (there are more).
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1479&context=clevstlrev
This is not a bold new claim or anything. (I suspect that many posters would agree that this is an issue if it were not about Trump.)
I don’t know how you could possibly know this to be true, and I don’t put much stock in it.
Just from my understanding from hearing from former prosecutors and the like. But it sounds like your position comes from the same type of evidence.
It is notable how unusually quiethe has been the past few days.
Still, for a preemptive pardon to be proper, your hypothetical scenario relies on these assumptions:
- Trump has done absolutely nothing wrong or illegal.
- Trump is worried that he might be framed for crimes he didn’t commit.
- In exchange for leniency, a witness against Trump agrees to give false testimony.
- Mueller is either complicit in the deception or allows himself to be deceived, and does not rely on any supporting evidence other than the witness’s say-so, out of his zeal to prosecute Trump.
Leaving aside that we can almost surely stop at (1), it doesn’t seem like a likely confluence of events.
Really?
Virginia House of Delegates election, 2017
Dems won statewide by almost 10 points (53.17% to 43.76%). That’s a wave.
Republicans won control of the House of Delegates 51 seats to 49.