An Chuck Grassley says he’s going to introduce a bill anyway. Calling his bluff?
Well…Mitch does kinda have a point: it’s not like Trump would ever sign such a bill.
I didn’t see the post in question until now. It’s pretty horrific to me and I don’t support it. I think using imagery that savage reinforces anger and inhumanity.
He knew Obama wouldn’t sign an ACA repeal and did that multiple times anyway.
Yeah, but Dear Ol’ Chuck is also attempting to add an amendment that would hamstring Mueller to the point that the entire investigation is effectively scuttled.
Yep.
The Republicans clearly are done with the Mueller investigation. Their on the donor class payroll and the mega donors are now beginning to see that Mueller’s going to expose a lot of damn people if this continues. Everyone in the “party” – actually the GOP’s more like a political crime syndicate – gets it. The plutocrats want Mueller finished. They’re not going to stop there, either, because they’re going to “reform” the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
McConnell, Grassley, and House Republicans all agree: time to end all law enforcement investigations into their corruption. It’s just a debate over how to achieve this with minimal political backlash - until they can completely rig the political and legal system to the point where that doesn’t even matter anymore.
That’s an interesting angle and one which has not been cited to this point. What Schneiderman seems to be saying is that under the current laws, Trump can effectively block people from being prosecuted under state laws by issuing them a pardon for federal crimes. Schneiderman is looking to overturn that, but as the article notes, the Republicans control the State Senate.
That said, there may be less to this than meets the eye. The article is unclear about this, but based on the depiction of these laws as being about double-jeopardy, I would guess that even as they now stand these laws currently only shield people who have violated duplicative federal and state laws. Meaning, if there’s a federal law against doing such-and-such and there’s also a state law against doing such-and-such, then once you’re pardoned for the federal crime of doing such-and-such you can’t be prosecuted for the same thing under state law. But that would not deter state prosecutors from bringing charges under state law for things which are not crimes under federal law altogether, and Trump couldn’t pardon his way out of this even if the proposed revisions are not enacted. There are many many things which are crimes under NY State laws and not under federal laws.
hopefully we aren’t at that point already, but if we were - how long before we know it?
Had I known I would take shit for it anyway, I wouldn’t have bothered toning it down so much.
Cohen has dropped his defamation lawsuit against Buzzfeed and FusionGPS over the Steele Dossier.
Interesting.
The Dossier says Cohen went to Prague for a secret meeting with a high level Russian with ties to Putin and a bank, and some Romanians. The meeting was to clean up some Manafort/Ukraine mess, and to plan to get money to Romanian bot farms.
Cohen has denied this, saying he only went to Prague once in 2001, and also saying that he’s never been to Prague ever. Mueller apparantly has evidence of Cohen’s going to Prague.
Wait, what?
Would like to note it is completely possible he is dropping the defamation suits for a lack of money to pursue them.
More likely he doesn’t want to risk legal exposure during discovery, now that he is the target of a criminal investigation.
Yeah, you left out the weasels and everything.
Like the rabies.
If they are pardoned federally, they are home free. They’ll just hang out in another state or another country until it all blows over. Trump won’t be sending US marshals to retrieve them.
My favorite:
Extradition is a thing. And the US Marshals Service doesn’t work for the president.
Normally, the double jeopardy clause applies only to a single sovereign. Meaning a state cannot charge and prosecute someone for the same crime after they have been tried and convicted/acquitted (barring certain retrials in appeal), but if someone is charged, tried, and acquitted of a crime in state court, the feds can charge and try them for the exact same underlying criminal conduct if there is a federal crime that covers the same conduct because the federal government is a different sovereign government. And vice versa (assuming another state has jurisdiction and a criminal statute that covers the alleged criminal conduct). Normally, the feds don’t do this because the DOJ has policies which generally prohibit this. The military has court-martialled a service member for certain offenses such as murder when they have been tried and acquitted of homicide in a state court, however.
Here, New York and a few other states have enacted laws that prohibit someone from being tried in NY state courts if they were tried and convicted/acquitted/pardoned in courts from other jurisdictions. The New York AG is asking the legislature to change this law, with Trump’s cronies in mind.
The US Marshals Service is part of the department of justice, which does report to trump.