Um, I dunno. TV?
we are defining “define” differently, and it is more than likely that it is my definition that is lacking.
“Determine”, maybe, is what I am looking for? If someone commits a crime, but you don’t know what the actual statute it is that they broke, what is it called as you make that determination? That is the word I should be using.
My point was that Trump and Co keep doing things that are certainly unethical, and to the layman seem should be illegal, so we will stop talking about how the unethical things that he did could be illegal when he stops doing them.
Now, to be quite honest, I am amazed that he has managed to stay within the law, while spitting upon the very ethics that the laws were built upon. I do wonder how intentional and “clever” that is, or if it just the case that the laws just aren’t set up to cover a situation like this, in that the president is given quite a bit of leeway with the expectation that he would use the powers responsibly.
I do not resent your input into these threads, BTW, in that, while you certainly do keep telling us things we don’t want to hear, and you play defense against the “prosecution” here on the dope, it is probably the same defenses that they would use, and if you can see a way to keep them legal, then I assume that their lawyers can too. I hope I and the rest are not too annoying as we try to pose arguments from angles you may not have considered.
OTOH, on the day that you actually start or post to a trump thread saying, “This is it, this is the scandal that is going to bring Trump down.” or something to that effect, I will be hitting up “predictit” or one of those sorts of sites.
The point isn’t that I personally sympathize with one group over the other, it’s that the poor immigrants have an incentive to collaborate with the Clinton campaign, because the campaign can offer them media access they wouldn’t otherwise have. Regardless of whether their actions are legal, said actions follow logically from their stated motives, and thus pass the smell test in a way that Trump and the Russians’ actions don’t. OK, I’ll quit hijacking the thread.
The expectation of responsibility runs counter to the philosophy of checks and balances. The point is to insure against irresponsibility.
Of course, laws aren’t always written (or not written?) with that in mind…
Yeah, this is one of those areas in which people strongly feel there is some sort of law in play. . . but there isn’t. In general, there is no obligation to report a crime. There are specific obligations that might arise from your job, or your relationship to the victim, but there’s not really a sweeping rule that requires reporting.
One of the worst cases I recall to illustrate this was the Jeremy Strohmeyer affair, in which Strohmeyer lured Sherrice Iverson, a seven year old girl, into a Nevada casino restroom and sexually molested her, then murdered her.
It developed that Strohmeyer’s friend David Cash Jr. saw the crime in progress and simply walked away, doing nothing to either stop it or report it. After this fact came to light, public outcry was raised, with Iverson’s family demanding that Cash be charged with something. Unfortunately, state officials concluded, there was simply no crime involved with seeing a sexual assault take place in from of you and walking away.
Cash was never charged with a crime, and even survived an attempt by students at the University of California to have him expelled for being an amoral monster.
Right, I knew that was the general rule, but somehow I got it into my head that there was an exception in cases of international espionage-related activity. Well, another victory over ignorance.
I think I tripped myself up with mentioning the piece of paper. Clearly, as you note it has no value without the information on it.
Let me try again to tease out what I think the difference is.
What the Russians seemed to be offering was opposition research as a service, which has value. In contrast, someone telling their personal story is primarily providing their time and personal knowledge in a way that would seem to be covered under the volunteer exception.
I imagine there are lots of grey areas here. For example, if a foreign national is an expert in developing campaign management software and has built such systems before for other countries, I would guess they couldn’t just gift an off the shelf package to a US campaign. But could they volunteer to write one from scratch?
Then I got to thinking: how does the prohibition on donations from foreign nationals square with Buckley v Valeo and its progeny? And I see that has actually been tested. In Bluman v FEC
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1121532194737627452&q=bluman&hl=en&as_sdt=20006
The court said that “we conclude that § 441e(a) passes muster even under strict scrutiny”. So if the Russians had promised money instead of info, that would be clearly out of bounds. On the other hand they say “Notably, § 441e(a) as we interpret it, see supra pp. 284-85, does not restrain foreign nationals from speaking out about issues or spending money to advocate their views about issues”. So if the the Russians were just concerned about the issue of corruption in US politics and were going to go public with some info they had about the same, that would be clearly in bounds.
To me, based on the facts at hand, it sounds more like the former than the latter.
Where did my analysis go wrong?
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I think your wrong turn is that you’re characterizing “opposition research as a service” as what they offered.
But that doesn’t square with what they described in the mail: they didn’t say, “If you want, we’ll start work to FIND any information that might exist.” They said instead, “We HAVE information already – do you want to know it?” They are, in other words, speaking out about a political issue in a way that they believe will be effective.
And that’s precisely the speech that engenders the most First Amendment protection.
Suppose what they are offering the campaign is stolen information. Products of hacks, phishing, or whatnot. Is dissemination of stolen information protected speech?
My WAG would be yes, as long as money is not changing hands. Otherwise, anyone who quoted from a Wikileaked document could be prosecuted.
I wonder, though, about knowingly disseminating forgeries. If the Russians said “We have this tape of Hillary accepting a bribe from George Soros in exchange for allowing Muslim terrorists into the country, and we’re pretty sure nobody can tell it’s fake”, and the Trump campaign had run with it, would they have been committing a crime?
There’s a big distinction between quoting an existing source and using information that they stole in the first place. Of course, proving it to a court’s standards is a far different matter.
But it’s information they have as part of their ongoing support of the candidate. That still sounds to me like offering a service.
Doesn’t the question of intent come into it? This wasn’t issue advocacy on the part of the Russians. They weren’t concerned about corruption in the US political process. They clearly intended to provide something valuable to the campaign in the hopes of future consideration on sanctions.
In your opinion, do you think there is enough here to charge someone with a crime (even if it is likely to lose on first amendment grounds)? Or is this just insufficient on its face?
Ironic if the only thing that keeps these folks out of jail are the same first amendment protections their boss would like to weaken.
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A distinction that seems to have been lost on the Supreme Court concerning the NYT publication of the Pentagon Papers. So yeah, that SCOTUS decision would make things “difficult” in the courts, if that’s what you meant.
I think we need a new constitutional amendment:
“The president shall have the power to issue pardons to persons convicted of federal crimes, except that the president and the immediate members of his or her family are ineligible for pardons. No former president shall be pardoned for crimes committed while serving as president.”
This eliminates the possibility of a corrupt president avoiding trial by giving himself a pardon and would have stopped Ford from allowing Nixon to avoid trial.
Right, actually stealing the information would be illegal, but AFIAK, if you just say “These papers mysteriously appeared on my doorstep!”, the burden is on the government to prove you’re lying, which in most cases will be nearly impossible.
Personally, I more or less* like the idea, but I don’t think either party would go for it. Maybe we should just cut to the chase, though, and pass an amendment that says “No person shall be elected president of the US if their last name start with Tr and ends in ump.” 
*the devil is always in the details for such things, and I can’t say I’ve fully thought out all the implications.
Nm
“Warmest greetings to Mister President of America!
I am great grandson of Tsar Nikolai’s finance minister and know what Swiss bank holds Imperial gold …”
He’d fall for it, wouldn’t he?
Trump has apparently been wondering if he can pardon himself.
Voracious curiosity about hypothetical matters and the details of governance has always typified the man.