Is now the time for moderate Republicans to try to retake control of the party?

[Kimstu]

@Sam_Stone

The Garland raid had the opposite effect than what might have been hoped: it’s driving the moderates even further from the center and towards Trump.

Which “moderates”? Mitt Romney, your only named example of a “moderate Republican”, does not seem to be in any way “driven towards Trump”, and nor does Liz Cheney. You say that moderate Republicans can be found at The Dispatch, a self-described “conservative” Substack publication founded in 2020 by anti-Trumper conservatives who also show no signs AFAICT of being “driven towards Trump”.

So who are all the actual Republican “moderates” who are being “driven towards Trump” by the DoJ pursuing their investigation of his possible crimes? We can all see that a bunch of decidedly non-moderate loony Trumpist conservatives who were getting a little bored with ex-President Trump’s lowered profile are now gleefully re-energized with a bunch of new and revived wackadoodle conspiracy theories about Trump being “persecuted”. But those are presumably not the “moderates” that you’re telling us there are “lots of”.

@Sam_Stone

As one commentator said the other day, Merrick Garland may have just handed the Republican nomination to Trump.

Can you cite which commentator you’re referring to?

@Sam_Stone

I really, really want him to go away. Garland’s actions make that unlikely.

Do you want the US Attorney General to just give up pursuing investigations into possible serious crimes on the off chance that that will result in Donald Trump magically just “going away”?

That didn’t seem to be your attitude towards FBI investigations of possible serious crimes the last time there was a similar sort of kerfuffle.

Like here:

@Sam_Stone

Question: Does Clinton have the authority to make that determination for herself? Can she just order a subordinate to copy something out of the classified system into her nonsecured E-mail, and to strip the classification headers from it, based solely on her own judgement that the material shouldn’t be classified? Or was she supposed to seek permission or notify someone of what she was doing? I really have no idea.

Or here:

@Sam_Stone

The investigation into this supposedly involves 147 FBI agents. It doesn’t take that many agents just to go through the E-mails, so I am sure they have agents following up chains of information, trying to find out where the classified info came from, who else might know about it, etc. If it’s true that SAP information was found on her hard drive with passages word-for-word from the original documents, then someone committed a felony transcribing it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if multiple indictments come out of this, including people who we don’t even know about yet. Whether Hillary will be one of them is an open question.

Or here:

@Sam_Stone

I have no idea what’s in those emails, but it isn’t impossible that something could be really damaging to Hillary while not originating on her server. […]

Of course, none of us have any idea. This could be a big deal, or nothing. My intuition tells me that if this looked innocuous the FBI would not risk making a big deal out of it right before an election. There would have to be at least a suspicion of new damning material.

Posts and posts in 2016 amplifying and analyzing all the hypothetical suspicions about the FBI investigation of Clinton possibly turning up evidence of serious wrongdoing.

A couple grumpy laments in 2022 that the FBI investigation of Trump’s potentially far more serious wrongdoing is misguided because it’s somehow interfering with the alleged likelihood of Trump just “going away”.