Dershowitz is a liberal Dem and has been for many years. I don’t think he has suddenly decided to become conservative.
What he has been doing lately is giving his opinions on legal issues and some of those say collusion is not a crime. He has been pretty consistent in saying you should not make a political difference into a crime. He said that about Hillary’s issues too.
Dersh might claim to be a liberal Dem, but he’s been full of shit for years, and opposed to the Democrats on many or even most issues for years.
That isn’t factual. He was a liberal decades ago, yes (or what passes for one). But he’s been a defender of authoritarianism for quite a while, now.
His old reputation has made him extra-valuable as a Trump-enabler, of course.
He may not have “decided” to. But that is a frequently-observed function of getting older (getting conservative).
To refute this I’d have to do a deep dive into Dershowitz’ public remarks, speeches, and writing for the past few years. I’m not going to use my time that way.
I’ll just note that you won’t convince many actual liberals/progressives that Dershowitz remains one of them.
And technically speaking, he’s right. “Collusion” is not a crime. It never was.
“Collusion” is a catch-all term used to describe an array of crimes that include such things as conspiring with an enemy to defraud the United States of a fair and impartial election.
We use the word, “collusion” as a shortcut. Knowledgeable people understand this. But Trump supporters don’t. They literally think that “collusion” has to be a crime in order for Trump to be guilty. They take literal meaning to a point of absurdity. And if Dershowitz is hanging his hat on this, then he’s either a shocking idiot or a repulsive cynic. I’ve never thought Dershowitz was an idiot. So…
Either way, he’s no longer deserving of respect.
For Trump to be guilty of collusion, somebody would have had to explain it to him. And he would have had to understand it.
Only the former, unless he can be diagnosed as mentally incompetent by the court. But Trump’s lawyers would need to plead mental incompetence - it’s not something that Mueller would try to prove - and, of course, Trump would never allow his lawyers to make such a plea.
Of course, they’ll still try to argue that Trump can’t be expected to understand complicated laws like, “Don’t work with foreign militaries against your own nation.” But that won’t serve as a defense from any legal standpoint.
My take on him is the following.
He wrote a book “The case against Impeaching Clinton” which he hoped to flog, once she won the election, and the Right howled for her impeachment. Which was about the dangers of impeachment fore purely political reasons. But when she didn’t, he just changed the title updated a few chapters, and then went on the circuit claiming that there wasn’t sufficient grounds to impeach Trump.
9/11 broke Dershowitz, just like it broke Dennis Miller. Both of them got knocked right off the ledge by the attacks.
Papadapoulis is in a facility in WI (which also held Rostenkowski)
Recently in the news because he lost an appeal
Brian
I’ll be shocked if Trump or Trump associates get nailed for a collusion-related crime. I think Don Jr. has the best chance of that happening in relation to the Trump Tower meeting, but they’d have to stretch CFR 110.20 to an absurd degree, and that would be entertaining if nothing else. Maybe the elastic “conspiracy” charge?
In any event, I think the boat has sailed. I’ll be shocked if some sort of crime involving election-related coordination with a foreign government actually took place.
Because you don’t think the election-related coordination with a foreign government happened, because you don’t think it’s a crime, or because you don’t think it can be proven?
That’s a good question. I don’t know if it happened. My theory is that Papadopoulos’ drunken blabbing combined with the bombshell Steele Dossier that kick started Crossfire Hurricane ended up a dud, because we know it did. The Steele Dossier’s bombshell claims are completely unverified two years later, regarding Carter Page et. al., all the key players supposedly involved in the scheme.
We know that the FBI trusted Steele and took the allegations very seriously, and even went so far as to arguably obfuscate the origins of the information in their FISA application. Because I think they believed they were on to something huge. But it just wasn’t there. By that time, of course, the snowball had become an avalanche, and Mueller was brought on. Trump throws gasoline on the entire thing in Trumpian fashion by firing Comey because of that whole “Russia thing”.
And here we are today. Is it possible some criminal collusion (using shorthand here*) took place? Absolutely. Do I think it’s more likely that they thought they had something big and got the ball rolling on something that turned out to fall flat, yet it was too late to stop? I do.
*Some criminal offense related to influencing the election in coordination with a foreign power
Wow. That’s a whole lot of debunked Republican talking points right there.
I’m willing to be wrong, I’ll just be shocked is all.
Hmm.
Is it -
[ul]
[li]Don Jr. thought he had something and it fell flat?[/li][li]Or Mueller thought he had something and it fell flat?[/li][/ul]
It a trumpist tried to conspire with a hostile government, and it fell flat, that’s still a crime. So is breaking into an empty house with the intent to steal things that are not there.
There is a shit load of information about the Trumps and his campaign trying to ‘get’ something on Clinton from the Russians. They have publicly admitted to it.
Like I said, it’ll be fascinating to watch if they apply CFR 110.20 to include damaging information on a campaign rival. It is a “thing of value” in a sense, but setting precedent that being given knowledge of criminal wrongdoing by a campaign rival as illegal would have a major impact on the way politics works, on both sides.
In this case above, the DNC operative would be in violation for coordinating with Ukrainian officials to find damaging information on Trump. But it doesn’t work that way. Information about criminal wrongdoing about a rival isn’t just not criminal, it’s a political tactic. The Clinton campaign as well, through intermediaries Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS, hired Steele to collect human intelligence from Russian sources about illegal activity by Trump. Yet somehow Don Jr. doing the same thing is suddenly criminal?
No, I don’t see them going that route. But I’m not a prophet, who knows? Mueller is after scalps, that’s what the Special Counsel does. Just ask Scooter Libby. So who knows, but I’ll be surprised.
So you think Don Jr. hired an opposition research company that then hired a guy who got information from Russian informants? :dubious:
If so, what was the name of the opposition research company? Who did they then hire?
It doesn’t matter who hired who, or who offered and who sought. At least as far as the wording of the law goes. It does not differentiate between any of that. Including damaging information about a political rival as a “thing of value” would implicate any of those scenarios. Which is absurd.
Did Clinton, or anyone else since Nixon, explicitly request that a foreign government engage in illegal activity against their opponent?
Actually even Nixon didn’t do that-- He had Americans to do all of his illegal activities.