2 Trump answers to Mueller leaked
Did not know about Trump tower meeting and did not hear about wikileaks from Stone
I’m gonna go way out on a limb and say that Trump Jr. almost certainly told Trump Sr. about the meeting, and that Mueller knows this. Trump is probably going to have to fall back on the “I don’t recall” defense.
'Round here we call that a “Sessions”.
Someone please tell me: At what point does common sense kick in?
How does anyone still doubt that 1) Trump’s campaign conspired with Russians to subvert the election in Trump’s favor; and 2) that Trump was well aware of the fact from at least the time Manafort was hired to run his campaign?
This is just not that hard, even from a legal point of view. Proof must be beyond a reasonable doubt, not all possible doubt.
ETA: By quoting you both, I am not implying you don’t understand this. I know you both do. It’s just the sort of garbage Trump followers buy, even in the face of the most nonsensical “explanations.”
For a good 35, 40 percent of us? Never.
But Trump won’t be on trial. Impeachment is a political decision, not a criminal one, and the bar for GOP Congressmen isn’t “all possible doubt”, or “reasonable doubt”, but “will brainwashed Fox news watchers still vote for me if I lie about this?”
Which 20 GOP senators will vote to remove Trump from office? That assumes all Dems vote to remove him which may not happen. It will probably be much easier to vote him out in 2020 than to get rid of him via impeachment.
I’m tending to think it’s better to wait for 2020 rather than try impeachment. Impeachment will make his core supporters feel even more outraged and that the system is corrupt. It has the potential to make Trump into a martyr. It would also mean Pence becomes president, and I could see him winning in 2020. Long term, I think we’ll end up in a better place if Trump gets voted out in 2020 rather than impeached.
I do understand this but tend to reach for legal definitions due to career background. But just in general… WTF does it take for people to simply use their common sense? It’s a rhetorical question, but I simply can’t shake my head any harder.
And of course you nailed it about the brainwashed Fox “news” watchers. The propaganda is the real problem.
I think I agree with this. Impeachment forces everyone to pick a side and a certain percentage of undecideds will indeed side with Donald as some kind of gag reflex. Drag out the exposure of the greed, graft and willingness to subvert American interests, however, and in 23(!) months all the undecideds (who are needed) are just sick of him.
as I understand that you need the 75% of the Senate to convict, which you will never get, indeed it is the wisest idea to investigate and hamper and let him behave in the very extremely irritating fashion (and do the economic damage) to cripple- he then is the crippled bird for the next election.
it is 67% percent to convict but they are not going to get that barring some miracle happening
Marcy Wheeler points out that in Mueller filings Roger Stone went from someone who had “regular contact with senior members” of the campaign in previous filings to someone who had “regular contact with senior members including then candidate Donald J. Trump” in the most recent one.
To some extent, I’m less concerned about this than with the systemic issues.
Trump is not a great President. But that said, he’s limited in his badness by those confirmed by the Senate, and they’re doing their best to turn his crap into gold, and sometimes coming up with some halfway decent stuff. Leaving the postal system, for example, was a great move. The NAFTA re-negotiation seems to include some real measures relevant to Trump’s aim to protect American manufacturing. In the last six months (basically, since hiring John Bolton - I feel like he and Kushner have formed a power couple, to do reasonable work) the administration has not been horrible in terms of what they’re actually doing. Obviously, a Left-head might disagree, but the direction of the policy aside, they’re at least doing that policy in a reasonable fashion.
If Pence comes in, he’ll be a lame duck President, he’ll continue those policies that ended up reasonable and shut down the ones that never became better than crap. But, overall, the practical output of the Executive branch will not be wildly different.
For Trump to skate is sort of like OJ Simpson going free. It enraged those who had decided he was guilty and was seen as a big win for those who had decided he was innocent. But in the greater scheme of things, one murderer got off and the world continued on. There was no big change. The guilty verdict would have only really mattered to a very small number of people, and for the rest it was just entertainment.
But it doesn’t really matter whether Trump is removed from office largely because he’s just so strongly incompetent. His own intent to screw everyone just always backfires, and he’s hamstrung by a Senate who knows that he is incompetent and has seen to it that the leash is strung short.
But what if, instead of Trump, we had a President who was competent and criminal? One who strongly needed to go, in order to prevent the country from, for example, tossing the Senate, electing a President-for-life, etc.
If our system can’t toss Donald J Trump, based on all of the criminal evidence in the world that he worked with a foreign power to defeat the integrity of the election, then what hope do we have when someone competent comes along who needs to get kicked out?
We need to reform the system. That’s the more pressing concern than Trump.
And yet, it’s not what either party was trying to sell in the last election, and nor am I optimistic about the next. I’m sure a few small tweaks will be introduced but, fundamentally, you need all of the partisans and populists to vote for measures that reduce partisanship and decrease the public’s (and corporate) impact and visibility into the political process.
I find it hard to believe that Trump Sr. didn’t know, and iirc, there are some questions surrounding Hope Hicks and the entire timeline that strongly suggest that he knew, but I haven’t looked at that in a while.
I’ve long believed that Trump is much, much more likely to get nailed for either lying or obstruction than any kind of collusion conspiracy.
Their base really wants it, but at the same time, they don’t want to be seen as simply harassing the president over things that have no hope of bearing fruit, but instead just make him look bad. There’s definitely a sense that it would need to be something truly substantive in order for Democrats to proceed with impeachment.
Edit: double post, ya’ll need a five-minute delete button.
You might get it if Trump shot ~25 republican Senators. Still a close call.
I feel like this will become a notable point at some time in the future:
Also potentially relevant in coming times:
And if one of those 25 was Ted Cruz, the Senate would back Trump no matter what.