The Thread of Democrats

[Forty Two]

Democrats: give us documents.
White House: we are not giving you shit.
Nixon tried it with ”tapes.”
Did not work.

Stop with the whattaboutism. This is the Thread of Democrats, so mentioning Nixon and the White House now is irrelevant and has nothing to do with the defalcations and idiocies of the Democrats.

[Tero]

The Democrats have the right to subpoana Trump documents. He is just stalling. You missed the point: it did not work for Nixon.

[BarnettNewman]

So he was a phone phreaker? Who the fuck cares? So were Jobs and Wozniak.

I don't care. I wouldn't vote for the guy anyway. Let's just see who else doesn't care about criminal business practices, and improper hacking of confidential information..... who else doesn't think that matters... you don't, as you just said.

Phone phreaking is about as criminal as illegally downloading music. OMG he got free long distance!!!!

[Forty Two]

He was stealing the phone service in order to have more online time to illegally intrude on computer systems and gather confidential or private information. But, all the articles in WaPo and such are suggesting that the Cult of the Dead Cow was just a bunch of funky punkers operating a bulletin board system, and by "hacking" they meant, like, you know, writing edgy stories, and being sort of "out there, man" you know, like being cool and hip. Hacking didn't mean, like, actual hacking, like breaking into computer systems -- their hacking was all good-natured, "hacktivist" hacking - that was to help groups lower on the progressive stack and to "teach microsoft a lesson" so they fix the easy holes in their Back Office systems....

Blah - blah - freakin' blah. lol

[Forty Two]

The Democrats have the right to subpoana Trump documents. He is just stalling. You missed the point: it did not work for Nixon.

Congress doesn't have the "right" to subpoena any and all executive documents -- they want, for example, transcripts of the President of the United States' conversations with foreign leaders. You think Separation of Powers allows Congress to just eavesdrop on the President's conversations? In any case - recall that Congress subpoenaed the Obama administration in 2011, and there was a court ruling about it in 2016. We'll see what happens to these broad subpoenas in 2022. LOL

[Tero]

Trump is trumping on that. Nevertheless all the fired staff will be interrogated.

[Tero]

Very clever pairing of free speech and socialism! (not)

Liberals dominate every aspect of university life in all but a handful of schools. They dominate the faculty, they dominate the administrations, they dominate in the boards of directors, boards of trustees and of course, the student bodies themselves.

She never explains why. Are the jobs so low paying that conservatives would not take them? Is this the deep state?
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/laura-i ... -was-about

[Tero]

The Democrats have the right to subpoana Trump documents. He is just stalling. You missed the point: it did not work for Nixon.

Congress doesn't have the "right" to subpoena any and all executive documents -- they want, for example, transcripts of the President of the United States' conversations with foreign leaders. You think Separation of Powers allows Congress to just eavesdrop on the President's conversations? In any case - recall that Congress subpoenaed the Obama administration in 2011, and there was a court ruling about it in 2016. We'll see what happens to these broad subpoenas in 2022. LOL

Congress acts on the president when needed. This is the checks and balances. How else would you impeach a president.
Atlantic:

United States v. Nixon required the president to turn over his tapes to a court seeking to use them in a criminal case against other defendants; Clinton v. Jones held that Bill Clinton could not stay a sexual-harassment lawsuit against him until leaving office. In addition, the country had lived through its second presidential impeachment and Senate acquittal. Did the Court cases change the analysis? No, said the OLC lawyers. “The Framers considered who should possess the extraordinary power of deciding whether to initiate a proceeding that could remove the President … and placed that responsibility in the elected officials of Congress. It would be inconsistent with that carefully considered judgment to permit an unelected grand jury and prosecutor effectively to ‘remove’ a President by bringing criminal charges against him while he remains in office.”


Unbeknownst to the public, in May 1998, the distinguished constitutional scholar Ronald W. Rotunda had reached the opposite conclusion. He confidentially advised then-independent counsel Kenneth Starr that one particular president, Bill Clinton, could be indicted. “The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed the state[ment] that no one is ‘above the law,’” Rotunda wrote. The independent-counsel statute itself made no sense if the counsel could not indict the president—and Clinton had consented to passage of the statute that created the office, so in effect he had consented to be indicted. Anyway, the Whitewater “scandal” was not about his conduct as president: “witness tampering, document destruction, perjury, subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and illegal pay-offs … in no way relate to … President Clinton’s official duties” and “are contrary to” his duty “to take care that the law be faithfully executed.”

All of these opinions used the same materials, even as they reached varying conclusions. (One exception: Rotunda considered the laws of other countries, many of which—for example, Papua New Guinea’s—allow prosecution.) Consider one textual point: Bork cited the 25th Amendment, which allows the temporary removal of a disabled president. This, he said, argued against indictment because it shows the nation has to have a president at all times. Rotunda also cited the 25th Amendment. Since a president can always be replaced, he wrote, indictment in office would be no big deal.

No wiser after the memos, I bounced the question off half-a-dozen distinguished scholars, of varying professional backgrounds. Each of them began as the memo writers did—text, history, precedent, and policy. None thought those sources gave the answer, and each had a different suggestion for how to move the question forward.

Peter Shane, a former OLC attorney and a prominent separation-of-powers scholar at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, suggested an institutional answer: A government lawyer, he suggested, owed a duty to begin with earlier executive-branch opinions. Those are not binding; but there’s “a presumption of respect for prior opinions,” he said. But such an important question should also inspire a complete review of all the historical sources.

The earlier opinions had suggested that an indictment of a president would be too disruptive. But Shane found that argument “not very persuasive.” The Constitution permitted disruption of a presidency by impeachment, he said. Would an indictment be “more destabilizing than impeachment?”

Walter Dellinger, now a professor at Duke University and Washington lawyer, headed OLC during the Clinton administration. As acting solicitor general, he also argued—and lost—Clinton’s claim that he should be immune, while in office, from Paula Jones’s civil suit. The history and caselaw sources lead nowhere, he said: “It’s a scoreless tie.” Affording the president immunity in office, he suggested, might make it impossible even to try other defendants in a serious conspiracy case. Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski circumvented this problem with an indictment naming President Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” But Dellinger noted that Jaworski did not concede that a sitting president could not be indicted.

“There is no expertise” that can answer the question, he said. “It’s a matter of choice.”

Pamela Karlan, a prominent Supreme Court litigator and the head of Stanford’s Supreme Court clinic, noted that the Constitution answers some questions—“Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t be president”—but doesn’t answer many others. In this area, “it is possible that there is no answer,” she said. Institutional precedent to her seemed less important to her than the constitutional policy. “What are the big values of the Constitution?” she asked. “Will the country fall apart if we do this? Is it a really bad idea?”

Verna Williams, interim dean and professor at the University of Cincinnati School of Law, drew on her background as a litigator both for the government and in public advocacy cases. Supreme Court precedent seemed most salient to her. In both United States v. Nixon and Clinton v. Jones, presidents had claimed immunity from legal process while in office; in both cases, the Supreme Court denied the claim. Reasoning from those precedents, she suggested, a lawyer should conclude that “where there’s a right, there’s a remedy … no one is above the law.”

Nancy Leong, a professor of law at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, teaches criminal procedure. Unlike Shane and Dellinger, oriented to the executive branch, she drew her answer from institutions of the criminal-justice system itself. A special counsel is a prosecutor, she noted. “There’s a way in which this takes us back to prosecutorial discretion,” she said. English and American law for centuries have assumed that a prosecutor may weigh the needs of justice and of the system as a whole in deciding which cases to pursue and which to drop. Why, she asked in effect, should a special counsel not function in the same way? “Prosecutorial discretion has always had a political aspect,” she said. For example, she notes the differing priorities of the Obama and Trump Justice Departments in areas like marijuana regulation and deportation of aliens. A prosecutor might ask, “What is the system designed to accomplish here? Built into the discretion of special counsel is the likelihood that the legislature is going to undertake the function provided.” If the system relies on the legislative branch for an initial check, what should a prosecutor do “if the legislature is not providing a check?”

Saikrishna Prakash teaches constitutional law at the University of Virginia and is the author of Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive, a historical study of the executive branch. There is simply no constitutional answer to the question, he said. The text is silent; the limited immunities for Congress pointedly exclude the president. Congress could certainly by statute create immunities for the president, but it has not. “There is no reason to impose a constitutional solution,” he says. Indicting a president might be a crazy thing to do; but “the Constitution can allow crazy things to happen.”

After listening to these wise scholars, I incline toward Prakash’s view. Presidential indictment and prosecution is, in a sense, the Schrödinger’s Cat of Article II. We just don’t know, and we won’t know, whether it’s allowed until we open the box—that is, until evidence leads some prosecutor to decide that a sitting president, in the interests of justice and national survival, must face indictment while in office.

If I were that prosecutor, I certainly wouldn’t ask Giuliani’s advice. I think that if I had clear and convincing evidence that a president had violated major criminal laws, I would do what prosecutors do: Go to the grand jury and ask for a “true bill” of indictment.

If I got it, all hell would break loose. But American politics has always been hell.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... nt/560957/

[L'Emmerdeur]

Right wingers can on occasion come up with decent (if derivative, in this case) comedy.

[JimC]

Very clever pairing of free speech and socialism! (not)

Liberals dominate every aspect of university life in all but a handful of schools. They dominate the faculty, they dominate the administrations, they dominate in the boards of directors, boards of trustees and of course, the student bodies themselves.

She never explains why. Are the jobs so low paying that conservatives would not take them? Is this the deep state?
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/laura-i ... -was-about

Dumb conservatives?

[Tero]

Yeahbut ”those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”

[JimC]

...and console themselves with gin...

[BarnettNewman]

He was stealing the phone service in order to have more online time to illegally intrude on computer systems and gather confidential or private information. But, all the articles in WaPo and such are suggesting that the Cult of the Dead Cow was just a bunch of funky punkers operating a bulletin board system, and by "hacking" they meant, like, you know, writing edgy stories, and being sort of "out there, man" you know, like being cool and hip. Hacking didn't mean, like, actual hacking, like breaking into computer systems -- their hacking was all good-natured, "hacktivist" hacking - that was to help groups lower on the progressive stack and to "teach microsoft a lesson" so they fix the easy holes in their Back Office systems....

Blah - blah - freakin' blah. lol

Oh so it’s not free long distance that’s the concern. Thanks for the goal post move.

[Tero]

berniegram1.jpg (42.3 KiB) Viewed 2746 times

[Forty Two]

He was stealing the phone service in order to have more online time to illegally intrude on computer systems and gather confidential or private information. But, all the articles in WaPo and such are suggesting that the Cult of the Dead Cow was just a bunch of funky punkers operating a bulletin board system, and by "hacking" they meant, like, you know, writing edgy stories, and being sort of "out there, man" you know, like being cool and hip. Hacking didn't mean, like, actual hacking, like breaking into computer systems -- their hacking was all good-natured, "hacktivist" hacking - that was to help groups lower on the progressive stack and to "teach microsoft a lesson" so they fix the easy holes in their Back Office systems....

Blah - blah - freakin' blah. lol

Oh so it’s not free long distance that’s the concern. Thanks for the goal post move.

Is theft a concern? You tell me.