The US Presidency 2020

[OldSolduer]

No, I meant the phrase 'Drinking the Koolaid.'

:rofl:

Not to derail this but I remember that massacre. And it wasn't Kool Aid - it was Flavour Aid. 

 

[daftandbarmy]

Not to derail this but I remember that massacre. And it wasn't Kool Aid - it was Flavour Aid. 

And may I just say that I find it slightly disturbing that you have facts like that top of mind

 

[OceanBonfire]

Dozens of Republican former U.S. national security officials to back Biden

Dozens of Republican former U.S. national security officials are forming a group that will back Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, people familiar with the effort said, in a further sign that President Donald Trump has alienated some members of his own party.

The group will publicly endorse Biden in the coming weeks and its members plan to campaign for the former vice president who is challenging Trump in the Nov. 3 election, the sources said. It includes at least two dozen officials who served under Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, with dozens more in talks to join, the sources added.

They will argue that another four years of a Trump presidency would endanger U.S. national security and that Republican voters should view Biden as the better choice despite policy differences, the sources said.

The initiative is being led by John Bellinger III and Ken Wainstein, according to the people involved, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Both held senior posts under George W. Bush. Bellinger served as legal adviser to the National Security Council and State Department. Wainstein served as Bush’s homeland security adviser and as chief of staff to former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Another member of the group, the sources said, is Robert Blackwill, who served as a foreign policy adviser under both Bushes and ambassador to India under George W. Bush. The group includes some independents and officials from outside the national security arena, the sources said.

...


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-biden-republicans-exclus/exclusive-dozens-of-republican-former-u-s-national-security-officials-to-back-biden-idUSKBN23U2LY

 

[PuckChaser]

I've binned all the off topic posts that were borderline personal attacks or attempts to skirt the "no memes" policy. If people cannot debate issues, properly call sources into question or not take any of the above personally, there will be warnings/time outs handed down.

Over the next few days I'll also trim this topic into the current US Presidency thread and a new thread for the upcoming election. I'd ask folks to try to keep from cross-pollinating when possible just to keep discussions clean and on point.

- Milnet.ca Staff

 

[brihard]

Trump has commuted the 40 month sentence handed down to Roger Stone, his former advisor. Stone was convicted of seven felonies for obstruction, witness tampering, and making false statements pertaining to the Mueller investigation. He was part of the Trump campaign's go-between with Wikileaks, and he lied about it and attempted to suppress at least one other witness. He was due to report to prison next Tuesday. He has not been fully pardoned, but won't serve his sentence.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53371756

 

[Kat Stevens]

Trump has commuted the 40 month sentence handed down to Roger Stone, his former advisor. Stone was convicted of seven felonies for obstruction, witness tampering, and making false statements pertaining to the Mueller investigation. He was part of the Trump campaign's go-between with Wikileaks, and he lied about it and attempted to suppress at least one other witness. He was due to report to prison next Tuesday. He has not been fully pardoned, but won't serve his sentence.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53371756

Nice to have a boss that looks out for you.






8)

 

[Retired AF Guy]

From Lawfare, an in-depth look at the details behind President Trump's commutation of Stone's sentence:

The Roger Stone Commutation Is Even More Corrupt Than It Seems

By Quinta Jurecic, Benjamin Wittes

Saturday, July 11, 2020, 11:22 AM

President Trump’s commutation of the prison sentence of his longtime confidante Roger Stone is wholly unsurprising. Indeed, given Trump’s repeated teasing of the matter over the life of the case against Stone, it would have been something of a surprise had he not intervened so that his felonious friend was spared time behind bars.

But the predictable nature of Trump’s action should not obscure its rank corruption. In fact, the predictability makes the commutation all the more corrupt, the capstone of an all-but-open attempt on the president’s part to obstruct justice in a self-protective fashion over a protracted period of time. That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s actually not. Trump publicly encouraged Stone not to cooperate with Robert Mueller’s investigation, he publicly dangled clemency as a reward for silence, and he has now delivered. The act is predictable precisely because the corrupt action is so naked.

In a normal world, this pattern of conduct would constitute an almost prototypical impeachable offense. But this is not a normal world. Congress is unlikely to bestir itself to do anything about what Trump has done—just as it has previously done nothing about the obstruction allegations detailed in the Mueller report. Indeed, in the midst of a presidential campaign, a second impeachment would surely be ill advised. The only remedy for this behavior, at least while Trump remains in office, has to lie in accountability in the context of Trump’s campaign for reelection.

That is why it is so important to understand the history that led to the Stone commutation, just how corrupt it is, and why the predictability of the president’s action actually inflames public outrage—not inures the public to what Trump has done here.

Roger Stone isn’t just Trump’s confidante or friend. According to newly unsealed material in the Mueller report, he’s also a person who had the power to reveal to investigators that Trump likely lied to Mueller—and to whom Trump publicly dangled rewards if Stone refused to provide Mueller with that information. Now, it seems, the president is making good on that promise.

When the report first became public in April 2019, it described how Stone reached out to WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign and represented himself to the Trump campaign as having inside information on upcoming releases of information damaging to Hillary Clinton. But a significant portion of the material on Stone was redacted because of ongoing criminal proceedings against him.

Recently, however, following the guilty verdict against Stone, a court unsealed that hidden material thanks to litigation by BuzzFeed News and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). The newly unredacted information—some but not all of which was revealed over the course of Stone’s trial, but some of which was not previously public—is highly revealing of Stone’s relationship with the president.

During the 2016 campaign, Mueller writes, Stone “made several attempts to contact WikiLeaks founder Assange, boasted of his access to Assange, and was in regular contact with Campaign officials about the releases that Assange made and was believed to be planning.” He spoke repeatedly about his connections to Assange, witnesses told Mueller, and his ability to find out what new releases of information WikiLeaks was planning. Crucially, the unredacted information includes testimony from multiple witnesses who described Stone’s conversations about upcoming WikiLeaks releases with high-level campaign officials—including Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort—and even Trump himself.

According to Manafort, Trump personally told the chairman that he should keep in touch with Stone about WikiLeaks. Another campaign official, Rick Gates, recalled an incident during the campaign in which Trump spoke by phone with Stone and then told Gates that, as Mueller paraphrases, “more releases of damaging information would be coming.” Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen told Mueller about overhearing a phone call in which Stone told Trump that “he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and in a couple of days WikiLeaks would release information.” Then, Mueller writes, once WikiLeaks began dumping material damaging to Clinton in July 2016, Trump “said to Cohen something to the effect of, ‘I guess Roger was right.’”

So Trump clearly knew about and encouraged Stone’s outreach to WikiLeaks, the unredacted report shows. Yet in written answers the president provided to Mueller’s office in the course of the special counsel’s investigation, Trump insisted that he did not recall “the specifics of any call [he] had” with Stone during the campaign or any discussions with Stone of WikiLeaks. And shortly after he submitted those answers, the unredacted report states, Trump began tweeting publicly in support of Stone—calling him “brave” and congratulating his “guts” for refusing to testify.

Trump’s tweets were always suspicious, to say the least. And his answers to Mueller seemed less than entirely credible even when the redacted report was first released. But the newly revealed text makes clear Mueller’s suspicions that Trump lied in his written answers—and then pushed Stone not to testify in order to prevent Mueller from discovering that lie. As Mueller put it dryly: “[T]he President’s conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President’s denials and would link the President to Stone’s efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks.” The special counsel also writes that Trump’s tweets to Stone—along with his tweets criticizing Cohen, who was by then cooperating with investigators—“support the inference that the President intended to communicate a message that witnesses could be rewarded for refusing to provide testimony adverse to the President and disparaged if they chose to cooperate.”

Stone did, indeed, refuse to provide testimony adverse to Trump. And while his precise relationship to WikiLeaks and Assange was never fully explained, he stood trial for lies to Congress denying his efforts to contact WikiLeaks, and for intimidating another witness who could have contradicted those lies. As the judge in Stone’s case put it: “He was prosecuted for covering up for the President."

Now, with Trump’s commutation, Stone has received the precise reward Trump dangled at the time his possible testimony was at issue.

“Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency,” the White House said Friday evening. In the White House’s telling, Stone was targeted by out-of-control Mueller prosecutors for mere “process” crimes when their “collusion delusion” fell apart. He was subject to needless humiliation in his arrest, and he did not get a fair trial. “[P]articularly in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial, the President has determined to commute his sentence. Roger Stone has already suffered greatly. He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!”

Indeed he is. But the story may not be over.

“Time to put Roger Stone in the grand jury to find out what he knows about Trump but would not tell. Commutation can’t stop that,” tweeted Andrew Weissman, one of Mueller’s top prosecutors, following the president’s action.

That’s most unlikely while the Justice Department remains in the hands of Attorney General William Barr. But it’s far from unthinkable should Trump leave office in January. What’s more, the commutation means that the story Mueller tells about potential obstruction vis-a-vis Stone did not end with the activity described by the Mueller report. It is a continuing pattern of conduct up until the present day. That potentially makes it easier for a future Justice Department to revive at least one of the obstruction questions that Barr squelched when he closed the cases Mueller intentionally did not resolve. In addition to all the facts reported by Mueller, including facts that have been redacted until recently, Trump has now consummated the deal he dangled before Stone.

That’s something the Justice Department may want to examine anew—someday.

Link

 

[brihard]

From Lawfare, an in-depth look at the details behind President Trump's commutation of Stone's sentence:

Link

It’s not ‘corrupt’. It’s a perfectly legitimate exercise of the president’s prerogative to commute the sentences of his underlings convicted of felonies for actions they took to assist him in getting elected. The law fully empowers him to protect those loyal to him from being held accountable for criminal acts.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Jonathan Turley has an opinion  less overwrought than the stable of Democratic supporters.

The power can be reformed, assuming people don't just want to keep it for when they need it and use it to make noise when they don't.  Reformers are worth listening to; agitators are just seagulls.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Arnold Kling did a recent post (Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation) based on a 2006 paper about behaviour (link at post) and excerpted the piece I repeat here:

"Many people feel sentiments according to the following social exchange logic: I will give up the benefits of violating this moral rule if others in my social world do. If I followed the rule, and you did not, I have been cheated by you. The more others cheat on a rule I follow, the more exploited I feel, and the more tempted I am to discontinue following the rule when it is costly to do so"

Hence "whataboutism".  The simple argument against "whataboutism" (which misunderstands it) is "two wrongs do not make a right".  "Whataboutism" is really "you broke the rule for political advantage before; I believe you will break it again when it benefits you in future; so I will not yield political advantage to you and your hollow calls for me to respect it now.  If you want change, you demonstrate sincerity and go first."  A vicious cycle, unless someone chooses to break it by acting responsibly.

 

[Good2Golf]

Arnold Kling did a recent post (Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation) based on a 2006 paper about behaviour (link at post) and excerpted the piece I repeat here:

"Many people feel sentiments according to the following social exchange logic: I will give up the benefits of violating this moral rule if others in my social world do. If I followed the rule, and you did not, I have been cheated by you. The more others cheat on a rule I follow, the more exploited I feel, and the more tempted I am to discontinue following the rule when it is costly to do so"

Hence "whataboutism".  The simple argument against "whataboutism" (which misunderstands it) is "two wrongs do not make a right".  "Whataboutism" is really "you broke the rule for political advantage before; I believe you will break it again when it benefits you in future; so I will not yield political advantage to you and your hollow calls for me to respect it now.  If you want change, you demonstrate sincerity and go first."  A vicious cycle, unless someone chooses to break it by acting responsibly.

At first Brad, I thought you accidentally cross-posted this here instead of the Liberal Minority Government in 2019 thread....but sure, I can see that this would apply in America as well.

Regards
G2G

 

[Brad Sallows]

It fits everywhere, but most of the heat generated these days is in response to something Trump has done, which to hear some people speak of, had never been done before.

The barrier is the first leap of faith.  I assume the people who like to claim the moral high ground would want to enthusiastically seize the opportunity and take the credit.

 

[QV]

I'm giving Trump's eleven commutations the same scrutiny I'm giving Obama's 1,715 commutations. 
 

 

[brihard]

I'm giving Trump's eleven commutations the same scrutiny I'm giving Obama's 1,715 commutations. 

And with that scrutiny applied, how many did you find where Obama commuted the sentences of anyone convicted of felonies for crimes they committed in securing his election, or obstructing investigations into same?

 

[Weinie]

Speaking of investigations, how many did the Steele Dossier generate. The whole process is rotten. 

 

[Brad Sallows]

Maybe James Comey and Robert Mueller can co-author an apologetic op-ed for all the "mistakes" and abuses of process committed during their investigations; they've both demonstrated a willingness to weigh in with op-eds regarding injustices.

Maybe someone can write an open letter acknowledging all the egregious misconduct of the media in pursuit of the "collusion" myth, and a member representing the editorial board and newsroom of each major media company can sign it.

That Trump is corrupt, and that his cronies' scalps are slipping away from those who collected them as consolation prizes, are not particularly grave issues.  The greater danger is that people who used their positions to throw mud in the gears of the administration of a legitimately elected president get away with it.  What's the disincentive to do it again the next time the presidency is won by the "other" team?

If Durham's investigation doesn't turn up some charges, or no charges result in convictions, the people who feel "more exploited" are going to be even more alienated from the political establishment and the people who think the chickenshit pursuit of someone like Flynn matters more than the rules of pursuit.

 

[mariomike]

Speaking of investigations, how many did the Steele Dossier generate.

He had this to say @foxandfrlends,

WOW,
@foxandfrlends
  “Dossier is bogus. Clinton Campaign, DNC funded Dossier. FBI CANNOT (after all of this time) VERIFY CLAIMS IN DOSSIER OF RUSSIA/TRUMP COLLUSION. FBI TAINTED.” And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/945646491955290113

 

[Mick]

Honest question: what abuse of process is Mueller alleged to have committed?

I understand he was designated as Special Prosecutor as a result of AG Sessions' recusal, and investigated within parameters given to him by the DOJ.

It is also my understanding that other than the recent op-ed piece dealing specifically with Roger Stone's commuted sentence, Mueller has generally avoided commenting publicly on the Trump Administration.

Again, I am genuinely interested in understanding the abuse of process etc that Mueller is accused of committing.

Thanks. 

 

[FJAG]

Honest question: what abuse of process is Mueller alleged to have committed?

I understand he was designated as Special Prosecutor as a result of AG Sessions' recusal, and investigated within parameters given to him by the DOJ.

It is also my understanding that other than the recent op-ed piece dealing specifically with Roger Stone's commuted sentence, Mueller has generally avoided commenting publicly on the Trump Administration.

Again, I am genuinely interested in understanding the abuse of process etc that Mueller is accused of committing.

Thanks.

Honest Answer: There wasn't any.

That said, there'll be a litany of unsubstantiated stuff coming out of the usual conspiracy media to allege that Mueller is the Anti-Christ. Watch and Shoot.

op:

 

[tomahawk6]

He'll have his chance to lie to Congress.  ;D