2020 Elections - Trump FIRED

[Typical Lax Dad]

I hope this isn’t too negative. If so, I apologize in advance.

[ggait]

I'm saying Rudy gets a pardon. He probably wants/needs one -- for Lev and Igor stuff.

I'm saying no self-pardon. Trump loves to do things (i) because he can and (ii) that people tell him not to do. But his main exposure is in NYC/NYS.

So a federal self-pardon seems mostly counter-productive. Makes federal indictment and impeachment conviction more likely, and is neutral/negative for things in New York.

When it comes to saving his own skin, I think Trump will be plenty careful/strategic/smart. The only question is whether he has any good lawyers still advising him.

[runrussellrun]

I hope this isn’t too negative. If so, I apologize in advance.

Stark Park is in a wonderful location. Wonderful statue of Manchester finest. Of course, he did own slaves, so there IS that.

[runrussellrun]

I'm saying Rudy gets a pardon. He probably wants/needs one -- for Lev and Igor stuff.

I'm saying no self-pardon. Trump loves to do things (i) because he can and (ii) that people tell him not to do. But his main exposure is in NYC/NYS.

So a federal self-pardon seems mostly counter-productive. Makes federal indictment and impeachment conviction more likely, and is neutral/negative for things in New York.

When it comes to saving his own skin, I think Trump will be plenty careful/strategic/smart. The only question is whether he has any good lawyers still advising him.

A pardon for what?

Sorry, I am being serious, I didn't know we had "precog" pardons to along with "precog" crimes. This video always reminds me of that movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI-8CVixZ5o

[Typical Lax Dad]

I hope this isn’t too negative. If so, I apologize in advance.

Stark Park is in a wonderful location. Wonderful statue of Manchester finest. Of course, he did own slaves, so there IS that.

Good for him. Hopefully he did well.

[runrussellrun]

I hope this isn’t too negative. If so, I apologize in advance.

Stark Park is in a wonderful location. Wonderful statue of Manchester finest. Of course, he did own slaves, so there IS that.

Good for him. Hopefully he did well.

Apparently, they named a "house" after him on some TV show.

[runrussellrun]

I hope this isn’t too negative. If so, I apologize in advance.

Stark Park is in a wonderful location. Wonderful statue of Manchester finest. Of course, he did own slaves, so there IS that.

Good for him. Hopefully he did well.

IS doing well, in your world, only defined by material accumulation?

What do you think of John Stark?

[MDlaxfan76]

Okay, time for a little poll:
Who thinks Trump will pardon himself,
who thinks he won't.
I think he will....cuz he can and he's
that kind of arrogant aszhole (and cuz
he's real scared).

That'd be my bet, and his kids...Rudy may be out of luck!

[MDlaxfan76]

So if DOPUS self-pardons before Senate trial - how does that affect things? I've read that he doesn't have a 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination as that is not part of the Senate rule package unless the Senators put that in - in fact no due process or any normal rules of criminal law apply to an impeachment procedure.

See my 3:54 p.m. post in this thread for my thoughts.

While it is true normal criminal rules don't apply in a Senate impeachment trial, I can't imagine the Senators would not allow T**** to invoke the 5th if he had a valid basis to do so. If he were to be forced to testify and if he gave incriminating testimony, that testimony could be used to convict him in a criminal trial. That would be extraordinarily unfair and just wrong.

Now if T**** were to refuse to testify in response to a valid Senate subpoena under circumstances where he had no 5th A. rights, theoretically, the Senate could hold him in contempt and put him in the Senate jail which I imagine is getting renovated right about now. I can see it now. 50 D Senators plus Mittens vote to incarcerate the T****ster.

So, let's say that somehow Trump had immunity due to pardon, thus forced to testify...there are potential civil actions from these same events...right?

[ggait]

What do you think of John Stark?

He was a great king. Things in the North really headed south after he was gone.

[runrussellrun]

What do you think of John Stark?

He was a great king. Things in the North really headed south after he was gone.

Didn't fall for it.....not into dwarf porn

....the EX made me watch that junk show LOST, years ago. horrible. At least it had some attractive humans on it.

heard the dragon lady lost her turd, had a melt down and the real John Stark married his sister.

Wonder what seacoaster thinks of native son Gen. Stark.

Like Ben Franklin, and others, Stark didn't dig the oligarchs in your face, " Society of Cincinatti" truthism. A more "skullNbones" than Masonic temple.

still around. you'd be surprised who loves them some heraldtry and birth rite.

[Typical Lax Dad]

I hope this isn’t too negative. If so, I apologize in advance.

Stark Park is in a wonderful location. Wonderful statue of Manchester finest. Of course, he did own slaves, so there IS that.

Good for him. Hopefully he did well.

IS doing well, in your world, only defined by material accumulation?

What do you think of John Stark?

[runrussellrun]

I hope this isn’t too negative. If so, I apologize in advance.

Stark Park is in a wonderful location. Wonderful statue of Manchester finest. Of course, he did own slaves, so there IS that.

Good for him. Hopefully he did well.

IS doing well, in your world, only defined by material accumulation?

What do you think of John Stark?

were these two pigs telling the truth? could be easy enough to time stamp the photo. also easy enough to fake the time stamp. but, they said they took the picture after the blah blah blah..........

DUDEs of pigland....what were you doing in the Capitol on that afternoon. Just stumbled out of that silly Irish place with the yardarms.....and just happened to notice "something going on" and started taking selfies with their pig Hill buddies.

I noticed that the NJ Congresswoman was texting intel during the armed invasion ....to lord knows whom....around the same time as other members of Congress. They all deserve the same look into, yes?

also, sometimes it's the one that crows the most that need to be watched.

I know 5 males adopted from Russia. all in early 20's.

3 of them are currently in the US military. Just an observation.

AFANS fecesbook feed of pretend liberals tells me that Russia is still a threat..............

and what better cover than a USNA grad. Navy has never had a spy problem tho.

woe....see, next time, I could break this all up into different posts. I edited them after, to prove that I could thanks tld for the inspiration.

maybe, just maybe, I can get to over 10,000 posts by valentives day. Are golf courses closed in Florida

[Typical Lax Dad]

I hope this isn’t too negative. If so, I apologize in advance.

Stark Park is in a wonderful location. Wonderful statue of Manchester finest. Of course, he did own slaves, so there IS that.

Good for him. Hopefully he did well.

IS doing well, in your world, only defined by material accumulation?

What do you think of John Stark?

were these two pigs telling the truth? could be easy enough to time stamp the photo. also easy enough to fake the time stamp. but, they said they took the picture after the blah blah blah..........

DUDEs of pigland....what were you doing in the Capitol on that afternoon. Just stumbled out of that silly Irish place with the yardarms.....and just happened to notice "something going on" and started taking selfies with their pig Hill buddies.

I noticed that the NJ Congresswoman was texting intel during the armed invasion ....to lord knows whom....around the same time as other members of Congress. They all deserve the same look into, yes?

also, sometimes it's the one that crows the most that need to be watched.

I know 5 males adopted from Russia. all in early 20's.

3 of them are currently in the US military. Just an observation.

AFANS fecesbook feed of pretend liberals tells me that Russia is still a threat..............

and what better cover than a USNA grad. Navy has never had a spy problem tho.

woe....see, next time, I could break this all up into different posts. I edited them after, to prove that I could thanks tld for the inspiration.

maybe, just maybe, I can get to over 10,000 posts by valentives day. Are golf courses closed in Florida

EDIT: Just saw your golf course reference. I am not sure about Florida but I just got an invite to TCC yesterday. Hoping it’s open later in the Spring. I am not much of a golfer but I will play it.

[ardilla secreta]

Okay, time for a little poll:
Who thinks Trump will pardon himself,
who thinks he won't.
I think he will....cuz he can and he's
that kind of arrogant aszhole (and cuz
he's real scared).

Donald Trump and a small pole. Is this another one of your 50% off stories?

[DMac]

Nope, I'd bet small pole is 100% of what Donald's got.
People like that gotta get gold toilets and big planes, ya know.

[seacoaster]

Another article on the First Amendment and Trump's conduct with the mob:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... ution.html

"The video message President Donald Trump released Wednesday suggests that the centerpiece of his defense to both conviction in the Senate and to subsequent criminal charges in court will be the First Amendment. But there is a big hole in this defense.

The president’s post-impeachment video decried the “unprecedented assault on free speech we have seen in recent days” and “efforts to censor, cancel and blacklist our fellow citizens.” While these words seem to refer to steps taken by Twitter and YouTube to prevent their platforms from being used to incite further violence, Trump is presumably laying the groundwork for the defense of his own incendiary statements at the rally just before the invasion of the Capitol by his supporters. Because the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio that the First Amendment requires criminal incitement to be both intended and likely to incite imminent lawless action, the president may, in fact, be able to escape criminal liability for those remarks because he avoided explicit calls to violence at the rally and wove in mixed messages about being “peaceful” with his violent rhetoric.

But the First Amendment does not protect Trump from liability for his failure to act once his rally speech set serious federal crimes in motion. The strongest case for both convicting Trump on the articles of impeachment in the Senate and for convicting him on criminal charges after he leaves office would be based primarily not on what he said at the pre-invasion rally but on what he failed to do after the insurrection began. The president cannot escape responsibility for failing to take decisive action for hours while his supporters invaded, vandalized, and terrorized the Capitol.

Ordinarily one cannot be held criminally liable for what one fails to do. But criminal law does recognize liability for one’s omissions when one has a legal duty to act. For example, parents can be prosecuted for failing to protect their children because parents owe a duty of care to their children.

The president has a sworn duty to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, a duty that in this case required him to immediately and unequivocally discourage his most ardent supporters from committing insurrectionary crimes once he realized they were occurring. Trump’s violation of that duty by failing to act makes him an accomplice to those crimes if he intended by that omission to assist or encourage those crimes. A strong case already exists that the president wanted his supporters’ insurrectionary crimes to continue in order to change the result of the election or at the very least obstruct the certification of his defeat. Recent press reports suggest that even stronger evidence might come to light. That intent, coupled with his oath of office, makes him an accomplice to those crimes if his supporters were even slightly encouraged by his inaction.

We do not yet know much about what Trump said or did in the White House while the Capitol riot was ongoing, although some press reports suggest he was lobbying senators by phone to vote his way for the election results and delaying deploying resources to quell the insurrection. Facts already known make clear that he violated these duties of protection, however. His supporters invaded the Capitol shortly after 2 p.m. Trump did not ask his supporters to leave the Capitol until 4:17, more than two hours after they first overwhelmed the Capitol Police. His 4:17 p.m. video message also repeated many of the lies about the election that motivated their crimes in the first place, pouring more gasoline on a fire that he was supposedly asking people to extinguish.

One important advantage of focusing on the president’s failure to immediately try to end the invasion of the Capitol is that it makes it much harder for the president to rely on the messages about peaceful protest that he mixed in with his incendiary rhetoric. For example, at 2:38 p.m. Trump tweeted, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay Peaceful.” The rioters at that point were anything but peaceful. Similarly, amid all the violent language of his rally remarks Trump did say once that his supporters should march “patriotically and peacefully” to the Capitol. His defenders will argue that these messages about peaceful protest both show that he did not intend violence to result and also made it unlikely that violence would result from his remarks, thereby bringing his speech within First Amendment protection. These mixed messages might work against a theory that Trump intended to incite violence before the invasion. A prosecution based on Trump’s duty to stop the violence turns things around, however. Trump would need to show that he had tried hard to stop the violence after it began, and one who is serious about stopping an ongoing riot does not send mixed messages.

A failure-to-act prosecution would also focus attention on Trump’s damning first post-invasion tweet. At 2:24 p.m., he tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” This first post-invasion tweet encourages the crimes that were taking place at that very moment. A focal point of Trump’s rally remarks was that Vice President Mike Pence must simply award the election to him. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” Trump said. Later in the rally he said that, if Biden became president, “our country will be destroyed, and we are not going to stand for that.” So the first statement Trump made after a violent mob stormed the Capitol was that Pence had failed do what was necessary to save the country. It was just six minutes later that a member of the mob fatally injured a police officer with a fire extinguisher.

The president had another legal duty that provides a second basis for guilt. One who creates a risk of peril to another can be prosecuted for failing to try to protect those known to be imperiled. Such liability does not require that the defendant intentionally create the risk of peril. Someone who negligently sets fire to a building he believes to be abandoned can be guilty of intentional murder if he fails to try to help people he sees running from the flames.

Negligence is much easier to prove than intentional incitement. One is considered negligent if one ignores a foreseeable risk. Ironically, Trump himself admitted the violent acts of his supporters were entirely foreseeable in a tweet he issued after the insurrection was over and its violent nature was clear. That evening he tweeted, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

These failure-to-act theories of liability would allow Trump to be found complicit in a number of federal felonies that were committed in the Capitol, including destruction of government property, rioting, assault, and possibly even terrorism offenses, seditious conspiracy, and felony murder for the death of the officer assaulted with the fire extinguisher. These charges could be brought against him by the Department of Justice once he leaves office. They could also serve as a basis for his conviction in the Senate on the articles of impeachment. While the articles themselves allege incitement, strict rules of pleading do not apply in an impeachment trial because impeachable offenses do not necessarily have to be crimes.

Prosecuting Trump for his failure to act may also make more sense to the one-third of the public who don’t believe Trump was responsible for the invasion of the Capitol. Public opinion will matter a great deal in the political arena of the Senate impeachment trial. Steeped in a culture of individual responsibility, Americans in general—and perhaps Trump supporters in particular—have a hard time believing that you can be responsible for someone else’s crimes because you encouraged them. That same culture of individual responsibility, though, honors duties to protect those for whom you are responsible. Trump violated his duties to protect people, property, and institutions. The First Amendment provides no defense for these violations in either a court of law or the court of public opinion."

[njbill]

So, let's say that somehow Trump had immunity due to pardon, thus forced to testify...there are potential civil actions from these same events...right?

If you mean Jan. 6, I'm not so sure. In theory, I suppose someone could bring a civil action seeking to have T**** held to be the master conspirator. Could the Capitol policeman's family sue for wrongful death? Could others who were injured seek to have T**** held liable? I suppose, but my gut feeling is those would be tough cases to win. Something to keep an eye on, though, as the evidence develops.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Exclusive: Large bitcoin payments to right-wing activists a month before Capitol riot linked to foreign account

We need to get to the bottom of this. This could be bigger than Benghazi.

[njbill]

Whether Garland’s DOJ will indict T**** for the events of Jan. 6 will depend, I think, on what additional evidence they are able to gather. While I’m not quite as pessimistic as some about an indictment, at this point, I’d put the odds at less than 50/50. But that could change as the evidence develops.

For one thing, many commentators are focusing almost exclusively on the speech T**** made at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. I think the prosecutors can look at other evidence of T****’s intent which includes many of his post-election statements about getting Congress to throw out the electoral votes of the key states and, in particular, his statements about the Jan. 6 rally.

Also most or all of the hostage videos and statements T**** put out on and after Jan. 6 show consciousness of guilt. He keeps saying “peaceful, peaceful, peaceful.” Why? Because he’s trying to cover up his intentions from earlier in the day on Jan. 6 and before when he wanted his supporters to storm the Capitol. But do the storming peacefully. Yeah, right. And if I say “peaceful” after the fact, people will think I intended “peaceful” all along instead of the truth, which is I’m worried people will know I expected and hoped for some degree of violence, but now that I’m in trouble, I want to try to distract from my real intentions.

In Brandenburg v. Ohio and in many of the other First Amendment/incitement cases, violence did not actually occur after the words in question were uttered. In the T**** Jan. 6 incident, however, violence did occur. That’s relevant (though not dispositive) to whether T**** intended his followers to engage in acts of violence.

If a mob boss says to “take care of Mr. X” and nothing happens, it may be tough to prove the boss intended for Mr. X to be killed. But if Mr. X ends up dead, it’s easier to prove murder. What actually happens can shed light on what the speaker intended.

The evidence that T**** reacted with glee as he watched the violence on TV will also be added to the hopper and is very damning. If he didn’t intend violence, why was he happy it was occurring? A grand jury no doubt will be convened. The eye witnesses will be identified. I suspect they will give truthful testimony about what they saw and heard.

Pat Cipollone reportedly advised T**** he had possible criminal exposure and advised him to put out one of his hostage videos where he sprinkled in the word “peaceful.” There is no attorney-client privilege between T**** and Cipollone so Pat can be subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury. Could be very interesting to hear what was said in those conversations.

If some of the R congressmen really did give reconnaissance tours to the perps on Jan. 5, and if T**** knew and approved of the tours, his goose is cooked.

Another point. All of the commentators are focusing on whether T****’s incendiary remarks incited violence to such an extent that they are not protected by the First Amendment. I think it isn’t necessary to allege and prove T**** intended violence.

It seems clear he intended for his supporters to go to the Capitol Building to get members of Congress to object to enough electoral votes so that Biden wouldn’t get 270. The evidence of that seems quite strong, almost irrefutable.

Whether T**** intended his people to accomplish this end through violence can be the subject of, let’s say, Count I of the indictment. Count II should charge him with inciting a non-violent (i.e., a bloodless) coup. T****’s intention was to illegally overturn or overthrow the 2020 election so that he, not Joe Biden, would be President come Jan. 20. Attempting to overthrow the duly elected government is an illegal act, a violation of federal criminal law, even if violence was not intended.

Yes, a First Amendment analysis would still be necessary to see if his words were protected free speech as opposed to being the basis for criminal charges, but if you remove the “incite to commit violence” aspect, I think it is a lot easier to reach the conclusion that what T**** said in advocating a coup immediately before the coup was attempted about a mile away is not protected under the First Amendment.

What distinguishes this case from all other incitement cases, whether or not involving violence, is that here the mob stormed the U.S. Capitol Building. The f’ing U.S. Capitol Building. Not some Target in Outback, Alabama.

If the leader of that attempt to overthrow the government is not prosecuted, that will be a sad day in our country’s history.

A word on how some of the commentators have been characterizing Brandenburg. (Caveat: I haven’t studied up on post-Brandenburg jurisprudence). That case was actually rather narrowly decided in a per curium opinion. The court held the Ohio statute, which primarily was directed at advocating violence, was unconstitutionally overbroad. It did not address whether the words uttered by the defendant were protected by the First Amendment. But most on point, under Brandenburg it is not necessary that T****’s words advocated violence in order to be unprotected. Advocating (non-violent) lawlessness is enough. That's critical.