US Politics Thread 2021-24

[Otto Harkaman]

What could possibly go wrong

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by Otto Harkaman

What could possibly go wrong

Your wife is smarter than you?

[mapuc]

What is it about your food processing facility who seems to spontaneously ignites ?

Markus

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by mapuc

What is it about your food processing facility who seems to spontaneously ignites ?

Markus

Considering over a half million fires are reported in the U.S. each year. I’m going with the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

Considering over a half million fires are reported in the U.S. each year. I’m going with the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

Nevertheless a conspiracy has evolved out of this.

Markus

[August]

Claiming that estimated deficit reduction pays for billions in new spending.


That's like saying if you overdraft on your bank account by only half as much as you did previously it justifies spending even more money that you don't have on something else.

DAY SEVEN: White House refuses to explain who will pay for Biden's $500B student loan handout

Economists say taxpayers are likely on the hook for it

By Haris Alic | Fox News

President Biden and White House officials remain silent about how they plan to pay for the cancelation of between $10,000 to $20,000 in student debt for millions of Americans.
Despite unveiling the policy last week, administration officials have yet to explain how Biden's student loan handout will be paid for in the long term. Economists say that since the proposal calls for the government to forgive the lending outright, taxpayers are likely on the hook as the principle and interest are piled on top of the nearly $31 trillion in existing U.S. debt.
"If this ends up being added to the national debt, it's just going to drive up the interest costs needed to not default on that figure," said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow in economics at the center-right Manhattan Institute. "All of that is eventually going to drive up taxes because at some point you'll have to figure out a way to pay that debt."
Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House multiple times about how it plans to pay for the student loan handout or if future tax hikes will be needed. Administration officials have yet to provide an explanation but say the handout is "fully paid for" through deficit reduction that is occurring separately from the new handout. The deficit reduction is occurring after trillions in temporary federal spending to combat COVID-19.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/day...t-loan-handout

[Skybird]

Are the midterm elections not as safe as the Oranges had hoped after all? I assume the abortion thing is something that impacted heavily against them, considering that there is a bipartisan majority throughout society against banning abortion.



https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...ions-rcna45336

[Catfish]

^ the "conservatives" lost some female voters for sure

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Catfish

^ the "conservatives" lost some female voters for sure

It would be an insignificant number. Most people's position on abortion is fairly well hardened. There are much more pressing issues for US voters than abortion.

[August]

Barr unloads on Mueller: 'He made some very serious errors'

by Daniel Chaitin, Deputy News Editor

August 25, 2022 10:16 PM
| Updated Aug 26, 2022, 01:10 AM

Former Attorney General William Barr is unleashing heavy criticism of former special counsel Robert Mueller to an unprecedented degree years after his Russia investigation came to an end.
"I don’t think he was on top of his game. I think he made some very serious errors," Barr said in an interview with former New York Times editor Bari Weiss on her Honestly podcast published Thursday.
Mueller, a former FBI director, was appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 after then-President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. The FBI's Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation, which was examining links between Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign, was wrapped into that effort along with an obstruction of justice inquiry.

Barr, who began his second stint as attorney general in February 2019, chastised Mueller over the members picked for his team and also reignited criticism of the special counsel's handling of the obstruction aspect of the investigation.
"He goes out and hires partisan Democrats to make up his investigative team, which means half the country is going to be suspicious from the very beginning," Barr told Weiss, according to the transcript. "That defeated the whole purpose of naming him. I think it was pretty evident within a few months of his taking the position that there had been no collusion."

"But instead of stopping it at that point and letting the country move on, he took two instances, which clearly on their face were not obstruction and which even his final report doesn’t try to argue were obstruction," and used them to "bootstrap the rest of the two-year investigation," Barr added.

Mueller's report was released in April 2019. The special counsel said his team could not establish a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. In addition, the special counsel outlined 10 instances of possible obstruction of justice, including the firing of Comey and a desire by Trump to fire Mueller, but did not reach any conclusions on them. Mueller also said he “determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the president committed crimes” but that “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Before releasing Mueller's report, Barr disclosed that he and Rosenstein concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to establish Trump committed an obstruction of justice offense. A Justice Department memo supporting Barr's decision not to prosecute former President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation was released without any redactions for the first time this week from a Freedom of Information Act legal fight.

Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official and FBI general counsel who was known as Mueller's "pitbull," appeared on MSNBC on Wednesday and criticized what he said was a "shocking" document. The Russia investigation, which Trump derided as a "witch hunt," is now under review by special counsel John Durham, who was appointed to the task by Barr.
Critics of Barr have long condemned his rollout of Mueller's report, including his sending a letter to Congress with a summary of its findings that preceded the report's release. But in speaking with Weiss, Barr expressed exasperation at what he said was the Mueller team's failure to heed his request to deliver to him a report that could be released to the public immediately.

"I asked him, when you give me the report, you have to sanitize it so I’m in a position to release it as soon as you give it to me because if there’s a delay between the time you give me the report and the time I can make it public under the law ... a lot of damage can be done to the country, the stock market, and our foreign adversaries. People are going to wonder if the president's going to jail. So you have to give it to me in a form in which I can release it," Barr said.

The former attorney general said what he got, a report with no redactions and grand jury materials that needed to be concealed, forced him to come forward with a summary while redactions were implemented for roughly three weeks. This was despite Mueller saying he understood Barr's directive to give him a report that could be released quickly, the former attorney general said.

"I don’t know why it was done. It was inexplicable to me," Barr said. He said in the intervening period he had to tell people "what the bottom line was: that there was going to be no indictment of the president and, therefore, there was no collusion. He didn’t reach a decision on obstruction. I took the sentence from his conclusion and said while he didn’t find obstruction, he didn’t exonerate him. I put that in the letter. And then I said, 'However, I am making the decision based on the report, and I don't find there was obstruction.' And then I explained why I didn't find there was obstruction. So half the letter is me explaining my decision — not Mueller’s decision. And I thought that was the responsible thing to do. People who are acting in good faith can scour that letter and not see anything misleading in it."

He added: "The other thing I haven’t really understood what the thrust of this complaint is because we got the report out a couple of weeks later, and if the stuff was so damaging, why didn't Congress impeach him at that point? There were crickets. So the idea that I affected the thing by summarizing the report ... was the left-wing throwing a tantrum because Mueller didn’t deliver the goods as far as they were concerned."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...RetaZjgAQlegKU

[em2nought]

Originally Posted by August

Barr on Mueller:

Yeah, right they were errors.

Originally Posted by Skybird

Are the midterm elections not as safe as the Oranges had hoped after all?

Depleting our entire strategic reserve to drop the price of gas probably helped good ol' Brandon more. Oh, and giving out free college money for votes never hurts a democrat either.

[August]

Originally Posted by em2nought

Yeah, right they were errors.

Yeah nice way of putting it eh?

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by em2nought

...Oh, and giving out free college money for votes never hurts a democrat either.

Education should be free anyway. Wouldn't you want your kids to get an education without having to refi your house to help pay down the debt, or do you thing those higher paying job opportunities only belong to the rich kids?

[Rockstar]

Ah yes more trickle down economics. Raise taxes even further to pay the wealthy their due for providing your free education. Who pays the teachers, administration offices and those who make the curriculum? What about room and board heating and air conditioning? Who pays for the building maintenance and the furniture? Now that government is paying for it who determines eligibility to attend?

Nothing in life is free, but hell let’s continue adding more people to the government plantation by nationalizing the education system. To hell with lower taxes, jobs and a decent wage, huh?

If the New York FED was correct then it’s government interference what’s causing tuition prices to skyrocket. To top it off FREE means things turn out like California’s Black Education Failure. More government interference more debacles.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...ation-failure/

[Skybird]

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung quotes three American high profile law experts regarding whether or not to sue the Donald.
-------------------
Donald Trump's handling of classified documents has many parallels to the confidential emails on Hillary Clinton's private server. There was never an indictment then. Why should this be different now? Three legal experts provide different answers.

The search for truth in the USA has probably never been as difficult as it is today. The political polarization is so immense that even proven experts have great difficulty maintaining their credibility as neutral observers. This is currently very evident in the investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) against Donald Trump. Among other things, it accuses the former president of having withheld highly secret documents from his private club Mar-a-Lago in Florida and hiding them from investigators. The house search on Aug. 8 strengthened those suspicions. But is that enough to indict a former president and possible future presidential candidate?

"Yes," says Harvard professor emeritus and constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe. "The violation of the Espionage Act is extremely serious and extremely clear," says Barack Obama's former mentor. "The only question is when this indictment will occur." It's also quite likely that Trump will be held accountable for obstruction of justice, he says. "After lying to the government about possessing these highly classified documents, he stored them in unsecure locations."

There's no question that instead of turning the documents over to the National Archives or back into the custody of the intelligence community, Trump moved countless boxes of files from the White House to his private Florida residence - a club where foreign guests also come and go - after his term ended a year and a half ago. The former president handed over some of the documents voluntarily, and another only after pressure from a court subpoena. On June 3, a lawyer signed a statement on behalf of Trump's office saying that "to the best of her knowledge" all documents requested by the FBI had been turned over. However, the Aug. 8 house search exposed this as a sham. Even in Trump's personal office, investigators found documents subject to the highest level of secrecy. For Tribe, it is therefore clear: Trump stole these documents from the state and hid them from investigators. For that, he must be held accountable.

Alan Dershowitz, however, has a very different opinion. He, too, is a Harvard professor emeritus and describes himself as a Democrat. "I didn't vote for Trump twice and I wouldn't vote for him a third time." Dershowitz believes the FBI's evidence is sufficient for an indictment. But even so, he believes a prosecution is wrong based on the current facts. For former presidents or future presidential candidates, he says, different requirements apply: "You don't indict them unless the evidence is so overwhelming that both political parties agree."

"An indictment of Trump has to pass the Nixon test and the Clinton test," Dershowitz says. In the Watergate affair of the 1970s, he says, the president's offenses were so serious and the evidence so overwhelming that the Republican Party had to drop Richard Nixon. At the same time, he said, Trump cannot be impeached today after Hillary Clinton got off scot-free with the negligent handling of her emails. "Otherwise, we become a banana republic where a dictator says, 'For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.'"

Indeed, there are some parallels between Trump's handling of classified documents and the Clinton affair. During her time as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, she used personal email servers through which she communicated on business. Among the 30,000 messages the eventual presidential candidate turned over to the State Department in 2014, FBI investigators found 110 emails containing information that was classified at the time they were sent. Of those, 8 correspondences contained information that was considered "top secret" and 36 contained information that was considered "secret."

Clinton's lawyers themselves sorted out what they considered to be relevant emails for investigators. The remaining messages were then deleted. The FBI, however, found no evidence that this triage was not done honestly. Clinton's handling of highly classified information was "extremely careless," but ultimately the facts were not sufficient to support an indictment, then-FBI Director James Comey said after the investigation concluded. Specifically, the evidence was insufficient to prove Clinton engaged in intentional and willful misconduct in handling classified information.

For Tribe, it's clear that the FBI was following the letter of the law politically independently then and continues to do so now. "All of the claims that Trump is being targeted more harshly than Clinton are a mere distraction from the actual facts." The confidential information on Clinton's email servers ended up there by mistake, he said. "And she never refused to turn it over." Dershowitz, who has repeatedly defended controversial figures such as O. J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange and Trump, however, distrusts government institutions. "The Justice Department generally overdoes things," he said. He was a lawyer in the case of the "Pentagon Papers" on the Vietnam War, he said. "The government said the publication of those papers would be enormously damaging to U.S. security. The Pentagon Papers were published, and they caused no harm."

Which Harvard professor should we believe? Tribe, who called Trump and individual supporters "terrorists" on his Twitter account for subliminally threatening social unrest should impeachment occur? Or Dershowitz, whose argument bolsters Trump's narrative of a political vendetta, helping to further erode public trust in American institutions?

Perhaps David Laufman is right. "Comparisons to the Clinton case are premature because we don't have all the facts yet," says the former head of counterintelligence and export control at the Justice Department. In his role at the time, the lawyer oversaw the investigation into the email affair. It was a unanimous decision, he says: "There was a consensus that prosecution was not warranted in the Clinton case."

However, based on the details already known in Trump's case, Laufman says, "Secret documents were withheld even after a court subpoena was issued. These are far more serious factors than the facts uncovered in the Clinton investigation." Already, he said, the public details are pretty damning for Trump. "And they're going to get more damning as we learn more," he said.

"No one else but Trump would have been handled with such merciful kid gloves," Laufman adds. And if the former president ends up being indicted, he said, he will have the opportunity to defend himself in the U.S. and cross-examine the government's witnesses. "That's how our criminal justice system works. He's not above the law. He's not above the Constitution."
-------------------------

I'm lining up somewhere between Laurence Tribe and David Laufman.