Politics, Law, and the Mar-a-Lago Search
That's some catch, that Catch-22.
Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a former senior Justice official under the George W. Bush administration, offers his tentative “Thoughts on the Mar-a-Lago Search.” While he says we simply don’t know enough to truly evaluate the situation, he’s right that the politics here matter much more than the law. But his analysis also highlights the Catch-22 that is the Trump administration: because Trump was an unprecedented President in so many ways, pretty much every reaction to him will also be unprecedented—and thus cited as evidence of unfair treatment.
Several sensible commentators—including George Will, Damon Linker, and David Brooks—think Attorney General Garland made a mistake, perhaps a disastrous one, in executing the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. (They made these claims before the federal magistrate unsealed the warrant and the inventory of seized materials.) They worry that the search will, in Will’s sedate words, harm “social comity” and “domestic tranquility.”
They are right in this sense: Trump supporters would have viewed any criminal legal process directed at Trump from the Biden Justice Department as, in Linker’s words, “an illegitimate act undertaken by an alien, tyrannical ‘Regime’ resembling a Third World dictatorship.” Justifiably or not, this reaction—and the further diminution in trust in the Justice Department and FBI by a large chunk of the country—was a directly foreseeable consequence of Garland’s decision.
Commenters on Twitter are unsurprisingly savaging him for declaring Will and Brooks “sensible.” But if rabidly anti-Trump thinkers who have left the GOP in disgust are worried about the search, it’s worth paying attention.
Which is not to say that Garland made the wrong decision. On that question it is far too early to tell. Will is right to suggest that Garland’s decision, even if scrupulously non-political in intent, is “inherently political” and should be judged by how well he “adjust[s] tidy principles to untidy realities” and “balance[s] competing objectives.” And the bar should be very high before the Justice Department in an administration run by [Biden]’s former and probably future political opponent, uses unprecedented criminal process against Trump—especially given our cleaved politics, upcoming elections, and the well-documentedmistakes and illegalities that the Justice Department and FBI committed in pursuing Trump in the past.
Goldsmith is right here. While it’s exceedingly frustrating that demanding the former President follow the law is seen as a politicization of justice, the act is in fact inherently political. I simply assume that Garland was painfully aware of that and that his decision, therefore, cleared that very high bar. Goldsmith is not making that assumption but rather waiting to evaluate the results.
And yet Trump has for all his adult life, and especially during his presidency and post-presidency, shown contempt for law. The FBI’s belief that Trump acted illegally in bringing scores of sensitive documents to Florida, or in not returning them upon request, is very far from shocking. It also appears right now—and this too would not be surprising—that Trump and his advisors did not fully cooperate with the National Archives’ and the Justice Department’s efforts to secure and retrieve this information. There obviously must be a point where information is so sensitive, and Trump’s disregard for law so extreme, to justify legal process against Trump, even in the current milieu. Otherwise the law is entirely hostage to a former president’s (and his supporters’) self-serving veto—something no legal system can tolerate.
That’s where I was the moment I learned of the search. But, again, Goldsmith is putting himself in the position of a senior DOJ official, not a concerned citizen.
Garland will be judged over the coming days and months and years on whether that point had been reached—whether Trump’s indifference to law, and the failures of negotiations with Trump to right his wrongs, and the stakes of the information Trump possessed, justified the Mar-a-Lago search.
Lawfare posted a good account of the warrant, the documents seized (which included ones with classified markings), and this summary of what it all implies:
The FBI has clearly developed significant evidence of criminal activity at Mar-a-Lago related to the handling of classified material, and government property more generally. There is evidence of document tampering. And there is evidence, at a minimum, of willful retention of material that should not have been at the resort. Precisely who is the subject of these investigations and how strong the evidence is at this stage remains unclear. But we can infer from the granting of the warrant that a magistrate judge, at least, believes it meets the probable cause standard governing all federal searches and seizures. We can further infer from Garland’s apparent eagerness to have this material made public that the Justice Department is confident of its position, not just in court but in public opinion.
Whether Garland made the right call will depend on how much this description holds up, and how serious the wrongdoing appears to the public independent of legal technicalities.
Ultimately, I think that’s right. Again, that’s unfair: the standard should be whether Trump followed the law, both as President and after. But mere misdemeanors won’t be enough in the eyes of nonpartisans.
The first factor is the nature of the classified information that Trump had at Mar-a-Lago. Not all of the legal predicates in the warrant turn on the documents at Mar-a-Lago being classified. But the prudence of Garland’s judgment will turn to a large degree on the true sensitivity of the information there.
Former President Obama once said, in the context of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation:
What I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that … there’s classified, and then there’s classified. There’s stuff that is really top-secret, top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state, that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.
Obama was criticized for this remark because he commented publicly on the investigation, and because he revealed the skepticism with which top officials view (and often disregard) the U.S. government’s overclassification of information.
And yet there is truth in what Obama says. The government massively overclassifies, and even many highly classified secrets are “stuff that you could get in open-source.” It will matter a lot, in assessing Garland’s decisions, whether the information Trump had was closer to “really top-secret, top-secret” or to information available in public.
Again, I think this is right. And yet it’s doubly frustrating. Not only because we should demand that Presidents be scrupulous in their handling of state secrets but because Trump likely wouldn’t have been elected absent much less egregious handling of state secrets by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. And I say that as a reluctant Clinton voter who nonetheless believed she was malfeasant.
There are many reports that “[c]lassified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought.” Trump’s unsurprising response: “Nuclear weapons is a hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax, two Impeachments were a hoax, the Mueller investigation was a hoax, and much more.” If indeed the FBI was searching for “documents related to nuclear weapons,” it will matter a lot whether the documents concerned, for example, Trump’s tweet-claim that his button was bigger than Kim Jong-un’s, or rather described nuclear weapons design or foreign nuclear capabilities—i.e. secrets that, if revealed, would truly harm national security.
What’s frustrating here is that we may never know. That is if Trump had “secrets that, if revealed, would truly harm national security” in his possession, DOJ isn’t going to release them just to vindicate their search.
The second factor will concern what Trump and his associates did with the information. The warrant referenced 18 U.S.C. § 1519, a criminal statute that prohibits the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations, and 18 U.S.C. § 2071, a criminal statute barring the concealment, removal, or mutilation of government records. It will matter a lot whether Trump and his team, for example, merely removed classified markings on documents that Trump previously declassified (more on this below), or whether they did something more nefarious, such as altering or destroying documents to conceal illegal possession. (There are of course many possibilities in between.)
Again, frustrating. We ought to expect the President to follow the goddamn law. But, yes, a lot of people who aren’t highly political will roll their eyes at merely “technical” violations.
It will also matter, relatedly, what we learn about the process preceding the search. Had Trump and his team been cooperating with the government to return all inappropriately retained documents, to the point where the two sides had reached a good-faith disagreement? Or had they been prevaricating and stonewalling in bad faith?
Early reports suggest something closer to the latter, but many relevant details remain unclear. The ultimate answer to this question will (among other things) inform how to assess the invocation of the third statute referenced in the warrant, 18 U.S.C. § 793, which criminalizes the failure to deliver on demand documents and other materials “relating to the national defense” that “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” If Garland is invoking this famously vague criminal provision from the Espionage Act over a good faith dispute about compliance with the Presidential Records Act, that will be viewed as overkill. If he did so as a last-ditch effort to secure vital national security secrets, that is another matter altogether.
Again, I think that’s right. Garland isn’t an amateur, though. I don’t think he’s going after love letters from Kim Jong Un.
After a longish discussion of whether Trump had declassified the documents in question and the nature of the President’s powers to do that that very much echoes previous discussions here, Goldsmith continues:
Several other factors will inform how Garland’s actions here are judged. It obviously matters if Garland indicts anyone following this search. A prosecution—either of Trump or his associates—would raise the stakes significantly higher. Garland could have executed the warrant in good faith as a last-ditch effort to secure sensitive documents and yet decide, as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, that any discovered criminal activity should not be prosecuted for prudential reasons—including national harmony, worries about revealing classified information at trial, or doubts about a successful prosecution.
Absolutely. Goldsmith doesn’t offer his conjecture on how this would be received but I suspect it would mirror the DOJ decision, which I thought correct if frustrating at the time, not to charge Clinton: Democrats will be outraged while Republicans will see it as proof that Trump did absolutely nothing wrong.
The final factor concerns where the Mar-a-Lago action fits into the larger picture of Justice Department actions against Trump, including, for example, any criminal action related to January 6. One (unlikely) possibility is that the Florida search was an isolated action against Trump that does not result in a prosecution, that is not followed by other department actions against him, and that quickly diminishes in significance. At the other extreme, and more likely, is that the Mar-a-Lago search will be followed by a multi-pronged criminal investigation of Trump, his associates, and perhaps some congressional republicans related to January 6 (or some other matter).
Right.
Goldsmith concludes:
There are too many imponderables here to assess this issue at this point. But in general, and even assuming very bad acts by Team Trump, the more unprecedented investigatory and prosecutorial steps that one administration takes in response to the acts of a prior administration, the worse. If there is a lot more to come, and it seems that there is, that will put more pressure on the question whether Garland acted prudently out of practical necessity in executing the Mar-a-Lago warrant.
All of Garland’s decisions will be judged, as former FBI Director James Comey once wrote, not from the perspective of “urgency and exigency” under which he acted, but rather from the “perfect, and brutally unfair, vision of hindsight.” Hopefully Garland anticipated this hindsight judgment and acted with a scrupulous attention to process, and with a fair-minded, non-overreactive assessment of the facts, and of what needed to be done, all things considered.
Goldsmith withholds judgment on that until we know more. I simply assume it knowing what I know about Garland’s reputation.
But, again, this all illustrates the Catch-22. Not only is anything the Biden administration did here—including simply allowing Trump to get away with keeping classified documents in violation of the law—going to be viewed through partisan political lenses but the very fact that it’s damned near unimaginable any modern President would have acted this way means there’s no precedent for any of this.
Punditry culture makes EVERYTHING about Politics. Where is the line for politicians? Little boys/girls? Robbery? Fraud? Assault?
Republicans are conditioning people that ONLY election are sufficient for political accountability.
BULLSHIT
You should have seen the sheepish looks of the softcore Trumpers in my office when I reminded them that 7 years ago…a group of people were saying, “If I handled classified like that, I’d go to jail.”
I simply asked were those people wrong and whats the difference today. I did throw them a bone that another group of people were making the same argument they’re making today.
Politicians are going to Politician. I dont expect boy/girl scouts (ThemScouts?). But we need to have clean laws between politics and Crime.
This should be the first, last, and only thought.
Would Messrs. Will, Linker, and Brooks have been as sanguine about this if a Democrat had wandered off with classified material?
Look, we don’t know what he had down there, not really. But certain facts are known, one of which is that Mar-a-Lago is a CLUB. People are in and out of there all the time. This is as far from a secure facility as one is likely to get.
Trump’s lawyer signed an affidavit in June that ALL classified materials had been turned over. ALL of them. I have never really cared if the lot of them are lying or incompetent, because the end is the same. Payment records for our intel services, including those undercover? If that was really there, WHY did Trump have that? Nuclear ANYTHING, WHY did Trump have that?
All of this fussing about whether or not something is political…what Trump did was wrong. This isn’t going 5 mph over the speed limit.
Again, picture a President Beto O’Rourke or Pres. AOC (etc.) doing this. Do you honestly believe they wouldn’t be calling for their head(s)?
I’m going to point out something else here, that I’ve been thinking about a lot.
Look at that picture of Mar-a-Lago. See how close the ocean is? That place is as vulnerable to sea level rise, or hurricane swells, as any other place that close to the coast.
If there’s a hurricane in the area, what would happen to those documents? Everyone realizes that had this idiot been given a pass, they’d be one storm away from a horrible, horrible breach of security.
Why do people continuously give this man a pass? Why???
“Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.” Admiral David Farragut
Does society work better if the people are rule followers? Or, do we want to constantly allow a little fudging? Oh, that rule is just “technical” or it should apply in in this particular case. And who here doesn’t exceed the speed limit or roll through a stop sign on occasion?
Or does it matter who you are? We know that rich people get away with shit that poor people don’t. And that many laws are specifically targeted at poor or maligned groups. But on the other hand, I think we should demand more of our elected officials, who largely overlap with the rich, privileged members of society. And who are responsible to us.
I wasn’t super impressed with Hillary’s sloppiness, but there’s also intention to consider. That episode was borne of convenience, as I recall. Trump is actively defying laws and rules, as he has always done. Ignoring, and therefore encouraging that behavior is not going to work well in the long run. Nixon had his contemporaneous defenders, too, but you won’t find many today. As it should be.
Trump, his entire life, has benefited from the good graces of people doing the right thing while he skirts the law under their cover.
Any president following an unethical, greedy, incompetent guy like Trump is going to invoke pearl-clutching in response.
We do it anyway because the alternative is to encourage more Trumps.
All too often we fret, “will this have an effect on trumpers?”, when that is actually immaterial. There is simply no way to breach the wall with them. We should instead be asking, “what is the effect in the mushy middle?” You know, the ones that know and care as much about politics as I do about college sports ( I believe Alabama has some kind of football program? Or is that basketball?). My gut tells me that not going after Trump makes him stronger and therefore more desirable in their eyes.
What message does it send to Trump and the GOP if the DOJ doesn’t dare to go after TFG’s brazen wrongdoing?
These are the same people who actively conspired (albeit incompetently) to end American democracy.
If the last two years has taught us anythig it’s that these people won’t stop until they are made to stop.
Also:
@drj:
What I’m basically saying is that pro-democracy/pro-rule-of-law people must inevitably take a stand at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Better sooner than later.
This is giving in to the heckler’s veto. Giving in to the threat of terrorism. It doesn’t matter whether the documents were classified. They were government property and Trump stole government property. When the NARA came to retrieve them, the only response was to hand them over. When Trump and his minions (don’t forget the many people who aided and abetted the crime, all of whom I assume were trained and cleared to handle the material and signed exit NDAs which lay out the penalties for violations) conspired (yes, conspired) to hide and conceal government property, then they committed a criminal act.
The pundits and legal people who are writing these get out of jail pieces believe your place in society exempts them from the laws, rules, and regulations that govern our society. It shouldn’t.
The two things many in politics agree on, Democrats and, for want of a better term, establishment Republicans, is that someone needs to get rid of Trump, and that it’s someone else’s job. Whose job is it to get rid of Trump? It’s Garland’s job as much as anyone’s, but only to the extent it falls within the scope of his job, which is to enforce the law. To the extent he does that without fear or favor, he’s on the side of the angels. If that gets rid of Trump, fine. If not, well he’s done what’s he could.
Brooks and Will are essentially pushing a version of Murc’s Law. Somehow or other it’s up to Dems to deal with Trump. And not only that, they should do it without upsetting Republicans. If they’re concerned Garland will “in Will’s sedate words, harm “social comity” and “domestic tranquility.””, GOPs sank that boat long ago.
And, as always, IT AIN’T JUST TRUMP. If Garland somehow removes Trump from the scene, he’s just teeing up DeSantis.
If I’m allowed an aside, I started reading George Will in, I think, Newsweek in the 80s. He was a partisan hack then, and not a very bright one. The key to successful punditry is to find a market and tell them what they want to hear. As J. K. Galbraith observed, shilling for the wealthy pays better than crusading for the truth.
And another aside – that is one bigly ugly building.
From Goldsmith:
I’m sorry, but this framing puts the onus in entirely the wrong place.
There is nothing unprecedented about the current DOJ investigating serious federal crimes like obstruction of justice, dereliction in securing state documents, or espionage. There is nothing unprecedented about the FBI executing a search warrant based on probable cause. The current administration is doing what any administration should be expected to do under the law.
It is the prior administration that broke every conceivable precedent and norm. It is the prior administration that was criminal in its actions. The framing should be “But in general, the more one administration acts criminally such that the successor administration must investigate and prosecute in response to those acts, the worse.”
@gVOR08:
Apparently Trump added an 1800 sq. foot ballroom and several other of his inimitable tuches.
LOCK HIM UP!
@Jen: @Jen:
Juliette Kayyem has an article in http://www.theatlantic.com entitled “Why Trump’s Safe Wasn’t Safe.” You might want to read that, although I guarantee it won’t make you feel better.
No person should be held above the law. Is Trump a person or something else?
@CSK:
I made a pretty funny typo in this comment, but it has some truth to it.
On the one hand, I don’t disagree, but on the other when it comes to Brooks and Will in particular, this is just their column-needs-to-be-written move. They are both scolds, to one degree or another, and a main part of their stylistic conservatism is to tsk-tsk about possible unintended consequences of action (but often ignoring the flip-side, the unintended consequences of inaction).
All of this punditry, and almost all of the media coverage entirely misses the point…why did Trump have this stuff, and what was he doing with it?
All the rest of this is inside baseball.
A guy who had over 200 contacts with Russians documented by the Mueller Report, many of them intelligence assets, is in possession of highly classified documents.
A guy whose son-in-law got $2B from the Saudi’s is in possession of highly classified documents.
A guy whose daughter received 16 trademarks from China, for her shuttered business, is in possession of highly classified documents.
Why?
All of this matters far, far, more that USAG Garland’s calculations.
I wonder if Goldsmith is pondering what I’m pondering. This is complete speculation, but isn’t it possible that Trump held these documents in order to deter or prevent prosecution – as hostages? “I have declassified them and I will hand them out…” sort of thing?
I don’t give this high odds. I still prefer “these make me look cool, and you can’t have them!” kinds of explanations.
@Steven L. Taylor:
100% to what you wrote. There’s definitely some “feed the beast” here. Additionally, I think both fall into the category of reflexively trying to find the “both sides are wrong” angle (much like David French who twisted himself in knots over the weekend on his substack to try and eliminate any real difference between Hillary Clinton and Trump–at least for the moment–in order to advocate against further prosecution).
@Jay L Gischer: In my junior year of college, I was stacked up with all kinds of things–I’d taken a very challenging course load, I was involved in a number of school activities such as student government that had me working right up until the end of the year, etc., and on top of that finals and papers due. I knew I had to get my stuff boxed up, but everything else came first. About an hour before my mom was to arrive–on the last day the dorms were open–I still hadn’t packed anything. I piled everything into the middle of the room and started to chuck it all into garbage bags and suitcases.
This is sort of what I think happened at the White House, but with a lot more classified material lying around. Trump probably had personal stuff mixed up in there and instead of you know, actually preparing to leave, he/his people chucked it all into boxes and took it.
Now, that’s not the process, but that @sshole, time and time again, has demonstrated how many f&cks he gives. I think that yeah, he realized later what he had and thought, hmm, there’s no way they’ll come after me for this. I’ll just hang onto it. Maybe it will have some value. The strategic thought came after the self-preservation angle, I think.
Trumps Investigation Miscalculation
As this points out, there is
Honestly, what’s the big deal? Pull the trigger and nail him. They treated him with kid’s gloves throughout the back-and-forth and in the end it didn’t work. They gave him a ton of leeway and what they did they get? A guy claiming that the FBI planted documents on him. (Which now he claims were totally his and absolutely declassified.) And now that they have him dead to rights we have to hear about how this is unprecedented. It’s not. There are many precedents for Trump in American history.
And this is the George Will column:
Remember the Pop-Tart pistol boy? The 7-year-old chewed his pastry into the shape of a gun and said “Bang! Bang!,” so his school suspended him and urged all parents to discuss the “incident.” Remember the 5-year-old girl who was labeled a “terroristic threat” and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation because she talked about shooting people with her Hello Kitty gun that shot bubbles? How did we reach this point where so many adults flinch from acting the part by practicing prudence?
This nation is running low on an indispensable ingredient of a successful society: trust, in institutions and one another. This week was another subtraction. Garland has said about the Justice Department, “We will and we must speak through our work.” Actually, his political duty is to explain and justify his work more thoroughly than he did in his minimalist statement Thursday afternoon.
Hamlet did not want his capacity for action to be “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” If only the Justice Department were more prone to allowing itself to be inhibited by thought.
What does this even mean? It’s pundit Dada. If you read these words and are convinced it’s because you have been driven to the inarticulate and inexpressible in an attempt to find a way to hedge against prosecuting Trump. I don’t know a single Trump supporter, so I can only suspect that it must be humiliating to find yourself calling one or two or more of these specimens friends, especially if you style yourself intelligent (i.e. you enjoy quoting Hamlet for no particular reason), and I’m guessing that there’s a deep urge to placate these people so that they don’t sound worse and worse.
@gVOR08: “He was a partisan hack then, and not a very bright one.”
Yes, but he used big words and wore a bow tie, so he was widely accepted as an “intellectual.”
This essay is premised on the idea that Trump voters form their opinions and attitudes in rational ways, amenable to persuasion, reason and factual evidence.
They don’t. There is no argument which can persuade them to treat Trump as any other citizen before the law.
Their entire worldview is premised on the idea that there are different classes of people, an aristocracy where Trump is at the top of the pecking order, and he is the law itself. Note their latest talking point, which is that merely by pointing to a stack of documents, Trump can simply declare them unclassified. L’etat ce’est moi.
We need to stop this, stop treating Trump voters like cranky toddlers who need to be placated and appeased. Like, if only we did the silly song and dance, they would hush their squalling. These people see democracy and the rule of law as their enemies, and we need to take them seriously.
@wr:
And the fact that Will is insanely boring also adds to his reputation for profundity.
@BugManDan: Bone Spurious can’t keep a bargain when it constrains him. He has no boundaries.
If Trump’s lawyers told the DOJ that Trump had no further documents in his possession belonging to the government and such statements proved to be false, then they, as officers of the court, have some serious explaining to do. If they lied or knowingly conveyed lies, then they should face the consequences of the law and their profession without a hint of any favoritism.
@Modulo Myself:
As a businessman he had staff who’s job was to cater to his whims and try to make a buck themselves. As president he was treated as a man child by staff who had their own agendas and side hustles and by highly placed officials and generals. If he disclosed something from a secret document to a guest, or even a foreign leader or ambassador there was really nothing anyone could do except nod their heads, put the document back, and ignore anything about declassifying until Trump had forgotten about it. If he went around the cabinet table demanding praise, there was nothing to be done except be as effusive as you could manage. If he wanted a wall and McConnell declined to pay for it, you stole a few bucks from defense, built some piece of it, and told him it was working great. If he said he got two scoops of ice cream while everyone else got one there was nothing to do but make sure his scoops were as generators as you could manage. He was, after all, the president in the Imperial Presidency we’ve created. He isn’t anymore and there’s no reason Garland, or anyone else that doesn’t work for him or grift off him, should put up with his shit.
As I’ve said before: any adversary TLA that doesn’t have agents inside Mar-a-Lago is guilty of gross negligence.
See, Evil Espionage for Dummies, chapter 1.
Or it shows that they’ve finally decided they’re not going to get more and so will sell at the offered price.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Sure, but someone needs to write about “unintended consequences of action” considering the glut of op-eds about the unintended consequences of inaction.
And I think it’s a bit weird to criticize these writers in particular for ignoring the flip side of their arguments, considering that’s what pretty much all op-ed writers do.
@CSK: If Americans want to avoid having sh!tshows like the one from last week, they’re going to have to be more careful about who they nominate and elect. Given that ~47% of the electorate can be counted as Republiqan, I’m not confident about more care being exercised in the immediate future.
(And nominating a person who was 77 or so when he threw his hat into the ring was not exactly a brain trust move for the Democrats, either.)
@Chris: Sadly, government official =/= person in the sense in which you mean. We’ve known this all along because our Constitution makes no provision for criminal prosecution of officials while serving–only impeachment. I suppose there have been some representative who have been criminally prosecuted, but I don’t know of any who hadn’t been expelled from/resigned their offices before that prosecution happened. Feel free to enlighten me, though, I’m sure the list is insubstantial.
@Matt Bernius:
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of what he wrote. He did not advocate against further prosecution of Trump. In fact, about half the piece is spent explaining why Trump could be prosecuted for obstruction, which is something that didn’t apply to Clinton.
His point was that if the deciders in law enforcement are going to have the legal standard that powerful people should get lesser punishments than normal people for similar crimes, then we shouldn’t make an exception for Trump.
@BugManDan: Sure, but it was REPUBLICANS who pushed Nixon out. Related to FG, we can’t even get REPUBLIQANS (not a typo) to agree to stop him from running for office again AFTER he’s been replaced in an election. Not exactly Profiles in Courage types.
(And even Inspector Clouseau had better awareness than these knotheads do. On the other side, they do know their constituency–and can sell it out with the best of them.)
The Nuremberg War Crimes trials were unprecedented too.
There had been lots of genocides throughout the ages, so the crimes were completely precedented, but it was completely unprecedented to hold the perpetrators accountable in a court of law. And it was a good thing that we held the Nazis accountable when we could.
Just because the Turks got away with the Armenian Genocide is no reason to let the Nazis off the hook for the Holocaust.
But that is the Republican “But Hillary’s emails” argument in a nutshell. It’s a morally bankrupt argument at its core, even if one were to believe that Clinton’s emails were the exact same thing as Trump’s pile of documents in Mar A Lago.
From Goldsmith:
What fucking “social comity” is this douchecanoe talking about? It is referring to “socialists” and “groomers”?
And what fucking “domestic tranquility”? Is it a Trumper attacking an FBI field office? Or the guy who set his car on fire to attack the Capitol a few days ago? Or the January Fucking 6th Insurrection? Or the death threats being made against country health workers during the height of the Covid protections due to “socialist masks”?
Even if he is just referencing a mysterious “They” and not questioning the argument, lots of people are saying this guy is a fucking moron.
@Gustopher:
Bravo, your compound insult is rather fresh.
OK, I wasn’t here today so obviously I am late to the party, but WTF?????????????????? They worried that the search will, in Will’s sedate words, harm “social comity” and “domestic tranquility”??????????????????
Where in the FVCK were they from 2016 thru 2021??????????????? Now they worry about “social comity” and “domestic tranquility” ??????????????????????? NOW???????????????
Haysoos Crispo, have they got their collective heads up their collective asses. James, I’m a little disappointed in you. You are smarter than this.
I can read no more.
@OzarkHillbilly: Welcome back. Hope you enjoyed Granddaughter Day and am glad you found a place to elbow your way in. As always, the comment was timely and succinct. Bravo!
I did. I think I am finally refiguring out how to relate to toddlers. I think they may have enjoyed my company today as much as I did theirs. Maybe. I hope.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m sure they did.
Here’s the thing: the Trump base is going to be enraged no matter what you do. If the FBI search never happened, they would invent some pretext, some action or inaction, to get enraged about. Fury is their drug. They are not going to go without a hit in some form or fashion. I mean … look at what they’ve been venting their spleen on lately: drag shows, “CRT”, TV commercials, plays. There’s no end to it. No reasoning with it.
HOWEVER …
The vast majority of the people who voted for Trump are not Very Online. They aren’t paying attention to this. And even the dopes hanging around outside Mar-A-Lago have the political memories of goldfish. You can’t let your actions be determined by what Sean Hannity might say on TV.
Aside from Brooks being full of it, and Will being 90%full of it (and Goldsmith being a Harvard professor), this is really just a former DOJ guy deferring to Presidential Majesty. A man who watched Trump try to overthrow the government, and normalized it in his head before the trash was cleaned up.
In reality, Obama, Clinton and this administration since it’s basically the Obama administration should just stop. They allowed Clinton to happen and anyone attempting to parse this is a shill. This isn’t whataboutism it’s whether it’s lawful and Trump has far more leniency with documents that a Secretary of State who destroyed 30k+ emails, 15 state issued phones, bitwashed a server and then lied in at least two occasions.
Add in the fact that’s he may have very possibly declasse the material and Obamas remarks about tlHillarys case and you’re whistling Dixie.
Well, all it took was the inexplicable 2016 election of a known grifter ((slash) faux television star ((slash)) real state developer to turn our system inside out. Norms? Ethics? Rules? Agreements? Hey if it’s not nailed down take it.
…and don’t you dare levy any legal consequences because, well they might get mad and riot, maybe kill federal officials and politicians too.
The Trump presidency was the first mob operation to occupy the White House.
@drj: These are the same people who actively conspired (albeit incompetently) to end American democracy.
If the last two years has taught us anythig it’s that these people won’t stop until they are made to stop.
I certainly agree. These anti-American Democrats seek to install their version of a one party government where everyone is called “comrade”.