quetzlcoatl wrote:There is voluminous evidence that Trump has committed crimes for many decades, on a consistent and ongoing basis (the most obvious ones being fraud, money laundering, and criminal tax evasion).
I think at best you could establish civil fraud or breach of contract. Money laundering has to be moving your own ill-gotten gains from one venue to another. Nobody has established that Trump has ill-gotten gains beyond civil fraud or breach of contract, which are handled in civil courts. The issue people like jimjam bring up comes down to Trump sold something to someone who had ill gotten gains. That's not a crime Trump committed. As for criminal tax evasion, Trump has been under audit since Obama got into power. The IRS hasn't prepared criminal charges against Trump, most likely because they cannot sustain a case.
quetzlcoatl wrote:The fact that the Clintons and many others also committed economic crimes doesn't let Trump off the hook.
I don't hear anybody saying that it does. Like I've said for a long time, I don't think Trump is some sort of paragon of virtue. I do not place my trust in politicians generally. However, there isn't any evidence that meets federal rules of evidence that maps to violation of federal law that has been presented yet. It is pure innuendo.
I've said before the Clintons were far and away worse, but they structured the Clinton Foundation as a way of taking bribes so that they could grease the skids in Washington, while not benefitting directly from the money themselves. In other words, the Clintons used the Clinton Foundation as a way to pay off people who did favors for them, or as a way of inducing people to do favors for them. The Clintons don't pay anybody off. The Clinton Foundation does. The money for the Clinton Foundation doesn't come from the Clintons, it comes from people (and countries) for whom they've done favors.
As a political matter, trying to trash Trump on stuff like this will always fall flat, because the alternative is Washington establishment politicians who are invariably far worse.
quetzlcoatl wrote:You shouldn't let the fact that our government chooses not to prosecute many of the laws on the books (when the criminals are rich and influential) blind you to criminal behavior.
I don't. However, I would defer prosecuting someone like Trump until people like Comey, Brennan, McCabe, Clinton, Abedin, etc. are at least charged and tried. Pulling shit like charging General Flynn or George Papadopolous does no favor for the reputation of the law itself. It's sort of okay-ish with Manafort, but it shouldn't take a special counsel to do that, so it suggests that he had some sort of non-prosecution agreement that didn't apply to the special counsel.
As far as I'm concerned, the whole thing is payback, because Nunes blew the lid off of the coup attempt by tracking the flow of funds from Hillary Clinton's campaign, to the DNC, to Perkins Coie, to Fusion GPS to Christopher Steele.
I don't think they will find anything meaningful on Trump. If they can find something he forgot to declare on a tax return or something, we will find about about it 3-5 days before the election. As I said, we are used to that sort of shit now. As I also said, I don't care who gets elected president now--although I prefer Trump--so long as it is not Joe Biden.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden
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