Trump and Russiagate - Page 179 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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By jimjam
#14970406
If recent reports that Mr. Cohen floated the idea of giving Mr. Putin a $50 million luxury apartment in a future Trump Tower Moscow prove true, both the president and his company could face substantial jeopardy.

Some of the lies that the special counsel spells out in the redacted memorandum appear to implicate the president and those close to him in possible collusion and obstruction crimes. Notably, Mr. Manafort is accused of lying to the special counsel regarding his contacts with the Trump administration.

We don’t know the content of those contacts, but considering public statements about potential pardons, it is not hard to imagine they could implicate the president and others in a conspiracy to obstruct justice or witness tampering if, for example, they suggested a potential pardon if Mr. Manafort protected the president.

Contrary to the president’s claim that all of this “totally clears” him, the danger to Mr. Trump, his business and his campaign has compounded significantly. For all these reasons, the president is unlikely to have a restful, tweet-free weekend — or a calm 2019, for that matter.
#14970416
You realize one of these ‘serious accusations’ is about a meeting that never happened? Mueller’s report admits this. They are trying to make people seem guilty for things that didn’t even happen.
User avatar
By jimjam
#14970421
One Degree wrote:You realize one of these ‘serious accusations’ is about a meeting that never happened? Mueller’s report admits this. They are trying to make people seem guilty for things that didn’t even happen.

Do you share Donald's opinion that he has been "totally cleared"? :eek:
#14970425
jimjam wrote:Do you share Donald's opinion that he has been "totally cleared"? :eek:


No. Federal investigations don’t work that way. The real question is should we care what they produce? Based on what I know so far, only the naive should still have any interest in the results. The entire premise of ‘Russian interference’ is devoid of reality. An informed person should accept it as a fact, not something worthy of investigation. The simple fact it is being investigated is proof it is politically motivated.
User avatar
By jimjam
#14970483
One Degree wrote:No. Federal investigations don’t work that way. The real question is should we care what they produce? Based on what I know so far, only the naive should still have any interest in the results. The entire premise of ‘Russian interference’ is devoid of reality. An informed person should accept it as a fact, not something worthy of investigation. The simple fact it is being investigated is proof it is politically motivated.

No offense but this is somewhat myopic. #1 politically motivated? Of course …… this is the potus and political crap, to say the least, goes with the territory. #2 Russiagate is an evolving moving entity. One of it's evolving functions is to keep a wack job potus with little or no concern for any law somewhat restrained. #3 it is so much fun to watch Donald get pissed off, he is possibly our most entertaining potus ever. But, then, that is a part of his genius. Divert the saps while raiding the US Treasury at the same time. :) #4 should we care? Definitely ….. it is nice to see Donald reap some of the hateful trash that he sows.
#14970625
One Degree wrote:No. Federal investigations don’t work that way. The real question is should we care what they produce? Based on what I know so far, only the naive should still have any interest in the results. The entire premise of ‘Russian interference’ is devoid of reality. An informed person should accept it as a fact, not something worthy of investigation. The simple fact it is being investigated is proof it is politically motivated.

There was proof the Russian collusion narrative was liberal propaganda before Trump's inauguration. And Mueller has known for nearly a year that any Russian interference was not coordinated with any member of the Trump campaign. However, he has been determined to pin a crime on as many people associated with Trump as possible and toss a little Russian salad dressing on for good measure.
#14970822
Will Donald Trump be impeached?
New court filings show Donald Trump was “at the center of a massive fraud” against the American people, the incoming chair of the House judiciary committee said on Sunday.
Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat set to take over the panel in January, said Trump would have committed impeachable offenses if it is proven that he ordered his lawyer to make illegal payments to women to keep quiet about alleged sexual encounters.

“What these indictments and filings show is that the president was at the center of a massive fraud – several massive frauds against the American people,” Nadler said on CNN’s “State of the Union”.
Another top Democrat, the California representative Adam Schiff, said Trump “could face the very real prospect of jail time”.
Federal prosecutors said in court filings on Friday that Trump directed his then lawyer, Michael Cohen, to commit two felonies: payments made to women who said they had sex with Trump in return for their silence, in an effort to influence the 2016 election.
“They would be impeachable offenses,” Nadler said, though he added it would still be a judgment call for lawmakers whether the offenses were important enough to warrant impeachment proceedings, which should only be launched in the gravest circumstances.
“Whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question,” he said. “But certainly, they’d be impeachable offenses, because even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.”
The Republican Congress absolutely tried to shield the president. The new Congress will not try to shield the president.
After Democrats take control of the House, Nadler said, they will aggressively investigate what happened during the campaign.
The Republican Congress absolutely tried to shield the president,” he said. “The new Congress will not try to shield the president. It will try to get to the bottom of this in order to serve the American people and stop this massive fraud on the American people.
Perhaps consciously echoing a famous phrase from the Watergate scandal which brought down Richard Nixon, he added: “What did the president know and when did he know it about these crimes?”
Schiff, the incoming chair of the House intelligence committee, said the filings indicate prosecutors may move to indict Trump as soon as he leaves office. The justice department has taken the position that a sitting president cannot be indicted and prosecuted, though the point is disputed among legal scholars and politicians.
There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the justice department may indict him – that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the very real prospect of jail time,” Schiff said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
The California Democrat said the “powerful case” prosecutors made for Cohen to serve a prison sentence would apply “equally” to the man identified in filings as “Individual 1”: the president.
“To have the justice department basically say that the president of the United States not only coordinated but directed an illegal campaign scheme that may have had an election-altering impact is pretty breathtaking,” he said.
Schiff also said the intelligence committee will call Cohen to testify before Congress again. Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in prior testimony. Schiff said the committee has already been in touch with Cohen’s lawyer.
Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said Trump’s alleged actions were “things that cannot and should not be ignored”.
“We want to know everything, and we will know everything that has happened here at some point,” Rubio said, also on CNN. “If someone has violated the law, the application of the law should be applied to them like it would be to any other citizen in the country.”
Appearing on CNN, ABC and CBS, Rubio repeatedly said a presidential pardon for Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair whose links with Russia were also detailed in court filings on Friday, would not be a good idea. Trump has publicly declined to take the idea off the table.
“I believe it’d be a terrible mistake,” he told ABC’s This Week. “Pardons should be used judiciously. They’re used for cases with extraordinary circumstances.”
Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, sounded a note of caution about the possibility of impeachment, saying there is not yet evidence that would broadly convince Americans they are warranted.
“If impeachment is moved forward on the evidence that we have now, at least a third of the country would think it was just political revenge and a coup against the president,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press. “That wouldn’t serve us well at all. The best way to solve a problem like this, to me, is elections.”
“You’re overturning the will of the voters,” he said. “I’m a conservative when it comes to impeachment. I think it’s a last resort and only when the evidence is clear of a really substantial legal violation … we may get there, but we are not there now.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... SApp_Other
#14970824
This ⬆️ article leaves out a lot of legal questions more honest media have discussed. For instance, it would not be illegal for Trump to pay them. His contributions and expenditures are not limited where Cohen’s are.
User avatar
By jimjam
#14970871
“This White House is headed into a world of trouble — a Democratic Congress, Mueller closing in, and anybody who comes into this White House has to be thinking about lawyering up. Worst case scenario you could become H.R. Haldeman.”

CHRIS WHIPPLE, AUTHOR OF “THE GATEKEEPERS”
User avatar
By Hindsite
#14970901
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy believes that prosecutors will attempt to indict President Donald Trump on campaign finance charges, judging from the sentencing memo in the Michael Cohen case on Friday.

McCarthy, a conservative legal analyst who worked as a prosecutor in the same Southern District of New York jurisdiction that is currently prosecuting Cohen, argued in a column on Fox News that the prosecutors would not have drawn attention to Cohen’s relatively minor campaign finance violations if they did not intend on charging Trump over payments of hush money to two women before he became president:

The major takeaway from the 40-page sentencing memorandum filed by federal prosecutors Friday for Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney, is this: The president is very likely to be indicted on a charge of violating federal campaign finance laws.

It has been obvious for some time that President Trump is the principal subject of the investigation still being conducted by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

When Cohen pleaded guilty in August, prosecutors induced him to make an extraordinary statement in open court: the payments to the women were made “in coordination with and at the direction of” the candidate for federal office – Donald Trump.

Prosecutors would not have done this if the president was not on their radar screen. Indeed, if the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all.

McCarthy acknowledges the strong case Trump has in his defense, but says that prosecutors may be focusing on him anyway.
#14970953
You don’t see the political dirty tricks in bringing charges against Trump that can not be tried until he leaves office? This leaves a suspicion of guilt over him that can not be shown to be groundless until he leaves office. Guilty until proven innocent. Nasty.
By Rich
#14970961
How could anything Trump's done in term of collusion and corruption with foreign governments ever get close to what Hilary did with the Clinton Foundation?
User avatar
By Crantag
#14970970
One Degree wrote:You don’t see the political dirty tricks in bringing charges against Trump that can not be tried until he leaves office? This leaves a suspicion of guilt over him that can not be shown to be groundless until he leaves office. Guilty until proven innocent. Nasty.

There is a mechanism for bringing charges. It's called impeachment.

It is a narrative twist though that 2020 may turn into a referendum for Trump's freedom. It's sort of ironic, being that Trump was partly running on jailing his opponent in 2016. Now he's looking at running to stay out of jail, with the statute of limitations stuff.
#14970975
Crantag wrote:There is a mechanism for bringing charges. It's called impeachment.

It is a narrative twist though that 2020 may turn into a referendum for Trump's freedom. It's sort of ironic, being that Trump was partly running on jailing his opponent in 2016. Now he's looking at running to stay out of jail, with the statute of limitations stuff.


Not even the DNC leadership thinks impeachment is a good idea. The actual things Trump can be charged with are so minor that the Democrats are better off with ongoing suspicion than they are with presenting evidence. I don’t totally rule it out though because so many Republicans are either corrupt or morons that they may agree to anything.
#14970978
One Degree wrote:Not even the DNC leadership thinks impeachment is a good idea. The actual things Trump can be charged with are so minor that the Democrats are better off with ongoing suspicion than they are with presenting evidence. I don’t totally rule it out though because so many Republicans are either corrupt or morons that they may agree to anything.

The crimes aren't minor. Cohen is facing hard time for the crimes which Trump is implicated in.

I don't really disagree with you on the politics. Moreover, I'm with you, indict Trump now, fuck that shit about a sitting president can't be indicted.

But, that's not going to happen, so Trump is instead facing the real prospect of running for reelection on the 'I need to stay out of jail, so I have to be president until the statutes of limitations on crimes for which I am an unindicted co-conspirator run out'.

You seem to think that isn't fair. However, it is a consequence of Trump's criminal activity. Therefore, said criminal activity is the root cause of Trump's predicament. I would say that is fair. There are consequences for breaking the law, even if in this case they are a bit complex in nature; which is due to the given framework of institutional norms in the way of government and law.
#14970981
Crantag wrote:The crimes aren't minor. Cohen is facing hard time for the crimes which Trump is implicated in.

I don't really disagree with you on the politics. Moreover, I'm with you, indict Trump now, fuck that shit about a sitting president can't be indicted.

But, that's not going to happen, so Trump is instead facing the real prospect of running for reelection on the 'I need to stay out of jail, so I have to be president until the statutes of limitations on crimes for which I am an unindicted co-conspirator run out'.

You seem to think that isn't fair. However, it is a consequence of Trump's criminal activity. Therefore, said criminal activity is the root cause of Trump's predicament. I would say that is fair. There are consequences for breaking the law, even if in this case they are a bit complex in nature; which is due to the given framework of institutional norms in the way of government and law.


I agree and disagree. I agree all should be held accountable. I disagree because of the lack of uniformity in enforcement which is politically motivated. He should have been tried before the 2016 campaign with most other politicians.
User avatar
By jimjam
#14971002
Russians have long been doing favors for Mr. Trump. In the 1980s, a Russian criminal named David Bogatin bought five Trump Tower apartments with $6 million in laundered funds. In the 1990s, the Russian Mafia favored the Atlantic City Taj Mahal, in part, because of the casino’s lax money laundering controls. The Trump SoHo in Lower Manhattan, unveiled in 2006 on Mr. Trump’s reality TV show, “The Apprentice,” was reportedly developed with the help of an alleged gangster from the former Soviet Union.

Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. lieutenant colonel skilled in the art of manipulation, certainly seems to understand that Mr. Trump’s world runs on favors. After all, the Russian president did Mr. Trump the biggest favor of them all. Mr. Putin turned his intelligence services into a virtual extension of the Trump campaign, hacking emails out the Democratic Party’s computer networks. That, together with the finely tuned, voluminous social messaging pumped out by internet trolls in St. Petersburg, Russia, may have tipped the scales in a close election.
#14971004
Come on. You have to realize how silly it is to think Russian tweets determined the election. How are they any different than the billions of other tweets intended to influence your vote? I am sorry but people need to be laughed at for believing such nonsense.
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