Precedent. If you get two acts that were committed, but are declaring one to be illegal and the other not, you are being a political hypocrite unless you can articulate a reasonable explanation as to why one situation is fundamentally different than the other.
So Trump has records at his house that are left over from his Presidency. You claim that it is because he can’t keep anything from his time in the White House.
Then explain why it wasn’t a crime when Obama did the same thing, keeping tractor trailer loads of records from the White House, while shredding tens of thousands of documents.
”In a break from tradition, Barack Obama’s presidential library is actually opting out of any sort of relationship with the National Archives…Meanwhile gone with the wind are all scandals that took place when Obama was in the Oval Office. How did Obama get away with it? When you can go about fundamentally transforming America after bragging before the election that this was your intention, to get away with it and continue in private life to try to overturn the results of the 2016 election, you can get away with most anything.
Or how about the time that Clinton kept records from when he was President. Judicial Watch actually sued over that one, and the court ruled that Presidents have the ability to rule certain records to be personal property, and are thus exempt from public records acts.
The case in question is titled Judicial Watch v. National Archives and Records Administration and it involved an effort by the conservative watchdog to compel the Archives to forcibly seize hours of audio recordings that Clinton made during his presidency with historian Taylor Branch.
Here is the important part:
But Jackson’s ruling — along with the Justice Department’s arguments that preceded it — made some other sweeping declarations that have more direct relevance to the FBI’s decision to seize handwritten notes and files Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago. The most relevant is that a president’s discretion on what are personal vs. official records is far-reaching and solely his, as is his ability to declassify or destroy records at will.
To those who are all over the classification issue, both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama signed executive orders — which remain in force to this day — declaring that presidents have sweeping authority to declassify secrets and do not have to follow the mandatory declassification procedures all other government officials do.
So anyone who says otherwise, provide the reasons why these cases do not apply to Trump. The White House certainly can’t. That makes this political.
2 Comments
Jonesy · September 8, 2022 at 7:13 am
Anyone who has been paying attention should be aware by now of the 2 Tiers of justice being applied in this country.
-Democrats do something, its OK.
-Conservatives do the same thing, its wrong and must be prosecuted
Hillary vs Trump with classified info (Comey: “no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges” vs an FBI raid)
Lois Lerner or Eric Holder vs Bannon on contempt of Congress – they didn’t get hauled into court but Bannon did.
There are many more examples….
Extend/Apply this concept to free speech and you see another avenue by which conservatives are treated as lesser citizens. Watch for criminalization of political dissent. That is a potential point of no return.
Aesop · September 8, 2022 at 7:09 pm
This isn’t about outcomes. They know they’ll get trounced on the merits in 99.9% of courts. (The 0.1% victory would be serendipitous happenstance.)
The raid and the brohaha are the process, and the process is the crime, because it will muddy the waters at least well beyond what are looking to be disastrous mid-terms, and hopefully, enough to derail Trump in 2024 from what is otherwise going to be a landslide victory for nomination, and the general election unless they up their steal-game yuuuugely.
So throwing sh*t, and hoping it sticks, is their sole purpose.
And when Trump runs, and wins, if he doesn’t dismantle the FBI root and branch in the first hour, it’s already a failed presidency.
If he of all people hasn’t learned that lesson by now, it’s banana republic to beyond the horizon, until the shooting starts.
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