Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

In the meantime, stopping the republican agenda seems like a more fruitful area for us mere citizens to engage in.

selling state secrets to a foreign power is espionage, not treason

why can it not be both?

if arranging with a foreign government we've sanctioned for invading another country to lift those sanctions if they release emails they've stolen from the other candidate's presidential campaign is treasonous, then i don't ever want to be patriotic ; )

my hypothetical regarded a quid pro quo of $50 million or upwards, not merely the release of emails. I take your point, though it is unrelated to mine.

treason is very narrowly defined in u.s. law, and the things trump and his team are accused of do not meet it:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381

what are they accused of?

more suspected than accused. those who are doing the accusing have no authority and atm poor quality evidence.

still can't get over the fact that Trump's campaign manager was literally being paid eight figures to push Putin's agenda

18 U.S. Code § 2381 - Treason

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason...

"giving aid and comfort" to "enemies" does not seem to be a particularly narrow definition to me, unless these are terms of art, much narrowed by case law not cited.

"Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States...adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort..."

helping putin subvert the us electoral process seems as though it might qualify

I am not a legal scholar but it has been my understanding that that phrase is interpreted as "aiding an enemy combatant's troops during a battle". Had we declared war on Russia before the election, there might be a case.

my understanding is: russia is not at war w/ the united states, so putin's government does not qualify as an "enemy" for legal purposes. ppl who spied for the germans during WW2 were charged with treason, but ppl who spied for the soviets during the cold war were generally charged with espionage. if the soviet union didn't qualify i can't imagine putin does.

obv this is in no way meant as a defense of trump et al, i just think it weakens our case if we throw around the word "treason" this casually.

yes otm (thanks, John Marshall!) and my side loves doing it

so what if these fuckers are treasonous ? Trump down to let's say Sessions , they are found guilty we impeach them all . But the republican party is still in power through proven nefouse means. hypothetically what's to stop another party from doing the same thing ? Colluding with a foreign country by any means to get their party in with some stooge expendable President and administration. We just aren't set up in any way to handle this sort of thing.

Espionage still carries the death penalty, though, right?

I'm just saying, I don't think the administration will say 'no no, it was just espionage' in from of a jury...

Also, the US Constitution sets a high bar on evidence required for treason, so prosecutors always prefer other charges simply as a matter of their own convenience. After all, the Rosenbergs were charged with espionage, which was an easier standard to meet in court, and still were executed, so that no higher penalty was foregone by choosing the 'lesser' charge.

yea Trump getting impeached seems very much like a fever dream, but the Trump admin being rendered toothless seems to be...well kinda what's been happening already

espionage is a capital offense in theory but afaik the rosenbergs were the last ppl to be executed for it in the u.s.

for that matter the list of ppl who have been successfully convicted of treason here is fairly low.

Devin Nunes is very annoyed with all these tedious questions!

https://twitter.com/costareports/status/846458763280338944

Nunes to me just now: “I had to go to the White House to meet with a source. Can no one go to the White House anymore?”

if a unit of treason is called a 'benghazi' . . . how many benghazis is it to hire one of vladimir putin's top lobbyists to be your presidential campaign manager?

A much more interesting idea than "treason", since we are bouncing off into this weed patch, is "high crimes and misdemeanors", which phrase has never been subjected to interpretation in case law because it does not apply to cases brought in the judicial branch. To my recollection, there have only been three bills of impeachment drawn up (Andrew Johnson, Nixon and Clinton) and only two impeachment trials (Johnson & Clinton) both ending in acquittals. (imo, Nixon would have been successfully impeached had it come to that.)

To my way of thinking, the phrase was intended to broadly convey the idea of malfeasance, corruption, or any other abuses of office determined by the people's representatives to seriously damage the nation or abrogate the oath of office. It's always been a strange, slippery phrase, but it was intended to be.

hypothetically what's to stop another party from doing the same thing ? Colluding with a foreign country by any means to get their party in with some stooge expendable President and administration.

I hate these mousefuckers as much as anyone here, but I find these hypotheticals really hard to focus on and/or apply.

When I try to universalize any of this, my brain just gives up. We keep trying to analyze and postmortem 2016 as if anything like it had ever happened, and as if anything like it can reoccur.

What other foreign country is a candidate for this sort of thing? What other campaign, what other candidate, what other presidential race could any of this be a lesson for? 2048, in which cyborg Franken faces off against zombie Omarosa, but it turns out that Armenian zombiephobes secretly tapped into the campaign managers' brainwaves?

We can't say how the race would have gone without Russian meddling, because we'd need a control group or a test case where everything else was comparable - and nothing, nothing is comparable to Trump v. Clinton. It's possible that nothing ever will be. We're through the looking glass. Is the next race Pence vs. Booker with a disgraced Trump running a third-party write-in campaign from jail? Or is it asymmetrical - Palin vs. Biden? Paltrow vs. Gowdy? Kanye vs. Nixon-brain-in-a-jar? Nobody fucking knows.

No grand point, here, I'm just confused and tired.

yeah i'm pretty high atm and i really didn't think that out just kinda thinking out loud

(MEGA THREAD) yeah i'm pretty high atm and i really didn't think that out just kinda thinking out loud

no matter how high anyone is, jared taking command is at least criminal nepotism at the highest rank of the american federal government. why do republicans hate the constitution?

Well...why was Bobby JFK's Attorney General again? (I'm not pulling a 'both sides do it' argument here, I've just still never understood how THAT happened.)

to piss off LBJ

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/3110

I think this is what you're looking for, qualmsley

http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/wills_1-052412.jpg

I've read more than a few JFK-RFK and Kennedy-sycophant bios and haven't gotten a decent explanation (Joe Kennedy's crack: sending RFK to Justice would give him legal experience).

Then again, no one had a problem with Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter as Wilson and FDR's advisors while on the court. It was more of a problem with Abe Fortas.

One of the bizarro things about this is that Julius Rosenberg's crimes were a lot less than these guys are suspected of doing (and my college bud who was his grandchild has been boggling at the brazenness of it all since December).

do we know yet why boris epshteyn resigned from the white house the day after devin nunes ran there and squealed?

I suspect the odious Epshteyn is the scapegoat for Kellyanne's missteps and a general loss of control over the narrative, but what do I know?

Meanwhile "Let's Clown These Scrub-Ass Doofuses" is the new "I Pity the Fool."

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/wait-lets-clown-these-scrub-ass-doofuses-some-more-1793687360?utm_campaign=socialflow_deadspin_facebook&utm_source=deadspin_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Seventeen days. That’s how much stamina flinty-eyed deal master Donald Trump, sober policy knower Paul Ryan, and all the Republican Party had for a health care overhaul they’d been promising for seven years, before the work of negotiating amongst themselves overwhelmed them and they retired to their fainting couches. You can’t close on the sale of a fucking townhouse in 17 days. Holy hell, what a bunch of losers.

These fucking amateurs! These butter-soft babies. These utter, utter fucking frauds. Let us clown them for all eternity; let us never forget what a bunch of unserious cosplaying shit-for-brains they are, each and every one.

I understand the calls to not get too giddy, but honestly stuff like this is one of the few bright linings to the current shitcloud. Let me have this one bright lining please.

cosplaying

solid burn imo

If you're seeking out silver linings, it occurred to me the other day that ACA is at least one piece of O's legacy that the GOP won't be able to sweep under the rug in their attempt to legislate as if the last eight years never happened. It's something.

don't know what to make of it, but there is another tweetstorm today from Seth Abramson, this one positing that Source E in the Steele dossier is Boris Epshteyn:

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/846455259430051842

I feel like repealing Obamacare on the date it was signed into law (what a burn! do you see?) was their chief priority; whatever was actually in the new law was of secondary importance to most of them (all but the Freedom Caucus.) xp

seth abramson is insane and desirous of twitter followers

Medicaid expansion is popping up in red state governments now because it is clear the aca is firmly in place, that's a huge win

Which?

Sorry forgive my ignorance but I thought there was a deadline for Medicaid expansion? That the states had to say yes before a certain date (many years ago now)?

looks much like buzz so far but Kansas at least is talking about expansion in state senate https://www.google.com/amp/s/kansascity.relaymedia.com/amp/news/politics-government/article141024998.html

Less concrete in Maine and the va gov is calling for expansion though will be going against gop legislature so poor chances. some articles mention north carolina also but i can't find anything sourcing that more directly

I've also seen NC and GA as possible

its almost as if these state governors could use billions of dollars of free money!

It all keeps getting better!

https://twitter.com/JohnJHarwood/status/846489401077194752

Nunes to CNN: "if I wanted to, I could have snuck onto WH grounds at night when nobody would have seen me"

and Adam Schiff is finally asking him to recuse himself from the investigation

Yup:

https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/846493210960637952

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C79Y_idXkAEhE9z.jpg:large

Rep. Schiff is otm.