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So, my debut post. I've been lurking here for some time and I have decided to experiment with some public posting.
The culture war issue on my mind is the federal prosecution of NY State AG Letitia James. A summary, from my perspective:
She more or less campaigned for office with "Get Trump!" as one of her campaign promises.
Upon taking office, she and her team went through some of Trump's deals for the purpose of looking for grounds to pursue a claim against him.
She and her team discovered that in one of his real estate deals, he had supplied arguably exaggerated figures for property he had used as collateral for a loan.
The State of New York sued Trump in the general trial court making use of a consumer fraud statute which, until then, had been mainly used against businesses that take advantage of individual consumers (i.e. not deals between sophisticated businesses). This consumer fraud statute did not require proof of damages, which was helpful to the AG's efforts since Trump and his organization had paid the loan back in full and with interest.
The trial court awarded a judgment against Trump for hundreds of millions of dollars, a judgment which was later reversed on appeal.
This lawsuit had been one of numerous other "Get Trump!" legal activities, civil and criminal, in multiple jurisdictions.
After Trump was re-elected, a Trump loyalist with access to federal home loan files went through Letitia James' files and discovered arguable fraudulent statements in her mortgage applications for certain properties. Letitia James was referred for possible prosecution and ultimately indicted for bank fraud.
Normally in situations like this, the mortgage applicant is not prosecuted. Rather, they are required to pay the higher interest rates which would would have been required had the application been completed accurately.
Personally, my reaction to this series of events is one of satisfaction. I was outraged by the lawfare campaign against Trump and it seemed to me that AG James activities were an abuse of her office. The prosecution of James strikes me as a reasonable tit-for-tat, necessary to deter the Blue Tribe from future abuses. The most charitable interpretation I can think of with respect to these lawsuits is that they are a form of "Nazi punching," i.e. the idea that if you are dealing with genocidal psychopaths, it's reasonable to oppose them By Any Means Necessary. But of course, as others have pointed out here, when you combine (1) it's okay to punch Nazis; and (2) my out-group are, generally speaking, led by Nazis, the net result falls somewhere between "counterproductive" and "civil war."
What's also interesting to me is that for the most part, the media coverage has downplayed points 1-6 from above even to the extent of completely ignoring them in certain cases, giving the impression that Trump is just gratuitously using the justice system to target his political enemies. (Yes, this is the "boo outgroup" part of my post.)
So this brings me to my main question: What will happen next? Given that the Blue Tribe members (apparently) feel that they are the victims of a vicious unprovoked lawfare attack, will they decide to retaliate at the next opportunity? Are we about to enter an era where every outgoing president preemptively pardons himself and all of his associates; conservative businessmen with political aspirations avoid contact with New York and California; and liberal businessmen similarly avoid Florida and Texas? Probably this is an exaggeration, but I would guess that the Blue Tribe is thirsty for revenge and I could easily see this lawfare business escalating.
A secondary question: Perhaps, much like the mainstream media, I am omitting important context from my summary. Are there additional facts I should consider which would (or should) change the way I see this lawfare business? In one article I read (I think it was the New York Times) the point was made that the fraud alleged against Trump was much bigger than that alleged against Letitia James. But to me, this does not seem like an important distinction because the key similarity is that in both cases, it seems that the authorities chose a target for political reasons and then went looking for arguable wrongdoing by that person. (As opposed to starting with the wrongdoing and then looking to see who was responsible.)
It's a bad precedent, but it isn't Trump's precedent. Turnabout is fair play and so far nothing I've seen from Trump rises to the level of what his enemies have already done to him personally.
Yeah, I remember that during his first campaign, he made a suggestion/promise that if he was elected, Hillary Clinton would be prosecuted. At the time, I was a little disappointed that he didn't follow through. But now I see that was the correct move, even assuming for the sake of argument that Hillary Clinton had some skeletons in her closet (which is probably a pretty good assumption).
It's just not good to have a situation where each party, upon getting into power, starts prosecuting the leadership of the other party. It's better for the country as a whole to let politicians get away with crimes than to have this kind of back and forth.
I'm of two minds on this - I agree with you that there needs to be a level of immunity, but we also have an incredibly badly behaved political class.
I guess I tend to be a lot more on the side of "If it's something you can explain in 10 words or less, and everyone would agree about how severe it is, prosecute them - if it's something that requires detailed technical expertise to understand, then you probably need to let it slide." Under this standard:
To be fair, in general I prefer that our criminal system work that way - I remember someone said something like "The only real crimes are those you could explain to the founding fathers", and I kind of agree with that system; I think we have too many things that are either crimes or technically-not-crimes due to weird arcane loopholes that make intuition kind of useless, and the whole system relies on prosecutorial discretion to avoid everyone being in jail forever (which is another way of saying "If the people in power don't like you, you're going to jail").
Agree in principle, but 'storing classified information incorrectly' is almost always prosecuted, is relatively simple to understand, and is quite a serious offense (although that part might not be well understood by lay people).
The reason it's always prosecuted is because the seriousness is impossible to determine. The whole point of properly controlling classified information is so that we know who has access to it and are aware when it's lost. But if you store it improperly, even if there's no evidence that a bad actor or foreign state accessed that information, you have to assume that they did access it, because the controls that would tell you it was accessed are not in place. In other words, every piece of information on Hillary's server must be assumed to be in the hands of our enemies. Her case is exceptionally egregious because her team wiped the server, so the nation doesn't even know what information was on there that was potentially leaked.
I think she should have been prosecuted. The violation is clear, significant, and deliberate, making this case far far more severe than the average. She was let off for political reasons, and because she's well connected, and I believe that is morally and also practically wrong, and is a large part of the reason why citizens don't trust the system to protect their interests. It's a clear failure of the system of law in the country when well-connected people are immune from the consequences of their misdeeds.
If you are talking about the e-mail server case, the official reason why she wasn't prosecuted (and presumably the real reason why Trump didn't try to prosecute her after taking office) was the difficulty of proving that it was deliberate.
The private server was supposed to be for unclassified e-mail only (including SBU material and material subject to mandatory record retention laws that should have been held on official government servers). Hillary used the proper secure systems for most of her classified comms. Over the four years she was Secretary of State, there were a few hundred e-mails on the server that should have been classified Confidential, including a single-digit number that actually had been classified Confidential and marked as such, a few dozen that should have been classified Secret (none of which actually were) and two that should have been classified Top Secret.
It isn't clear if mishandling Confidential information is a crime or not. (The criminal laws relate to the actual threat to national security, not to the level of protective marking, and most Confidential information is not that sensitive). And it is pretty hard to prove that the mishandling of Secret and Top Secret material was "willful" if it involves a small number of e-mails which should have been marked classified but were not.
what's the required level of "intent" under the mishandling statute being discussed?
Let's look at Comey's statement or the FBI report. Hmm, Comey finds that Hillary Clinton's handling was "extremely careless." Odd phase in this context. I wonder why he picked it.
During the later OIG investigation, the investigators reviewed various draft's of Comey's statements. A key change was from "grossly negligent" to "extremely careless." Why do you think Comey and the FBI went with this change?
Probably because the required level of intent is gross negligence and Comey's statement, absent that top-level edit, is essentially 'Yes, Hillary Clinton committed the crime described in the statute because her intentional plan to at the very least circumvent disclosure laws which necessarily would implicate at least communications about classified information did rise to the level of gross negligence which is specifically described in the law as being illegal, however, no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges for this crime we acknowledge she likely committed.' This statement, a more honest one, sort of gives away what you're trying to hide. Not to mention, another problem is prosecutors have indeed brought charges against people relying on the lower level of intent of gross negligence.
Whoopsie. Now there may be other reasons no "reasonable prosecutor" would bring charges, like the worry they'd end up committing suicide by shooting themselves 11 times in the back, but it sure as shit not because Clinton was only "extremely careless" which is totally different from "grossly negligent." Not to mention a bunch of other edits made by Comey from the original draft prepared for him in order to downplay the breadth of Clinton's misbehavior.
On a side note, I always encourage others to read the OIG reports about these controversies; they always have some of the best facts and rather odd conclusions. Many times they'll weave a narrative of facts to basically accuse the FBI and others of political cover-up or some other corruption scheme, but then step back and let the reader make their own conclusions, and the report is filed away in some basement somewhere and forgotten about.
How is classified information determined in court cases? Is it the mark on the paper, whether something should or shouldn't be classified even if unmarked, whether it was classified at the time of mishandling or at some later point, or is it something else?
We'll leave aside for now the fact the FBI didn't examine the server, didn't seize the emails, and relied on a private vendor to send them a copy of both, or the fact Clinton's team was engaged in a coordinated conspiracy to illegally delete and cover-up the entire ordeal which the DOJ gave general immunity agreements (something near underheard of in federal prosecution) in return for interviews which the FBI agents there noted were just full of lies (lies violate and rescind immunity grants). Even after all this nonsense, the FBI still had to admit Clinton had many dozens of emails with classified information in them, and many more discussing classified information in them.
Huh? It is completely clear that "mishandling confidential information" is a crime if the mishandling rises to the level of gross negligence. Are you arguing it's an element of the mishandling statutes being discussed to prove "the actual threat to national security" as opposed to typically being used in the charging decisions?
Whether any particular set of facts rises to the level of "gross negligence" is what may be unclear, but not whether or not mishandling classified information in a grossly negligent manner is a crime or not because it is. Even the rosiest view in favor of Clinton is still plenty to determine gross negligence.
Let's compare this to your comments about mortgage fraud and donald trump with respect to his statements of financial condition (SFCs). You don't note most of Trump's statements over the decade+ and dozens of commercial transations, loan applications, insurance filings, etc, were not false. Instead, you focuse on the minority of statements which you claim are false, misleading, fraud. In that case, you're completely comfortable that a minority of behavior can establish a pattern of fraud for Trump, but for Clinton it's important to note "most" of her classified communications were fine. Why the different treatment?
looks like basic who/whom
After all, the murderer doesn't murder 99.99999% of the time. Why are you focusing on my honorable, family-man friend who maybe perhaps unfortunately murdered someone when it's only .00001% of his behavior? However, let's talk about my enemy the murderer who killed someone.
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