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i held my tongue on this last night because i appreciate dissenters here but the discussion has gone too far without someone taking an appropriately hard stance in criticsm.
these are abject falsehoods originating in the same retarding hatred that has wholly taken the federal bureaucracy. trump achieved nothing in office and he was defeated as an incumbent in 2020 by the largest vote total a candidate has ever received. these indictments of a man whose only success is cultural fixture as the left's he-who-is-most-hated is transparent to everyone ungrasped by mass media as the latest attempt in most of a decade of baseless serial persecution.
if trump had special access materials on an unsecured server the place would have been raided at 3 AM by FBI's SWAT but i have to read shit like "he's getting the kid gloves treatment" and "clinton just did it right" yeah, she just did it right when she directed her team to destroy as much evidence as they could. you'd have been better off calling me a fucking moron, i'd feel less insulted than being presented serious consideration of the feds' position. no, no, this time, they really really really have something.
only grossest judgment would here assert preeminence of decorum yet i still give this circus a far fairer treatment than it deserves. many paragraphs of carefully worded lies corrupt the spirit more than one-sentence petulance.
Article II, Section 1. The President is incapable in any way, shape, or form, of mishandling information classified under his authority. Next topic please.
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I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't hid the documents and "corruptly concealed a document in a federal investigation, and made false statements and representations". I'm not even sure why he did those things, it doesn't seem to have helped him at all.
Reminder that around the same time, biden was found to have kept classified documents - but he (as far as we can tell) hasn't tried to hide them or lied about their existence!
all evidentiary priors support "they will perform lengthy investigations on trump for things that didn't happen." there is no evidence to assert this as unique. they would investigate him over nothing, because they have repeatedly investigated him over nothing. hyperrelevant example: a federal investigation over a crime it is not possible for the president to commit.
If you can find evidence that a past president did something like this and wasn't prosecuted, I'll significantly change my mind.
It is still illegal to lie under oath / to investigators about a crime you didn't commit!
Focusing on this single crime isn’t the right lens. The right lens is the Durham report. The right lens is the Ukraine impeachment. The right lens is the NY indictment. The right lens seems to the the Georgia investigation.
So perhaps after a bunch of phones investigations they finally found one that stuck. But no other prominent politician would be subject to this level of investigation.
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that would be the former secretary of state who kept special access materials on a server she had wiped, who did who knows what with a dozen phones she had destroyed, and who is once again selling "but her emails" hats in a truly amazing flaunting of lawbreaking. the difference is where trump as executive could do whatever he wants with classified materials, clinton as secretary of state had no authority whatsoever to handle those materials as she did. yet she profits from a crime trump is being indicted for, a crime it is not possible for him to have committed.
it's not only a crime he didn't commit, it's a crime that doesn't exist for the executive. the DOJ is investigating him for an area of law they have no authority to act on and it is not illegal to obstruct an unlawful investigation.
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The documents were moved at his order while President. By Executive authority under the constitution-as-written and implicit-as-extrapolated from established precedent, all materials discussed here were declassified upon formal transfer of power.
Hang on. You're saying he declassified them by accident?
Basically, by putting them in his possession when he became a person who did not have authority to see them, he implicitly declassified them because he was still president when he made the decision?
If yes, that's hilarious.
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That would be news to Trump who is on tape on page 15 of the Indictment complaining that the plan to invade an unnamed country (probably Iran) he just 'found' is still classified so he can't use it to refute Mark Miley's claims that Trump wanted to Invade.
Interestingly this doesn't necessarily undermine the legal point -- it's very possible that Trump was wrong about this! He's wrong about lots of things!
It's bad for the easier defense in which he claims that he deliberately declassified this stuff verbally or similar prior to leaving office, though.
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i'm not suggesting anything. this is exactly how the law works. materials of the leaving executive are considered declassified as a matter of law and precedent.
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They also have him on tape showing a writer and book publisher a 'plan of attack' on 'Country A' and then bemoaning the fact that he didn't declassify it while he was president.
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It is more ridiculous to assume that the president willfully did an act that was illegal when he could do the literally same act and make it legal. Hence the idea that the president cannot mishandle documents.
The only argument would be that Trump inadvertently brought the documents (ie didn’t willfully take the documents) and then while ex president upon learning of the documents kept them.
The law is indeed incredibly clear: the President is the sole adjudicator of whether his documents are personal or subject to 44 USC 22. Neither congress, the archives, nor the courts can make determinations on executive materials because in so doing they would effectively limit executive authority established by Article II Section 1. Those documents of a former executive are for constitutional purposes considered to have been handled at the prerogative of the executive while still in office. Thus the tidy precedented solution of implicit mass declassification.
You are flailing against the impenetrable wall of "ALL RELEVANT MATERIALS CONSIDERED DECLASSIFIED AT FORMAL TRANSFER OF POWER" because a body of individuals who have made their contempt of the United States' constitution and laws not so much clear as irrefutable fact are predictably disregarding that constitution and those laws along with prior administrative and case precedent as they attempt yet another attack on the uniquely vilified failure of a former president.
Only nuclear secrets (of which the nuclear capabilities of foreign states do not qualify) exist in classification separate from executive authority, and executive classification exists solely because the President says it does. Congress has no say, the sitting Executive has no say (and this includes the DOD and DOJ), and the Courts can do exactly one thing and it's knock this farce down on constitutionality. If it doesn't happen in the lower courts it will swiftly be heard in SCOTUS where Trump will be found in favor 9-0.
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Presidential records act is questionable per se
I noted the obstruction charge is the most dangerous one for Trump and honestly I think probably dead to rights.
the DOJ does not have the authority to investigate the former executive over the handling of classified documents as such. it is not possible to obstruct an unlawful investigation.
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I think that is the only legal argument that survives (ie he didn’t realize he took classified documents until after his power to declassify pased)
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