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Trump indicted with 4 counts over 2020 election
Hooooooo boy.
It took way longer than it should have to answer the question: “by whom?”
This is federal, and not another New York charge.
Cynical read is that Mr Garland is trying to distract the news cycle from talking about Hunter Biden or the FBI.
Cynical read is that you're always talking about Hunter Biden. Breitbart has written 134,000 articles mentioning Hunter Biden and pumps out like 5 or 6 a day. Fox News has written 260,000 articles about Hunter Biden between January 1st, 2020 and today. You'd be saying this if it had dropped last month, last week, or next year. When, exactly, should the indictment have been unsealed to satisfy you?
Ah, right. The answer is never, isn't it?
I think you're making a relevant point here.
The right is making a lot of hay out of Hunter for probably many reasons: he keeps providing ample evidence, picking on an obviously senile Joe seems like punching down, and Hunter's corruption is so obvious that it's a simple example of hypocrisy almost anyone can understand.
However, I find myself exhausted by Hunter's stories. The density is too high, and he pretty much continues to keep getting away with everything. There's also an element of nothingburgers too, I honestly don't care that he did a line or two at the white house.
From a steelman/opposition advice perspective, do you think the right should be:
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Those numbers are obviously wrong. At 100 articles per day it would take Fox 8ish years to write that many.
Google "hit" and "result" numbers are always highly exaggerated.
Fair enough, but the point still stands. They're putting out 3-10 per day on the dates I can check.
Do you know of a more accurate way to quantify?
Well the Brietbart page has 5 pages with 20 articles on each mentioning "Hunter Biden." 100 articles mentioning him sounds low to me but probably somewhere in the right ballpark. The best way I can think of to conduct this sort of comparison would be to compare that name to the search results of a list of unrelated things, like "russia", "healthcare", "election", and so on. Then you can kind of eyeball [articles which mention Hunter Biden] / [articles which mention unrelated things] and compare that to the results on a different platform.
It doesn't matter all that much though, your point is still valid. Though I think the current timing is undeniably a bit more convenient for Hunter than almost any other timing would be.
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My facts were wrong by an order of magnitude but I’m still right!
Thankfully, hlynka is routinely wrong by multiple orders of magnitude so I think I'm still safe.
Low effort, pure direct antagonism without even a pretense of substance? Three day ban.
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Really? Can you link an example?
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Sure, and how many articles have CNN, MSNBC, Et Al written about Trump?
My take from the beginning has been that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. I don't think you can reasonably claim that Trump acted inappropriately by "mishandling classified information" "being a party to foreign influence" or "inciting violence and questioning the legitimacy of US elections" without implicating Clinton and Biden in even more serious crimes.
The crux of the issue is that the DNC has explicitly rejected the principle of equality before the law in favor of "rules for thee and not for me" and I don't think they realize just how dangerous a game they are playing.
That might be relevant if I had been complaining about the latest Hunter Biden hearing being planned to distract from a damaging Trump story. Moreover, Trump was a sitting president while Hunter Biden is the son of one, so a better analogy would be Jared Kushner.
The crux of the issue is that Trump pushed the envelope on all of those issues farther than any of the examples you gave. Clinton conceded the election peacefully the morning after:
I'm still unaware of any concrete evidence that Joe pushed policy X or Y as a party to foreign influence either to enrich his family or otherwise. The closest I've seen has been pushing for the resignation of the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma, but a Republican-controlled senate investigation apparently turned up nothing years ago. While Hunter apparently illegally bought a gun, smoked a lot of crack, fucked a lot of hookers and enriched himself on his father's name it's still not clear to me how Biden harmed the interests of the United States to rake in the corruption money.
There's probably no point rehashing similar arguments from the other side; Jared Kushner receiving 2 billion from the Saudis after being staunchly pro-Saudi Arabia while directly serving in Trump's white house, Trump delaying hundreds of millions of aid to Ukraine while pressuring Zelenskyy to investigate the Biden's, so on and so forth.
I'm out of time, so you'll undoubtedly be devastated that we don't get to rehash the Clinton email saga again although I'll admit you're maybe closest to the mark here given that, if I remember correctly, she instructed her lawyer to destroy evidence.
You mean aside from the proverbial smoking gun and the blood all over his clothes.
There's no evidence that Joe ever used his position of influence to enrich his family so long as you ignore that time he flat out admitted to doing so, Sorry bub, but you and I know that if Trump or one of his Sons had uttered those exact same words you'd be all over it like white on rice rather than trying to explain it away as a nothing-burger, and that is exactly why your feigned outrage carries no water.
The dude is literally making the case that bribery isn’t that bad provided it doesn’t harm the US interest. I just don’t see that as an honest interlocutor.
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Devon Archer testified that Burisma wanted Hunter to take care of the prosecutor who was causing a problem. Joe Biden then took care of the prosecutor. Pretty closely tied.
If the argument is “well this didn’t really harm the US” maybe but maybe not. This is the corruption we know but there could be more and corruption is bad per se.
Again Trump was indicted for correctly sniffing out the corruption of the Biden’s and using government power to bring it to the forefront. How was what Trump did harmful to US policy? Is that really the only standard?
We are now stating “presidents or vice presidents can accept bribes as long as it doesn’t harm the US?”
I don’t believe you really believe that.
That's not what Trump was indicted for.
Then maybe if the idea that I'm making a pro-bribery argument beggars belief you should consider that your interpretation of what I'm saying was flawed.
Just now realized we were talking last each other. I was referring to the impeachment as the indictment (which is what an impeachment is — it is an indictment)
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Then why was the constant, repeated, over-and-over-again refrain that Trump's actions were "contrary to the interest of the United States"? This was incessant, and we have the tapes. Law professors spilt barrels of ink on the topics of possible mixed-motives, the proper method by which either the courts or an impeachment proceeding should determine "the interest of the United States", etc. This was perhaps the single dominant topic/question of the impeachment. They felt like they needed to show that his actions were contrary to the interests of the United States, and their method of doing so was to roll out bureaucrat after bureaucrat (who theoretically report to Trump) to say, "Well, actually, we decided what was in the interest of the United States, and what Trump did went against that."
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Of course Trump was charged with using his office for illegitimate ends. The ends here was pressuring Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political opponent. It is now reasonably clear (and even back then there was a bunch of smoke) that Trump wanted actual corruption of his political opponent investigated. So what I said was correct.
Maybe you shouldn’t write things with the effect “show me how it harmed US policy” if you don’t want people to believe you think bribes aren’t a big deal provided it didn’t harm US policy
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When you scratch the surface of many of the different attempts at lawfare against Trump, they're often undergirded by a necessary axiom: "The deep state, bureaucracy, The Party, whatever you want to call it, decides what is in the interest of the United States. If you do things that are counter to that decision, then it is inherently illegitimate, could only be for some nefarious personal interest, and is almost certainly illegal. But if you do things that are aligned with that decision, then you're a pretty good guy who really shouldn't be put through all the stress of, like, investigations and stuff. You're one of us." This was probably most obviously on full display during the first Trump impeachment.
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They think it's perfectly safe. If they win, it's effectively illegal to challenge them and they get their permanent Democratic hegemony. If they don't win, they figure the Republicans will not retaliate in kind, or due to the deep state remaining in their hands will not be ABLE to retaliate in kind. And I cannot see the flaw in this reasoning.
...because in your heart of hearts you're one of them.
appeals to legality only work on people who see the legal system as legitimate.
By "effectively illegal to challenge them" I mean they can use the full force of the Federal government against challengers using the law as an excuse. Not that it is de jure illegal to challenge them, though a good number of conservatives tend to believe that too -- despite the system being obviously corrupt they accept its results as if it is not, and blame anyone on their own side who does not do so.
And?
are you really so afraid of being prosecuted or held at gunpoint?
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