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powerboatr wrote: ↑Sun Aug 14, 2022 1:15 pm

philip964 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 13, 2022 11:25 pm I have heard from a friend that the top secret document thing is not going be the charge as the President does not have to abide by those laws. He will be charged under a World War 1 espionage law set up to arrest spies.

The news was so infuriating, they were breathlessly asking the question- “Has the nation been endangered by the actions of this Former President”. As if Russian and Chinese spy’s have had complete access to Mar a Lago and to Melania’s underwater drawers.

i think thats thin using espionage act. becasue the discovery portion by trumps legal team would most certainly drag comey, clinton, fbi personnel that were found to be harboring classified documents and that comey even leaked them to the press. use their NON CASES as precedent. which should force garland to charge or arrest those people if he plans on trumps charge sticking
IMO
the true RAID was mot\re about jan 6th evidence. the warrant was pretty broad .
if archives or intel folks on the premises had issue with some classified documents, they appeared to have already fixed that by him declassifying them and the double locked storage. not to mention the months long file review etc that has been going on to ensure everything was in its place .

The problem with the Espionage Act as it pertains to Trump is that it requires the possession to be unauthorized or with the intent to harm the US or benefit a foreign country. Since Trump was the man in legal control of who was authorized, including authorizing himself, he could not possibly be in unauthorized possession. After the blowup of Hillary's aiding Russia case, there is no way anyone could prove Trump was doing something to harm the US or benefit a foreign country. The interesting loophole on all this is that if he was doing it to benefit himself by using it in his business, it is not a crime.

As I pointed out above, he also had no classified documents because he had declassified them. And he was the final arbiter of what was classified until Biden was sworn in.

As for the claim of violation of the Presidential Records Act, that is a possibility. But that is not a crime. There is nothing in the law that I can find that defines any penalty for the president violating it. It is in Title 44, while federal crimes are generally in Title 18 (with military crimes in Title 10).

This means there was no real legal justification for the search warrant. So, I think it was done more for political reasons and I doubt those reasons had to do with January 6th. Both this whole warrant show and the on-going January 6th circus are more, IMO, to do with discrediting Trump in case he runs again. They are deathly afraid of him getting in office again and wanted to scare him off and convince voters he is a criminal to stop them for voting for him. Ironically, I think their ploy backfired on them and convinced him to run again when he was going to not run and instead play kingmaker and support Desantis.

As I type that, a Machiavellian thought came to mind. Maybe that is what they wanted after all. They know they could not beat Desantis but they think they can beat him by convincing independents he is crooked. That is a weird thought, but possible. Either way, I believe it had more to do with the next presidential election (with a little benefit to the mid-terms thrown in) than any real crime.

And this politicization of the DOJ makes me agree that we need to remove almost all federal law enforcement and turn that power back over to the states.

powerboatr wrote: ↑Fri Aug 12, 2022 1:27 pmtrump stated he declassified these documents they found while still president

I just saw an article that said Trump had a standing order. Since he had to take work to his residence sometimes to prepare for the next day, and it would be illegal to take classified documents out of the oval office area, the standing order said that any documents he took to his residence were deemed to be declassified. He would then reclassify them the next day when he came back into the office.

If that is documented, even as a verbal order to a subordinate, it kind of blows the case out of the water. No one gets to overrule the president on what is classified or not.

powerboatr wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 12:18 pm i watched a video interview a while back about the primary elections. he said the primaries are designed to make people feel like their vote is actually counted, and that the delegates choose the person running based on "their" vote, not the actual primary votes cast by the people. it gave me the chills at how candid he was. he had been a party delegate for a long time IIRC 20 plus years

I thought everyone was aware of this and I truly see nothing wrong with it. Primaries are not public voting, but are the method the party uses to select its candidate. They are run according to party rules. Both major parties have the convention rules set up with "super-delegates" whose votes count more at the time of nomination than the regular delegates representing the voting districts. The super-delegates are all party ruling class and control the nomination.

The reason I see nothing wrong with this is that it is all stated in the party rules and published in advance. If you don't like the way they rig the primary, don't join the party.

he then eluded to the same practice on the federal level after the general election. he stated the electoral college delegates don't have to vote for who won the most votes in that state, that they can vote amongst themselves to pick the winner for the state. we saw this 1st hand at 2020 election.
with the confusion and constant vote changes and sec of state issues clouding the process.

This is not 100% accurate. Under the Constitution, there is nothing that forces the electors to vote the way the state did. But each state has their own laws on this. Some states do make it a crime to not vote the way the people did, others do not. Most states (well, 48 of them) have laws saying whoever won the popular vote gets all of the state's electoral votes. The remaining states (Maine and Nebraska) actually split their electoral votes with each congressional district being legally bound to how the popular vote went in that district and the two electors for the whole state going to whoever won the state wide popular vote.