Impeachment, Take Two (and Other Trump News)

[Sara Nilsson]

Find it "interesting" that if you go to breitbart, I suggest you don't. The version of the search warrant they show doesn't have anything redacted including the agents names. I hope those guys can get some protection asap because I fear for their safety now.

[Missy]

The only appropriate response to any of this garbage: Let's go Donald.

[stormwyrm]

If he doesn't hang for this they should apologise to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

[Oniya]

:inserts Hanover Fist's testimony from the Captain Sternn segment of Heavy Metal.:

That basement room that Beau talked about has potential.

[gaggedLouise]

If he doesn't hang for this they should apologise to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

An early mentor of Trump and his long-term ally Roger Stone was Roy Cohn, the "quintessential fixer" (in the words of his student Alan Dershowitz). Cohn was a political hack and a master of shady deals, and he taught Trump and Stone a great deal both about business and about getting your way with courts of law. Earlier in his career, he had played a big part in getting the Rosenbergs sent to the electric chair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#Political_activities

[gaggedLouise]

Comic relief - this is one of those that manage to be both hilarious and gloomy at the same time, and I love that:

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2022/08/12/trump-lego-bomb/

[js207]

I always knew 45 might turn out to be a spy for some dictator - he was just that bit too fascinated with them.

I thought his bizarre interests in Putin and Kim were too obvious for him to be an actual agent - aren't 'secret agents' supposed to keep it, er, secret? I think it was more that he didn't have much regard for democracy - he was more impressed with "strong" governments instead.

Also ironic in hindsight that a key part of Hilary Clinton's platform was "let's make up with Russia", and how Romney was mocked for suggesting Russia was a problem area. Whoops.

[Missy]

I thought his bizarre interests in Putin and Kim were too obvious for him to be an actual agent - aren't 'secret agents' supposed to keep it, er, secret? I think it was more that he didn't have much regard for democracy - he was more impressed with "strong" governments instead.

You do realize this is exactly what you would say if you were a Russian agent.

[Oniya]

I think it's more important to realize that you don't have to be good at being a spy to commit espionage.

[Thufir Hawat]

You do realize this is exactly what you would say if you were a Russian agent.

No, not really. An actual agent of any totalitarian country would be just as likely to be staunchly Democrat, pro-democracy, pro-equal rights, pro-everything that you like, and abhorring all dictators.
For spies, misdirection and pretense are not just part of their game, they are the game.

[Missy]

I think it's more important to realize that you don't have to be good at being a spy to commit espionage.

I had been remarking to be silly, but no you don't have to be good at killing people to have killed someone    You just have to be dumb enough to do it.

[Azy]

All it really takes is for a very smart and sneaky person behind the curtain to find a very easy to manipulate useful idiot.  I'm not usually one to buy into conspiracy theories, but considering everything we know, it always seemed to me like someone was working Trump like a puppet.  Whatever their scheme was would've been more successful if they had taken his Twitter account away.   

[stormwyrm]

I thought his bizarre interests in Putin and Kim were too obvious for him to be an actual agent - aren't 'secret agents' supposed to keep it, er, secret? I think it was more that he didn't have much regard for democracy - he was more impressed with "strong" governments instead.

Trump wouldn't be a "secret agent" but an intelligence asset, i.e. someone who can be manipulated by the actual secret agents, those that actually take orders from the GRU, SVR, MSS, or whoever. Some assets can be induced to betray their country by ideology, bribery, threat, or blackmail, or they may simply be useful idiots whom the secret agents can trick into treasonous behaviour. If so, Trump appears to fall into that last category. His megalomania seems to be such that he thinks he is above the law. It doesn't seem so inconceivable that an agent might even have gotten him into misappropriating those TS/SCI documents by what essentially amounts to a schoolyard dare.

[Thufir Hawat]

Trump wouldn't be a "secret agent" but an intelligence asset, i.e. someone who can be manipulated by the actual secret agents, those that actually take orders from the GRU, SVR, MSS, or whoever. Some assets can be induced to betray their country by ideology, bribery, threat, or blackmail, or they may simply be useful idiots whom the secret agents can trick into treasonous behaviour. If so, Trump appears to fall into that last category. His megalomania seems to be such that he thinks he is above the law. It doesn't seem so inconceivable that an agent might even have gotten him into misappropriating those TS/SCI documents by what essentially amounts to a schoolyard dare.

That, however, is completely plausible.

All it really takes is for a very smart and sneaky person behind the curtain to find a very easy to manipulate useful idiot.  I'm not usually one to buy into conspiracy theories, but considering everything we know, it always seemed to me like someone was working Trump like a puppet.  Whatever their scheme was would've been more successful if they had taken his Twitter account away.   

I suspect there was a note on his file "resists quitting Twitter regardless of threat to his own well-being, check whether you can work Twitter into banning him" .

I had been remarking to be silly, but no you don't have to be good at killing people to have killed someone    You just have to be dumb enough to do it.

Totally true, and it's got a long tradition, as evidenced by the classics !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ

[TheVillain]

Trump wouldn't be a "secret agent" but an intelligence asset, i.e. someone who can be manipulated by the actual secret agents, those that actually take orders from the GRU, SVR, MSS, or whoever. Some assets can be induced to betray their country by ideology, bribery, threat, or blackmail, or they may simply be useful idiots whom the secret agents can trick into treasonous behaviour. If so, Trump appears to fall into that last category. His megalomania seems to be such that he thinks he is above the law. It doesn't seem so inconceivable that an agent might even have gotten him into misappropriating those TS/SCI documents by what essentially amounts to a schoolyard dare.

This is exactly why the Mueller Invesitgation didn't really pan out as much as people hoped it would in fact. Mueller found ~120 events that under normal circumstances would qualify as Collusion or Obstruction of Justice - but Mueller just couldn't confirm that Trump just wasn't so stupid to be that easily played. If you don't mind the use of analogy, Mueller could prove for a fact that Trump pushed the button that sprung the death trap that killed about 120 people - but Mueller ran out of time before he could prove for a fact that Trump wasn't tricked into pressing the button by someone else.

[Oniya]

So, Trump is claiming that he 'declassified' all of those things he had at Mar-a-lago.  This is the same sort of stunt he's pulled before, and it turns out that it could bite him in the ass this time.

Back when he still had Twitter, he made claims about declassifying  the documents regarding the 'Russia Hoax' - and a couple of journalists, including CNN, called his bluff and filed Freedom Of Information Act requests to see those documents - and were told that no, just because the President says 'It's declassified', it doesn't mean it's really declassified.  Paperwork has to be filed.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7273621-LEOPOLD-FOIA-Trump-Declassify-Tweets-Meadows.html

It's not the first time that a court has ruled in this way.  There was an earlier FOIA request made regarding the investigation into Carter Page - and again, the decision was that DOJ didn't get the paperwork, so no FOIA for you.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.185512/gov.uscourts.dcd.185512.62.0_2.pdf

And most recently (July, 2020) the courts made a decision regarding an FOIA request made by the New York Times in 2017, regarding the CIA's actions in Syria that Trump claimed he had declassified:

https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/18-2112/18-2112-2020-07-09.pdf?ts=1594303207

Nope.  No go.

So, the ass-covering that DOJ has already had to do with regards to Trump's other off-the-cuff 'declassification' declarations has cemented the fact that he couldn't have simply waved his hands and made these TS:SCI documents into souvenirs.

[TheVillain]

Oh yes, I’ve had to point that out to a few people.

The process to declassify information or documents has dozens of steps. Presidential authority only covers the first handful of them. The president by themselves only can take classified information and make the Pentagon promise that I’ll think about declassifying it eventually. And even then, the law flat out says that there’s some topics which the answer will be no. Information about our nuclear arsenal for example.

I’ve also had to point out that the last time we caught anyone doing anything remotely like this it was the Rosenbergs and we actually brought back hanging to deal with it.

[Missy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlVhDJwY8uk

[Oniya]

Frankly, I take anything starting with 'Russian media reports say' with one of those deer-licks they sell in the hunting departments of sporting goods stores.

Thing is, it doesn't matter if Russia got them from Trump, from some other source, or are lying out their asses about even having them - as Beau so rightly says.

[stormwyrm]

"...I was thinking at the time that, whatever condemnation might be reserved for his ill-fated presidency, Nixon acted heroically to make the American system of government work through his resignation. As part of that system, Nixon himself knew exactly what to do when the fateful event came. Never for a moment, it seems, did Nixon think that all the screaming agitations within the various sectors of U.S. society to have him disciplined for his breach of faith were an illegal conspiracy of the rightists, the centrists, or the leftists in collaboration with members of the American media, youth movements, and the American public to overthrow the duly-constituted government of the United States of America." — Primitivo Mijares, The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (1976), writing about his visit to Washington, D.C. in 1975. (emphasis added)

Fast forward 46 years, Trump and his cronies seem to have the chutzpah to do exactly what even Nixon it seemed did not.

[gaggedLouise]

Last week, Trump claimed that as president he had the authority to declassify anything he wanted, on the fly, without even making any record of his act. You know, like a wizard who changes things by the act of touching them...Now he is instead making the claim that the White House documents belong to him, they are his and his alone, his private papers - and therefore of course they belong at his home. This is beyond nutty. 

[Callie Del Noire]

Last week, Trump claimed that as president he had the authority to declassify anything he wanted, on the fly, without even making any record of his act. You know, like a wizard who changes things by the act of touching them...Now he is instead making the claim that the White House documents belong to him, they are his and his alone, his private papers - and therefore of course they belong at his home. This is beyond nutty. 

The man would lie, badly, about the color of… well anything.

[Beorning]

Last week, Trump claimed that as president he had the authority to declassify anything he wanted, on the fly, without even making any record of his act. You know, like a wizard who changes things by the act of touching them...

A side note: it's not the first time he did something like that. I remember that, according to the accounts of those White House people who talked to the January 6th commission, he once verbally declared Sidney Powell to be his advisor with a security clearance etc. Just like that. According to these accounts, one of his actual advisors / lawyers directly told him that him *declaring* something like that doesn't automatically make it a fact...

[Swidi]

one of his actual advisors / lawyers directly told him that him *declaring* something like that doesn't automatically make it a fact...

[TheVillain]

I'm starting to wonder if he legit doesnt understand that declassifying something *is a process* that has *dozens* of steps, and Presidential Authority can only *start* the process. Him saying something is declassifed only *at most* says it might be declassifed in a year years, and usually doesn't amount to anything at all.