ChiGoose

Wow! What hyper partisan Democrat appointed this guy!?

She is an idiot, but the Dems haven't come within 5 points of this district since 2008 regardless of the candidates. It was Trump +6 in 2020 and this is expected to be a strong GOP year, so +7 seems about right.

LOL. Trump doesn't give a flying f*** about his supporters. It's why he was totally fine with them dying of COVID. He's a classic narcissist and is fundamentally incapable of caring about anyone other than himself. The second someone no longer provides him with a benefit, they might as well be dead to him.

I get that people see things through a political lens, but what you did was to take things that have absolutely nothing to do with people taking classified documents out of government custody and claim that they were the same as what happened at Mar a Lago this week. It would be a good argument to point out the various government officials who had taken classified materials from the government (Hillary Clinton, Gen. Patraeus, Colin Powell, etc.) and argue why their instances were similar or dissimilar to Trump's. But instead, you just threw a bunch of irrelevant stuff on the wall hoping that people wouldn't look into it to realize it had absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand or even the point you were trying to make. Laws often are complex, but this isn't a particular complex situation. A private citizen had classified materials in their home and the government suspected they hadn't returned everything when asked. And while we don't know what specifically they were looking for because Trump won't release the search warrant, one main difference is a new law passed in 2018 to specifically address this issue. Because of that law (signed by Trump), what may not have been a crime in the past may be one today.

Ok, gonna take this point by point. 1. Rolling Stone article on Obama keeping documents classified The Obama administration invoked executive privilege over 11,000 documents. We can debate whether or not they should have, but Obama did not physically take the documents to his home. He simply invoked privilege to keep them from being made public. The government retained custody of the documents the entire time. This is obviously different than a former president absconding with classified documents to their home. 2. PBS article on Obama administration withholding FOIA requests The Obama administration set a record for censoring government documents or denying access to them under FOIA. Once again, the government retained custody of these documents and they were not taking to Obama's house. It's a bad look for Obama but has absolutely no relevance to the Mar a Lago search. 3. USA Today Piece on the Presidential Records Act This is an opinion piece that is behind a paywall so I can't read all of it, but it appears to be arguing that Presidents should waive certain privileges. Seems like a good idea, but I don't see how it has anything to do with former presidents taking classified documents into their homes. 4. Business Insider piece on Obama administration and FOIA This is another article outlining how the Obama administration was not transparent with FOIA. Once again, this has nothing to do with someone taking classified documents. None of these articles had anything to do with people taking classified documents out of government custody. 5. Hillary Clinton's emails Clinton used a private email server in her house that contained classified info contrary to policy. The State Department IG investigated this and referred it to the FBI. During the course of the investigation, Clinton handed over the server itself, as well as a thumb drive with emails. None of this investigation involved physical documents, it was only about emails, therefore, the only physical evidence would have been the server itself, which the FBI took into possession from Clinton. Had she not turned it over, they may have executed a search warrant, but because she did, there would be no expectation that there would be any physical evidence at her home. 6. Trump is a Russian? While the Trump campaign worked closely with Russian agents during the 2016 election, there was no explicit agreement with the Russian government, and therefore there was no basis to charge him with conspiracy. To say the investigation was fake, however, requires blinding oneself to the evidence. Trump's campaign was clearly working with Russians and therefore should have been investigated. However, the ideas like the 2016 election was stolen, or that Trump was taking orders from Putin are nonsense and have no basis in reality. 7. Ukraine Trump asked for a quid pro quo to his personal benefit in order to deliver aid to a foreign country. That is... bad. 8. Michael Avenatti Avenatti is in jail because he's a fraud. The whole Resistance love affair with him was incredibly cringey 9. Stormy Daniels Trump's lawyer went to jail for facilitating hush payments to Daniels. I don't know what the controversy is here. 10. The IRS I don't know what this is in reference to 11. Jan 6 There is more to the potential crimes on Jan 6 than the riot. Trump took actions he was told were illegal in order to try to overturn the election 12. Presidential Records Trump, as a private citizen, possessed classified government documents in his home. He refused to return them for months. When the government did get them, they apparently believed that not everything was returned. They obtained a search warrant and went to Mar a Lago in plainclothes and were escorted about the premise by the Secret Service. The search was apparently so low key that people at the building didn't realize what was going on for some time during the search. The bottom line here is: should private citizens be able to keep classified government documents without permission or clearance?

This is just blatantly false. Biden pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor for NOT fighting corruption. It was a move backed not just by US policy, but also by the rest of Europe. Burisma had been investigated for its activities before Hunter joined its board but was not under investigation at the time that Biden called for the prosecutor to be removed. Senate Republicans investigated this and found there was no evidence that Biden had pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor as a way to protect Hunter. In fact, if anything, removing the corrupt prosecutor would have made it more likely, not less, that Hunter would be investigated. You can cherry pick little things all you want, but once people look into the actual thing you're claiming, it'll quickly become evident that you have fallen for misinformation. Reality? Their last remaining brain cells?

Law enforcement is only corrupt when it goes after people I agree with. When it goes after people I disagree with, then you have to back them.

You gotta love the conspiracy theorists already claiming the FBI planted evidence. Jumping the gun there a bit. If they were really planting evidence, how would we know yet until that "evidence" was revealed? Also, everybody seems to be an expert on how magistrate judges are selected for warrant sign offs in Florida now. If the judge in this case truly was in the tank for Epstein, why would he sign off on a warrant for one of Epstein's buddies? All year, it was "if Trump did a crime, why didn't he get charged for it?" and now, when Trump isn't even charged with a crime, but just has his place searched because he kept classified documents there, we gotta move those goalposts some more because the GodKing cannot be questioned.

I forget who said it but I find this quote illuminating: “Conservatism has one proposition: that there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect” It makes the hypocrisy around policing we see here make sense. Back the Blue unless the Blue is policing the “wrong” people.

Well, she was an illegal immigrant, so don’t forget that.

Generally, the FBI doesn’t immediately make the warrant public, though they do leave a copy with the person they executed against. So we shouldn’t expect the DoJ to make it public, but Trump can do so the second he wants to. Why hasn’t he?

Don't forget the FBI breaking protocol to hurt Clinton and probably hand the 2016 election to Trump. Or the time the DoJ found countless instances of the Trump campaign working with the Russians and did... nothing with it. Or the time the DoJ outlined multiple times when Trump himself committed obstruction of justice but they decided to wait out the statute of limitation for... reasons. Or the time the FBI scuttled the background check of one of Trump's SCOTUS nominees despite more than 4,000 tips. You know, that DoJ and FBI definitely is in the tank for the Dems, right?

All institutions are made of people and all people are fallible. Just because somebody screws up or one person in a large group has bad intentions doesn't necessarily mean the entire endeavor is compromised. It is helpful to keep things in context. As someone who spent the majority of my life believing the Dems are the bad guys and who is now begrudgingly allied to the most incompetent party ever, I have no problem criticizing the dems.

Anyone have a subscription to WSJ? Looks like they took 10 boxes worth of documents during the search but I can't get to the article.

So wanting to make the elites comply with the law is an elitist position and opposing any attempt to make the elites comply with the law is the anti-elitist positions? Do I have that right?

The White House should not be coordinating with the FBI on ongoing investigations. It's not plausible deniability, it's how things are supposed to work.

I cannot guarantee anything but I am very willing to bet that the middle class will not be bled dry by the new IRS auditors. What they should do is just have the IRS prepare the returns for most Americans. Employers provide the information to the IRS anyway but we have to guess what they have because lobbyists won't let congress simply the process. If you are not a contractor and get a W-2 every year, the IRS basically already has everything they need. You should be able to just view it and either approve or change it.

So this will prove out to be false. But it's weird to me that all these people complaining about the elites naysay any action of actually holding elites accountable. I don't get it.

Hopefully nobody in the White House knew ahead of time. It wouldn't be appropriate for the administration to have been briefed on this beforehand.

Ok, so a law that mandates that the IRS use additional resources to go after the elites means they won't do it? So are you saying that it is impossible to enforce the tax law against the elites and we shouldn't even try?

What other way should they have done it? They wanted to be sure they had all the documents, what other way is there to do that than to physically go there and check? From what we know, it seems that they coordinated with the secret service detail, arrived in plain clothes, and many of the people who were there didn't realize what was going on while the search was happening. I think that beats the heck out of a pre-dawn no-knock with SWAT teams knocking down the door.

Got a new job this year with a significant pay bump and better work-life balance. Definitely doing way better than I was when I was working 60-80 hours per week for peanuts. Has nothing to do with who was president though.

I doubt he has clearance. Presidents generally don't need clearance since they own the classification of information by virtue of being president. No SF-86 required. . Former presidents can be read into classified info at the request of the current president, but I don't believe former presidents maintain any clearance on their own. So a big concern (and I am NOT saying this is what happened) would be someone selling secrets. Documents with TS/SCI info on them would be very valuable and could make someone a good chunk of change. Less malicious would simply be that those documents belong to the national archives and should not be stored outside of its custody. If they did not believe they had received all of the documents taken from the White House, they would likely want to search to ensure there are no documents remaining at Mar a Lago that shouldn't be there. Since these are physical documents instead of digital ones, it's not as simple as just ensuring files were deleted or removing a server or two.

Did Trump declassify the documents while he was still president? I haven't seen anything on that. There are a lot of questions that we don't have answers to (but it's not preventing people from jumping to conclusions) but if this was all political, Trump could just make the search warrant public and show it's about some paltry little thing and didn't justify the FBI actions.

The law as crafted is to give the IRS resources to target high wealth individuals and corporations with complicated tax structures. I am absolutely in favor of ensuring that all Americans are subject to our tax laws, not just the poor and middle class. If they use the funds improperly, they should be punished for it. So I will ask you for a third time: Do you think the IRS should enforce tax laws against the elite?