ChiGoose

For (I think) the fourth time: The January 6th Committee investigation is NOT a criminal investigation. It is looking for things that would be out of scope for a criminal investigation by an institution like the FBI. I do not understand why this is such a difficult concept to grasp.

Under this logic, there is no point to making any laws because bad people would ignore them. So let's just get rid of all laws then.

I'm trying to be fair here, but I don't see how the 2020 riots are relevant to the Jan 6th investigation as they are not part of the committee's scope. It's fine to argue that there should be an investigation into them, but that would be better off in its own thread.

I'm not condoning anything. This is a thread about Jan 6th and the investigation. If you'd like to discuss the riots in 2020, I suggest creating a thread for that.

It's not germane to this thread.

And I am continuing to say that a congressional investigation is not an FBI or even criminal investigation. I don’t know why this is so hard to understand. The committee’s remit is NOT to look for crimes. It’s to understand what happened and recommend legislation to prevent it in the future. Continued deflection to the FBI and saying that nothing went wrong if there was no chargeable crimes is just asinine.

I think this is the big problem. If you are looking for a prediction or clear marker, I cannot give it to you. I do not know what the hearings will show. But I also know that the standards for a criminal investigation and a congressional investigation are very different. If people don't understand that, then I'm not sure what the point of further discussion is because we'd just be talking past each other.

Once again, there is a tremendous difference between an FBI investigation and an congressional investigation. There are also things that could be bad that don't amount to be crimes. There are things that might amount to crimes but lack sufficient evidence to bring a charge (since the DoJ is only supposed to charge when the believe they will convict, with few exceptions) I don't have any real expectations of the hearings. I do not know what they have. I do not believe this is the final "we got him!" of Trump. I am not confident that actual criminal charges will follow the hearings But I do know that there are things a congressional investigation might uncover and disclose that the FBI never would reveal. And I know that if we want to prevent insurrections in the future, we better have a clear idea of what happened on January 6th, regardless of whether or not it sends people to jail. I find the idea of "it's either actual chargeable crimes or nothing" to be a bright line that does not reflect reality and allows people to take political coverage to defend their own side from bad behavior. It's a handwaving dismissal of potentially real issues that people will claim for their own political interests.

All of the above is complete nonsense.

I am not arguing that at all because I understand the difference between an FBI investigation and a congressional one.

Believing someone like Dinesh D’Souza is like believing Occupy Democrats. Just grifters looking for easy marks.

I am all for this. No reason entire agencies need to be in DC. They would just need smaller legislative aid offices, not the entire agency. Since the coal industry is dying, they should move the EPA to West Virginia to provide job opportunities to the families that currently rely on mining. This way, moving from fossil fuels to renewables acts as a boon for the area instead of harming it. Other agencies should be moved around the country to benefit communities as well.

Looks like it might still be contested but from what I’ve read, Ukraine executed a feint to draw the Russians in and then Ukraine successfully counterattacked and is continuing to push them back.

I don’t personally know, but potentially to cause enough disruption to prevent certification that day and give people like John Eastman more time to make legal arguments. Or maybe it’s nothing! But it’s insane to not even look into it. I see no reason to believe the QAnon Shaman was part of a plan. He was likely just another poor mark who got swept up into the fervor. Agreed. Me too.

Well, if that’s all there is, the hearings will certainly be a dud. But if they have evidence of a plot to prevent certification or that those with authority to call in help to stop the insurrection intentionally did not do so, then we should see it. And that kind of evidence wouldn’t be something seen on Capitol security cameras.

Was there an organized plan to prevent the certification of the election, and if so, who was involved and what role did they play? While most of the people there were likely just swept up into the rally fervor, it is important to know if there were people who actually planned to prevent certification and what actions they took.

Where have I advocated for that?

It is incredibly material if suicide is attempted with a firearm because firearms are far more lethal than other methods. People who survive an attempt generally do not die of suicide. Most of the common methods of suicide (pills, cutting, etc.) are far more likely to fail than succeed. Suicide attempts with firearms are almost always successful (~90%). So that means that the method of a suicide attempt has a strong impact on the likelihood someone will die. While the common trope is that people who commit suicide are suffering from prolonged depression, suicide attempts generally occur in a brief moment of crisis. They snap and then make the attempt. If they have access to a gun, they most likely will die. If not, there is a very good chance they won’t. Since suicides are roughly half of gun deaths, we definitely should consider them as part of any approach to reduction in gun violence.

I think there are still some unanswered questions (what was Trump doing during the attack?) and I’m curious to see what is in Mark Meadow’s texts. I am not going to draw any conclusions until we see the evidence but it’s surprising to me that people wouldn’t want to know what the committee has found.

Bingo. If you are going to deprive someone of their rights, there needs to be due process. That involves the judicial system, not just the cops.

There was an attempt to overthrow an election result based on conspiracies and a wild misreading of the law. The point of the investigation is to determine what exactly happened and how it can be prevented in the future. The video is good for going after the people in the crowd but it is important to know if there was an actual plot to storm the Capitol, and if so, who was involved. That takes more than cameras. It takes investigation, interrogations, charging the small fish to get them to roll on bigger fish, etc. I’m not going to pretend to know if there was some grand conspiracy that rolls up to Trump (“We finally got him!” -Some Libs for the 20th time…) but we exist as a nation because of the peaceful transition of power. People tried to prevent it in 2020 and it would be good to know how to shut that down in the future.

Yes, the Carter Page FISAs were flawed and the IG admonished the FBI for screwing them up. It showed poor judgment by the investigators and deficient procedures around FISA applications that will hopefully be rectified. But as I stated previously, even if you throw out absolutely everything related to Carter Page, you would still have tons of connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians. And you would still have the investigation because it did not start with the Steele Dossier and Page. As to Misfud, I'm happy to stipulate that he wasn't acting on behalf of the Russians. Maybe he was talking out of his a$$ or maybe Papadopoulos misunderstood what he said. In any event, you have a member of the Trump campaign claiming to be in contact with the Russians who want to damage the Clinton campaign. That has to be investigated! It would be completely irresponsible NOT to investigate it. If there was truly nothing there, that would have been the end of it. Just like the Alfa Bank claim by Sussman: the FBI looks into it, determines there really isn't anything there, and closes it out. Instead, what they found is that the Trump campaign was absolutely crawling with Russian connections. That's why it turned into a big investigation, because as soon as they started looking, they found tons of connections.

Investigations take time. Especially when witnesses don't cooperate. Taking the time to do a thorough investigation is better than rushing through it. That being said, there's a hard stop they need to account for because the GOP will shut down the committee in January in the very likely event that they take the House.

Ok, I have tried to discuss this in good faith. You asked me to read the IG report's executive summary, so I did. When I talked about what it said, you laughed at it as being unbelievable (despite having asked me to read it in the first place). You clearly have no idea how the FBI or investigations or campaign opposition research works. And despite me trying to stick to primary sources and evidence, you continue to make completely unsubstantiated claims to seem to have arisen from some online fever swamp completely removed from reality. Look at all of the claims you've made with absolutely zero citation to evidence. Given the quality of the claims, I would imagine such citations would be from incredibly dubious sources. At the start of this Sussman trial, I laid down a marker on what would make me change my mind. I thought the case was weak but if Sussman was convicted and then Durham started getting convictions up the chain, I would reconsider my position. When Sussman was acquitted, this apparently became evidence not that the case was weak, but that the grand Clinton conspiracy went even deeper. Clinton is apparently the kind of person who can control the entire FBI (I guess she wanted the Comey letter?), DC juries, the justice system, basically everything she touches, but still lost the election? It seems much more likely that the FBI was investigating Russian connections with the Trump campaign because there were just so many different Russian connections to the Trump campaign. I don't know what the media diet is of the people on this board, but given these wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that fly in the face of evidence and logic (as well as the constant citing to the freaking Federalist), it's clear that we do not live in a shared reality and I find that sad. So many people just point to what media outlets and political actors claim and ignore that underlying facts. It makes serious discussion next to impossible. Also, I say all of this as someone who did NOT vote for Clinton and was still a Republican in 2016. I don't know what happened to the party but dear lord am I glad I left it.

Stronger controls around straw purchases. Our background check and gun tracing programs leave a lot to be desired and have loopholes that facilitate interstate gun trafficking. If we had a system where we had close to a 100% success rate in taking a gun used in a crime in Chicago and tracing it all the way back to the specific individual who purchased it and where they purchased it, that would allow us to prosecute the straw purchaser and potentially the store (if it did not comply with regulations). These actions would reduce the availability of guns to criminals through straw purchasers.