ChiGoose

It’s not at all, regardless of how much you want it to be. He broke the law, refused every chance to rectify that, and anyone of us in his position would already have been arrested. Sorry if that makes you sad, but the facts don’t care about your feelings.

1. The president doesn’t actually hold a security clearance. Unlike others who can retain clearance when transitioning to civilian life, the president’s right to view classified documents disappears the moment they are no longer president. Like Cinderella’s carriage turning into a pumpkin at midnight. 2. Under the PRA, all presidential records (even unclassified ones) become the property of the Archivist at the expiration of the president’s term. The president himself has no possessory right to them. 3. It doesn’t matter what Trump’s intent to *do* with the documents was, only that he knew his possession was illegal and he kept them anyway. So, even if he took unclassified government documents when he was president, the second he was no longer president his possession of the documents without an agreement from NARA was illegal.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter post. There’s a discussion to be had about what the law should be, but I’m only taking about what the law actually is. You’re right that I would disagree with your categorization of Cannon’s special master order. Her court didn’t have jurisdiction and a special master wasn’t warranted here. We know this because, on appeal, the 11th Circuit asked for any cases supporting her decision and Trump’s lawyers couldn’t find a single one. As to Garland’s actions, it’s helpful to remember the entire history of this saga: - Trump illegally possessed government documents - The government asked him to return them - Trump refused - The government spent something like 8 months negotiating the return of the documents - Trump returned boxes of documents and stated that all of the documents had been returned - The government is informed that Trump still has some of the documents despite claiming they had all been returned - The government obtains and executed a search warrant at Mar A Lago Given that fact pattern, I’m not sure there’s any alternative to a search warrant at that stage. It’s clear that they could not trust him to turn over the documents under his own volition. As I stated, the only difference that Trump makes here is that he’s currently not in handcuffs like you or I would be under the same fact pattern. If the DoJ declines to indict him, he gets his stuff back. If the do indict him, he gets to challenge every piece of evidence to keep it out of the trial. Until then, we just play the waiting game. This is almost entirely wrong.

So you have a couple of things wrong in your account, but I'd like to mainly just address the concerns of bias. In the scenario you're laying out, Trump does have recourse. If and when he's indicted, he can get evidence that was improperly seized excluded from trial. To set an example, let's pretend that, in the course of the search, one of the FBI agents took a ficus plant from Trump's office even though it clearly wasn't a document. Later, when examining the evidence, agents removed the plant from its pot and found a bag of cocaine. On that bag was a name, like "H. Maddas," so the agents began searching for this person and were able to find them. Mr. Maddas had documents proving that Trump was selling our nuclear secrets to the Saudis, so the FBI takes them, deposes Maddas and then files additional charges against Trump for possession of illegal drugs and selling our nuclear secrets. Looks bad! However, Trump's attorneys would then file motions to exclude any evidence obtained from the ficus plant from trial as the plant was seized illegally because it was not within the scope of the warrant. They are going to win that motion. Now, the DoJ has a charge against Trump for possession of cocaine but they cannot tell the jury that they found cocaine in his possession. The judge will toss out this charge on a motion from Trump's attorney as the DoJ cannot meet even the basic prima facie case for possession with the admissible evidence. Additionally, Trump's lawyers will file a motion to exclude any evidence around H. Maddas and his evidence of Trump selling secrets. This is called "fruit of the poisonous tree" which bars evidence, even if found legally, if it originally derived from an illegal search. There was nothing illegal about the FBI going to talk to H. Maddas and getting the additional evidence, but the only reason the FBI was even there was because they originally conducted an illegal search of the ficus plant. So the court is going to prevent the H. Maddas evidence from being presented at trial as well. The selling secrets charge will also be dismissed for lack of admissible evidence. The bottom line is that Trump isn't being treated differently* than how anyone else would. This is not a political prosecution but exactly the prosecution you would expect if anyone did what Trump did. Under the law, Trump actually is an ordinary citizen. That's the beauty of the American system: we have regular people elected to lead our country and then they step down and become regular people again (as far as the law is concerned). The 11th Circuit, in overturning Judge Canon's ridiculous order, explicitly stated that Trump is to be treated as anyone else would in his position and rejected the idea of a special exception in the law for ex-presidents. *I suspect that the DoJ is using prosecutorial discretion to avoid charging Trump until they have fully fleshed out the case. If you or I were in Trump's shoes, we'd already have been indicted. This is the singular instance in which Trump is being treated differently than anyone else would be in this case.

Never said I was non-partisan. Never lied about who I was. Keep making stuff up, it’s basically all you do at this point.

I would be genuinely shocked if that happens. Seems incredibly unlikely.

Does it make you feel good to put words in my mouth? To make things up and attribute them to me? Do you sit at home, thinking about me? Wondering how you can get me to react to you? You seem to be infatuated with me, some random person on the internet you don’t actually know. It’s kinda sad, buddy. I hope you find some meaning in your life, but given the braindead posts you put up here, I’m not sure you could even manage to tie your own shoes to get outside and touch some grass. Be careful you don’t trip on them and fall. If you posted something of value on this site, it’d be a first.

Looking forward to Sinema’s new job at Fox News in 2024.

I don’t know why Comey broke FBI protocol. If were to guess, there were leaks and rumors about the NY office that Rudy was still close to from his time as prosecutor. If Comey felt that the info was going to get out anyway, maybe he was trying to get ahead of it. Still the wrong move.

Also answered by just reading a couple of pages. If you don’t believe me, you could also check out the Senate report, signed off on by chair Marco Rubio. You can’t unring that bell. Hillary had a reputation as a lifelong politician with questionable relationships and had spent most of the campaign under investigation. I’m not sure how much Comey clearing her actually mattered to the public. It certainly didn’t sway most of PPP.

I did not say that. Russians ran an influence operation and the Trump campaign welcomed it and sometimes cooperated. How effective it actually was is up for debate. If there was a solitary thing that changed the outcome (and I’m not sure there was), it’d be James Comey violating FBI protocol a few days before the election to announce another Clinton investigation.

This is helpful, because by any reasonable understanding, members of the Trump campaign did collude with Russians. Anyone capable of reading a couple of pages and a table of contents understands this. So when we see people saying otherwise, we can discount their opinions as uninformed.

This requires a considerable amount of cooperation, strategic planning, and competence from the left that I’ve yet to see actually exist.

My takeaway is that most of the people on this thread have terminal online brain, don’t understand how things work, and eagerly jump on anything that makes them feel good or smart. I don’t want to defend Twitter. Twitter has problems, all social media sites do, but I’m hardly convinced by people being outraged that a political campaign (not the government) flagged non-consensual sexual content for review. Content moderation is hard and everybody is going to screw it up, no matter how hard they try not to. But maybe the reason that conservatives tend to face moderation more is simply because they’re just lying more.

I mean, you’re not seeing that. You’re just seeing a company trying to figure out content moderation and making mistakes. But the fever swamps will see what they want to see because the only reason they aren’t recognized for their obvious greatness must be because powerful forces are working against them.

Our diverse military is currently helping Ukraine beat the ever loving piss out of the super manly Russian army that Ted Cruz loves so much. You're on the wrong thread, BTW. All of your Putin bootlicking comrades are in the Ukraine thread.

Yes, it’ll be released.

My point was that nuking a story is worse than allowing it but not amplifying it. I made no claims about the quality of the fact checking itself as it was irrelevant to the point I was making. You did the whole “just asking questions” cowardly BS about the vetting instead of just expressing your own position, and then pretended it was a good faith debate instead of just the childish exercise in trolling that it was.

There is no fool-proof form of content moderation. Every system is going to have flaws. I said I think it’s better not to delete or block things while they are being vetted. You decided to be a troll about it. That’s not a debate, it’s just performative assholery.

No, I was saying that allowing the posting of links while they are being vetted is better than completely nuking the links. But you knew that, you’re just being a troll. That, or you can’t read. Thanks.

Dunno I don’t work at Facebook. What are they?

According to TechDirt, Facebook’s policy when something is flagged as a potential misinfo op is to allow it to be shared but not to boost it through the algorithm until Facebook’s internal fact checkers had reviewed it.

Well then it’s a good thing that Taibbi stated that the government didn’t request the items to be taken down! Also, what your call gobbledygook is what most people call facts and logic. But I’m not surprised you had difficulty parsing it.

The article points out the Facebook’s policy in similar situations is to allow the posting of the link but not boost it through algorithms until it’s vetted. That seems way better than Twitter’s nuking policy.

Yes, Taibbi explicitly states that there was no evidence of government involvement. Basically, Twitter had a really bad moderation policy (nuke suspicious info until it’s vetted) were warned about potential election interference by the FBI, and when they saw the laptop story, they invoked their (bad) policy. This immediately backfired due to the Streisand Effect and was such a bad call that not only did a prominent Dem Congressman reach out to them to say blocking the story was bad, but they ended up reversing course within a day.