Lock him up! CNN reports Trump to be indicted

Drop the indictment? That’s nit how pleas work. He would need to plead guilty or no contest, they won’t just toss the indictment. I have no idea what Justice considers a fair plea at this stage, particularly after he thumbed his nose and flat-out embarked upon a campaign to defraud the government. It sure won’t be, “We’re sorry, Mr. Trump,” unless they suffer from terrible pretrial rulings.

 

Fine, don't toss the indictment, give him a fine with no prison time.

Don't threaten your arch political rival with spending the rest of his life in federal prison.

 

If that’s consistent with other similarly situated cases (to the extent there is such a thing), I’d be fine with that.

I don’t, however, buy the “threatening of an arch-rival” charge, not under these mind-blowing facts, not after seeing the extent of Trump’s deliberate obstruction, and further considering this started long before he announced his candidacy (and was not too far removed from his presidency), and considering the fact that an independent prosecutor was appointed to investigate (which Trump knew AND STILL embarked upon is campaign of instruction).

 

If we're going by the letter of the law, common law larceny all you need to do is move the stolen item an inch and you can be prosecuted. The rest is arbitrary standards and prosecutorial discretion.

And I've been told that if Trump returned these documents, he would be suffering no legal consequences. All I'm asking is for the DOJ to put their money where their mouth is and for you guys to put your money where your mouth is.

 

LOLOLOL

 

There were a whole bunch of documents that Trump returned. They don't show up anywhere in these charges. Because he returned them when he was asked to return them.

 

YES!!! Exactly this. If he had done the thing, this wouldn't be happening, but he didn't and so it is.

 

Nice slight of hand moving of the goalposts here. Bravo.

 

But this completely omits the most egregious conduct outlined in the indictment!! You just want to forget and forgive Trump’s KNOWINGLY LYING in response to repeated informal requests, formal requests, and subpoenas, compounded by his intentional act of (poorly) hiding the documents from the government, and then telling his lawyer he had nothing so the lawyer could lie to the government.

What troubles me is that you haven’t discussed the actual danger Trump presented through the documents. He had them in unsecured locations. He had boxes of unsealed documents in a room, where the boxes were surrounding A LARGE-SCALE COPY MACHINE!!!

Doesn’t it give you the slightest pause that maybe the guy, holding secure documents who lied about having them, and then went through great trouble to move them to hide them, might make use of his volume copy machine and copy, dare I say it … AND SELL OR EXPLOIT, these very same documents?!?!

 

Of course not, but you know that. His team will likely argue that at the time the documents were taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, he was still president and had authority to declassify information. And you can cite all the process laws you want and I can cite the laws that the Congress has power to check the president, but none of that has mattered in the past 30 years (at least), so we're bickering over what the POTUS had the right to do and what he didn't have the right to do and there is an argument for his team to make.

 

You don't understand that fallacy. It's weird since you are an expert in so many of them.

"Moving the goalposts is a fallacy in which the two parties in a debate agree on evidence that would refute a claim, but then, when such evidence is presented, the “losing” side insists that the given evidence is insufficient. At first, this might not seem like a fallacy, because while it is obviously a cheap shot to use in a debate, the logical implications of it are not so obvious."

Why won't you go away?

 

Apologies for any lack of clarity in what I wrote. What moving of the goalposts do you see here?

 

Well, first, he did NOT under any set of facts move the documents WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT. Second, the moment Biden took office, he no longer had a single right to a single document. He had no lawful control over them. Third, he boasted to a third party that he showed the documents to that p (a) the documents WERE CLASSIFIED, (b) he could have BUT DIDN’T declassify that WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT, (c) he did it argue they were declassified when testing the subpoena, (d) even if at some point he did have the authority to remove the documents, he was then asked by the existing executive branch to return the documents, and HE DID NOT REFUSE TO RETURN THEM, he said he didn’t have them, then he said he found some and returned those, then lied by saying he did an exhaustive search but found nothing, then moved the documents, then lied in connection with a duly served subpoena.

His team will argue many things. One of the best, perhaps only possible path to win argument, is that the Government cannot use his attorneys’ statements against him. I think that argument is facially doomed, given the crime fraud exception to the privilege, but it’s perhaps his only path.

The rest of your arguments are not, in my opinion, legally sustainable or factually supported. They sound to me as of they were given birth by Gateway.

 

So it's the lying then, not the failure/refusal to return the documents.

 

You tell me. You know what you did, don't pull a Hillary and play dumb.

 

Strawman argument. That's not what he said.

 

Ignore button is right there, buddy.

 

That's disingenuous. Give him the courtesy of answering a direct question.

You are such a bad actor.

 

I would if half the posts in a thread weren't your shitposts. Threads are impossible to follow when everything is one side of a conversation.

 

If me and maybe half a dozen to a dozen conservative posters left, this entire forum would be one side of a conversation.