US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9019

On October 19 2017 01:37 LegalLord wrote:
Honestly, all this legality/permissibility drama aside, it's a fairly distasteful protest. Though to be fair there shouldn't be any laws against mere poor taste.

On October 19 2017 01:39 farvacola wrote:

Dude's a former US Attorney with a work history of going after the KKK; he's a bit light on charisma imo, but he compares quite well with Roy Moore overall.

On October 19 2017 01:37 LegalLord wrote:
Honestly, all this legality/permissibility drama aside, it's a fairly distasteful protest. Though to be fair there shouldn't be any laws against mere poor taste.

On October 19 2017 01:37 LegalLord wrote:
Honestly, all this legality/permissibility drama aside, it's a fairly distasteful protest. Though to be fair there shouldn't be any laws against mere poor taste.

The questioning of Attorney General Jeff Sessions by Senator Martin Heinrich (D., N.M.) demonstrates why congressional hearings are theater, not searches for the truth.

Senator Heinrich pressed the attorney general to disclose the contents of conversations with President Trump. As a matter of policy, the attorney general does not answer such questions in order to protect the president’s power to invoke executive privilege. Heinrich may not like that privilege (at least with a Republican in the White House), but it is recognized in law. Knowing Sessions would not answer the questions, Heinrich proceeded to accuse the attorney general of obstruction — allegations of obstruction having become a Democratic fetish now that the Obama administration is no longer in power and matters such as “Fast and Furious” and the IRS abuse of conservative groups are no longer the focus of congressional hearings.

There are many relationships as to which the law protects the confidentiality of communications: marital, doctor-patient, attorney-client, priest-penitent, and so on. There is also, of course, the privilege against self-incrimination. In a trial, where a judge presides and ensures that lawyers don’t play unfair games, the lawyers know they are not supposed to ask questions in front of the jury that will induce the witness to refuse to answer. The lawyer knows that if the witness is asserting a legitimate legal privilege, the lawyer is not supposed to try to make it look like the witness is obstructing the proceeding. In fact, if a prosecutor refers to the defendant’s refusal to answer questions, it can result in a mistrial, so seriously does the law take the protection of this privilege.

Congressional committees go kangaroo court in this regard. There is no judge to tell them to knock it off.

Senator Angus King (I., Maine) followed up on Heinrich’s “obstruction” shenanigans by, first, establishing that President Trump did not invoke executive privilege in order to prevent Sessions from testifying; then, he got Sessions to acknowledge that the privilege belongs to the president and the attorney general is not empowered to invoke it. Adding two and two but coming up with five, Senator King expressed outrage that Sessions proceeded to refuse to answer questions about his discussions with Trump.

To be clear, the president’s decision not to assert his privilege in order to prevent the attorney general from appearing at the hearing is not a waiver of the privilege with respect to any individual question to which it may apply. And the attorney general’s refusal to answer any individual question is not an invocation of the privilege; it is a pause to enable the president to determine whether to waive the privilege. If the privilege is waived, then the attorney general will answer. And if senators want to advance the inquiry rather than create a misimpression of obstruction, they can submit the questions in writing ahead of time and ask whether the president will waive the privilege.

Of course, legal propriety has to be balanced against political accountability. It is important that Congress and the public be informed about any questions as to which the president is invoking executive privilege. But it is wrong to suggest that the attorney general is obstructing a congressional investigation by protecting a legitimate legal privilege.

On October 19 2017 01:49 Yurie wrote:
Not being from the US I have totally failed to see how some random sports people kneeling to support some random cause is a big deal. Or even something worth covering positively or negatively at all.

Could somebody explain what the uproar is about?

On October 19 2017 01:43 farvacola wrote:

No, Biden's showing his age with that "Golden Mean in the public forum" bullshit and Kasich knows exactly what he's talking about, for once.

On October 19 2017 01:49 Danglars wrote:

National Review

Older article on the same topic since it keeps coming up. If Congressional Committees wish to do more than political theater, they can submit their questions in advance to prompt an actual invocation of executive privilege. It's obvious the latest tomfoolery is actors playing their part with no substance.

On October 19 2017 01:54 LegalLord wrote:

An attitude of "respect the flag, stand for the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem" is expected here (though not at all mandated). Refusing to do so is seen as displaying a sign of disrespect for the country, which seems fairly inconsistent with the goal of the protest unless you are trying to say "fuck America."

On October 19 2017 01:49 Yurie wrote:
Not being from the US I have totally failed to see how some random sports people kneeling to support some random cause is a big deal. Or even something worth covering positively or negatively at all.

Could somebody explain what the uproar is about?

On October 19 2017 02:01 LegalLord wrote:
Plenty of shitty, counterproductive protests back then too.

On October 19 2017 02:01 LegalLord wrote:
Plenty of shitty, counterproductive protests back then too.

When Reince Priebus departed from the West Wing in July, after months of rumor and acrimony, he didn’t let the door hit him on the way out. “A president has a right to hit a reset button. I think it’s a good time to hit the reset button,” he told CNN. “I’m always going to be a Trump fan.”

But the graceful exit and months of public silence were very far from the end of the story. On Friday, Priebus testified for hours with lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team who are probing possible Russia collusion and a host of other matters, including obstruction of justice in Trump’s decision to fire F.B.I. Director James Comey. While Priebus has been careful not to criticize the president openly, sources who have spoken to him say he’s not happy about the way he was treated by Trump and his family. “He was champing at the bit to testify,” a Republican familiar with Priebus’s thinking said. Priebus declined to comment to me about what he told Mueller’s lawyers, but his attorney, William Burck, told Politico that his client “was happy to answer all of their questions.”

According to sources familiar with the matter, the person in Trump’s orbit who may have the most to be worried about in Priebus’s testimony is Jared Kushner. Priebus has knowledge of Kushner’s proximity to the controversial decision to fire Comey during a weekend at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in early May, which, hypothetically, is the lynchpin of an obstruction case against the president and his advisers. Trump was accompanied for the weekend by Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller. At the club, Miller drafted an angry letter to Comey justifying his removal. (White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly told Trump to revise the letter, which people who viewed it likened to a “screed.”) The following Monday, after returning to Washington, Trump told other advisers, including Priebus, of the decision to oust Comey during an Oval Office meeting.

Kushner’s closeness to the discussion of firing Comey continues to be much discussed by current and former Trump administration officials, who see it as one of the main drivers of the administration’s present legal travails. Two sources familiar with the matter told me that prior to Comey’s dismissal, Kushner expressed concern to West Wing officials about the investigation. “He’s all over us,” Kushner told one official in February, according to two sources briefed on the conversation. “He was freaked out about Comey from day one,” one Trump adviser said.

Some in the West Wing were concerned about Kushner's entanglements even before he was a government employee. According to two sources familiar with the matter, transition officials became concerned about meetings that Kushner had helped to set up with representatives from the Chinese insurance giant Anbang and the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund to raise hundreds of millions to bail out 666 Fifth Avenue, the debt-laden crown jewel in his family’s real-estate empire. The meetings raise ethical questions given Kushner’s status as a presidential adviser involved in foreign policy. They worried that he could be subject to, as one of them put it, “an influence operation” by foreign governments.

Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell declined to comment. On Monday evening I was contacted by Charles Harder in his capacity as a legal representative for Kushner. He, too, declined to comment. (Harder, who has represented Hulk Hogan and Melania Trump, recently severed ties with another client, Harvey Weinstein.) Ty Cobb, a member of Trump’s legal team, who is handling the administration’s response to various legal and federal investigations, e-mailed me to say: “It is disturbing how unsubstantiated and reckless this story is. It combines conclusions arising without foundation with well worn but widely peddled fantasies that other outlets have passed on for months because nothing in it is verifiable except for the long well known fact that Jared and his family were in New Jersey that weekend. Jared has fully cooperated with all investigations since the beginning. He has been demonstrably transparent with the Congress. Jared voluntarily produced documents and even appeared for six hours of well received testimony before investigative bodies. Way out of bounds, here!”

Kushner’s legal team has said that their client complied with federal ethics laws when he met with investors. Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, agrees. “At the time that Kushner had them, he was not an official,” Painter told me. But Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and chair of the government watchdog group CREW, says Kushner’s real-estate meetings with foreign investors are problematic. “They raise issues under the transition’s own ethics code,” Eisen told me in an e-mail. “We have a very senior White House adviser whose family is facing an enormous looming liability on 666 Fifth. While he may have divested his personal interest, his family members are at risk, and you can’t divest your gene pool. The situation has given and continues to give him and his family . . . an enormous possible incentive to curry favor with potential investors.”

For his part, Priebus is trying to keep his channels to Trumpworld open and seems to be downplaying any notion that he used his Mueller testimony to settle scores. According to a source, Priebus said after his appearance: “I really didn’t want to hurt anyone.”