The official "let's impeach Trump" thread

[Red]

So the Russians assisted in the effort to get rid of Yovanovitch, the American Ambassador to Ukraine:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/tech...ve-helped-spread-smear-us-ambassador-ukraine/

"The story that appeared on The Hill website on March 20 was startling.
Marie Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, had given a “list of people whom we should not prosecute” to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, according to a write-up of an interview Lutsenko gave to the conservative columnist John Solomon.

Five days later, an image of that purported list appeared in a post on the website Medium and on a number of other self-publishing platforms in locations as disparate as Germany, South Africa and San Francisco. In less than a week, the Medium essay had been translated into Spanish and German and posted to other websites.


Now, a social media analysis firm, Graphika, has traced those posts to a Russian disinformation campaign — in the first evidence that a network of accounts involved in spreading disinformation before the 2016 election also participated in circulating the false claims about Yovanovitch that led earlier this year to her recall from the U.S. embassy in Kyiv."

 

[Red]

Trump's supporters here think we can now dismiss as fake news any connections to Russia that might exist, and that Trump does not want revealed for all the world to see. All just a hoax to those supporters. Naw, I doubt it, and I've been suggesting for years, that if you want to know exactly what connections exist between Trump and Russia, follow the money. Of course, Trump simply will not allow it, and now the SCOTUS will take the issue up in March, 2020. But, really, although I might not find out in my own lifetime at this rate, lol, Trump opponents will someday have the last laugh:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixg...ns-are-so-important-this-week-in-impeachment/

https://newrepublic.com/article/143...ses-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate

 

[idestroyedthetoilet]

Democrats hate it when Johnathan Turley gives history and legal lessons. He's out again with more.

The Trump impeachment is even weaker than the Johnson impeachment, which had an accepted criminal act as its foundation. This will be the first presidential impeachment to go forward without such a recognized crime but, like the Johnson impeachment, it has a manufactured and artificial construct. The Trump impeachment also marks the fastest impeachment of all time, depending on how you count the days in the Johnson case.

The same is true with the abuse of power article. I testified that the House had a legitimate reason to investigate this allegation and, if there was a showing of a quid pro quo, could impeach Trump for it. Democrats called highly compelling witnesses who said they believed such a quid pro quo existed, but the record is conflicted. There is no statement of a quid pro quo in the conversations between Trump and the Ukrainians, and White House aides have denied being given such a demand. Trump declared during two direct conversations, with Republican Senator Ron Johnson and Ambassador Gordon Sondland, that there was no quid pro quo.

One can question the veracity of his statement, as he likely knew of the whistleblower at the time of the calls. But there is no direct statement in the record by Trump to the contrary. Democrats and their witnesses have instead insisted that the impeachment can be proven by inferences or presumptions. The problem is that there still are a significant number of witnesses who likely have direct evidence, but the House has refused to go to court to compel their appearance. The House will therefore move forward with an impeachment that seems designed to fail in the Senate, as if that is a better option than taking the time to build a complete case.

"I don't like the way he talks" is not an impeachable offense.

 

[fishonjazz]

Democrats hate it when Johnathan Turley gives history and legal lessons. He's out again with more.





"I don't like the way he talks" is not an impeachable offense.

But according to you trump has done multiple things that are in fact impeachable and should be impeached. That's according to you anyways.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app

 

[Eminence]

That Trump managed to sell to so many people that he's not a part of the 'system' is truly astounding to me.

 

[silesian]

The investigation was a waste of time. Our country could have been better served without doing it. Most the convictions were perjury traps. Which one of those so called crimes could be possibly be worse than what the FBI and Clinton did to start the stupid process in the first place? Thats the real crime that you turn your morals off to forget. The aftermath of convictions were the poison berries grown from the rotten seeds Clinton and the FBI planted. They forced people into mistakes and lying, and also uncovered some real crimes in the process. But none the less, the most egregious crime has been severely overlooked. The FBI being compromised is no joke. Thats the real threat to the country. I suppose you could believe it was just coincidence that 17 errors were all made in the same direction.

View attachment 8618

they made me lie

Cops are crooks

ok, scoop.

 

[silesian]

2 out of 6 is "most"?


Ll.

Welcome to Trumpian truthsylvania Avenue

 

[Hotdog]

That Trump managed to sell to so many people that he's not a part of the 'system' is truly astounding to me.

Really? Because Im not sure if you have noticed but everyone and their dog are going after Trump. You think a system guy gets the treatment he is getting?

We are talking about a cabal of elitists, deep staters, and globalists. Trump is definitely not a part of that group. I think that has been made pretty obvious by what is happening to him for even thinking about draining the swamp.

How you cant see that is baffling.

 

[sirkickyass]

Thats how I feel about the Russia Birthers.

Im actually ready to come to the middle whenever you guys are.

In your view what is "the middle?"

 

[sirkickyass]

I do want to put on my lawyer hat for a bit here and say that the "unless there's a statutory crime, you can't impeach" argument is very bizarre to me. I see Jonathan Turley and the GOP talking heads say that like it's this beyond obvious statement. It doesn't actually make any sense in the overall framework of the American legal system.

The structure of our government is that there are tiers of legal authority. Roughly:

Tier One: The Constitution

Tier Two: Statutes.

Tier Three: Administrative law and implementation decisions.

And so on and so forth. We can have debates about where things like executive orders and OLC decisions sit, but there's no dispute that the Constitution sits at the top.

In this scheme, laws derive their power and force because they are in accordance with the larger constitutional design. This is why the Supreme Court invalidates laws that are Unconstitutional. By contrast, it does not invalidate portions of the Constitution that are incompatible with individual laws passed by Congress. The existence of Constitutional mechanisms takes precedence over the existence of laws: not the other way around.

The GOP insistence that it is impossible to invoke constitutional remedies without reference to later-drafted criminal statutes gets this power relationship precisely backwards. The impeachment process was drafted and defined before there was even an operating United States criminal code. The impeachment clauses of the Constitution exist independently of any specific criminal violation - they do not require Congress to have passed a specific "don't abuse your power brah" criminal statute in order to be effective. Many of the crimes against the country that a President could commit are probably logistically only commitable by that one person. No one else has the authority to sell US Foreign policy credibly. A legal theory that the impeachment provisions of the Constitution are inoperable unless later codified by statutory grant presupposes that the Constitution gets its power from later law and that we need a separate criminal code that applies to only a single person. These are, frankly, legal absurdities.

Those who most claim to love our Constitution sure do their damnedest to render it ineffective. They either don't understand the basics of how the government is supposed to work or are purposely saying things that "sort of sound right" to confuse people who don't know any better. And it honestly saddens me to these sort of "ignorant of civics 101" talking points spread so widely during this process.

 

[sirkickyass]

Also, it is surreal to me that it has been taken as an article of faith that the Russia investigation turned up nothing. We have the Mueller report, which documents all the Russian hacking and distribution of information to Wikileaks. We have Don Jr.'s "I love it email" and we know they met with the Kremlin lawyer about Magnitsky act sanctions. We know all about Manafort and Flynn's connections to Deripaska and other Putin connected oligarchs. We've got people in jail that were at the closest points of Trump's inner circle.

Just today: Maria Butina, the Russian spy who infiltrated the NRA and used Russian money to pump up the influence of the gun right's group,to help Trump, in the 2016 election, has been hired as a new television presenter for state-run Russia Today. She wears a t-shirt that says "foreign agent" in the promotional video for her new show.

https://tolknews.ru/news/27366-stal...TxpoutiARz3VinWD5IE_XAt3KhSnOYbPFwog9CY07zKgs

Here's video of Butina talking to then candidate Donald Trump at a public forum, in which they agree that there should be no sanctions on Russia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fp1TioaLcg&feature=youtu.be

The core issue in American politics is that Trump's administration has fundamental and glaring legitimacy problems, he was elected by a minority with the interference of an adversarial foreign power. In reality, the GOP has won the popular vote in a presidential election precisely one time in the last 30 years. A rule by the minority is not sustainable over decades in a consitutional democracy, and there's a push to pretend that isn't what has occurred. Trump's illegitimacy cannot be psychologically acknowledged by the party - it requires too much of a shock to the overall system of understanding of what and who America is. But until we break the deadlock caused by illegitimate government we're all going to be at each other's throats perpetually.

 

[Harambe]

I do want to put on my lawyer hat for a bit here and say that the "unless there's a statutory crime, you can't impeach" argument is very bizarre to me. I see Jonathan Turley and the GOP talking heads say that like it's this beyond obvious statement. It doesn't actually make any sense in the overall framework of the American legal system.

The structure of our government is that there are tiers of legal authority. Roughly:

Tier One: The Constitution

Tier Two: Statutes.

Tier Three: Administrative law and implementation decisions.

And so on and so forth. We can have debates about where things like executive orders and OLC decisions sit, but there's no dispute that the Constitution sits at the top.

In this scheme, laws derive their power and force because they are in accordance with the larger constitutional design. This is why the Supreme Court invalidates laws that are Unconstitutional. By contrast, it does not invalidate portions of the Constitution that are incompatible with individual laws passed by Congress. The existence of Constitutional mechanisms takes precedence over the existence of laws: not the other way around.

The GOP insistence that it is impossible to invoke constitutional remedies without reference to later-drafted criminal statutes gets this power relationship precisely backwards. The impeachment process was drafted and defined before there was even an operating United States criminal code. The impeachment clauses of the Constitution exist independently of any specific criminal violation - they do not require Congress to have passed a specific "don't abuse your power brah" criminal statute in order to be effective. Many of the crimes against the country that a President could commit are probably logistically only commitable by that one person. No one else has the authority to sell US Foreign policy credibly. A legal theory that the impeachment provisions of the Constitution are inoperable unless later codified by statutory grant presupposes that the Constitution gets its power from later law and that we need a separate criminal code that applies to only a single person. These are, frankly, legal absurdities.

Those who most claim to love our Constitution sure do their damnedest to render it ineffective. They either don't understand the basics of how the government is supposed to work or are purposely saying things that "sort of sound right" to confuse people who don't know any better. And it honestly saddens me to these sort of "ignorant of civics 101" talking points spread so widely during this process.

I love it when you speak legalese to me.