POLITICS President Trump: 100+ Mornings After (Term 1 Complete)

My understanding is that it is the definition of obstruction of justice. And impeachment doesn't necessarily mean removal from office. Clinton was impeached.

 

My gut says russia manipulated the campaign, and both without and within. Trump may not have been aware, but I suspect members of his campaign either were aware or should have been.

And it was about the clinton emails. Russia had them, and gave them to wikileaks. Those close to the campaign were aware of all this. Remember, guilliani even hinted about them about to be leaked.

Trump asked Russians to leat them if they have them. Months prior, his son sat in a meeting with Russian contacts to discuss what they had on clinton.

Do the math. Something was fishy. Manafort seems like a good thread to tug.

And don't think this is all partisan. We know the GOP servers were breached around the same time. Nothing was ever leaked. Why? Don't know, but it could mean some are compromised. Could just be there was nothing useful at the time.

Putin has a personal dislike for clinton, and knew sanctions would continue or intensify under her. Under trump, he has refused to impose the sanctions congress nearly unanimously passed just a few months ago, which is actually a constitutional crisis that isn't getting any attention.

You tell me. Why shouldn't the passed sanctions be imposed? Even trump admits they meddled now, so why not?

 

I'm pretty sure it means you do something you aren't supposed to do in order to hide the truth. Trump firing Comey is within his scope of duty as President and based on the amount of shit that guy was taking you'd be hard pressed to say it was unwarranted.

You'd have to prove Trump knew there was something bad that Comey was going to uncover and that he explicitly fired him over that. Otherwise, he can just say, "Yeah, this guy is a big embarrassment and I was tired of his incompetence screwing up the Russia investigation and the FBI in general."

 

Not if it was for investigating trump, which it was.

 

It matters if Trump fired him due to the fact that he wanted to obstruct the investigation rather than it being for job performance or Trump wanting to go in a different direction. The president can fire the FBI Director for whatever reason he wants, but doing so to prevent a legitimate investigation of himself would, and should, force Congress to act.

 

Here's a very even handed discussion of this. https://www.lawfareblog.com/andrew-c-mccarthy-changes-his-tone-obstruction-justice

It isn't black and white, and it may come down to a sum of many actions.

 

It is laughable.

 

Do you think that Comey himself was doing the actual investigation? If not; how did firing him obstruct it?

 

Good lord. You’ve lost your mind.

 

The refusal to enforce Russian sanctions not getting any publicity is astonishing to me, too. In an administration that has broken so many of the rules and precedents, I guess certain things that would get massive interest, normally, just don't any more. I mean, hell, the vote for this was, like 97% of Congress in favor and at a time when the president's Russia connections are under serious question.

 

He fired Comey because he was bent on protecting his domain and is a worthless POS.

 

Did you miss the indictments last week?

 

You just said it was the very definition of obstruction.

 

That's not my question to answer, though. Mueller will have to decide. If Trump fired Comey because he wanted to stop an investigation of himself, then he could be in deep shit. Anything else, even if firing Comey was petty political stuff, is within the purview of the president.

 

To me it is. But I am giving you a fair entry point rather than railroading the issue. Read what they're saying. If he wasn't the CiC it'd be done. But this is unprecedented circumstances

 

Media needs to be pushing the "Russia sponsored anti-Trump rallies after the election" story more. Trump always reacts when he feels slighted.

Speaking of colluding with Russia. Couldn't it be said that CNN and MSNBC who so gleefully covered those rallies were colluding with Russia?

 

I don't think it is, even if he explicitly said he fired him due to the Russia stuff. I'd wager he also said about 400 other things about Comey himself and through his representatives. He says tons of things. He didn't go outside the scope of his duties and you could find about a billion articles questioning Comey's competence prior to the firing, so it would be hard to say the termination was unjustified.

Basically, you might be able to convince yourself that Comey's termination had a nefarious motive, but you could never prove it.

 

If he asked him to end the investigation and take it easy on flynn, and then fired him when he didnt. That's how. If he followed that up by asking sessions and rosenstein to fire mueller, even more so.

Or maybe not. Maybe he had multiple foreign agents (Flynn, Manafort, etc) around him that were undeclared and working on his campaign, involved with illegal activities, and he had no idea.

Accept he did know about flynn and advised him to not admit to any wrongdoing...

There's a mine field. It's far from checkmate, but this isn't a nothingburger.