Now that it's been shown to be irrefutable that a president cannot be indicted, let's move on to why Mr. Mueller needs to be removed as Special Impeachment Counsel (SIC). Reason 1 --He hired Andrew Weissmann as investigator knowing full well his anti-Trump/pro-Hillary stance and also his failings and nefarious tactics in other cases, such as Enron. Weissman, as well as Mueller, should be removed from the witch hunt poste haste. Please feel free to post your reasons here as well. --Izzy
So government employees must be screened for thought crimes against the administration... Why were those other Presidents indicted?
I don't think that Mueller the Clown should have ever been appointed for all the reasons discussed, but at this point I am all in favor of just letting him go forward and try to prosecute trump. It is being exposed hourly that the fbi and his team are corrupt, biased, and conflicted. It is a tremendous gift and shit-heap for defense teams to work with and for the public to learn more about so that they can see just what this witch hunt clown show is comprised of. As I have said many times, Mueller has a real crappy track record in big cases and he also saw how Comey fell from grace. He knows that if he goes after trump and puts the country through a big mess but gets no conviction that his legacy gets very crappy, very fast, just like Comey's did. He also knows that as a witchhunter he has to bring home at least some scalps but that was always a given. Mannafort and Flynn were handed to him on a platter when he arrived so that is no accomplishment on his part. Then he got the popocrapulus guy, and podesta has come up, and there will be a few more, and he will get some offshore tax thing on trump that will spin in the courts for years and Mueller will probably lose on appeal as with most of his Enron, hells angel, anthrax, and Anderson little cases. So he has to decide whether to try to take on trump directly in the courts. I say just let Mueller just continue to show what a shitheap his team is and let the defense attorneys use all that as cannon fodder. The investigation will go on for a long time to come because Mueller has nothing else to do in life and he wants to use it to hurt trump in the midterms especially if he cannot get a prosecution on trump or does not dare to try. Mueller is following the same trajectory that Comey did. We all know that Comey used to be Mr. Above Reproach with the Sterling Reputation. Then he began to descend into hell where both the dems and the republicans tagged him as being the man who trashed an election and trashed the FBI. Mueller is currently having a very bad week, with quite a few more to come as his little traveling circus and their acts are exposed. No way would I get in the way of that.
I see that picture of Jeff Sessions there in that video and it reminded me that he is from Alabama, where Senator Roy Moore is from. Good thing your ilk has assured us that he will never be seated and will be expelled if he. giggle.
It is not irrefutable the president cannot be indicted. The DOJ has a standing memorandum that states the president cannot be indicted but it has not been tried in court. I’d like to remind you the FBI had a standing memorandum to not take any actions or make statements about or against politicians within two months of an election and that memo was broken in this last election. I agree the memorandum is sound but in no way does that mean it is irrefutable. There are plenty of scenarios we can come up with that a sitting president would justifiably be indicted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/...ed-kenneth-starr-memo.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0 Can the President Be Indicted? A Long-Hidden Legal Memo Says Yes By CHARLIE SAVAGE JULY 22, 2017 WASHINGTON — A newfound memo from Kenneth W. Starr’s independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton sheds fresh light on a constitutional puzzle that is taking on mounting significance amid the Trump-Russia inquiry: Can a sitting president be indicted? The 56-page memo, locked in the National Archives for nearly two decades and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, amounts to the most thorough government-commissioned analysis rejecting a generally held view that presidents are immune from prosecution while in office. “It is proper, constitutional, and legal for a federal grand jury to indict a sitting president for serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the president’s official duties,” the Starr office memo concludes. “In this country, no one, even President Clinton, is above the law.” Mr. Starr assigned Ronald Rotunda, a prominent conservative professor of constitutional law and ethics whom Mr. Starr hired as a consultant on his legal team, to write the memo in spring 1998 after deputies advised him that they had gathered enough evidence to ask a grand jury to indict Mr. Clinton, the memo shows. Other prosecutors working for Mr. Starr developed a draft indictment of Mr. Clinton, which The Times has also requested be made public. The National Archives has not processed that file to determine whether it is exempt from disclosure under grand-jury secrecy rules. In 1974, the Watergate special counsel, Leon Jaworski, had also received a memo from his staff saying he could indict the president, in that instance Richard M. Nixon, while he was in office, and later made that case in a court brief. Those documents, however, explore the topic significantly less extensively than the Starr office memo. In the end, both Mr. Jaworski and Mr. Starr let congressional impeachment proceedings play out and did not try to indict the presidents while they remained in office. Mr. Starr, who had decided he could indict Mr. Clinton, said in a recent interview that he had concluded the more prudent and appropriate course was simply referring the matter to Congress for potential impeachment. As Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the latest inquiry, investigates the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia and whether President Trump obstructed justice, the newly unearthed Starr office memo raises the possibility that Mr. Mueller may have more options than most commentators have assumed. Here is an explanation of the debate and what the Starr office memo has to say. Why do some argue presidents are immune? Nothing in the Constitution or federal statutes says that sitting presidents are immune from prosecution, and no court has ruled that they have any such shield. But proponents of the theory that Mr. Trump is nevertheless immune for now from indictment cited the Constitution’s “structural principles,” in the words of a memo written in September 1973 by Robert G. Dixon Jr., then the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. This argument boils down to practicalities of governance: The stigma of being indicted and the burden of a trial would unduly interfere with a president’s ability to carry out his duties, preventing the executive branch “from accomplishing its constitutional functions” in a way that cannot “be justified by an overriding need,” Mr. Dixon wrote. In October 1973, Mr. Nixon’s solicitor general, Robert H. Bork, submitted a court brief that similarly argued for an “inference” that the Constitution makes sitting presidents immune from indictment and trial. And in 2000, Randolph D. Moss, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Mr. Clinton, reviewed the Justice Department’s 1973 opinions and reaffirmed their conclusion. What was the Starr office’s stance? In laying out his case, Mr. Rotunda played down arguments that permitting a president to be indicted would cripple the executive branch. Instead, he placed greater emphasis on immunity issues that the Nixon — and, later, Clinton — legal teams dismissed. Among them, he noted that the Constitution’s speech-or-debate clause explicitly grants limited immunity to lawmakers for certain actions. “If the framers of our Constitution wanted to create a special immunity for the president,” he argued, “they could have written the relevant clause.” He also wrote that the 25th Amendment, which allows for temporary replacement of a president who has become unable to carry out the duties of the office, created a mechanism that would keep the executive branch from becoming incapacitated if the president was on trial. And he noted that if indictments had to wait until a president’s term was up, some crimes would become untriable — such as those where the statute of limitations had run out. That could happen for crimes that do not rise to an impeachable offense, he wrote, citing the example of a president who punches an irritating heckler. “No one would suggest that the president should be removed from office simply because of that assault,” he wrote. “Yet the president has no right to assault hecklers. If there is no recourse against the president, if he cannot be prosecuted for violating the criminal laws, he will be above the law.” What has the Supreme Court said? The Supreme Court has never addressed the question of whether a sitting president can be indicted and tried. But in a landmark 1997 ruling, Clinton v. Jones, it permitted a lawsuit against Mr. Clinton for unofficial actions — accusations of misconduct before he became president — to proceed while he was in office. In his 2000 memo, Mr. Moss dismissed this ruling, emphasizing that the burdens of being a criminal defendant were greater than the burdens of being sued by a private litigant. But in the Starr office memo, Mr. Rotunda deemed the ruling far more significant for the criminal question. “If public policy and the Constitution allow a private litigant to sue a sitting president for acts that are not part of the president’s official duties (and are outside the outer perimeter of those duties), and that is what Clinton v. Jones squarely held,” he wrote, “then one would think that an indictment is constitutional because the public interest in criminal cases is greater.” Could Mueller go where no prosecutor has before? Even if Mr. Mueller were to uncover sufficient evidence to indict Mr. Trump, decide that the legal arguments in the Starr office memo were correct and conclude that he wanted to ask a grand jury for an indictment while Mr. Trump is president — all big ifs — yet another uncertainty would loom: whether he must accept the Office of Legal Counsel’s analysis, even if he disagreed with it. The Justice Department’s regulations give Mr. Mueller, as a special counsel, greater autonomy than an ordinary prosecutor, but still say he must follow its “rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies.” They also permit Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to overrule Mr. Mueller if he tries to take a step that Mr. Rosenstein deems contrary to such practices. There is no guiding precedent about whether Office of Legal Counsel memos would fall into that category, or if a special counsel is free to reach his own legal judgments. But as Mr. Mueller’s office investigates, the ambiguity about the rules could influence calculations in the Trump camp about how much to cooperate and how much to fight, said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor turned defense lawyer. “I would be surprised if Mueller indicted the president for the same prudential reasons that swayed Starr,” Mr. Mariotti said. “But the specter that he might do that could have an impact on things. If I were on the president’s team, I would say, ‘I don’t think it’s likely that he would, but it’s possible,’ depending on what the facts are.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/31/u...el-starr-weighing-whether-indict-sitting.html THE PRESIDENT'S TRIAL: THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL; STARR IS WEIGHING WHETHER TO INDICT SITTING PRESIDENT By DON VAN NATTA JR.JAN. 31, 1999 The independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, has concluded that he has the constitutional authority to seek a grand jury indictment of President Clinton before he leaves the White House in January 2001, several associates of Mr. Starr said this week. While the President's legal team has fought in the Senate chamber for the President's political survival, Mr. Starr and his prosecutors have actively considered whether to ask a Federal grand jury here to indict Mr. Clinton before his term expires, said Mr. Starr's associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.