The Mueller Investigation.

[Jon Miller]

Thanks for keeping it clear pchang.

JM

[Elok]

That's daft. You're effectively banning otherwise legal (and routine, and unremarkable) conversations based on fairly open-ended criteria. For that matter, it would be extremely easy to circumvent and quite difficult to catch under most circumstances. If it's a law, that particular application is absurd and I don't care if it's broken.

Also don't care if he tried and failed to prevent Mueller from chasing shadows for more than a year.

EDIT: On the one hand, I can see the "get him out of there by any means" angle, though he's more useless than dangerous IMO. But this whole thing has been such a bloody farce from day one, and it's all to no advantage. He's already conspicuously violating the Constitution by abusing the office for private profit. Unambiguously. You can't get anything with it, because the GOP won't betray their own for anything less than the kind of outrage even Trump is unlikely to deliver. So where was this going? What was the point? Is complaining that he interfered with a fundamentally misguided and grossly overhyped investigation going to get you anywhere?

[Jon Miller]

I think that every time Trump can be recognized as terrible he should be.

I do not think that Mueller's investigation was pointless or a bloody farce (it hit Manafort and a bunch of Russians). Even if it did not find conspiracy between Russia and Trump.

I really don't understand why you don't have a problem with Russia's actions (or the Trump campaigns).

JM

[Elok]

It's more that pretty much everything he does is wrong, and this whole investigation was focused on some fairly arcane transgressions that were never going to whip up sufficient outrage to shift the needle. I'm in the "this was about some Democrats' need to prove to themselves that the election was illegitimate" camp, more or less. I mean, I can't claim to read the minds of half the country, but I don't see it serving any other purpose. If you want to talk about wrong things Trump does, well, he's still selling cluster bombs to the Saudis, and the Saudis are still dropping them on hospitals last I checked, so no, I really can't care about whether we indict one of the staff members he hasn't gotten around to sacking yet.

[-Jrabbit]

I've yet to hear one Democrat claim the election was illegitimate. Plase cite.
And the investigation was begun before the election happened. Why would you not want to know about outside forces trying to influence our elections?
Clinton was impeached for far less. Why does this bloviating ass get a pass?

[pchang]

Apparently investigations are only worth it if you can convict the Kingpin.

[spambot]

Every analogy breaks down somewhere, of course. But I wasn't comparing it to lying. You ever hear of those cases when the cops hassle the hell out of some guy for no good reason, and he makes enough of a ruckus that they can charge him anyway because he resisted an arrest that never should have happened in the first place? That was what I was thinking of. You've got the competing perverse-incentive-creating precedents of, one the one hand, encouraging disrespect of the law by letting it go, and on the other, encouraging abuse of power by making it easy for law enforcement to secure a conviction for virtually anyone just by being dicks and trusting the suspect to have limited patience. The latter worries me more. Again, this is far from an exact parallel, but Trump being a ****head does not justify using the law for fishing trips*. It now appears that he had no need to obstruct justice because he wasn't actually criminally culpable of anything; he was only being ornery because he's too dumb to do anything but act up when he thinks people are disrespecting him. Okay. Let's move on. Everyone agrees he's violating the emoluments clause, right? The GOP won't play ball on that either, but at least that's clear, comprehensible, and real. Big step up.

*I've had a couple of fairly well-informed people tell me that it doesn't necessarily mean all that much when the FBI gets someone to turn for them; basically they're trained to methodically ask endless questions until they catch you in some kind of contradiction, large or small. Once they've got that, they've got you over a barrel for lying to the feds, and you have no choice but to play along or face jail time. This is, to put it mildly, kind of scary.

Obstructing justice for no reason at all makes no sense and is something that someone who is too irrational to be president of a country would do.

[Lorizael]

Trump obstructing the investigation is the most egregious part of a broader pattern of believing the law doesn't apply to him and that he can do anything as president. Our presidents are powerful enough as it is, and the balance between the executive and legislative branches has been slipping since the constitution was ratified, so we should absolutely resist every lurch toward authoritarian rule, especially when it takes the form of an incompetent, corrupt scumbag.

[Jon Miller]

I'm in the "this was about some Democrats' need to prove to themselves that the election was illegitimate" camp, more or less. I mean, I can't claim to read the minds of half the country, but I don't see it serving any other purpose.

I don't think that it can be proven that Russia changed the outcome of the election and never expected it to do so (I don't think it is possible to do so), so my interest had nothing to do with 'proving that the election was illegitimate'. I can't really name anyone who was in that boat. The more left wing people in my orbit had no interest in the Mueller investigation (they don't trust the FBI), the only people who were impacted by the report were people in the Middle (who didn't trust the Main Stream Media or who didn't pay attention to Trump, but were inclined to trust the FBI).

I do think that the anti-democracy actions by Russians, Republicans (legal and illegal) and other actors are very concerning both for 2016 and going forward. Any legitimacy of our government will be lost if we don't act and having the FBI defend against illegal and anti-democratic actions by foreign powers is an important part of having a working government. The Mueller investigation was an important part of this defense.

The winner winning and having illegal actions support their win (even if they were not key) must be investigated. Otherwise elections become about who cheats the best or has the most illegal influences and so on and not about who is legitament.

If elections aren't real and aren't allowed to have outcomes, there is no point in pretending that we are a Republic or a Democracy.

JM

[Elok]

Okay, a number of points:

1. Leaving aside the part where Trump wouldn't know what to do with a dictatorship if you gift-wrapped it, didn't the MR say that basically every time he tried to order an illegal action, they ignored him? This doesn't look like creeping autocracy; it looks like a really embarrassing presidency. But we knew that. It's unlikely that anyone will follow in Trump's footsteps because it's hard to find people who are that good at making humiliating public spectacles of themselves. There may be a threat to American democracy, but it doesn't come from Trump himself, or anything he does.

2. There's a credibility cost. Just like with Lewinski, everybody knows what it's really all about. Doubling down by claiming that an unproductive dishing session with a Russian bottom-feeder constitutes a solicitation for nebulous "campaign contributions" just looks desperate. It's not like there aren't plenty of much more dire instances of corruption in campaign finance. This isn't about that, this is about **** Trump. Yes, I agree, **** Trump, but let's try not to be completely silly about it.

3. There's a second credibility cost in that future, potentially more serious allegations will be less impressive coming from people who wasted our time with this. We shouldn't cry Really Boring Wolf.

4. There's also an opportunity cost. If all this effort and attention had been focused on something actually terrible that he does, like the camps, we might have gotten something done. It's not too late to do that; the sooner we put this fiasco behind us, the better.

5. As I've said before: Trump is a symptom of a much larger problem, one I don't know how to solve or even clearly define. The part where our society got so broken that he sounded like a good idea--where did that come from? How are we going to fix that?

[pchang]

Things you do not care about: criminal matters
These are in the bailiwick of the FBI and special prosecutors
Things you care about: policy matters
These are in the bailiwick of Congress

Mueller and Congress act independently and neither gate or otherwise require resources form the other.

Congress was never going to act while both houses were Republican. Mueller could get started right away. The House is just getting started.

[Proteus_MST]

...

1. Leaving aside the part where Trump wouldn't know what to do with a dictatorship if you gift-wrapped it, didn't the MR say that basically every time he tried to order an illegal action, they ignored him? This doesn't look like creeping autocracy; it looks like a really embarrassing presidency. But we knew that. It's unlikely that anyone will follow in Trump's footsteps because it's hard to find people who are that good at making humiliating public spectacles of themselves. There may be a threat to American democracy, but it doesn't come from Trump himself, or anything he does.

...

Sure, but I guess if I go and hire 10 professional killers to kill Donald Trump ... and they, instead of murdering Trump, just tell the FBI about this, then I am sure that I would be arrested for conspiracy to kill the president nevertheless, even though I didn't find anyone who actually tried to do so.

Or as another example:
Prostitution ... if (in a US state where prostitution is forbidden) I try to hire a prostitute and it turns out that the woman, I try to give money in order to have sex with me, in reality it is a police woman posing as prostitute, I will get arrested and charged with prositution nevertheless, despite no sex taking place


So I cannot imagine that the attempt of obstructing justice is legal, just because the person you order to do your bidding doesn't do as you wish
(even more so if we take into account that Trump fired one person who didn't do his bidding (Comey) and in an interview even admitted that Comey was fired because he refused to obstruct justice on his orders (before later changing the story and claiming Comey was fired for other reasons))

[Lorizael]

Leaving aside the part where Trump wouldn't know what to do with a dictatorship if you gift-wrapped it, didn't the MR say that basically every time he tried to order an illegal action, they ignored him? This doesn't look like creeping autocracy; it looks like a really embarrassing presidency.

He's a really pathetic dictator who...

If all this effort and attention had been focused on something actually terrible that he does, like the camps, we might have gotten something done.

...established camps to imprison brown-skinned migrants and refugees?

[Elok]

His complete ineptitude at maintaining a stable, functional, and obedient administration is entirely distinct from his mistreatment of a politically vulnerable demographic group. He faced very few obstacles to setting up those camps; the culture of border enforcement largely supports extreme measures and hates illegals, and if push comes to shove most Americans don't care any more about them than they do about the Yemenis or any other abstracted group of foreigners getting the short end of the stick.

[seIf biased]

His complete ineptitude at maintaining a stable, functional, and obedient administration is entirely distinct from his mistreatment of a politically vulnerable demographic group. He faced very few obstacles to setting up those camps; the culture of border enforcement largely supports extreme measures and hates illegals, and if push comes to shove most Americans don't care any more about them than they do about the Yemenis or any other abstracted group of foreigners getting the short end of the stick.

tough criticism

[pchang]

About 40% of Americans are ignorant bigots. This should not be enough to win the House, Senate, or Presidency.

[Dinner]

I'd put it at 30% which is the old Bush 30% and about the rock bottom Trump can expect to get in public opinion polls. Also, they are mostly ignorant partisans not ignorant bigots. They just go where ever they are lead and always vote red.

[pchang]

538 polling aggregates say closer to 40%.

[Berzerker]

there are fine bigots on both sides