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  1. #1
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    That’s all Trump’s lawyers have?

    That’s all Trump’s lawyers have?

    By Jennifer Rubin September 1

    The Wall Street Journal reported this week on two memos President Trump’s lawyers prepared for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III:

    One memo submitted to Mr. Mueller by the president’s legal team in June laid out the case that Mr. Trump has the inherent authority under the constitution to hire and fire as he sees fit and therefore didn’t obstruct justice when he fired Mr. Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in May, these people said.

    Another memo submitted the same month outlined why Mr. Comey would make an unsuitable witness, calling him prone to exaggeration, unreliable in congressional testimony and the source of leaks to the news media, these people said.

    As legal arguments, these are pathetic. Taking the last one first, arguing to Comey’s long-time colleague Mueller that Comey is a liar won’t win the day, nor does it pass the laugh test. Comey’s testimony will be lined up against written evidence and other witness testimony and actually may come out looking even more credible as a result. This is the sort of weak assertion one would make on Sean Hannity’s show; it’s not worthy of consideration by Mueller or any other serious prosecutor.

    The “he can fire at will” argument is obviously flawed for at least three reasons. The argument is so bad one wonders if the Trump team is not ready for prime time or is simply trying to provide fodder for his cult-like following to support him if he tries to fire Mueller.

    First, simply because Trump has the power to do something doesn’t mean he can do so with corrupt intent. That is the essence of bribery and other corruption statutes. Trump has the power to veto a bill, but not if it is a quid pro quo for a bribe. Jed Shugerman of Fordham law school explains, “Even if the president has the power to do something, he can’t exercise that power for an illegal purpose. A president can order a military strike, but if his intent was to kill a person who slept with his wife, he is guilty of murder.” He continues, “And if he fires someone in order to impede a valid investigation into his own campaign, which Trump has essentially confessed on national TV, he is guilty of obstruction of justice. If they were debating only that basic point with Mueller, then their client is in serious trouble.”

    Second, firing Comey isn’t the half of it. Trump first tried to shut down the prosecution by asking Comey directly, then by imploring his director of national intelligence Dan Coats and his NSA director Mike Rogers to intervene. When that did not work he not only fired Comey but concocted a phony cover story, sent his vice president out to misrepresent the reason for the firing, tried to intimidate Comey when he hinted at the existence of White House tapes and then retaliated against him with his attempt to call off prosecution.

    Third, Mueller has the option, as did the independent prosecutors in Watergate, to make a referral — in essence a recommendation — to the House to proceed with impeachment. There is little doubt that the course of action as it has been described by witnesses and credible press accounts lines up with the articles of impeachment the House was ready to approve in Watergate. In Article 1, for example, the House was prepared to allege that Nixon had been “interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees.”

    Jeffrey Toobin has reached the same conclusion (“if Comey was telling the truth in this memo, and obviously there’s a dispute about that from the FBI — from the White House, but if he’s telling the truth, I don’t know how anyone can see this comment as anything but obstruction of justice”) as has former Republican White House ethics counsel Richard Painter. (“I believe obstruction of justice would be occurring if there were an express or implied threat to fire the FBI director if he did not drop the Flynn investigation or other parts of the Russia investigation,” he said. “That’s obstruction of justice. The president fired the FBI director.”)

    In sum, the two memos to the special prosecutor are so lacking in merit one wonders why Trump’s attorneys bothered. As Constitutional guru Larry Tribe remarked to me, “To be candid, if the memos submitted by the President’s lawyers are as the Wall Street Journal reports, they’re quite stupid. Nothing in the analysis the Journal recounts could possibly persuade anyone remotely familiar with the constitutional origins of the impeachment clause, its historical interpretation, or its settled objectives.” Maybe the president needs better lawyers.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...=.fdd76a25fc35
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Poor Jennifer Rubin. The Trump lawyers have nothing because there is nothing. But hey I do appreciate your pointing out that Comey is Mueller's "long time colleague" which is the essence of conflict of interest. Comey is a liar, a professional pathetic stupid liar. Comey ain't right, that's what Trump is trying to say and tell everyone. Everyone who saw that Wednesday Comey hearing before Congress when Grassley said "eegads" knows Comey ain't right. That's why Trump fired him, Trump doesn't want Wacko-Birds in charge of the FBI. And rightly so!!

    poor little jennifer
    sittin on a stool
    counting her trump fizzles
    one by one ....
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  3. #3
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    September 1, 2017 By Kirsty Jane
    ALERT: Comey Drafted Statement Clearing Hillary Before Interviewing Key Witnesses

    As FBI director last year, James Comey began writing drafts of a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton, even before all witnesses in the investigation — including Clinton herself — had been interviewed.

    The Senate Judiciary Committee obtained the Comey memos as part of its investigation into his firing by President Trump, which occurred on May 9.
    From The Daily Caller
    The revelation that Comey had begun drafting memos of his exoneration statement comes from transcripts of interviews given last fall by two FBI officials.

    James Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff, and Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel of national security and cyberlaw at the FBI, gave the interviews as part of an investigation conducted by the Office of Special Counsel into the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.

    In a July 5, 2016, press conference, Comey said that he would not be recommending charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information despite her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

    While the transcripts of those interviews are heavily redacted, they indicate that Comey started working on an announcement clearing Clinton in April or May of last year, before the FBI interviewed 17 witnesses in the case, including Clinton and some of her top aides.
    Clinton was interviewed for several hours on July 2, just three days before Comey’s announcement.

    In a letter to the FBI, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham also noted that Comey’s draft was prepared even before two Clinton aides, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, had reached what the two Republicans called a “highly unusual” immunity deal with the Justice Department.

    The limited immunity deal prohibited investigators and prosecutors from asking about conversations between the two Clinton aides and Platte River Networks, a Denver-based tech firm that maintained Clinton’s server after she left the State Department.

    Grassley and Graham questioned whether Comey could have conducted a complete and impartial investigation if he had already made a conclusion about the outcome before all of the information in the case had been collected.

    “Conclusion first, fact-gathering second — that’s no way to run an investigation,” Grassley and Graham wrote the FBI. “The FBI should be held to a higher standard than that, especially in a matter of such great public interest and controversy.”

    “The outcome of an investigation should not be prejudged while FBI agents are still hard at work trying to gather the facts,” they added.

    http://eheadlines.com/alert-comey-dr...key-witnesses/

  4. #4
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Comey is rotten to the core and if Mueller a "long-time colleague" didn't already know that then Mueller is as rotten as Comey or too dumb to have a law degree.
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