Mueller turns up the heat on impeachment

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
Analysis: The special counsel's live-TV contradiction of Trump's 'total exoneration' claim may be enough to kick-start the process in the House.

In the sober, restrained tones of a prep school dean, the veteran prosecutor went live on national television Wednesday to contradict President Donald Trump's mantra of "total exoneration" in the Russia probe and to tell the country that the responsibility of holding Trump accountable for possible obstruction of justice lays at the feet of Congress because the Department of Justice won't do it.

"After that investigation, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that," Mueller explained at a Justice Department press conference at which he announced he was dissolving his office and resigning. "We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime."



Start the hearings NOW.
 

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
Trump Allies Shift Their ‘No Obstruction’ Refrain After Mueller Speaks Publicly

President Trump’s allies, in the wake of public remarks by special counsel Robert Mueller Wednesday, have tweaked the language they have used to claim that the President did not commit criminal obstruction of justice.

The shift is minor, but telling.

No longer are the President’s top mouthpieces asserting that Mueller himself, in his report, found no obstruction. They are now hanging that conclusion on Attorney General Bill Barr — who said in an initial summary of the report that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein found Mueller’s evidence of obstruction insufficient — or on the Justice Department, generally.

Mueller said on Wednesday that he was unable, per DOJ policy, to accuse a sitting President of a crime, but that, nonetheless, if his team “had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.”

Both points he had previously stated in his report, which was mostly made public on April 18.

Yet, perhaps because there is now camera footage of him making the statement, many in Trump’s orbit no longer feel comfortable attaching Mueller specifically to the “no obstruction” claim.

“The report was clear—there was no collusion, no conspiracy—and the Department of Justice confirmed there was no obstruction,White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement after his remarks.

Vice President Mike Pence echoed that rhetoric in a statement of his own that said that the “Department of Justice concluded there was no collusion and no obstruction.”

The President’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow said that Mueller’s probe had produced no “findings” of obstruction against the President, but then stressed that the “Attorney General conclusively determined that there was no obstruction by the President.”
 

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
For the TL;DR crowd:

i6mtgPO.png
 

drbrumley

Well-known member

Impeachment Will Be Good for Trump
By William L. Gensert
American Thinker


Since Trump’s election, the dream uniting all Democrats is to impeach the president. Having won the House and with a mere majority necessary to initiate Articles of Impeachment, that dream will finally come true – never mind that chances of conviction in the Senate are near nil, with 67 votes required to sustain and Republicans still in the majority. They will impeach because, as with the scorpion, it’s their nature.
It doesn’t matter that after more than two years of investigation, President Trump has not been found to have committed any crime. Impeachment is not a criminal proceeding; it is a political proceeding, and in the “People’s House,” the majority decides what constitutes “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Articles of Impeachment will soon pass in the House because Democrats will want the Senate trial to play out during the 2020 presidential election.



Democrats are prone to overreach.
 

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
Impeachment Will Be Good for Trump
By William L. Gensert
American Thinker


Since Trump’s election, the dream uniting all Democrats is to impeach the president. Having won the House and with a mere majority necessary to initiate Articles of Impeachment, that dream will finally come true – never mind that chances of conviction in the Senate are near nil, with 67 votes required to sustain and Republicans still in the majority. They will impeach because, as with the scorpion, it’s their nature.
It doesn’t matter that after more than two years of investigation, President Trump has not been found to have committed any crime. Impeachment is not a criminal proceeding; it is a political proceeding, and in the “People’s House,” the majority decides what constitutes “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Articles of Impeachment will soon pass in the House because Democrats will want the Senate trial to play out during the 2020 presidential election.



Democrats are prone to overreach.

I don't agree, I've seen a lot of discussion online among Democrats about the pros and cons of impeachment. For various reasons. And there hasn't been a dream of impeachment "uniting all Democrats" since the election. There are good reasons for impeachment, and good reasons for caution. Not every Democrat is on the same page.

Also, the House impeaches, the Senate convicts (I know you're aware of this), but my point would be: Impeach. Let the historical record show the process, let the American people see for themselves rather than getting a whitewashed version from Barr, and let history show whether or not in the face of clear evidence, the Senate chooses to protect their own.
 

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
You're going to get your wish, and your not going to be happy about the outcome..

I don't know if there's a good outcome for the country, to be honest. I don't look at impeachment lightly, but sometimes the hard thing needs to be done and too many seem complacent about lawlessness at the highest level of government if it's their guy. I'm amazed at what passes for 'conservative Republican' these days.
 

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
This comment I read elsewhere online expresses my thinking pretty well:

"If there is no ultimate plan to hold the administration accountable then we might as well admit that politics and reelection is more important than our constitution and rule of law. I say this with the full understanding that impeachment may be politically inconvenient. However, if Trump is guilty (and I believe he is), regardless of the political outcome, he must be impeached. House members are honor bound to that responsibility. if they can't follow through then their oath of office is meaningless as is our constitution."
 

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
When will the Republican silence on Trump end?

William S. Cohen is a former Republican congressman, senator and defense secretary who served on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 during the Watergate impeachment inquiry.

Now that Robert S. Mueller III has broken months of silence, declined informal invitations to appear before Congress and said that his 448-page report “is my testimony,” it now falls to lawmakers to take the next steps, if any, in the matter of President Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been hesitant to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. Her caution is well placed.

Impeachment is an extraordinary political remedy under the Constitution. The democratic process by which we elect a president is defined by passion and partisanship, but any effort to remove that leader is likely to be unsuccessful if it is similarly motivated. As an English lord chancellor once wrote, “The power of impeachment ought to be, like Goliath’s sword, kept in the temple, and not used but on great occasions.”

All who are elected or appointed to high office are fiduciaries of the public trust. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo once described the standard of a fiduciary’s conduct to be “something stricter than the morals of the marketplace. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.”

With the exception thus far of Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Republicans have taken the position that Mueller’s redacted report has resolved all issues of alleged presidential collusion with the Russians and obstruction of justice. Case closed.

This is not a tenable position. The Mueller report has raised nearly as many questions as it has answered. But more important, as someone who legislatively helped craft the original Office of Special Counsel, I can attest that Congress never intended to subcontract out its investigative powers to the executive branch.

Congress can be informed by, and take advantage of, Justice Department or special counsel investigations, but it should never be limited by them.
At the moment, public opinion polls indicate that a majority opposes impeachment proceedings against Trump. It also appears unlikely that two-thirds of the Senate would support removing the president from office based on the evidence currently available.

Politicians who ignore public opinion do so at their peril, but peril goes with the territory of holding office. It’s also important to remember that public opinion is not anchored in concrete. It shifts according to the information it finds to be persuasive and free of rank partisanship.

During the Watergate scandal, the majority of the American people initially opposed impeachment proceedings being launched against President Richard M. Nixon.

But as the hearings moved forward, we learned that, among other activities, the president had authorized the payment of “hush” money to those who had engaged in criminal activity; urged his subordinates to commit perjury before Congress; attempted to have the CIA derail an ongoing FBI investigation; and sought to use the IRS to punish those on a list of his political enemies.

In our private deliberations, the majority of Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee at the time divided into those who strongly opposed the effort to find impeachable conduct whatever the facts, several members who indicated they were open to persuasion if the evidence was clear and convincing, and a few who held their cards very close to their vests.
Democratic members seemed divided between those who were strongly in favor of impeachment and those who had to be persuaded — among the latter were those from Southern states where Nixon enjoyed strong support.

In the end, six Republicans nonetheless felt compelled to place loyalty to the rule of law above our political affiliation and political futures. We concluded that Nixon clearly had engaged in obstruction of justice and abuse of power.

The silence of Republicans today in the face of presidential behavior that is unacceptable by any reasonable standard is both striking and deeply disappointing.

When one talks privately to some Republican members about a president who lurches from tweet to taunt; who, according to those who have worked closely beside him, is incapable of telling the truth even in mundane situations; who accepts the word of Vladimir Putin and rejects the unanimous judgment of our intelligence community that Russia launched a cyberattack at the very heart of our democracy; and whose toxic combination of egotism and insecurity distorts the basic process of governing, they express their disdain and even alarm at how he conducts the nation’s affairs.

Yet, the same members are reluctant to speak out publicly even in the face of behavior they would find intolerable by any previous occupant of the Oval Office.

Fear is a potent weapon. Today, Trump uses the accelerant of social media to rally and stir the passions of his supporters, even with information that is patently false. Technology’s ubiquity, speed and power, and other profound changes, make this a more complex time than the Watergate era was.

But Congress should not turn away from the central issue of whether Trump has, in word and deed, engaged in conduct that is fundamentally inconsistent with, and antithetical to, the highest office in the land.

If Congress cannot secure the cooperation of executive branch officials in the exercise of its oversight responsibilities, it will have no choice but to enter the temple and remove the fabled sword.

 

drbrumley

Well-known member
This comment I read elsewhere online expresses my thinking pretty well:

"If there is no ultimate plan to hold the administration accountable then we might as well admit that politics and reelection is more important than our constitution and rule of law. I say this with the full understanding that impeachment may be politically inconvenient. However, if Trump is guilty (and I believe he is), regardless of the political outcome, he must be impeached. House members are honor bound to that responsibility. if they can't follow through then their oath of office is meaningless as is our constitution."

Like I said, go ahead and impeach him..yall aint got nothing, and hopefully after this witch hunt is over, the Dems cease from being a party.
 

drbrumley

Well-known member
May 27, 2019
Robert Mueller: Dishonest, deceptive and diabolical
By Patricia McCarthy

Democrats' expectations of victory over Trump were dashed when Robert Mueller absolved the president of any untoward arrangement with Russian tools of Putin. Within an hour, Mueller went from being heralded as the "most trusted man in America" to a traitor. His words had been twisted by A.G. Barr, they said. Mueller would come to Congress and tell them the real truth. But Mueller does not want to be grilled by crazed Democrats; one can imagine their vicious anger that would be directed his way. By noon that day, these former Mueller devotees turned their wrath upon Barr. Suddenly, he was "the president's lawyer," not the A.G. In short, since the day the report was released, the Left's meltdown that began on election night 2016 got infinitely worse. For nearly three years, they had studiously ignored the mountains of evidence that the entire fiasco was a seditious attempt at a coup, a scheme to frame and overthrow a duly elected president. Those involved believed that their plan would work. Those who were duped by the rumors and innuendo because they so hated the fact that this drain-the-swamp outsider had come to power in their backyard were left stunned.

Mueller never deserved the "most trusted man" sobriquet. He has a long record of abusing the power of his office over the years, no matter which office he occupied at the time. He let four men rot in prison knowing they were innocent, a crime that cost taxpayers nearly $100M in recompense to the victims. He did the bidding of Hillary Clinton when she delivered uranium to Russia. Then, working with James Comey, he seriously misprosecuted the anthrax case, relentlessly pursuing an innocent man, Steven Hatfill, and again costing the taxpayers millions, this time $5.82M. As with Comey, Mueller's positions of power over the years have gone to his head and made him both arrogant and careless.

Obviously, Mueller hoped to find Trump guilty of anything that would give the Democrats enough rope for impeachment. But as the truth has seeped out over the last eighteen months thanks to real investigative journalists — John Solomon, Sara Carter, Jeff Carlson, Gregg Jarrett, Margot Cleveland, Eric Felton, Lee Smith and several others — Mueller may have realized that to perpetrate more lies on the public could bring the entire house of cards down. Once all the facts are revealed, it is likely that he will be permanently tainted by his deceptive machinations for personal or political reasons many times over the course of his career in law. The same goes for James Comey.

As new information is about to come to light, the principals are pointing their fingers at each other. It would be amusing if it were not all so deadly serious. These "principals" are all of a piece: not nearly as smart as they think they are, overweening, and pompous. Like Hillary, the people they sought to deceive are deplorable anyway. They probably do not feel any guilt for their crimes. Quick to accuse Trump of being a dictator, it is they who behave like dictators. They were all for transparency until the moment such transparency is likely to implicate them. Declassification of all things related to the attempted coup has the rats scurrying. "The truth will come to light...at length the truth will out!"

It will be interesting to see if any of the plotters has a sense of decency and expresses profound regret for his part in this obscene project. On this Memorial Day weekend, it would be wise for them to remember how this nation survived as long as it has. We owe our safety and security to the untold thousands of great men and women who have died to protect and preserve it. These scoundrels, Mueller, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, and the rest of them, have dishonored their service and sacrifice.
 

Gary K

New member
Banned
Analysis: The special counsel's live-TV contradiction of Trump's 'total exoneration' claim may be enough to kick-start the process in the House.

In the sober, restrained tones of a prep school dean, the veteran prosecutor went live on national television Wednesday to contradict President Donald Trump's mantra of "total exoneration" in the Russia probe and to tell the country that the responsibility of holding Trump accountable for possible obstruction of justice lays at the feet of Congress because the Department of Justice won't do it.

"After that investigation, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that," Mueller explained at a Justice Department press conference at which he announced he was dissolving his office and resigning. "We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime."



Start the hearings NOW.

In the sober, restrained tones of a corrupt snowflake school dean, the very corrupt prosecutor went live on national television Wednesday to contradict President Donald Trump's mantra of "total exoneration" in the Russia probe and to tell the country that the responsibility of holding Trump accountable for possible obstruction of justice lays at the feet of Congress because the Department of Justice can't legally charge Trump for lack of evidence.

Fixed that for you, Anna. In a multiple year politically inspired witch hunt, using Trump's political enemies as investigators, Muler (intentional spelling)couldn't find any legal evidence for charging Trump with collusion or any other form of an impeachable crime so now he's claiming impeachment doesn't actually require any crime by a president other than having his political opponents hate and fear him.
 

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
In the sober, restrained tones of a corrupt snowflake school dean, the very corrupt prosecutor went live on national television Wednesday to contradict President Donald Trump's mantra of "total exoneration" in the Russia probe and to tell the country that the responsibility of holding Trump accountable for possible obstruction of justice lays at the feet of Congress because the Department of Justice can't legally charge Trump for lack of evidence.

Fixed that for you, Anna. In a multiple year politically inspired witch hunt, using Trump's political enemies as investigators, Muler (intentional spelling)couldn't find any legal evidence for charging Trump with collusion or any other form of an impeachable crime so now he's claiming impeachment doesn't actually require any crime by a president other than having his political opponents hate and fear him.


Word salad. ^^
 

Gary K

New member
Banned
Word salad. ^^

I guess, then, your posts on this thread reach the level of word sal. In other words, they fall short of even being considered word salad.

You really reveal the level of your political devotion to a less than worthy cause when you dismiss facts such as who Muler used to filled his "investagatory" team. The fact that every one of them were donors to the Hillary campaign, and many had actually worked for Hillary and were Democrat operatives shows the extreme bias of the so-called "investigation". If the Republicans did that to a Democrat you'd be complaining loudly. It's people like you who really contribute to the political polarization in this country. A polarization that is tearing this country apart at the seams, and you're all for it and actively participate in creating it by not caring about the massive corruption on your side of the political aisle.
 

annabenedetti

like marbles on glass
I guess, then, your posts on this thread reach the level of word sal. In other words, they fall short of even being considered word salad.

^^ wince-worthy :eek:

You really reveal the level of your political devotion to a less than worthy cause when you dismiss facts such as who Muler used to filled his "investagatory" team. The fact that every one of them were donors to the Hillary campaign, and many had actually worked for Hillary and were Democrat operatives shows the extreme bias of the so-called "investigation". If the Republicans did that to a Democrat you'd be complaining loudly. It's people like you who really contribute to the political polarization in this country. A polarization that is tearing this country apart at the seams, and you're all for it and actively participate in creating it by not caring about the massive corruption on your side of the political aisle.

Very polarized partisan whataboutism word salad ^^
 

Gary K

New member
Banned
^^ wince-worthy :eek:



Very polarized partisan whataboutism word salad ^^

LOL.... So, being opposed to a politically motivated one-sided witch hunt of either of the two large political parties is being a "polarized partisan"? Interesting definition of partisanship. BTW, I'm neither Republican nor Democrat. I'm registered as an Independent. Both parties are corrupt to their cores. I could not, and would not, be a member of either.
 
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