All Things Trump: Is it over yet?

[Brian Peacock]

Let is go.

Or if you prefer...

Let it go.

[Tero]

[Svartalf]

Given all the shit she's taken from bill, I doubt that person is a good illo for that definition.

[Tero]

It's Nancy.

[Svartalf]

so much for my ability to recognize people

[Scot Dutchy]

Careful, he'll report you. He's like 42 was. Reported people for insults, while freely insulting everyone else knowing no one will report him because we aren't whiney bitches like him and Scot Dutchy.

Well, the mods ought to ping Scot before they rein me in. After all, he has called you "trailer boy" or "trailerboy" in 26 separate posts over the past five weeks. Also, words to the effect of "dole bludger", "unemployable" and similar. It's almost as though he has intentionally launched on a sustained harassment campaign.

Stalking and misrepresenting again. You have stop. Since when are you a mod? When did I say these alleged descriptions?

[Tero]

Hillary is not going to jail:
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, 3-0, that the conservative group Judicial Watch was not entitled to depose Clinton in connection with an 8-year-old Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records of details about information national security adviser Susan Rice discussed during interviews in 2012 about the deadly attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

During the protracted litigation surrounding the email saga, Clinton answered written questions under penalty of perjury about her email practices.

However, in March of this year, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the former first lady, Cabinet official and two-time Democratic presidential candidate to sit for a deposition. Lamberth, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan who has tangled with Clinton administration aides in a series of cases for decades, called Hillary Clinton’s earlier answers "incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory, at best."

But the appeals court ruled Friday that Lamberth’s order was a “clear abuse of discretion.”

D.C. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins suggested it was time to consign the Clinton email imbroglio to the history books.


“Secretary Clinton … provided eleven hours of public testimony before the House Select Committee, and has answered countless media inquiries on the matter,” wrote Wilkins, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “These facts underscore both the impropriety of the District Court’s Order and the appropriateness of turning the page on the issue.”

Wilkins called the proposed topics for Clinton’s deposition “completely attenuated from any relevant issue in this case.”

Wilkins’ 25-page opinion was joined by George W. Bush appointee Thomas Griffith and Obama appointee Nina Pillard.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the group is mulling its next steps. “We’re disappointed by the decision and considering our options,” Fitton said.


Longtime Clinton attorney David Kendall passed up a chance to publicly celebrate the court’s ruling. “The Court’s opinion speaks for itself,” he said via email.

During Clinton’s four years in Obama's Cabinet, she relied on a private email account and server for both her work-related and personal messages. The practice led to a storm of controversy that roiled her 2016 presidential bid and is widely viewed as contributing to her defeat by Donald Trump.

In response to press questions during the campaign and in the sworn statement, Clinton said she kept the private account and server after taking over as secretary of State in 2009 as a matter of convenience and not to avoid the Freedom of Information Act or other disclosure requirements. The FBI investigated, interviewed Clinton and recommended against criminal charges, but it did find dozens of messages in her account that officials said contained highly classified information.

However, Lamberth said in his March ruling that the FBI probe and representations by the State Department had not adequately put to rest questions about the episode.

"To argue that the Court now has enough information to determine whether State conducted an adequate search is preposterous," Lamberth wrote.

While Clinton turned over about 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department in response to its request to return the records, Trump and other Clinton critics have urged continued investigation to track down tens of thousands of other messages that Clinton ordered destroyed after her aides determined they were personal.

While the trove of messages Clinton returned was processed and released under FOIA during the 2016 campaign, messages have continued to emerge from the FBI. Some of the messages were recovered from the emails accounts of people Clinton corresponded with, but the State Department has never offered a clear account of where all the messages originated.

"Even years after the FBI investigation, the slow trickle of new emails has yet to be explained," Lamberth wrote.

Among the questions Lamberth wanted Clinton to answer: "How did she arrive at her belief that her private server emails would be preserved by normal State Department processes for email retention? Who told her that—if anyone—and when? Did she realize State was giving 'no records' response to FOIA requests for her emails? If so, did she suspect that she had any obligation to disclose the existence of her private server to those at State handling the FOIA requests? ... And why did she think that using a private server to conduct State Department business was permissible under the law in the first place?"

While the Justice Department opposed Judicial Watch’s request to depose Clinton, government lawyers opposed the move by Clinton’s lawyers to get the appeals court to block the testimony. Justice Department attorneys argued that while they viewed the deposition as unnecessary, the judge’s order requiring it was not so erroneous as to merit intervention by the D.C. Circuit.

In his March directive, Lamberth also ordered a deposition for Clinton’s former chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills. The D.C. Circuit panel declined, for technical reasons, to block Mills deposition in its ruling Friday.

However, Wilkins suggested the rational for requiring her to testify was equally flawed and the decision left open the possibility that she could seek relief from the appeals court in the future by defying the deposition order.

FILED UNDER: STATE DEPARTMENT, HILLARY CLINTON, FBI, ROYCE LAMBERTH, HILLARY CLINTON EMAILS, LEGAL

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

[Tero]

from Bella

[L'Emmerdeur]

John Yoo, the author of the 'perfectly legal to torture' memo that the Bush II era CIA used as justification for systematically torturing prisoners, has been a favorite in my personal rogue's gallery ever since that memo came to light. He rarely fails to find legal support for seriously fucked up policies. Of course he's pleased to announce that in his opinion, the US Constitution allows a president to go ahead and act as an autocrat; it's on the other branches of government to either accommodate the executive branch or attempt to thwart its actions.

'Trump’s Latest Assault on the Law Comes From George W. Bush’s Torture Lawyer'

As his political support withers away along with his prospects for re-election, Donald Trump is declaring his intention to try governing as a dictator.

Trump, who bashed Obama for relying on executive orders and boasted that he’d get legislative deals done, long ago gave up on getting bills through Congress. Now, relying on advice from the lawyer who told George W. Bush that torture is legal, the president contends that he’s free to govern by issuing plainly illegal executive orders.

That helps explain why Trump—who is denying the United States Postal Service the resources required to deliver many mail-in ballots —bizarrely claimed last week that he has the ability to issue an executive order to outright bar states from accepting mail-in ballots at all. While such a gambit would almost surely fail, Trump’s threat is part-and-parcel of a last ditch power grab by a desperate president.

...

Enter Berkeley Law School professor John Yoo, who came to prominence during the Bush administration for authoring the notorious Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memoranda opining that the CIA could legally torture al Qaeda prisoners. The memos became an ethical blot on the department, and were later withdrawn. Yoo is also the author of a new book contending that Trump is restoring the constitutional scheme contemplated by the Framers.

Recently Yoo authored an article advocating a strikingly Nixonian idea: that presidents have plenary authority to act illegally. Yoo’s claim is grounded on an eccentric, and entirely disingenuous, interpretation of a recent Supreme Court decision rejecting Trump’s effort to nullify the DACA program. Trump lost the case because of the sloppy means by which his administration set out to nullify the Obama era program, a move the court rejected because the administration relied on an insufficiently explicated, and improperly shifted, rationale.

But according to Yoo, who’s reportedly been boasting about meeting Trump in the Oval Office, the court decision stands for the proposition that a president is free to implement patently overreaching executive orders, falling outside the scope of his legal power and authority, and then simply dare the courts, Congress, or his successor in office to void them. By way of example, Yoo suggested that a president could simply declare that anyone can openly carry a gun throughout the United States.

Unsurprisingly, Yoo’s “theory” was catnip to Trump and his coterie, who repeatedly called upon him to expand upon it. Then, a few weeks ago, Trump began to make references to his intention to bypass Congress entirely, and do things like create an entirely new federal “health care plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act via executive order.

[Joe]

Yoo is such a nice, polite fellow that it's hard to believe he holds such an extreme view of the so-called unitary executive. I'm always amazed when I read him.

It says something that Trump couldn't get his Attorney General to propound this stuff. Barr's no slouch wrt plenary Presidential power.

[Tero]

Taylor Swift tweets:
Swift, who has nearly 87 million Twitter followers -- 1.7 million more than Trump -- was blunt about why she believes Trump is trying to undermine voting by mail. "Trump's calculated dismantling of USPS proves one thing clearly: He is WELL AWARE that we do not want him as our president." Swift added, "He's chosen to blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans' lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power."
CNN

[Brian Peacock]

She's a feisty one. I know there's a lot of media frenzy around her but she's written some bloody good songs.

[Tero]

Trump leases out 1.5 million acres of Alaska because there is no global warming:

CNN
Drilling in these controversial areas of the Alaskan arctic has long been controversial and the plans are certain to be met with legal challenges.

Environmental activists have sounded the alarm that drilling the Arctic could harm the environment and exacerbate the climate crisis. Climate change has been a key issue in the upcoming 2020 election, and Joe Biden, who is set to accept the Democratic presidential nomination this week, has called for a ban on new oil and gas permits on public lands.

[Scot Dutchy]

I thought there was too much oil anyway. Why drill for more?

[Tero]

Stay tuned for Trump tweeting about sleepy Joe Biden participating in his convention "in his basement."