Does Trump ever do any jail time? (4 Viewers)

Optimus Prime said:

will this mean anything other than Graham pleading the fifth to every question?

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Not sure. I think that idea makes Lindsey uncomfortable- he sees himself as a proper civil servant and would like to avoid those optics. But maybe .

Would LG’s testimony be televised?

I know federal cannot but this is the State of Georgia

Optimus Prime said:

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Probably already posted but...

MT15 said:

So completely irresponsible, yet on brand.

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Probably already posted but...

CoolBrees said:

Would LG’s testimony be televised?

I know federal cannot but this is the State of Georgia

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Grand jury testimony in either jurisdiction is never televised unless you're watching Law & Order.

…..Surely, you might think, Trump would finally be held to account now that he is no longer in office, but another Nixon precedent has created an implicit assumption of immunity even for ex-presidents.

On Sept. 8, 1974, a month after being sworn in, President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a “full, free and absolute pardon … for all offenses against the United States which he ... has committed.”

This was his way of putting the Watergate scandal — “our long national nightmare” — behind us.


Ford was pilloried for his decision. His approval rating plunged 21 percentage points overnight and never recovered.

Yet even many of those most critical at the time — including Ted Kennedy, Bob Woodward and former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste — later concluded that Ford was a “decent and honorable man” who had done the right thing after all.

Ford even won the 2001 Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum for letting Nixon off the hook.

Well, I humbly submit, it’s high time to rethink Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon along with the Justice Department’s decision to grant Nixon immunity from prosecution while in office.

Both decisions should be recognized as historic mistakes whose toxic fallout still poisons our democracy.


Things might look very different today if Nixon had gone to the slammer instead of escaping the wreckage of his presidency to rehabilitate his reputation and win acclaim as an esteemed elder statesman.

He was a crook and should have been treated as one. The kid-gloves treatment Nixon received created an expectation of criminal impunity for both sitting and former presidents that leads Republicans to think that it’s an outrage for Trump to be probed by prosecutors, no matter how many laws he might have broken.


Republican partisans are absolutely right that it’s unprecedented for the FBI to search a former president’s home — just as it would be unprecedented to indict a former president. But it shouldn’t be.

Any current or former president who commits a crime should face the consequences. In this case, if a jury concludes that the orange man broke the law, he should wind up in an orange jumpsuit…….

Seems most are thinking, as said here, than Trump is sending a threat DOJ's way...

He’s complaining today that the FBI took “all three” of his passports during their search. If that’s true, I would say chances are good he will be indicted. Also, why does he have 3 (1 expired, he said)?

Edited: already saw on Twitter that DOJ released a statement denying that they have his passports. Just another lie by Trump. What a shock.

MT15 said:

He’s complaining today that the FBI took “all three” of his passports during their search. If that’s true, I would say chances are good he will be indicted. Also, why does he have 3 (1 expired, he said)?

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The one expired is probably his US one. The other two were gifts from Poots and Kim...

Okay, further info: they had already offered to return them when Trump started complaining. So, he hadn’t missed them, the FBI discovered they had them and didn’t mean to take them and informed Trump’s representative that they were returning them, and then Trump complained on his discount Twitter so he could play the victim again, lol.

MT15 said:

Okay, further info: they had already offered to return them when Trump started complaining. So, he hadn’t missed them, the FBI discovered they had them and didn’t mean to take them and informed Trump’s representative that they were returning them, and then Trump complained on his discount Twitter so he could play the victim again, lol.

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Also, note the 'filter team'. A competent criminal investigation knows that seizures of quantities of material (like boxes of documents) can put the whole investigation at risk because wrongfully obtained evidence can sink a case, even if it's clear and damning evidence of guilt. So a well-run investigation will set up a filter team that is completely walled-off from the investigation team and their job is to pull potentially privileged or other potentially problematic material so that it can be returned or at least submitted to a judge for a determination before putting it in the hands of the investigators.

There are no "fishing expeditions" where they just go and take a bunch of boxes and see what they get - that's just a likely to harm the investigation as it is to help it.

superchuck500 said:

Trump says attorney-client privilege and executive privilege so give it back.

That’s not how it works, and saying it’s executive privilege pretty much admits that it’s presidential records act material that he shouldn’t have had.

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"by copy of this truth"... lol. This sounds like the stupid chain message that goes on Facebook talking about how you're ordering your likeness be still your own, and not used or owned by FB..lol. It doesn't work that way. You have to either petition the FBI or file a motion in court.

nolaspe said:

Mercer County man charged with threats to kill FBI agents after Mar-a-Lago search

A Mercer County man threatened online to murder FBI agents after the bureau's search of former president Donald Trump's Florida estate last week, saying...

www.post-gazette.com

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And yet GOP idiot politicians still deny that their rhetoric is endangering law enforcement.

This weekend, Florida governor Ron DeSantis delighted the crowd at a conference for the far-right group Turning Point Action by proclaiming that the FBI’s warrant to seize national-security documents stolen by Donald Trump was yet another double standard against law-abiding conservatives.

“You look at the raid at Mar-a-Lago, and I’m just trying to remember — maybe somebody here can remind me — about when they did a search warrant at Hillary’s house when she had a rogue server at Chappaqua and she was laundering classified information,” he announced. “I don’t remember them doing that.”

The Republican rationale for defending Trump despite clear-cut violations of the law is that the FBI has supposedly forfeited all credibility. Trump supporters “are mad because the Mar-a-Lago raid fits into a pattern of behavior targeting Trump and his associates by the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence community,” argues Byron York.

“When it comes to the FBI’s latest move, he garners near-universal assent — and for good reason,” writes National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry of Trump. “It is impossible to over-estimate the effect of the Russia investigation on the Republican psyche.” Margot Cleveland argues that it’s because of the bureau’s “widespread misconduct that Americans doubt the legitimacy of the FBI’s decision to search the former president’s home.”

Obviously, the weirdest thing about this trust heuristic is that it assumes the more credible party to this dispute is serial lawbreaker and pathological liar Donald Trump rather than the lifelong Republican he appointed to lead the agency. But the deeper and more twisted belief system being expressed by Trump’s allies is the premise that the FBI has engaged in a pattern of political bias against their party since the Clinton saga.

The truth is just the opposite: The FBI has often bent over backward to placate Republicans only to be met with distrust when its results fail to conform to their most paranoid fantasies.

Begin with DeSantis’s claim that the FBI never seized Hillary Clinton’s server: In fact, the FBI took it in August 2015. “The seizure of the server, along with electronic copies of its contents maintained by her private lawyer, is in connection with a criminal investigation into the mishandling of classified information,” gloated a National Review editorial at the time. “It is being dressed up by a reeling Clinton campaign as Hillary’s ‘voluntary’ surrender of the server in connection with a ‘security inquiry.’”..............