Adrastos, Fog Of History, Fog Of Scandal, Legal Docket, Political Crack, The Darnold

The Search

You’re probably wondering why Trump TP is the featured image in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Doorn search. This tweet by the dread Mike Allen of Axios explains why:

The Kaiser of Chaos has resisted turning over documents to the feds, which prompted the search warrant and the raid on Trump’s Florida pad. The feds know that this guy flushes incriminating paper down the terlet much to the chagrin of reputable plumbers everywhere. Fortunately, former President* Pennywise can afford a plumber; not that he’d actually pay one, but he can afford one.

In his never-ending search for sympathy, the Impeached Insult Comedian was the one who blew the whistle on the raid. Poor baby: “They broke into my safe.”

I wonder how much cash he stashes in his Florida safe.

Trump has spent most of his summer in New Jersey. Florida is hot and hurricaney during the sum-sum-sum-summertime, after all.

He’s currently in New York preparing to be deposed in one of the many lawsuits filed against him. My friend Fredo did a fine job chronicling all of the legal shit going on in Trump’s life right now:

I’ve been expecting some sort of raid on Trump properties, but I was surprised that it was over violations of the Presidential Records Act. It was enacted because of well-founded fears that Tricky Dick would destroy incriminating documents.

I learned something new about the Trickster last night:

I, too, had Nixon on my mind yesterday as it was the 48th anniversary of his resignation. Today is the anniversary of his bizarre farewell speech:

After four years of Trump befouling the executive mansion with mangled syntax, the speech seems less weird. Nixon was much smarter than Trump, but both excelled at self-pity.

The GOP is holding a pity party as I write this. That empty suit KMac issued empty threats of reprisal last evening:

Merrick Garland is a meticulous man. I’m sure his papers are in order: he’s not a Trump appointee, after all.

Regarding Merrick Garland and the DOJ: I told you so. A properly run DOJ neither leaks nor comments on ongoing investigations. Last night’s document search is just the beginning. There’s more to come.

And now for a particularly nasty musical interlude:

I was asked several times last night: would a conviction on document-related charges bar Trump from running for office? Legal experts are divided on that question. Here’s an epic quote from a thoughtful news analysis piece in the NYT:

“Specifically, the law in question — Section 2071 of Title 18 of the United States Code — makes it a crime if someone who has custody of government documents or records “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys” them.

If convicted, defendants can be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. In addition, the statute says, if they are currently in a federal office, they “shall forfeit” that office, and they shall “be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
On its face, then, if Mr. Trump were to be charged and convicted of removing, concealing or destroying government records under that law, he would seem to be ineligible to become president again.

 

But there was reason for caution: The law briefly received a close look in 2015, after it came to light that Hillary Clinton, then widely anticipated to be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, had used a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state.

Some Republicans were briefly entranced with whether the law could keep Mrs. Clinton out of the White House, including Michael Mukasey, a former attorney general in the administration of George W. Bush. So was at least one conservative think tank.

 

But in considering that situation, several legal scholars — including Seth B. Tillman of Maynouth University in Ireland and Eugene Volokh of the University of California, Los Angeles — noted that the Constitution sets eligibility criteria for who can be president, and argued that Supreme Court rulings suggest Congress cannot alter them. The Constitution allows Congress to disqualify people from holding office in impeachment proceedings, but grants no such power for ordinary criminal law.”

The good news is that one potential charge, seditious conspiracy, is serious enough to overcome these objections, which were based on the “But her emails” mishigas.

The bad news is that seditious conspiracy is much harder to prove than the presidential* papers thing, but there’s a growing mound of evidence about the Dipshit Insurrection. Patience is still in order. Never forget the Omar Theorem:

Despite my jocular tone, this is some serious shit. A search warrant has NEVER been executed on the residence of a former president before. It’s a righteous warrant: the FBI had a well-founded belief that incriminating evidence was present and that the target of the investigation might destroy evidence. That’s right, I just called the Kaiser of Chaos a target. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

The last word goes to The Kinks with a song that’s been in my head since I learned of the search:

One thought on “The Search”

  1. What a test of Tommy T’s resolve to not post about the doings at Free Republic. Stay strong, Tommy!

Comments are closed.