Flynn Walks

[_Icarus]

Honor, are you saying impeachment investigations are bad?

Aren't you the same guy who initially opposed impeachment proceedings and then admitted you were wrong to do so?

[_EAllusion]

Re: Flynn, I think it is straight up gas-lighting for a person defending a legitimate extremist position to think of disagreeing with it as somehow "extremist." While the product of a certain level of delusion, the haughty condescension about it is offensive. Real NYT editorial page energy there.

Re: Impeachment, I'm not sure how someone who stanned hard for the Pelosi position then doesn't have some regrets about that given how badly it turned out in the exact way critics said it would, but here we are. A broader inquiry that involved drawing up articles of impeachment based on a thorough investigation of all apparent impeachable conduct, which does include the Mueller report, not only was correct, but was strategically more sound. We are paying the price for avoiding it right now and will continue to do so in the future.

[_honorentheos]

I disagree with EAllusion in practise but not entirely on principle. Every president needs more and bipartisan congressional oversight but we're sliding faster in the opposite direction.

How would you have bipartisan congressional oversight? Congress is the most partisan place in the country.

What I suggest isn't something I have a solution for but it is essentially a call to return to the intent of the Constitution. Our bicameral legislative branch was setup in the Constitution as a check against the interests of the Executive Branch. But due to political party dominance of US politics, the interests at work today are not based on body of government but partisanship. Congress has been guilty of ceding many of it's Constitutional powers and responsibilities to the Executive, making the Executive stronger and Congress weaker.

[_honorentheos]

Honor, are you saying impeachment investigations are bad?

No. I'm saying historically they followed congressional investigations that refered the for impeachment. I'm against using impeachment as a mechanism for searching out impeachable offenses. It's unnecessary while overtly making impeachment a joke which undermines it's purpose, possibly it's legitimacy.

Aren't you the same guy who initially opposed impeachment proceedings and then admitted you were wrong to do so?

Something like that. I was initially opposed to the idea that the House had a Constitutional obligation to pursue investigating reasonable claims of executive overreach on the part of the Trump administration. I was persuaded they did, in fact, have a Constitutional obligation. I also wasn't excited by how the House had prosecuted the Mueller reports public hearings, and had a number of misgivings regarding the Democrats ability to execute that obligation. In the Ukraine call case, I was optimistic due to the case having advantages that I had hoped they would be able to use to present a solid, apolitical case that would be persuasive to at least enough members of the House and Senate to break the partisan gridlock even if it failed to achieve the improbable 2/3 majority in the Senate required to convict. Instead, the House Democrats made stupid mistakes like acting as if the entire country was like-minded but uninformed so the lines of questioning weren't even investigations or based on a strategy for prosecuting Trump. It was infuriating, actually. Worse, there were many open threads exposed in the process they should have chased down but didn't. The Senate essentially used that negligence to dismissively rush through the trial and call it a day.It seemed to solidify in many peoples minds that Democrats were doing exactly what right wing talk radio claims, trying to overturn the election rather than constrain an out of control authoritarian Executive. Would the nation have been better or worse off if impeachment hadn't been pursued? No idea. I'm less unsure that things would be far worse of impeachment had become the venue in the House for seeking new acts of overreach or abuse of power rather than the venue for investigating claims brought up from more traditional committee investigations. I'd caveat that with the House not pursuing the obstruction of the Justice Department in direct disregard of their authority. They should have pursued that as part of the proceedings.

[_honorentheos]

Re: Flynn, I think it is straight up gas-lighting for a person defending a legitimate extremist position to think of disagreeing with it as somehow "extremist." While the product of a certain level of delusion, the haughty condescension about it is offensive. Real NYT editorial page energy there.

What is extreme is the derisive portraying of evidence from multiple sides as "both siderism" or whatever you think it is, demanding the case be resolved before considered because your position is correct. It's interesting that you rarely engage with both sides of arguments when they come down to Trump. It's left you exposed on many public cases of overreach on this board from the Covington kids to the quality of evidence in the confirmations hearings for Kavenaugh to opposing the Democrat establishment almost as a religious belief. Whatever you want to call it, it isn't reasoned or justifiably considered so much as knee-jerk.

Re: Impeachment, I'm not sure how someone who stanned hard for the Pelosi position then doesn't have some regrets about that given how badly it turned out in the exact way critics said it would, but here we are. A broader inquiry that involved drawing up articles of impeachment based on a thorough investigation of all apparent impeachable conduct, which does include the Mueller report, not only was correct, but was strategically more sound. We are paying the price for avoiding it right now and will continue to do so in the future.

Again, you are just imposing a conclusion that contradicts how the public and Congress reacted to the impeachment. I can't imagine how a fishing trip turned out to have less of a corrosive effect on public opinion of the Democrats just going after Trump using any excuse no matter how substantial. In fact, if argue this preconception and the ability of Republicans to insert it successfully into the impeachment hearings contributed significantly to the failure. As I noted multiple times, the Ukraine case had positive aspects Tonite that seemed able to overcome many challenges but I expressed reservations regarding the Democrats being able to effective prosecute it. I don't feel I was wrong on either count. I also see the outcome as undermining your belief the steady drip of a weaponized impeachment fishing trip would have hurt Trump rather than the Democrats. We agree they should have pursued the case to a fuller conclusion before drafting articles of impeachment. There is zero evidence inserting the Mueller investigation into that would have been beneficial to the case. In fact, I'd argue the attitude behind it is what undermines the Democrats who seemed convinced of the obvious wrong doing's ability to make it's own case they failed to make one themselves. They just relied on testimony and pointed at it saying, See!? Guilty! It was frustrating. You're frustrating for similar dumb reasons.

[_Brackite]

I don't think the efforts of the political minority nor the deep state to undo the election of 2016 is an example of preserving democracy.

Rush Limbaugh has been going on again about "undoing the results of the 2016 election" this past week. But Rush and most other Republicans like to ignore the results of the 2018 election when Democrats won big.

[_Res Ipsa]

The host responded Thursday to questions asked in documents unsealed Wednesday that revealed key bureau officials discussing their motivations for interviewing Flynn in the White House on Jan. 24, 2017 -- with one note questioning if the FBI's "goal" was "to get him [Flynn] to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired."

"That is not a question that should ever be asked by anyone, any professional and would never be asked by the 99 percent of brave professionals in the FBI," Hannity said. "Now, shouldn't the goal of the FBI ... shouldn't it always be truth, the rule of law, justice? They work in the Department of Justice. We have a system of justice in America. Apparently not in Jim Comey's FBI.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/sean-hann ... -comey-fbi

Asking if your goal is to get someone to lie to prosecute them or get him fired should never be a question asked in the department of justice. This is the definition of a perjurty trap. Now that this has been exposed, they're going to pay for it.

BS! That’s the question the FBI should always be asking. If you don’t ask it, you won’t ever know when you are crossing lines.

by the way, a perjury trap Is incredibly easy to
avoid. Just tell the damn truth. Did you ever defend Bill Clinton on grounds of “perjury trap?”

[_EAllusion]

There is such a thing as a pejury trap wherein questioners use the foibles of memory and conversational speech along with coercive pressure to produce false statements that are used to stack up charges against someone. That didn't happen in Flynn's case, but it is a thing. Instead, "pejury trap" as it's being used by the sources Ajax is consuming means something more like, "give Flynn an opportunity to the lie to the FBI and then charge him with crimes when he does so." That's not a pejury trap. That's just committing' crimes.

You can tell how sincere Ajax is about this as a unfair practice by how much he has and is advocating for the huge number of people in prison for being hit on a "pejury trap" in this sense. Ajax also seems awfully uninterested in why Flynn would be lying since, as he claims, he did nothing wrong. This is where it becomes important for him to be vague about what Flynn was lying about or the content of his lies. Otherwise you have to confront what he was systematically misleading federal law enforcement about.

[_Dr Exiled]

Here is an article by Professor Jonathan Turley (I think he is a libertarian and a Constitutional Law Professor at George Washington University in D.C.) where he answers President Obama's claim that there isn't precedent to dismiss the Flynn case:

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/05/09/p ... ore-156010

He outlines how there actually is precedent to make the request and provides the case law that backs up his point, including a case where Eric Holder, President Obama's AG, made the same request.

[_EAllusion]

[quote=honorentheos post_id=1224148 time=1589132642 user_id=7137]...[/quote]
Just because you are a sucker for middle-brow pundit articles that attempt to manufacture a case for a position where there is no reasonable doesn't mean you are considering a case like a very serious intellectual while people you are interacting with are not. That you can't fathom that other people are also weighing the evidence if they don't have your own fallacy of the golden mean hangups is like 75% of the problem here.

The very serious, reasonable position is not that while Flynn seems shady, regrettably the FBI poisoned its own case by engaging in misconduct and now have to lawfully drop charges. That's wrong on several different fronts, and represents you buying into a bad-faith, misleading series of arguments regarding law enforcement misconduct. You do this while trying to seem sober-minded by acknowledging that mayhaps Flynn isn't a good actor. That you call denial of that "extremism" is just ridiculous. And no, this isn't the first time you swallow the bulk of some propaganda effort while not going whole hog and cross your arms thinking this makes you the clear-thinking one.

That you don't do this on subjects like global warming is a borderline miracle and probably just represents a specific area that you have some paraprofessional expertise in that insulates you from taking a manufactured middle-ground . So at least I'm spared being called an "extremist" there.

[quote]There is zero evidence inserting the Mueller investigation into that would have been beneficial to the case.[/quote]

Yeah, no evidence at all. I mean, it's not like the report details out with extensive evidence numerous episodes of impeachable conduct or anything.

Hey, remember after the truncated impeachment when Trump massively increased an ongoing effort to purge and replace with amoral hacks all the government non-loyalist inspector generals, justice department attys, intelligence officials, and now military leadership while simultaneously retaliating against anyone who blew the whistle on his admin's malfeasance? Do you think that would've occurred during impeachment?

Remember how during impeachment house managers brought a crazy, worst scenario case in which the President would try to condition federal disaster relief on political loyalty, then President Trump did that exact thing not a few months after with likely deadly consequences and that's just a thing we tolerate now? Do you think that would've happened if impeachment were ongoing?