Exiled wrote:If Trump fires Mueller or prevents him from doing his job, there may be a case of obstruction. But merely hiring Whitaker seems like the client that wants to sue when there is merely a potential problem in the future. This exchange doesn't add anything to this.
No, he has already obstructed justice when he fired Comey. But hiring Whitaker is also obstruction because the man has already gone on record saying the investigation is a witch hunt and he indicated there were ways to hinder it aside from firing Mueller - like refusing to fund certain aspects of it. So he basically appointed someone, illegally mind you, to a position for which his only purpose is to undermine an investigation. That's textbook obstruction.
Exiled wrote:If Trump fires Mueller or prevents him from doing his job, there may be a case of obstruction. But merely hiring Whitaker seems like the client that wants to sue when there is merely a potential problem in the future. This exchange doesn't add anything to this.
Yeah, that sounds right to me. Absent evidence that Whittaker has actually tried to obstruct Mueller’s investigation, I don’t think Whittaker’s appointment or Trump’s comment in the interview amount to obstruction.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
That's a weak defense and I doubt it would hold up in court. "Sure, I called the man a N**** several times for no reason, but the reason I shot him in the back for stealing my shoes had nothing to do with racism."
Kevin Graham wrote:That's a weak defense and I doubt it would hold up in court. "Sure, I called the man a N**** several times for no reason, but the reason I shot him in the back for stealing my shoes had nothing to do with racism."
I did read the whole interview.
You have your burden of proof exactly backwards. You would have to prove obstruction beyond reasonable doubt. And if I were on a jury and a prosecutor tried to sell that quote as an admission of guilt, I’d have serious doubts about the strength of the prosecutor’s case. And what Trump said bears no resemblance to your example.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
I thought we were talking about whether Trump’s statement in the Daily Caller interview was an admission of obstruction of justice, not whether the President has obstructed justice by some other act. Look, I don’t think Whittaker is qualified for the job, either under the Constitution or by experience. But it’s one thing to mouth off during talk radio interviews and another to risk prison time by actually obstructing an investigation. (Especially when you’ve told everyone how you’d do it.) Unless Whittaker actually obstructs the investigation, I don’t see how appointing him can be obstruction.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Kevin Graham wrote:Sure, I called the man a N****several times for no reason...
Wew, lad.
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.