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US Politics The Mueller Investigation - report is out

JGrimez said:
Does that include a guy Mueller sees jaywalking on the way to the office?
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No, but if jaywalking were a federal crime (it's obviously not) and in the course of his investigation Mueller uncovered evidence of jaywalking, he could charge the suspected jaywalker with that crime if he wanted to. That's not even unique to this situation, it's pretty much the general rule for any police activity. For example, if a police officer pulls you over and smells weed in your car, and then he searches your car for the weed and ends up also finding an unlawfully carried handgun (or stolen goods, or whatever), he doesn't have to ignore the handgun just because he found it while he was looking for evidence of marijuana possession. It would be perfectly lawful and appropriate to charge you with any crime consistent with the evidence found.
 
And let's assume, merely for the sake of argument, that Mueller really hates Trump and his sole personal motivation in conducting the investigation is to hurt Trump politically and get him removed from office. This might blow your mind, but it still would not matter at all. It's a well-established tenet of criminal procedure that subjective ulterior motives of investigators are wholly irrelevant as long as their conduct is objectively reasonable. See Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996).

It's amusing to me that Republicans were heavily in favor of all these pro-police procedural rules when they were only being applied to poor people in communities of color, but now they're suddenly incensed that the exact same rules are applied to Trump. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, you can't have different rules for different people based on their social status or political power.
 
Roger&Me said:
No, but if jaywalking were a federal crime (it's obviously not) and in the course of his investigation Mueller uncovered evidence of jaywalking, he could charge the suspected jaywalker with that crime if he wanted to. That's not even unique to this situation, it's pretty much the general rule for any police activity. For example, if a police officer pulls you over and smells weed in your car, and then he searches your car for the weed and ends up also finding an unlawfully carried handgun (or stolen goods, or whatever), he doesn't have to ignore the handgun just because he found it while he was looking for evidence of marijuana possession. It would be perfectly lawful and appropriate to charge you with any crime consistent with the evidence found.
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What if a police officer used knowingly false information to obtain a warrant to surveil the person he pulled over? Is that a crime?

Roger&Me said:
you can't have different rules for different people based on their social status or political power.
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What's your opinion on the FBI's ruling of the Clinton server investigation?
 
JGrimez said:
What if a police officer used knowingly false information to obtain a warrant to surveil the person he pulled over? Is that a crime?
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That never happened here, and we can parse through that and debate it in the future when I have the energy.

JGrimez said:
What's your opinion on the FBI's ruling of the Clinton server investigation?
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It was the appropriate decision. FBI had no grounds to charge her because they couldn't prove an essential element of the alleged crime. No reasonable prosecutor would agree to take that case because it's deficient on its face and would be summarily dismissed. It wouldn't have even proceeded to trial, because Clinton would've just filed a pretrial motion for summary judgment and the judge would've dismissed the case outright.

And bringing a deficient prosecution against her would also risk triggering double jeopardy, which could bar the government from ever bringing those charges against her in that case in the future--even if they found more evidence and could actually build an airtight case. The decision made good sense whether your goal is to "lock her up" or not.
 
Roger&Me said:
That never happened here, and we can parse through that and debate it in the future when I have the energy.
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I look forward to it. Just try to dumb things down a little for me.

Roger&Me said:
It was the appropriate decision. FBI had no grounds to charge her because they couldn't prove an essential element of the alleged crime.
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Appropriate? Do we have a constitution and should we follow the law? Does appropriate mean doing things the right way?
What is the essential element that couldn't be proven and why didn't you mention it? I have a feeling that you are actually thinking of intent, but that would be preposterous when discussing violations of the espionage act and mishandling classified information. Does every crime require intent for authorities to have grounds to charge?

Roger&Me said:
No reasonable prosecutor would agree to take that case because it's deficient on its face and would be summarily dismissed.
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What does reasonable prosecutor mean? One that wants to save their ass politically? Should they operate above political bias?
Are powerful politicians able to pressure authorities to obstruct justice? If you witnessed this yourself would you be honest about it even if it contradicted your political views?

I do not understand how possessing undeniable evidence can render a case deficient.
 
Evidence of the swamp/deep-state conspiracy: Republicans and Democrats working together to remove an elected president.
Remember their first Trump team surveillance request was so flimsy that it was rejected by the notoriously rubber-stamping FISA court, and was only after the unverified dossier was included that it was approved.

John McCain: Yes, It Was I Who Handed Comey The Unverified Trump Dossier
https://www.dailywire.com/news/30463/john-mccain-yes-it-was-me-who-handed-comey-james-barrett
In his upcoming book "The Restless Wave" (to be released May 22), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) admits that he was the person who handed then-FBI Director James Comey the salacious, unverified dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. It was that action that appears to have set off the sequence of events ultimately resulting in Robert Mueller's Russia probe.

In its report on McCain's admission, The Daily Beast - which fails to mention who funded Steele's project in the report ? notes that McCain's involvement came after Steele had met with American officials in Rome to discuss his findings. However, it appears to have been the decision by McCain, a frequent critic of Trump, to hand Comey the dossier that really got things rolling.

"I agreed to receive a copy of what is now referred to as 'the dossier,'" writes McCain in his upcoming book. "I reviewed its contents. The allegations were disturbing, but I had no idea which if any were true. I could not independently verify any of it, and so I did what any American who cares about our nation's security should have done."
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JGrimez said:
Do we have a constitution and should we follow the law?
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Yes, and yes. The Constitution would have barred prosecution against Clinton because it requires prosecutors to prove every element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. If that weren't the case, then prosecutors would be able to bring charges against anybody who does anything that's "almost illegal." They could just make up the law as they go along, which would make a mockery of Due Process. It would be impossible for anybody to know whether something is a crime or not.

I promise you, you do not want prosecutors to be able to charge you with a crime unless they can prove all the elements. It's one of the most basic protections we have against government tyranny.

JGrimez said:
I have a feeling that you are actually thinking of intent, but that would be preposterous when discussing violations of the espionage act and mishandling classified information.
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Your argument here fails because the espionage act simply does not criminalize negligent mishandling of information. It requires a knowing and willful act of disclosure, and FBI had no evidence which could prove Clinton did that. They needed evidence that she did it purposefully, not just made a mistake or did something careless. FBI could only prove that Clinton did something stupid, which wasn't a crime. It was just stupid.

If you think the espionage act should criminalize negligent mishandling of classified information, there's a straightforward way to fix that: lobby your members of Congress to change the law. But until they actually do change the law, you're stuck with what it already says.

JGrimez said:
What does reasonable prosecutor mean?
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In this case, one who chooses not to commit prosecutorial malpractice by prematurely bringing an unwinnable case and screwing over any chance of bringing a winnable prosecution against Clinton in the future by needlessly triggering double jeopardy.
 
JGrimez said:
Does every crime require intent for authorities to have grounds to charge?
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Yes, and that's a good question. Every crime consists of two parts: the physical act underlying the crime ("actus reus") and the mental intent to do the crime ("mens rea"). And the degree of required intent differs according to the crime. For example, the act of killing a human being is a crime called "manslaughter" when it's done with a negligent state of mind; but it's called "murder" when it's done intentionally. Or if I intentionally steal your laptop, that's "larceny". But if it looks identical to my laptop and I accidentally put it in my backpack and leave with it because I think it's actually mine, that's probably not a crime at all (but you might be able to sue me for its value in civil court, depending on the circumstances). If the prosecution can't prove the specific intent required for the crime, it can't prove the crime. Period. If the crime requires a knowing and willful act, a negligent act will not suffice. The specific intent matters a lot.

(As an aside, in some jurisdictions there's a very small subset of crimes which require no intent (called "strict liability" crimes), but they're extremely rare and a relatively recent invention and usually applied to things like traffic violations.)
 
Grimez I heard today that the talking point that a republican think tank initially hired fusion GPS was false, and that it was originally funded by Democrats. Have you heard anything about this?
I’m still confused about how such a frivolously acquired unverified piece of opposition reasearch fiction could be used to allow a sitting president to spy and a opposition presidential candidate. What a corrupt world we live in, hopefully all involved see Justice.
 
Roger&Me said:
And the degree of required intent differs according to the crime.
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Should a high-level government official who has been trained in recognizing classified information be absolved when they claim they could not recognize classified information while illegally forwarding said intel though a non-secure channel? There comes a point where claiming ignorance of the law is implausible.
And doesn't the fact that they've been trained disprove their claim that they didn't know? At what point does incompetence become negligence?
And wouldn't matters of endangering national security require very little proof of intent due to the potentially catastrophic nature of mishandling sensitive information?

Roger&Me said:
Your argument here fails because the espionage act simply does not criminalize negligent mishandling of information. It requires a knowing and willful act of disclosure, and FBI had no evidence which could prove Clinton did that. They needed evidence that she did it purposefully, not just made a mistake or did something careless. FBI could only prove that Clinton did something stupid, which wasn't a crime. It was just stupid.
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If you were honest and knew the details of the crimes you wouldn't say this. First of all we do not even know how the classified and special access program intelligence managed to get from secure networks onto her server. The transfer of these files proves intent as it is impossible to unintentionally do this. So why don't we know who did this and why aren't they at least being charged?
Let's say Clinton wasn't involved with this original transfer of files, but she then saw that she was housing classified information on her private server and was even forwarding some of these files to others. That was a knowing and wilful act. She committed a crime. The only way to dismiss this is by saying that she was too stupid to realize what she was doing, but to suggest that not only insults my intelligence but it makes one appear disingenuous (maybe we can even bring up destroying subpoena'd evidence). I appreciate your replies since you appear to know the law very well, but feel free to suspend the lawyer act temporarily and be straight up about what happened.

Roger&Me said:
an unwinnable case
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It was a slam dunk case. It was only unwnnable because the DOJ was corrupt and Clinton was a powerful politician.
 
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Droppersneck said:
Grimez I heard today that the talking point that a republican think tank initially hired fusion GPS was false, and that it was originally funded by Democrats.
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Correct. Republicans from Washington Free Beacon were engaging in legal opposition research against Trump, but after the Democrats took it over was when the Fusion GPS/Christopher Steele business began.
 
JGrimez said:
The transfer of these files proves intent as it is impossible to unintentionally do this.
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That's not enough, in fact you're not even talking about the right kind of intent. "Intent" is a term of art. You're confusing general intent with specific intent, anyway. And it wasn't even the espionage act FTR, it was the records act and 3 other statutes. And they didn't have enough to charge her under any of them.

JGrimez said:
It was a slam dunk case.
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It was a shit, unwinnable, political case and no prosecutor at DOJ was ever going to raise their hand to ruin their career over it. I promise you that. The evidence just wasn't there and it was basically just a political circus show.

And also, prosecutors are allowed to decline to prosecute a case if they want to, for basically any reason--even if the person is guilty and they have the evidence to prove it immediately. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, they do it all the time.
 
Grimez gets his evidence from conspiracy theory sites so it's kinda pointless trying to tell him there's no evidence, because to him it's as plain as day.
 
It's cool, it gives me a chance to debunk a lot of the talking points that are floating around and also maybe provide some context for anybody who's interested. This stuff is complicated, and it doesn't always follow what most people would consider to be "common sense," so there's a lot of misinformation floating around about the Mueller investigation in general. I mean, a typical survey-level textbook on criminal procedure is 1000-1500 pages long, and it's all Supreme Court case law because the subject is essentially its own highly specialized branch of constitutional law (concerning only the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments). Naturally most people won't know much about it, it's just not accessible information.
 
I find it interesting that the pro trump crowd seems totally find with the fact trump said over and over before the election that he'd lock Hillary Clinton up. Yet it's never happened.

And even if you wanna argue that the systems corrupt and is preventing him getting her out in jail, that still doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't make a promise you know you can't keep. He promised to lock her up, a promise he should have known he wouldn't be able to keep. Any way you look at it he looks bad. Either because he knew he wouldn't be able to and made a promise he knew he couldn't keep, or he really did think he'd be able to keep it and was just too incompetent to realize he was wrong. Or he was lying and never intended to at all.

Of course in reality the answer is that it was an empty piece of political rhetoric just like most campaign promises. Intended to please your supporters than forget it after the election.

My biggest problem with it was that shows that he has no respect for separation of powers and either doesn't realize or doesn't care that the president doesn't have the authority to just lock up anyone they like forever on their say so.
 
JGrimez said:
Did you see the figures for FISA warrants? So not only is FISC a rubber-stamp court . . .
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This is also just plain false. FISC is not a rubber-stamp court. It's actually a notoriously demanding court. It will usually decline to issue a warrant in the absence of an overwhelming showing of probable cause. The standard it applies typically is higher than what the constitution demands. The reason it issues warrants in a high percentage of cases is that investigators don't even bother applying for a FISA warrant unless they know they can get it. But FISC still rejects some warrant applications, for a variety of reasons.
 
The problem with the Internet is that people can say anything. When you're led to believe that anything from mainstream sources, and anything that disagrees with the conspiracy you support, is part of the conspiracy you support, the only things left are sites made to present pieces of evidence in a misleading way, and sites that are outright fabricating information, all to support said conspiracy. At that point, logical rebuttal of said points is, well, pointless. It's pretty frustrating.

But really nice to see you around again, Roger. :)
 
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