[News] Trump, Russia, and the 2016 Election

All news related to Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia and to the Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. New details should be cited to reputable sources.

Paleocon wrote:

Could, for instance, the President preemptively pardon gunmen from assassinating Supreme Court Justices? How far are we willing to take this little thought exercise?

I'd say however far the thought experiment goes, discussions of violence should not be a part of them.

What the people in that article are suggesting is basically what Ford did for Nixon. Preemptively pardon before a charge is laid out for past actions.

I haven't seen anyone yet suggest preemptively pardoning for future actions.

Kehama wrote:

And if the Pres happens to pardon himself for, say, collusion with a foreign power to influence a Presidential election, launder money for a foreign power and organized crime, lying under oath, illegal use of campaign funds, etc. is there truly no recourse for any other branch of the government to step in and say "now hold on a second, that's waaaaaay outside the scope of the pardon powers." or is this truly a power without a check?

There's no check outside impeachment. I suppose Trump could pardon someone for X and a court could rule that the charge they're facing is not included in X and allow prosecution, but that's fixable with a followup pardon. Nixon's acting assistant AG wrote that the president can't pardon himself, but that has no legal force. The SCOTUS can't issue an advisory ruling, so it would have to actually happen before any court could address it.

According to Lawrence Tribe, "During a Virginia debate over whether to ratify the Constitution, George Mason worried that the president might “pardon crimes which were advised by himself.” James Madison replied that a president who did so could be impeached." In 1886, SCOTUS ruled that the pardon power is "unlimited, with the exception [of cases of impeachment]" and "extends to every offence known to the law." He can't pardon before the crime, but he can immediately thereafter.

qaraq wrote:
Kehama wrote:

And if the Pres happens to pardon himself for, say, collusion with a foreign power to influence a Presidential election, launder money for a foreign power and organized crime, lying under oath, illegal use of campaign funds, etc. is there truly no recourse for any other branch of the government to step in and say "now hold on a second, that's waaaaaay outside the scope of the pardon powers." or is this truly a power without a check?

There's no check outside impeachment. I suppose Trump could pardon someone for X and a court could rule that the charge they're facing is not included in X and allow prosecution, but that's fixable with a followup pardon. Nixon's acting assistant AG wrote that the president can't pardon himself, but that has no legal force. The SCOTUS can't issue an advisory ruling, so it would have to actually happen before any court could address it.

According to Lawrence Tribe, "During a Virginia debate over whether to ratify the Constitution, George Mason worried that the president might “pardon crimes which were advised by himself.” James Madison replied that a president who did so could be impeached." In 1886, SCOTUS ruled that the pardon power is "unlimited, with the exception [of cases of impeachment]" and "extends to every offence known to the law." He can't pardon before the crime, but he can immediately thereafter.

My understanding is the pardon power is absolute (with the exception of presidential impeachment) for any Federal crime. He/she doesn't have power to pardon crimes against state law. I don;t think you can pre-emptively pardon, because explicit in accepting a pardon is admitting guilt to the offence, which you cannot do for something that hasn't happened yet. I suppose the grey area would be being offered a pardon but not accepting it until after the crime is committed?

thrawn82 wrote:
qaraq wrote:
Kehama wrote:

And if the Pres happens to pardon himself for, say, collusion with a foreign power to influence a Presidential election, launder money for a foreign power and organized crime, lying under oath, illegal use of campaign funds, etc. is there truly no recourse for any other branch of the government to step in and say "now hold on a second, that's waaaaaay outside the scope of the pardon powers." or is this truly a power without a check?

There's no check outside impeachment. I suppose Trump could pardon someone for X and a court could rule that the charge they're facing is not included in X and allow prosecution, but that's fixable with a followup pardon. Nixon's acting assistant AG wrote that the president can't pardon himself, but that has no legal force. The SCOTUS can't issue an advisory ruling, so it would have to actually happen before any court could address it.

According to Lawrence Tribe, "During a Virginia debate over whether to ratify the Constitution, George Mason worried that the president might “pardon crimes which were advised by himself.” James Madison replied that a president who did so could be impeached." In 1886, SCOTUS ruled that the pardon power is "unlimited, with the exception [of cases of impeachment]" and "extends to every offence known to the law." He can't pardon before the crime, but he can immediately thereafter.

My understanding is the pardon power is absolute (with the exception of presidential impeachment) for any Federal crime. He/she doesn't have power to pardon crimes against state law. I don;t think you can pre-emptively pardon, because explicit in accepting a pardon is admitting guilt to the offence, which you cannot do for something that hasn't happened yet. I suppose the grey area would be being offered a pardon but not accepting it until after the crime is committed?

And in the end it comes down to will the Legislature impeach and convict. As right now, that seems to be a double no, there is no real limit.

Demosthenes wrote:

What the people in that article are suggesting is basically what Ford did for Nixon. Preemptively pardon before a charge is laid out for past actions.

I haven't seen anyone yet suggest preemptively pardoning for future actions.

From what I’ve read about the whole watergate mess, people at the time were well aware that Ford’s blanket pardon for Nixon was a bit constitutionally dodgy, but everyone was just so glad to see the back of Nixon that they weren’t inclined to quibble about the details.

My take is that,. at this point, the real criminal behind all of this is Manafort. How he came to be inside Trump's profit is a story that needs to be told. Did Putin instruct Trump to bring him in? Did Manafort, on Putin's instructions, attempt to join Trump's campaign on his own?

I think, like Watergate, a lot of men will go to prison, and Trump will likely be impeached. And like Nixon, the public will accept a pardon of Trump so harry can just move on.

I do wonder, if Putin and Manafort calculated that Pence would actually be less desirable than even a 100 corrupt Trump, therefore making impeachment less possible. Pence is the fly in the ointment, right now. I really, really hope he is linked to all of this.

I don't like Pence either and pretty much am diametrically opposed to just about everything he stands for socially, but at this point he would almost certainly be a better leader than Tweeting Trump, the Social Media President.

It's too bad Pence isn't just ideologically different. He's just as likely to let the Russian's trample all over our democracy. How far down the list of succession do you have to go before you find a Republican that isn't a Russian stooge? Paul Ryan can't be trusted either.

This is actually the problem I brought up after the election, but before Trump took office. What Russia did deserves a serious response, up to getting into an actual shooting war. And we elected he only administration that would likely do nothing about it.

Yes, we would have been better off with a hawkish Clinton making Russia pay. Instead, it may be years before there is anyone in the administration that will even move to protect our voting machines, let alone all of the election meddling. It's despicable.

I believe Trump is fully capable of starting a nuclear war if the walls completely close in. I’d take a deal where he gets immunity and we get Pence if we avoided that.

Jayhawker wrote:

This is actually the problem I brought up after the election, but before Trump took office. What Russia did deserves a serious response, up to getting into an actual shooting war. And we elected he only administration that would likely do nothing about it.

Yes, we would have been better off with a hawkish Clinton making Russia pay. Instead, it may be years before there is anyone in the administration that will even move to protect our voting machines, let alone all of the election meddling. It's despicable.

Luckily states run their own elections. Pressuring them to actually takes steps to safeguard them should be easier.

That’s the thing, as much as trump is an incompetent embarrassment and the worst president in history (thanks, USA Today!), acting locally still has the most benefits to our day to day lives.

I think if Clinton won the election, anything true about the Russia story would be buried under coverage of emails and the Clinton foundation and every other thing the Republicans would drag out to use against her. Any focus on the election being hacked would have been dismissed by the Republicans as another case of the Clintons trying to Wag the Dog and deflect from their own scandals. Any attempt to secure our elections would have been spun as Hillary trying to make sure we never discover the three million illegal immigrants that voted for her. Any attempt by the Department of Justice to go after people in the Trump campaign would have been proof that Hillary was building her own private police state.

As bad as this is...I think it actually could have been worse.

And Trump / Russian bots were agitating for a civil war. And Russian officials were threatening a nuclear war if Clinton won.

DSGamer wrote:

And Trump / Russian bots were agitating for a civil war. And Russian officials were threatening a nuclear war if Clinton won.

So you're saying we may not be in the worst possible timestream after all. I need time to process this possibility, and maybe cry a little more.

LouZiffer wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

And Trump / Russian bots were agitating for a civil war. And Russian officials were threatening a nuclear war if Clinton won.

So you're saying we may not be in the worst possible timestream after all. I need time to process this possibility, and maybe cry a little more.

At least this way, the idea of Russian meddling is being taken seriously by far more people than I think it would have been if Clinton won and Trump lost. However unfair it is that this makes a difference, the symbol of this investigation is Robert Mueller instead of a Clinton White House.

Paleocon wrote:

Could, for instance, the President preemptively pardon gunmen from assassinating Supreme Court Justices? How far are we willing to take this little thought exercise?

I'm sure if that happened Paul Ryan would open imp--**snrrkk**, haha, oh man, sorry, I can't even finish that sentence with a straight face.

LouZiffer wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

And Trump / Russian bots were agitating for a civil war. And Russian officials were threatening a nuclear war if Clinton won.

So you're saying we may not be in the worst possible timestream after all. I need time to process this possibility, and maybe cry a little more.

I still want to be on the timestream where Gore won the election and we didn't go to war in Iraq.

Paleocon wrote:
LouZiffer wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

And Trump / Russian bots were agitating for a civil war. And Russian officials were threatening a nuclear war if Clinton won.

So you're saying we may not be in the worst possible timestream after all. I need time to process this possibility, and maybe cry a little more.

I still want to be on the timestream where Gore won the election and we didn't go to war in Iraq.

Isn't that the planet at the end of serenity where everyone just laid down and died from boredom and clean air? You want Reavers? Cuz that's how you get Reavers...

Carter Page feels somewhat like 'old news' at this point, but he gave a recent interview where he claimed to have never met or communicated in any fashion with Trump.

It appears he forgot that he claimed otherwise back in 2016:

while giving a talk in Russia.

At about 24:24 it is mentioned that his Wikipedia page makes the same claim about having never met Trump, and the reporter asks if that is true. Page responds that he had " ... certainly been in a number of meetings with him [Trump] and I've learned a tremendous amount from him ...". He then says that he wouldn't like to talk about 'actual briefings', implying they had occurred but he just wasn't able to speak about them.

I think the CNN news article showing that interview claimed that Page had been 'drilled' by Stephanopoulos. I know that is just SEO language at this point and the word has lost all meaning, but there was a case where they really could have 'drilled' him, and they completely dropped the ball.

Hobear wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
LouZiffer wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

And Trump / Russian bots were agitating for a civil war. And Russian officials were threatening a nuclear war if Clinton won.

So you're saying we may not be in the worst possible timestream after all. I need time to process this possibility, and maybe cry a little more.

I still want to be on the timestream where Gore won the election and we didn't go to war in Iraq.

Isn't that the planet at the end of serenity where everyone just laid down and died from boredom and clean air? You want Reavers? Cuz that's how you get Reavers...

All things considered, I'm okay with that.

The Latest: Attorney Pleads Guilty to Lying

WASHINGTON (AP) — THE Latest on the Russia probe (all times local):

3:25 p.m.

An attorney for a prominent law firm is pleading guilty to lying to federal authorities about his interactions with a former Trump campaign associate.

Alex van der Zwaan is entering the plea in federal court in Washington where he is admitting to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators about his interactions with Rick Gates. Gates is a former aide on President Donald Trump's campaign and a longtime associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The charge against van der Zwaan does not involve election meddling or the Trump campaign's operations. It stems from the special counsel's investigation into a covert Washington lobbying campaign Manafort and Gates are accused of directing on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian interests.

Manafort and Gates have pleaded not guilty.

Hobear wrote:
Paleocon wrote:
LouZiffer wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

And Trump / Russian bots were agitating for a civil war. And Russian officials were threatening a nuclear war if Clinton won.

So you're saying we may not be in the worst possible timestream after all. I need time to process this possibility, and maybe cry a little more.

I still want to be on the timestream where Gore won the election and we didn't go to war in Iraq.

Isn't that the planet at the end of serenity where everyone just laid down and died from boredom and clean air? You want Reavers? Cuz that's how you get Reavers...

I seem to remember there were sweet drugs involved too, not just the soothing dulcet tones of the Emperor of the Moon.

‘Patriotic’ Trump Supporter Finds Out She Was Tricked By Russian Trolls And Her Reaction Is Hilarious

Florine Gruen Goldfarb loves America. She is a real, down-home patriot. So much so that she unwittingly promoted a Russian-coordinated events on Facebook in support of Donald Trump. Goldfarb, who runs the Team Trump Broward County Facebook page, was one of the 53 percent of white women who backed Trump in 2016 and likely didn’t need Russia’s help to do it. But CNN reports that she did, in fact, promote pro-Trump events that were encouraged by Russian trolls on Facebook.

“I don’t care if they were involved or not,” she told a CNN reporter when confronted about her involvement in Russia-backed events organized by Being Patriotic Facebook page. “That’s the least important thing.”

To be fair, the Being Patriotic Facebook page doesn't mention which country you're supposed to be being patriotic towards.

Her reaction isn't hilarious at all.

It's scary.

I felt like I was watching my mother and aunt. It is exactly what they would say, the same way they would just dismiss facts because they don't like them.

It doesn't surprise me at all that Putin is a judo black belt. Probably the greatest concept in judo is the idea of using someone's force or overreaction against them. This is particularly useful against an opponent of greater size, strength, or capability.

He likely observed how easily and successfully Osama bin Laden did precisely this with our attacking Iraq shortly after the 9-11 attacks and figured this sort of asymmetry was necessary in attacking American interests. And to do so, he went to our history.

Historically, the ideological weapon we used against the Russians in the past was that of blind, enraged patriotism. We used this to root out any semblance of sympathy with global Socialism. We did so at great cost to ourselves as the ideological chemotherapy we used was used so indiscriminately we nearly destroyed our intellectual capabilities in the process. Having seen this, he knew all he had to do was enflame it again, but this time to be the one controlling it.

Sure enough, all he had to do was agitate. And with less than the budget for a single conventional cruise missile, he managed to f*ck up our elections and poison any faith in the democratic process. Worse yet, he recognizes better than anyone else that it is far easier to fool someone than to convince them that they've been fooled.

So here we stand. 40% of the nation unable to accept that they were bamboozled by a St. Petersburg troll farm and the rest too disorganized to do anything about it.

This nation is truly f*cked.

I remember having similar conversations with relatives and family friends around the time of the Planned Parenthood video. Eventually they landed on it doesn't matter if the video was fake, because it SHOULD be real because the cause is so good. The end justifies any means.

I've heard similar arguments from people I know and it boils down to "Russia couldn't have manipulated me to vote for Trump because I was going to vote for him anyway." It completely disregards the fact that information they were provided, or that was hidden from them, which may have caused them to vote for a particular candidate was hand picked by a foreign power to promote a particular outcome. The very idea that they may have been manipulated by an outside entity doesn't even cross their mind. It's just not possible because they're too smart, too savvy, and they know what they believe...etc. Unless a Russian spy in a trench coat broke into a polling station, stole all the ballots and replaced them with their own hand written ballots, they don't view it as interfering with the election in any way. One co-worker even said "Well the media was trying to convince people to vote for Hillary but no one says CNN was meddling in the elections, did they? How is this any different?"

Paleocon wrote:

It doesn't surprise me at all that Putin is a judo black belt. Probably the greatest concept in judo is the idea of using someone's force or overreaction against them. This is particularly useful against an opponent of greater size, strength, or capability.

He likely observed how easily and successfully Osama bin Laden did precisely this with our attacking Iraq shortly after the 9-11 attacks and figured this sort of asymmetry was necessary in attacking American interests. And to do so, he went to our history.

Historically, the ideological weapon we used against the Russians in the past was that of blind, enraged patriotism. We used this to root out any semblance of sympathy with global Socialism. We did so at great cost to ourselves as the ideological chemotherapy we used was used so indiscriminately we nearly destroyed our intellectual capabilities in the process. Having seen this, he knew all he had to do was enflame it again, but this time to be the one controlling it.

Sure enough, all he had to do was agitate. And with less than the budget for a single conventional cruise missile, he managed to f*ck up our elections and poison any faith in the democratic process. Worse yet, he recognizes better than anyone else that it is far easier to fool someone than to convince them that they've been fooled.

So here we stand. 40% of the nation unable to accept that they were bamboozled by a St. Petersburg troll farm and the rest too disorganized to do anything about it.

This nation is truly f*cked.

This is all true. To be fair, though, we softened the ground with Social Media. Our largest economic sector, where many of us make our money, is an industry predicated on influence and manipulation. Better known as advertising. Trump and the messages Russia was pushing reached people who were used to being lied to. They were used to being manipulated. They understood that a large chunk of our economy was predicated on deceiving.

The best thing we could do to "fix" this would be to purchase Twitter, purchase Facebook and run them as non-profits or, better, shut them down entirely.