All entirely irrelevant. Being able to justify something without impropriety does not excuse the impropriety, if anything it makes it worse. "We didn't have to lie, we chose to."
Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
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Very relevant if your intent is to hold it up as an example to show that the FBI might not have had reason or justification to do what they did.
Because its an example of an investigation when they did have reason and justification to do what they did.
Still a 'not going away' problem
Karamo, Finchem and Mastriano did not respond to The Post’s requests for interviews. A Lake spokesman responded to The Post’s inquiry with the following statement: “What happened in 2020 won’t happen in 2024 with Kari Lake as governor because, unlike last time, Arizona will finally have an elections process that our state can be proud of and confident in.”
Mastriano is arguably the GOP nominee this year who would hold more powers over elections than any other if he becomes Pennsylvania’s next governor. The commonwealth’s governor is not only empowered to certify the appointment of the winning presidential candidate’s slate of electors — as all governors are — but also appoints the secretary of state, who certifies the results and oversees elections generally.
In a radio interview in March, Mastriano made clear his intentions to use those powers. “I get to appoint the secretary of state, who’s delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs and everything,” he said. “I could decertify every machine in the state with the stroke of a pen via the secretary of state. I already have the secretary of state picked out. It’s a world-class person that knows voting integrity better than anyone else in the nation, I think, and I already have a team that’s gonna be built around that individual.”
In 2020, Mastriano tried to block Pennsylvania’s certification of Biden’s victory by introducing a resolution asserting incorrectly that the Republican-dominated legislature had the right to choose which electors’ votes should be counted. Legislatures can give themselves that power, but federal law prohibits them from imposing a new election law on a contest that has already occurred.
Mastriano also organized a gathering of Republican state senators in Gettysburg, Pa., in late November 2020, during which Giuliani shared baseless allegations of fraud in the state. And he attended the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, where he was captured on video crossing the police line. Mastriano appeared before the Jan. 6 committee this month but refused to answer questions.
Across the country in Arizona, Lake and Finchem together would hold similar power as Mastriano in Pennsylvania — including the authority to certify a presidential election result and to certify the votes of the presidential electors, a document that is sent to the National Archives and Congress and is considered an official record of a presidential result.
Lake, a former longtime local TV anchor, has repeatedly said she does not recognize Biden as the nation’s legitimate president. Had she been governor in 2020, she has said she would not have fulfilled her legal duty to certify Arizona’s election results, a maneuver that could have disenfranchised the votes of hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who cast their ballots for Biden.
Arizona’s current governor, Republican Doug Ducey, resisted calls from Trump allies to withhold certification, and last month endorsed primary opponents of both Lake and Finchem.
As a poll watcher, Karamo worked to block the result in Michigan in 2020, testifying to state lawmakers and signing onto legal battles claiming without evidence that she saw rampant fraud.
Should she become secretary of state, she would be responsible for co-signing the certificate of electors with the Michigan governor, an act she conceivably could decline to do. On Wednesday, she tweeted a link to a post on the Trump-backed social media app Truth Social claiming that the former president would be back in office this year. Later in the day, she claimed her account had been hacked.
The Republican nominee for governor in Michigan, Tudor Dixon, is also an election denier, but she has not gone so far as to say she would have blocked certification in 2020. Asked if she would do so if she did not trust a future result, her campaign issued the following statement: “Inflation is soaring, our education system is failing, and violent crime is way up across the state. That’s my focus, not ‘journalists’ trying to create a story for clicks.”
In Georgia, Republican voters nominated incumbents for the state’s top two offices with power over elections — Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, neither of whom echo Trump’s false claims.
In Nevada, the gubernatorial nominee, Clark County sheriff Joe Lombardo, has said he saw no evidence of fraud in the 2020 contest. The GOP’s pick for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, has been a leader of the movement to overturn the 2020 result, but the office he is seeking lacks the power to certify elections.
In Wisconsin, the nominee for governor, Tim Michels, has said the 2020 election “may” have been stolen but has stopped short of saying he would have blocked certification in his state.
If GOP candidates make good on their promises to try to block an election result they deem suspicious without evidence of widespread irregularities, it won’t happen without a fight. Democrats and voting-rights advocates are already preparing to take legal action if any state officials seek to block the certification of the popular vote.
Cliff Levine, a Democratic election lawyer based in Pittsburgh, offered similar thoughts about Pennsylvania. But Levine said it is not a slam dunk that legal challenges would force recalcitrant election officials to do their jobs. “It’s ministerial until you have a dispute,” he said.
Levine warned that there are many other ways an election-denying governor could try to create election-related chaos — by, for instance, decertifying machines, blocking electronic counting of ballots or pushing new policies that went nowhere in 2020, such as empowering the legislature rather than voters to determine which presidential candidate’s electors are counted.
“The systemwide protections to ensure fair and free elections will be severely challenged” if Mastriano wins, Levine warned. “The dam will burst.”
It is also not known what would happen if enough governors refuse to send their elector certificates. John Eastman, the Trump campaign lawyer and architect of the plan to deny Biden the presidency by overturning the results, argued to Trump and his allies that withholding certificates would kick the outcome to the House of Representatives, where each delegation has one vote. Currently, Republicans control 26 state delegations and Democrats control 20. Three are tied, while Alaska’s lone congressional seat is vacant.
The bottom line, legal experts warned, is that any attempt to disrupt the process risks creating even more chaos than what unfolded following the 2020 election.
“These people are out there saying they are going to do this,” said Bradley Schrager, a Democratic election lawyer based in Nevada. “Which means, logically, that there’s a constituency out there that yearns for this.”
And if election-denying candidates win in November, having campaigned on the issue, Schrager said they may claim a mandate to address their backers’ grievances by whatever means necessary.
“We’re in the world of, ‘What are you prepared to do?’ ‘How far will you go?’” Schrager said. “We’re focusing on certification and things of that nature. But all the little things that run an election go through these people. So you could not just gum up an election. You could destroy it.”
For those of you not clicking that video, he has laryngitis, and posted that video to say his show wouldn't be on until he got his voice back.
Yes, but if we're dragging this back to what kicked it off, it's the implication via Trump and his cult that this is a fraudulent search that planted evidence, which you are keeping buoyant as plausible.
On those grounds, the difference between minor impropriety without substantial effect and deception great enough to obtain a warrant that otherwise wouldn't have been granted is very large and very, very relevant.
That's not the implication. The claim is that it was an improperly executed (and unnecessarily aggressive) search that leaves open the possibility of fraud. If you choose to infer things far beyond that, that's on you.
On this subject, Trump in an interview with Fox News said "I will do whatever I can to help the country... Whatever we can do to help — because the temperature has to be brought down in the country. If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen." And the headline takeaway from that is "Trump warns 'terrible things are going to happen' to US", like it's a threat.
It would be nice if he actually fucking meant it when he says he wants to help, because he's pretty much spent the last decade or so finding new ways to sow division between Americans. So not a lot of people believe the "Let's bring the temp down". bit. At least nobody who isn't already so deep in his Ass that they ascribe only the best possible motives and implications to anything he says.
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The reason things are called discussion threads is that there is supposed to be a consistent line of reasoning running through them. If you want to debate stuff directly following on from and prompted by previous comments, then the most reasonable explanation they are following that thread. If they are in fact titbit non-sequiturs, it is your responsibility to appropriately communicate that. If you have failed to communicate adequately, the first person you need to look at for the resultant misunderstanding is you.
It kind of is a threat, though.
What Trump thinks is raising the temperature is the FBI investigating him for potential criminality: "scams", "witch-hunts", etc. In essence, what he is saying is that to calm everything down, he needs to be left alone, or at least handled with kid gloves. (How incredibly convenient.) Let's also consider what Trump is telling his supporters, because that is a million and one things except calming everything down. "Whatever we can do to help" is just an obvious lie sitting in plain sight. That twat has pitched up to a soft interview and been allowed to utter a trite, self-serving platitude that is utterly dishonest in the context of the other 90% of what he says. We shouldn't gratify it. "Terrible things are going to happen" is probably a closer reflection of what he is saying.
The guy who told his followers to "fight like hell" when he lost the election is now saying that we need to "bring down the temperature".
Here's a handy guide on how to tell when Trump is lying: His lips are moving.
The media has sown the division. The media did it, and is still doing it. And you're buying right into it. I'm thinking back to his inaugural address in 2017, where Trump called the Obama's gracious and magnificent, and then said we are all one nation sharing each other's pains and successes and destiny, and the headlines all called the speech dark and divisive. Trump said there that if you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice, so the media started a coordinated campaign to get people to hate America more, and conflate patriotism with racism.
Every politician talks like that. The difference is that when someone on the right commits an act of violence, you think it's Republicans' fault, and when someone on the left commits an act of violence, you still think it's Republicans' fault. I don't know I've ever seen a response so lacking in self-awareness as the people who constantly cry about the police being corrupt suddenly becoming avid defenders of the FBI the moment they cause Trump trouble.
No, it isn't. It's the truth. Conflict breeds more conflict than cooperation. All public figures are handled with kid gloves, B-list actors are handled with kid gloves, because anyone with a following is risky to be aggressive against. Like, imagine the fallout if they did a search like this to Justin Bieber. Now remember Trump was literally the president, and they're causing this kind of uproar because of minor bureaucratic negligence. He didn't file all the paperwork in the right spot? That's exceeding reckless by the DOJ.
Trump is unquestionably one of the biggest drivers of conflict in the last 7-8 years. He has thrived on conflict. He stormed right of the gates in his election campaign hurling abuse left, right and centre, including against other fellow Republicans. All these years on, he hasn't changed a bit. Indeed, he graduated to stoking up a mob to storm the Capitol building.
So the wider context of Trump saying that everything needs to be cooled down is that he can carry on his grossly inflammatory behaviour but no-one else should investigate his potential crimes or criticise him. What he is asking for is grotesquely unfair and completely unrealistic; dishonest and delusional. He doesn't merit the slightest recognition as a peacemaker, and doesn't deserve headlines as if he is.
By which you mean "he absconded with classified documents and is now going to argue that the act of absconding with the documents declassifies them because he (probably, presuming they aren't certain kinds of defense related documents) had the authority to declassify them but didn't bother to do so." This is like saying that shoplifting isn't shoplifting if you could have paid for the item but simply didn't bother to.
There's a process to declassify things because such a process is absolutely necessary to do document control, and document control is absolutely necessary in an org as big as the US government.
Lol, you have to be fucking kidding me.
Was this before or after he called immigrants rapists and drug addicts? Right about the time he said his opponent should be thrown in prison, I think... certainly after he did a piss-take imitation of a disabled reporter.
There is infinite space available between getting headlines as a peacemaker and getting headlines as a harbinger of war.
You don't respond to a shoplifter the same way you respond to an armed burglar.
Some immigrants are rapists and drug addicts, just like any large population, and then he said others are good people. It's funny how when Trump says some immigrants are good people, that somehow really means all immigrants are rapists, and when he says some fine people were protesting but not the neo-nazis, that means neo-nazis are fine people. Do you see the switches being flipped here?
Trump hardly initiated nor perpetuated the suggestion that Hillary should be in prison. Regular people did that. Normal, working class Republicans chanted "lock her up", while Trump for the most part was against the idea, and ultimately he won the election and did nothing to investigate or prosecute the Clintons.
The key word in that imitation is "reporter". The news media suck, and they all deserve far worse mocking than even what Trump gave them. He mocked and insulted reporters, and why wouldn't he, when they were doing everything in their power to make him out as Hitler.
Not an opinion I've noticed shared by a significant chunk of American law enforcement.
Imagine needing a six step verification process for a teacher to be allowed to call you a nickname, and your parents could veto it
Lotta crazy today. Next up, the common sense solution to enforcing anti-trans bathrooms bills: installing DNA scanners on every bathroom and locker room door