Well, there does appear to be agreement that you can't indict a sitting
president for crimes like stealing money because the court proceedings which
would follow, would distract him from his duties as President.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2018 11:22 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Is Donald Trump Above the Law?
Nothing like a bunch of lawyers to muddy up the swimming pool. No matter how
they twist the Constitution, it seems reasonable to believe that no person, not
the president or the wealthiest person in the country, can be above the law.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/23/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is Donald Trump Above the Law?
By James Risen, The Intercept
23 August 18
Ever since the federal investigations of President Donald Trump and
his lackeys began, most outside observers have argued it was highly
unlikely that Trump himself would face criminal prosecution.
The conventional wisdom has been that federal prosecutors would bow to
long-standing tradition and decades-old Justice Department legal
opinions and not seek an indictment of a sitting president. Trump
might face impeachment in Congress, which is a political process, but
it seemed far-fetched that prosecutors would try to send him directly
from the White House to prison.
But that line of thinking was upended Tuesday, when Trump became the
unnamed "Individual-1" in a federal criminal case. Tuesday was the day
that the chances that Trump will face indictment and criminal
prosecution surged higher than ever before.
In fact, August 21, 2018, seems certain to be a watershed day in
Trump's manic presidency.
In a Virginia federal court on Tuesday, Paul Manafort, Trump's former
campaign chair, was found guilty on eight counts of tax and bank fraud
in a case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, who has been
investigating whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia to
win the 2016 election.
Meanwhile, in a New York federal court on Tuesday, Michael Cohen,
Trump's longtime attorney and fixer, pleaded guilty to eight counts of
tax evasion, bank fraud, and, most critically for Trump, campaign finance
violations.
Both of Tuesday's cases were really bad news for Trump, but the Cohen
plea deal presented a more immediate threat to the president. As part
of his plea, Cohen directly implicated the president, asserting that
he worked with Trump during the campaign to pay off two women to keep
their stories of alleged affairs with Trump out of the press before
the 2016 election. Given the way the payments were made, as well as
their intent, that effort was a violation of federal campaign finance
laws. Cohen asserted in federal court that Trump had committed a
felony.
Now, federal prosecutors are faced with a dilemma. They have just
triumphed in a high-profile white-collar criminal case in which they
successfully nailed the personal lawyer to the president. They
squeezed Cohen so hard that he admitted the president was his
co-conspirator in a crime. And not just any crime - a crime designed to help
Trump win the presidency.
Can prosecutors now ignore the logic of their own case? Don't they
have to go after Trump himself?
Lanny Davis, Cohen's attorney, asked that question publicly on
Tuesday. In a tweet after Cohen's plea, Davis wrote that his client
"stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to
commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal
purpose of influencing an election. If those payments were a crime for
Michael Cohen, then why wouldn't they be a crime for Donald Trump?"
The Cohen and Manafort cases were brought by different teams of
prosecutors, and that may make a difference in how each is pursued
from here. The Cohen prosecution was conducted by the office of the
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, while the
Manafort case was brought by Mueller and his team from the special
counsel's office.
As special counsel, Mueller has great latitude in how he pursues the
Trump-Russia case. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse
himself from overseeing Mueller's investigation because of questions
about his own connections to Russian officials during the 2016
campaign. Mueller has taken great advantage of his independent status
to conduct a highly aggressive investigation of Trump and those around
him. Manafort was only the latest in a long line of people from the
Trump circle to discover just how seriously Mueller is pursuing his
inquiry. Mueller was clearly prosecuting Manafort to pressure him to
flip and tell all that he knows about Trump and Russian collusion.
But the prosecutors in New York who have handled the Cohen case don't
enjoy the same level of independence that Mueller does. Any effort by
Southern District prosecutors to pursue their case and investigate
"Individual-1" in the White House will almost certainly have to be
approved by Sessions. It seems unlikely that he would believe that his
recusal on the Trump-Russia probe would apply in the Cohen
investigation, even though Cohen is widely believed to have
information about the Trump-Russia case. And, after being repeatedly
and publicly attacked and humiliated by Trump for his recusal in the
Mueller inquiry, Sessions may be eager to prove his loyalty to Trump
and block any further investigation in the Cohen case. (Although it's
also possible that, after silently enduring months of Trump's abuse,
Sessions might keenly enjoy approving a legal assault on the
president.)
While the U.S. Constitution seems rather vague on the whether a
president can be indicted while in office, Justice Department lawyers
have consistently argued that constitutional law forbids it. In 1973,
during the Nixon administration, the Justice Department "concluded
that the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting President
would unduly interfere with the ability of the executive branch to
perform its constitutionally assigned duties, and would thus violate
the constitutional separation of powers,"
according to a DOJ memo written in 2000, at the end of the Clinton
administration. Almost three decades after Watergate, the 2000 memo
reaffirmed the department's earlier decision: "No court has addressed
this question directly, but the judicial precedents that bear on the
continuing validity of our constitutional analysis are consistent with
both the analytic approach taken and the conclusions reached. Our view
remains that a sitting President is constitutionally immune from
indictment and criminal prosecution."
If Sessions and the Justice Department block New York prosecutors from
pursuing Trump, what happens next? Will the information be referred to
Congress as part of impeachment proceedings? If Democrats retake the
House in the midterm elections this fall, will they be willing to
pursue impeachment, knowing they will almost certainly lack the votes
in the Senate to win a conviction?
What we know for sure is that the path to the criminal prosecution and
imprisonment of the president of the United States is now clear. How
it is handled will be a major test for the American system of government.
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