Mueller Investigation pt 6

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varwoche said:
We've already seen, repeatedly, that Mr. You're Fired is actually too cowardly to fire people face-to-face. Still, he took the cake when he instructed private citizen Corey Lewandowski to fire AG Sessions if Sessions wouldn't recuse.
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I read the link. It doesn't actually support this claim. It says Trump told Lewandowski to tell Sessions that Sessions was at risk of being fired. But there's no indication that Lewandowski was ever told to fire Sessions. Which, well, duh, because Lewandowski didn't have the authority to fire Sessions, even if Trump had ordered him to do so (which it looks like he never did).
 
Ziggurat said:
I read the link. It doesn't actually support this claim. It says Trump told Lewandowski to tell Sessions that Sessions was at risk of being fired. But there's no indication that Lewandowski was ever told to fire Sessions. Which, well, duh, because Lewandowski didn't have the authority to fire Sessions, even if Trump had ordered him to do so (which it looks like he never did).
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A more careful reading on your part, of my post and the linked article, would show my claim is accurate. Regardless, pardon that link and this one as I don't have time at the moment to find it and cite it directly in the Mueller report.

Wapo said:
The president told his former campaign manager that if Sessions refused, Lewandowski should simply tell the attorney general he was fired, according to the special counsel’s report.
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Ziggurat said:
I read the link. It doesn't actually support this claim. It says Trump told Lewandowski to tell Sessions that Sessions was at risk of being fired. But there's no indication that Lewandowski was ever told to fire Sessions. Which, well, duh, because Lewandowski didn't have the authority to fire Sessions, even if Trump had ordered him to do so (which it looks like he never did).
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This is cute. "At risk of being fired" is not the same as:
...At a second one-on-one Oval Office meeting July 19, Trump again told Lewandowski to deliver his message to Sessions, and fire Sessions if he refused to comply;
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Maybe you didn't read that far down the page.


ETA: I see Varoche found a similar quote.
 
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varwoche said:
A more careful reading on your part, of my post and the linked article, would show my claim is accurate. Regardless, pardon that link and this one as I don't have time at the moment to find it and cite it directly in the Mueller report.
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Actually, it's not. You're trusting too much in second-hand characterizations. The Mueller report itself doesn't make that claim. It says that Trump asked Lewandowski to ask Sessions for his resignation, but that's still not firing. It would have been firing if Trump had ordered Sessions to resign, but as I already pointed out, and as the reporter should know, Lewandowski did not have the authority to fire Sessions.
 
Belz... said:
There's no "gate" there. There's no controversy. It's plain that Trump attempted to obstruct justice.
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From: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/26/mueller-prosecutors-trump-did-obstruct-justice/
Prosecutors working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded last year that they had sufficient evidence to seek criminal charges against President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice over the president’s alleged pressuring of then FBI Director James Comey...Privately, the two prosecutors, who were then employed in the special counsel’s office, told other Justice Department officials that had it not been for the unique nature of the case—the investigation of a sitting president of the United States, and one who tried to use the powers of his office to thwart and even close down the special counsel’s investigation—they would have advocated that he face federal criminal charges.
 
Ziggurat said:
Actually, it's not. You're trusting too much in second-hand characterizations. The Mueller report itself doesn't make that claim. It says that Trump asked Lewandowski to ask Sessions for his resignation, but that's still not firing. It would have been firing if Trump had ordered Sessions to resign, but as I already pointed out, and as the reporter should know, Lewandowski did not have the authority to fire Sessions.
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Your tap dance is a fail. But I'll give you an A for effort.

We know Lewandowski didn't have the authority, that was the point. If Trump ordered Sessions to resign, that also would make this moot.

But Trump told Lewandowski to make demands and fire Sessions if said demands were not meant. Pretty straight forward.
 
varwoche said:
How about you cite one instance of a POTUS instructing a private citizen to fire a cabinet member.
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Corey Lewandowski comes pretty close:
The president said Sessions would be fired if [Sessions] didn’t take the meeting. Lewandowski told Trump that the message would be delivered soon and later joked with White House adviser Hope Hicks about the idea that Sessions would be fired for not meeting with him, a private citizen.
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varwoche said:
Or one instance of a cabinet member learning they were fired via social media.
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Rex Tillerson.


ETA: Ninja'ed by multiple posts. These questions must have been too easy---although it appears Ziggurat couldn't have answered them.
 
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Trebuchet said:
You say that as if it's a bad thing. Imagine how badly off we'd be if he was even half competent.
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On another forum that I frequented, the reaction after the election was a frightened "Oh God, what's he going to do?" It transformed into an exasperated "Oh God, what's he done now?" when the level of incompetence in the administration became clear.
 
You know all the "Trump Digs Coal" campaigning that Stubby McBonespurs did?

From: https://thinkprogress.org/russia-coal-trump-campaign-mueller-report-ad5a583fd32e/
In October 2016, Pennsylvania social media accounts promoted “Miners for Trump” rallies around the state with a picture of a gritty coal miner.... the social media promotions were not created by U.S. coal miners, however. Instead, they were the work of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian troll farm, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s recently released report...

The best part of the article?

...the image that the Russians selected for their poster as representative of American coal miners was Lee Hipshire, who died from black lung disease. His son, also a coal miner, told NPR, “My dad was one of the most staunch Democrats that you’ll ever see in your life, and he never would have even thought about putting his face on something like that.”
 
varwoche said:
Not counting Trump, who does it constantly, which is the point of contention.
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Fast Eddie B said:
I thought it was clear varwoche meant other than Trump.

ETA: which he apparently made clear while I was typing.
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Ziggurat was still denying that Trump had done it, so I thought there might be some purpose to stating a correct (hence non-Ziggurat) answer to varwoche's question as though Trump's actions were eligible.
 
newyorkguy said:
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
...The point of the Nixon comparison is that the argument that Trump shouldn't be impeached because "it would divide the country" is spurious, at best...
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I'm not sure I agree with that and I have read opinions of people who do not agree at all. The Republican-elected president previous to Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower. The Republican-elected president after Nixon was Ronald Reagan. I think it can be argued that Watergate -- and Nixon essentially being forced out of office -- left a bitterness and a resentment among Republicans that continues to this day. I think it can be argued that post-Nixon/Watergate the Republican Party became noticeably more callous and cynical. Some of the most partisan Republicans, like Gingrich, Cheney, Rumsfeld, all entered politics in that era.

Below is a quote from Geoffrey Kabaservice, an author and research director of the Republican Main Street Partnership.

Nixon was, despite the popular conception of him today, a centrist Republican—and because of Watergate, he may have been the last one. Nixon’s sensibilities were populist-conservative, but operationally he acted as a moderate and even occasionally as a progressive, for example when he created the Environmental Protection Agency and proposed national health insurance that would have covered more people than Obamacare. In 1997, I interviewed Elliot Richardson, who as attorney general played a key role in bringing down Nixon but felt history had wrongly remembered the 37th president. “Most people don’t really get the fact that the Nixon administration was to the left of the Clinton administration,” Richardson told me. Politico link
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Whilst I agree about your views about the policies of Nixon, I'd argue his dirty tricks were pretty cynical as was his Southern Strategy.

An alternative view is that the Southern Strategy, by giving a new home to the old Democrat Segregationalists, Nixon's Republicans worsened their party and improved the Democrats. After all, gerrymandering, and voter suppression were pretty normal practice in the South before desegregation, and the proponents of that have kept up the effective work.

Who knows how bad it would have been if Nixon hadn't been forced out in disgrace. Maybe it's taken a couple of generations for the Republican establishment to feel empowered enough to be as blatant as they now are?
 
a_unique_person said:
That all happened because the Congress was controlled by republicans who just voted yes to everything without any real scrutiny. Tax cuts and judge's don't need to take a lot of thought for them.

Now look at something that takes some real work. Where is it? Health care, for example.
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Actually, I think that the health care issue does speak to my point.

After all, Trump admitted that 'he did not know that the health care would be so difficult to deal with' even though he often promised to 'repeal and replace' Obamacare with something that would be much better and cheaper. However, Trump never even bothered to look into the details of health care reform until he was actually forced to do so, but his lack of vision clearly did not deter him from making all kinds of big promises as to how he alone would fix things.
 
dasmiller said:
Well,
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To be fair, the original post said Lewandowski was instructed to fire Sessions if Sessions refused to recuse himself, not if he refused to meet. A minor point, but Zig has a habit of being coy about his objections to such links. He waits for about five iterations before pointing out the minor misleading detail that justified his claim that a source was irrelevant.
 
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Crossbow said:
Actually, I think that the health care issue does speak to my point.

After all, Trump admitted that 'he did not know that the health care would be so difficult to deal with' even though he often promised to 'repeal and replace' Obamacare with something that would be much better and cheaper. However, Trump never even bothered to look into the details of health care reform until he was actually forced to do so, but his lack of vision clearly did not deter him from making all kinds of big promises as to how he alone would fix things.
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And he still makes promises he can't keep and people keep believing this will be the one he keeps.

A current lie is he's going to put Democrats that persecuted him in jail.
 
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