The Trump Presidency: Part 17

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Out of curiosity, what would be the right and legal way in the following situation:

Any US president suspects one of the presidential candidates to be involved in something illegal (maybe now or in the past) and goverments of another country might have serious information on this matter and could help.

What are the correct options?

a) Do nothing and wait until after the election so that the US citizen is not a presidential candidate anymore (risking that this person could then be actually the new president)?

b) Report/inform authorities: Which ones? FBI, CIA? Risking that someone in there then suspects the president/government to seek help from another country against a presidential candidate or trying to smear his campaign?

c) Possible illegal activities of US-citizens, especially presidential candidates, are not the presidents concern.

:confused:
 
carlosy said:
Out of curiosity, what would be the right and legal way in the following situation:

Any US president suspects one of the presidential candidates to be involved in something illegal (maybe now or in the past) and goverments of another country might have serious information on this matter and could help.

What are the correct options?

a) Do nothing and wait until after the election so that the US citizen is not a presidential candidate anymore (risking that this person could then be actually the new president)?

b) Report/inform authorities: Which ones? FBI, CIA? Risking that someone in there then suspects the president/government to seek help from another country against a presidential candidate or trying to smear his campaign?

c) Possible illegal activities of US-citizens, especially presidential candidates, are not the presidents concern.

:confused:
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1) collect evidence through proper methods.

2) decide if there is enough evidence to indict.

3) present evidence to a jury in a court of law.

Not sure why that was so hard.

ETA: assuming there is even a criminal act to investigate that the U.S. would have jurisdiction over.
 
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And what would be the proper method to collect information from a different government? Or is this never an option?

I am not a US citizen, so just asking out of curiousity.
 
I can’t figure out if Kellyanne Conway is a truly reprehensible excuse for a human being, or just an actress portraying one.

48809183716_c174f6396b.jpg
 
carlosy said:
Out of curiosity, what would be the right and legal way in the following situation:

Any US president suspects one of the presidential candidates to be involved in something illegal (maybe now or in the past) and goverments of another country might have serious information on this matter and could help.

What are the correct options?

a) Do nothing and wait until after the election so that the US citizen is not a presidential candidate anymore (risking that this person could then be actually the new president)?

b) Report/inform authorities: Which ones? FBI, CIA? Risking that someone in there then suspects the president/government to seek help from another country against a presidential candidate or trying to smear his campaign?

c) Possible illegal activities of US-citizens, especially presidential candidates, are not the presidents concern.

:confused:
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What makes you believe that law enforcement and intelligence officers aren't better informed and situated and can pursue those matters without the President? This is a question of conflict of interests.

In this case Trump is using appropriated military funds as a lever to get a foreign government to go after a political rival. Whether Biden is as corrupt as Trump, doesn't justify Trump using American power in this way.
 
Fast Eddie B said:
I can’t figure out if Kellyanne Conway is a truly reprehensible excuse for a human being, or just an actress portraying one.

[qimg]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48809183716_c174f6396b.jpg[/qimg]
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She's a reprehensible excuse.
 
acbytesla said:
What makes you believe that law enforcement and intelligence officers aren't better informed and situated and can pursue those matters without the President? This is a question of conflict of interests.
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I am not trying to agitate. I'm just interested in the correct way to act for a president if he thinks he is in the situation I presented.

My question is unrelated to Trump/Biden
 
alfaniner said:
Oh, I just figured it out! "Liddle'"-- the apostrophe represents "foot"!
So he's calling him Liddlefoot - like the dinosaur from The Land Before Time. What a genius way to make a snipe!

But then, there's the whole misspelling "little" thing...
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I think he was going for the typographical form of a bullies' version of "little" which IMO would be "widdle." Using an apostrophe usually indicates a contraction, as in Lil' Kim (the hiphop artist and the dictator of North Korea).

But "little" or "liddle" isn't a contraction for anything.

The conspiracy aspect of the choice of the term liddle - too much for me to absorb right now.

A couple of tech questions:
- My search for Lil' Kim yielded 139,000,000 results in .68 seconds. How does Google do that?
- When Trump tweets, does everyone who follows him get a text? Because that sounds like it would be annoying even if you welcomed Trump's copious output of propaganda
 
Minoosh said:
I think he was going for the typographical form of a bullies' version of "little" which IMO would be "widdle." Using an apostrophe usually indicates a contraction, as in Lil' Kim (the hiphop artist and the dictator of North Korea).

But "little" or "liddle" isn't a contraction for anything.

The conspiracy aspect of the choice of the term liddle - too much for me to absorb right now.

A couple of tech questions:
- My search for Lil' Kim yielded 139,000,000 results in .68 seconds. How does Google do that?
- When Trump tweets, does everyone who follows him get a text? Because that sounds like it would be annoying even if you welcomed Trump's copious output of propaganda
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The rapper can misspell her nickname however she wants, but the traditional spelling of the contraction of "little" is "li'l", because it is the sounds between the i and l which are omitted.
 
phiwum said:
The rapper can misspell her nickname however she wants, but the traditional spelling of the contraction of "little" is "li'l", because it is the sounds between the i and l which are omitted.
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But that only got 32 million results. Sometimes people get things wrong so often they become the new right. "Is comprised of," for example.
 
carlosy said:
I am not trying to agitate. I'm just interested in the correct way to act for a president if he thinks he is in the situation I presented.

My question is unrelated to Trump/Biden
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It really doesn't matter.

This isn't in his purview. It's overstepping his authority, it's also a conflict of interest.

It would be questionable if a candidate sent private investigators to a foreign country to dig up dirt on a political opponent. But to have the President use our national resources to do the same thing is definitely abusing his authority. Those resources and the power he wields doesn't belong to him.
 
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acbytesla said:
It really doesn't matter.

This isn't in his purview. It's overstepping his authority, it's also a conflict of interest.

It would be questionable if a candidate sent private investigators to a foreign country to dig up dirt on a political opponent. But to have the President use our national resources to do the same thing is abusing his authority. Those resources and the power he wields doesn't belong to him.
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He's oblivious to that thought. I mean, how hard would it have been form him to just do all this in secret? Doesn't he have some 2019 version of CREEP to do his dirty work while giving Trump plausible deniability? How did he think any of this is OK? He's not afraid of being caught - he truly seems to not understand how his actions could be perceived as improper.

ETA: Any moment he could tweet out that every president does this kind of stuff. I read that one of his initial disagreements with Tillerson was about paying bribes to foreign officials. Trump saw nothing wrong with it.
 
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carlosy said:
And what would be the proper method to collect information from a different government? Or is this never an option?

I am not a US citizen, so just asking out of curiousity.
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It would depend on the country involved.

We have agreements and a system with Ukraine (whose acronym slips my mind an the moment) where the State Department submits a request on behave of whatever law enforcement agency believes there is information in the other country. Ukraine reviews the request and returns what information they have, what other cooperation might be acceptable, and decides if they want to commit investigative resources to this.

At no point, besides perhaps submitting initial evidence to whatever US law enforcement agency would be appropriate for the suspected wrongdoing, is the President's personal lawyer involved. The AG isn't even supposed to be directly involved. It is standardized and bureaucratic specifically to avoid political interference because such a thing would be wrong, illegal, and damage future international relationships as well as internal trust in the legal system.

What Trump et al have done is clearly corrupt and illegal. Anyone pretending it isn't simply isn't being reasonable.
 
Minoosh said:
But that only got 32 million results. Sometimes people get things wrong so often they become the new right. "Is comprised of," for example.
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And sometimes, the fact that lots of people get the same thing wrong is no reason to regard it as right.

The apostrophe indicates missing sounds. Hence, "li'l" and not "lil'". And I don't give a damn how many go for the latter. That's not how the apostrophe works.
 
Minoosh said:
He's oblivious to that thought. I mean, how hard would it have been form him to just do all this in secret? Doesn't he have some 2019 version of CREEP to do his dirty work while giving Trump plausible deniability? How did he think any of this is OK? He's not afraid of being caught - he truly seems to not understand how his actions could be perceived as improper.

ETA: Any moment he could tweet out that every president does this kind of stuff. I read that one of his initial disagreements with Tillerson was about paying bribes to foreign officials. Trump saw nothing wrong with it.
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I know. He thinks it just business.
 
Fast Eddie B said:
I can’t figure out if Kellyanne Conway is a truly reprehensible excuse for a human being, or just an actress portraying one.

[qimg]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48809183716_c174f6396b.jpg[/qimg]
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Becoming the mask is a sad thing.

Unless it is becoming The Mask, then it might be fun.
 
We've had a couple of memoirs from Obama administration members who describe exactly the problem that a President faces:
there was overwhelming evidence that Trump was engaged in shady businesses, but the fact that he was a candidate made it almost impossible to start an investigation that wouldn't look like an abuse of power.

So the AG and IC focused on groups that Trump might have contact with in his criming, like Russian Oligarchs, the Russian Embassy, etc., or followed up leads given to them by other intelligence agencies.

We know from several sources that in the run-up to the election, Obama took great pains to never be alone in a room with Eric Holder, and made clear that he wouldn't discuss Trump with him.
 
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