Anonymous wrote:The indictment is online at NYtimes and it’s nuts. This mofo kept these secrets in a shower and on stage at Maralgo.
This photo is even worse than the shower and ballroom ones IMO.
Jesus; what a dump.
I agree
The people here are too evil and crooked to even care.
Even you guys aren’t stupid enough to think the cases are similar.
They aren't. Biden should never have removed classified documents, given he never had to power to declassify - ever. So finding them in his garage is worse. Removing the photo from this thread is an admission of that.
I'd really encourage you to read the full indictment. The Biden "case" and this one aren't remotely similar. In fact, none of the Trump charges involve the initial removal of the classified info. They only charged what he did after the subpoena.
They never are. Again, because you seem to be too dumb to understand. Biden should NEVER have had classified documents ANYWHERE in his home. EVER.
But Trump should have? The documents were taken to his home after he was no longer president. That was okay?
He had the power to declassify. Biden never had that power as VP or as a Senator.
“This is secret information. Look, look at this.” —Donald J Trump, post-presidency
Please, can I hear that tape as well?
So arrest Biden too, right? Trump had the power to declassify and no, he didn’t need permission.
Could you translate that into rational language?
Biden, as then senator and then VP, had classified documents that he could not have declassified at any point in time. So he should be arrested right?
Please read up on what Trump did. He is not being charged for what Biden did. You sound incredibly uninformed.
What’s uninformed is you not understanding that Biden broke the law. You all seem to be misled into thinking that it’s not about breaking the law, it’s about how the law was broken. That’s why this case will end up being decided by the SC. What this indictment is all about is tying up Trump from rallies and campaigning. I was actually thinking of voting for someone else but now, I am 110% behind Trump. I don’t’ like the man but I HATE miscarriages of justice more. And it has been three years of not prosecuting hardened criminals leading to the deaths of others. Three years of blatantly not protecting our borders. Three years of seeing FBI agents placed in churches and other institutions to spy on Americans. Three years of watching people lose jobs, being dragged off to jail for defending children, coverups of attacks on women in public schools, being lied to by some of our most prominent medical institutions so they could be bought off by big Pharma.
Imagine how big the crimes in government have to be in order for government to want to put Trump away this badly, how big those crimes must be to want to turn on a huge part of the population of the US. How big the payoffs are going to be if we just dispose of our Constitution. I wonder how far this government will go to ‘put down’ an ‘insurrection’. Remember, the very definition of tyranny is when the guns of the government turn inward.
You are delusional. Show us where Biden refused to comply with investigators regarding documents, where he deliberately hid them, got others to help hide them, repeatedly told lies about all of it - you can't. And as for all your other supposed government lies and coverups and malfeasance, it happened on Trump's watch - yet somehow you still think Trump is the solution?
JFC, Biden should not have even have the opportunity to comply. A US Senator or VP does NOT have the powers of declassification. Trump did under the Presidential Records Act. And btw, neither did Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Those were blatant violations of law. Not ‘hiding them’ , as you say, isn’t even a consideration. It was illegal for them to possess those documents
Under Trump’s watch? No (I’d call you Ma’am or Sir, but who knows how you identify and Lord knows, I would not want to be ‘impolite’).
Someone who doesn’t know that the Secretary of State, as an original classification authority, does in fact have declassification powers, or that declassification powers have nothing to with the PRA, should probably sit down and shut up about this.
She can only declassify her own stuff. It’s not near as broad as the President’s:
“ The Department of State, to include Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State, does have Originator Classification Authority. This means she carried the authority to control the level at which material generated by the Department of State is classified, within the boundaries of applicable doctrine. There is some material that must be classified as a matter of course, to include correspondence with Foreign Governments, controlled schedules, and information garnered from classified material.
However, there was information contained within her emails that had been classified by government agencies outside of the Department of State, beyond the scope of her OCA. Among her emails on the 'private server' were satellite imagery of foreign countries, classified by the intelligence agencies. These images are controlled as Top Secret, Special Compartmentalized Information, Talent Keyhole, but were located on her personal email server and mislabeled as unclassified. These items should never have been present on an unclassified, or general use, information system. The Government uses specially developed cyber enclaves to protect this data, segregating it from everything else. In order for these pictures to exist on an unclassified system, someone illegally copied them from a system cleared Top Secret information, crossed the physical air gap to a general use computer, and then emailed them to her. The situation is further complicated by the use of the personal server; if these communications had been made via a Government Information system, there would be a firm management and accounting of the emails. This would have satisfied the requirements of the Federal Records Act. By operating on via a personal server, she bypassed the established mechanisms for information assurance and accounting.”
You’re not talking about the things that were classified at a later date, after they were emailed to her, I hope.
Clinton did not have any classified “documents” in her emails. The retroactive “classification” was a determination that her staff sent her a few emails that referenced classified matters, and they should not have done so (even though some of the “secrets” were public knowledge that had already been reported in the media). No classified documents or sources were in the emails, but there were unclassified emails among staff who all held clearances that mentioned something that was known from classified sources.
That type of inadvertent insider communication has never been prosecuted, and very rarely would even result in a reprimand for the sender.
Hillary Clinton: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.”
James Comey: “Let me tell you what we found.”
-110 emails
-52 email chains
-8 of those chains were top secret
-36 were secret
-8 contained confidential information
Hillary Clinton: “it wasn’t the best choice, I made a mistake.”
James Comey: “This is going to be an unusual statement, in at least a couple of ways, although there IS EVIDENCE, our judgement is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
So if Hilary was guilty, and Trump has exponentially more classified info floating around his golf clubs, then he is exponentially more guilty.
That's what you are saying.
Trump traitors going to traitor.
I'm not saying she's guilty, Comey is. Your beef is with him. There is no 'exponentially' more guilty. There is, however, preferential treatment.
Comey quite famously did not say she was guilty of anything, he said that no prosecutor would charge her case.
Yet Comey and the Republicans weaponized this case against Hillary Clinton despite it being a non-case, and completely derailed her campaign.
If Trump's campaign at a bare minimum also comes to a grinding halt then maybe we can start to consider it fair - because if it doesn't, then all of the right's complaints about unequal and unfair treatment of Trump are completely bogus.
Anonymous wrote:I really think many of you are missing the obstruction. He had ample opportunity to work with NARA to return everything. He purposely mislead everyone. It never had to end this way had he returned everything.
Joking aside, they aren't missing the obstruction. They are choosing to willfully ignore it. The truth is that the security powers that be are willing to work with you if you honestly screw up and come to them with a mea culpa. Not only was Trump taking the documents not a screw up, but intentional, he then chose to lie, have others lie on his behalf, and hide them.
People like to point at the Reality Winner case. She's not in jail because she accidentally took a document out of the building that got mixed in her personal stuff. She's in jail because she removed it intentionally.
Reality Winner had no ability to declassify documents. Trump did and no, he doesn’t have to ask permission of anyone to do so.
You people have some weird mythology in your heads about "the President can declassify." There's a process for declassifying documents, even for the President. The process is NOT the President waving his hands and gesturing broadly, saying "I declassify this stuff' or simply willing it to be declassified with his mind. And if the process isn't followed, there is no way of knowing what is or isn't declassified and it would be chaos. If the downgrading and declassification process isn't followed or there is no evidence it was followed then it remains classified.
You are incorrect.
Nope. There is a legal process for declassification. Please provide a link that shows a president can think it or will it, and it becomes so.
Per Constitutional lawyers:
A former president has the legal right to access any and all of the documents created during his presidency, classified or otherwise. The second before a President leaves office, by his very actions alone in taking documents he can be said to have declassified them.
“Therefore, the former president cannot be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for this reason and more,” said Levin, who served as chief of state to Attorney General Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration.”
In addition, Trumps’ lawyers had been in active negotiations regarding the documents, starting only a year after Trump left office. Like with Obama, this kind of back-and-forth is the norm and can go on for years. And the National Archives is already in possession of the vast majority of documents created during the Trump administration, and the ones at issue are a very relative few, so yes, he has cooperated. Under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the president is “the executive branch and he’s the commander in chief.” So Trump is not guilty of violating the Espionage Act, which was invoked in the affidavit to obtain a search warrant. In addition, there are no criminal penalties associated with the Presidential Records Act; that has been cited by the FBI.
Now let’s talk Espionage Act and Clinton: Clinton had classified documents on an unsecured email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York/. Clinton wasn’t president, so she didn’t even have the protections presidents do.
“That violates the Espionage Act,” Levin said of failing to properly secure the documents, some highly classified, from foreign adversaries”.
Mark Levin is the source of this take? You may as well quote Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon.
Can you please tell me what disqualifies Levin in your mind? Not educated enough? Not enough experience?
He is misrepresenting the law, as he has done many times before.
He was the president in 2017. He is not the president now.
Still refers to the documents he took with him. Unless you are claiming he snuck into the WH and stole some while sleepy Joe was sleeping?
Did he give them back when the government asked for them?
Why is he declassifying highly sensitive documents that relate to national security in the first place? Simply because he wants to wave them around others to impress them? Doesn't make a very good argument for putting him back in the White House. He clearly has poor judgment.
"Just because I can" is not a mantra you really want a president to live by.
Anonymous wrote:I really think many of you are missing the obstruction. He had ample opportunity to work with NARA to return everything. He purposely mislead everyone. It never had to end this way had he returned everything.
Joking aside, they aren't missing the obstruction. They are choosing to willfully ignore it. The truth is that the security powers that be are willing to work with you if you honestly screw up and come to them with a mea culpa. Not only was Trump taking the documents not a screw up, but intentional, he then chose to lie, have others lie on his behalf, and hide them.
People like to point at the Reality Winner case. She's not in jail because she accidentally took a document out of the building that got mixed in her personal stuff. She's in jail because she removed it intentionally.
Reality Winner had no ability to declassify documents. Trump did and no, he doesn’t have to ask permission of anyone to do so.
You people have some weird mythology in your heads about "the President can declassify." There's a process for declassifying documents, even for the President. The process is NOT the President waving his hands and gesturing broadly, saying "I declassify this stuff' or simply willing it to be declassified with his mind. And if the process isn't followed, there is no way of knowing what is or isn't declassified and it would be chaos. If the downgrading and declassification process isn't followed or there is no evidence it was followed then it remains classified.
You are incorrect.
Nope. There is a legal process for declassification. Please provide a link that shows a president can think it or will it, and it becomes so.
Per Constitutional lawyers:
A former president has the legal right to access any and all of the documents created during his presidency, classified or otherwise. The second before a President leaves office, by his very actions alone in taking documents he can be said to have declassified them.
“Therefore, the former president cannot be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for this reason and more,” said Levin, who served as chief of state to Attorney General Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration.”
In addition, Trumps’ lawyers had been in active negotiations regarding the documents, starting only a year after Trump left office. Like with Obama, this kind of back-and-forth is the norm and can go on for years. And the National Archives is already in possession of the vast majority of documents created during the Trump administration, and the ones at issue are a very relative few, so yes, he has cooperated. Under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the president is “the executive branch and he’s the commander in chief.” So Trump is not guilty of violating the Espionage Act, which was invoked in the affidavit to obtain a search warrant. In addition, there are no criminal penalties associated with the Presidential Records Act; that has been cited by the FBI.
Now let’s talk Espionage Act and Clinton: Clinton had classified documents on an unsecured email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York/. Clinton wasn’t president, so she didn’t even have the protections presidents do.
“That violates the Espionage Act,” Levin said of failing to properly secure the documents, some highly classified, from foreign adversaries”.
Mark Levin is the source of this take? You may as well quote Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon.
Can you please tell me what disqualifies Levin in your mind? Not educated enough? Not enough experience?
He is misrepresenting the law, as he has done many times before.
Why would a president choose to declassify such material on a whim? What about these documents did not need to be classified any more? Why are they no longer sensitive information? What arguments for declassifying them is Trump's great brain making other than he likes to impress other people?
Anonymous wrote:I really think many of you are missing the obstruction. He had ample opportunity to work with NARA to return everything. He purposely mislead everyone. It never had to end this way had he returned everything.
Joking aside, they aren't missing the obstruction. They are choosing to willfully ignore it. The truth is that the security powers that be are willing to work with you if you honestly screw up and come to them with a mea culpa. Not only was Trump taking the documents not a screw up, but intentional, he then chose to lie, have others lie on his behalf, and hide them.
People like to point at the Reality Winner case. She's not in jail because she accidentally took a document out of the building that got mixed in her personal stuff. She's in jail because she removed it intentionally.
Reality Winner had no ability to declassify documents. Trump did and no, he doesn’t have to ask permission of anyone to do so.
You people have some weird mythology in your heads about "the President can declassify." There's a process for declassifying documents, even for the President. The process is NOT the President waving his hands and gesturing broadly, saying "I declassify this stuff' or simply willing it to be declassified with his mind. And if the process isn't followed, there is no way of knowing what is or isn't declassified and it would be chaos. If the downgrading and declassification process isn't followed or there is no evidence it was followed then it remains classified.
You are incorrect.
Nope. There is a legal process for declassification. Please provide a link that shows a president can think it or will it, and it becomes so.
Per Constitutional lawyers:
A former president has the legal right to access any and all of the documents created during his presidency, classified or otherwise. The second before a President leaves office, by his very actions alone in taking documents he can be said to have declassified them.
“Therefore, the former president cannot be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for this reason and more,” said Levin, who served as chief of state to Attorney General Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration.”
In addition, Trumps’ lawyers had been in active negotiations regarding the documents, starting only a year after Trump left office. Like with Obama, this kind of back-and-forth is the norm and can go on for years. And the National Archives is already in possession of the vast majority of documents created during the Trump administration, and the ones at issue are a very relative few, so yes, he has cooperated. Under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the president is “the executive branch and he’s the commander in chief.” So Trump is not guilty of violating the Espionage Act, which was invoked in the affidavit to obtain a search warrant. In addition, there are no criminal penalties associated with the Presidential Records Act; that has been cited by the FBI.
Now let’s talk Espionage Act and Clinton: Clinton had classified documents on an unsecured email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York/. Clinton wasn’t president, so she didn’t even have the protections presidents do.
“That violates the Espionage Act,” Levin said of failing to properly secure the documents, some highly classified, from foreign adversaries”.
Mark Levin is the source of this take? You may as well quote Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon.
Can you please tell me what disqualifies Levin in your mind? Not educated enough? Not enough experience?
He is misrepresenting the law, as he has done many times before.
Why would a president choose to declassify such material on a whim? What about these documents did not need to be classified any more? Why are they no longer sensitive information? What arguments for declassifying them is Trump's great brain making other than he likes to impress other people?
He needed to declassify them so he could tell people he was being accused of wanting to attack Iran only because DoD showed him a classified document showing how the US would attack Iran if war broke out. Trump saw the document and said "let's do it"
Anonymous wrote:I really think many of you are missing the obstruction. He had ample opportunity to work with NARA to return everything. He purposely mislead everyone. It never had to end this way had he returned everything.
Joking aside, they aren't missing the obstruction. They are choosing to willfully ignore it. The truth is that the security powers that be are willing to work with you if you honestly screw up and come to them with a mea culpa. Not only was Trump taking the documents not a screw up, but intentional, he then chose to lie, have others lie on his behalf, and hide them.
People like to point at the Reality Winner case. She's not in jail because she accidentally took a document out of the building that got mixed in her personal stuff. She's in jail because she removed it intentionally.
Reality Winner had no ability to declassify documents. Trump did and no, he doesn’t have to ask permission of anyone to do so.
You people have some weird mythology in your heads about "the President can declassify." There's a process for declassifying documents, even for the President. The process is NOT the President waving his hands and gesturing broadly, saying "I declassify this stuff' or simply willing it to be declassified with his mind. And if the process isn't followed, there is no way of knowing what is or isn't declassified and it would be chaos. If the downgrading and declassification process isn't followed or there is no evidence it was followed then it remains classified.
You are incorrect.
Nope. There is a legal process for declassification. Please provide a link that shows a president can think it or will it, and it becomes so.
Per Constitutional lawyers:
A former president has the legal right to access any and all of the documents created during his presidency, classified or otherwise. The second before a President leaves office, by his very actions alone in taking documents he can be said to have declassified them.
“Therefore, the former president cannot be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for this reason and more,” said Levin, who served as chief of state to Attorney General Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration.”
In addition, Trumps’ lawyers had been in active negotiations regarding the documents, starting only a year after Trump left office. Like with Obama, this kind of back-and-forth is the norm and can go on for years. And the National Archives is already in possession of the vast majority of documents created during the Trump administration, and the ones at issue are a very relative few, so yes, he has cooperated. Under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the president is “the executive branch and he’s the commander in chief.” So Trump is not guilty of violating the Espionage Act, which was invoked in the affidavit to obtain a search warrant. In addition, there are no criminal penalties associated with the Presidential Records Act; that has been cited by the FBI.
Now let’s talk Espionage Act and Clinton: Clinton had classified documents on an unsecured email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York/. Clinton wasn’t president, so she didn’t even have the protections presidents do.
“That violates the Espionage Act,” Levin said of failing to properly secure the documents, some highly classified, from foreign adversaries”.
Mark Levin is the source of this take? You may as well quote Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon.
Can you please tell me what disqualifies Levin in your mind? Not educated enough? Not enough experience?
He is misrepresenting the law, as he has done many times before.
Why would a president choose to declassify such material on a whim? What about these documents did not need to be classified any more? Why are they no longer sensitive information? What arguments for declassifying them is Trump's great brain making other than he likes to impress other people?
He needed to declassify them so he could tell people he was being accused of wanting to attack Iran only because DoD showed him a classified document showing how the US would attack Iran if war broke out. Trump saw the document and said "let's do it"
Bad judgment. Why put someone like that back in the White House?
Anonymous wrote:I really think many of you are missing the obstruction. He had ample opportunity to work with NARA to return everything. He purposely mislead everyone. It never had to end this way had he returned everything.
Joking aside, they aren't missing the obstruction. They are choosing to willfully ignore it. The truth is that the security powers that be are willing to work with you if you honestly screw up and come to them with a mea culpa. Not only was Trump taking the documents not a screw up, but intentional, he then chose to lie, have others lie on his behalf, and hide them.
People like to point at the Reality Winner case. She's not in jail because she accidentally took a document out of the building that got mixed in her personal stuff. She's in jail because she removed it intentionally.
Reality Winner had no ability to declassify documents. Trump did and no, he doesn’t have to ask permission of anyone to do so.
You people have some weird mythology in your heads about "the President can declassify." There's a process for declassifying documents, even for the President. The process is NOT the President waving his hands and gesturing broadly, saying "I declassify this stuff' or simply willing it to be declassified with his mind. And if the process isn't followed, there is no way of knowing what is or isn't declassified and it would be chaos. If the downgrading and declassification process isn't followed or there is no evidence it was followed then it remains classified.
You are incorrect.
Nope. There is a legal process for declassification. Please provide a link that shows a president can think it or will it, and it becomes so.
Per Constitutional lawyers:
A former president has the legal right to access any and all of the documents created during his presidency, classified or otherwise. The second before a President leaves office, by his very actions alone in taking documents he can be said to have declassified them.
“Therefore, the former president cannot be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for this reason and more,” said Levin, who served as chief of state to Attorney General Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration.”
In addition, Trumps’ lawyers had been in active negotiations regarding the documents, starting only a year after Trump left office. Like with Obama, this kind of back-and-forth is the norm and can go on for years. And the National Archives is already in possession of the vast majority of documents created during the Trump administration, and the ones at issue are a very relative few, so yes, he has cooperated. Under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the president is “the executive branch and he’s the commander in chief.” So Trump is not guilty of violating the Espionage Act, which was invoked in the affidavit to obtain a search warrant. In addition, there are no criminal penalties associated with the Presidential Records Act; that has been cited by the FBI.
Now let’s talk Espionage Act and Clinton: Clinton had classified documents on an unsecured email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York/. Clinton wasn’t president, so she didn’t even have the protections presidents do.
“That violates the Espionage Act,” Levin said of failing to properly secure the documents, some highly classified, from foreign adversaries”.
Mark Levin is the source of this take? You may as well quote Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon.
Can you please tell me what disqualifies Levin in your mind? Not educated enough? Not enough experience?
He is misrepresenting the law, as he has done many times before.
He was the president in 2017. He is not the president now.
Still refers to the documents he took with him. Unless you are claiming he snuck into the WH and stole some while sleepy Joe was sleeping?
I truly don’t understand why you think this matters. He didn’t declassify them. If he did, it still wouldn’t make any difference on the espionage counts, since those law don’t rely on classification.
He took them. He refused to return them. He shared them. He obstructed justice by hiding them and lying.
I would just like to point out that since there is no evidence he declassified any documents, he would actually need to take the stand to assert that as a defense. Since the espionage act does not rely on classification, that would be a very, very bad idea for any criminal defendant in this situation. He may have more hubris than a dump truck can carry, but for his sake, I sincerely hope he listens to his counsel on what testifying in his own defense will do to his chances of a successful appeal. The declassification argument is complete and utter bullshit in practice, and I wish some of the PPs would make the effort to learn about their own legal system. What you’re suggesting will be a disaster for him legally.
Anonymous wrote:I would just like to point out that since there is no evidence he declassified any documents, he would actually need to take the stand to assert that as a defense. Since the espionage act does not rely on classification, that would be a very, very bad idea for any criminal defendant in this situation. He may have more hubris than a dump truck can carry, but for his sake, I sincerely hope he listens to his counsel on what testifying in his own defense will do to his chances of a successful appeal. The declassification argument is complete and utter bullshit in practice, and I wish some of the PPs would make the effort to learn about their own legal system. What you’re suggesting will be a disaster for him legally.
If he listened to his lawyers he would have taken his get out of jail card by returning all the documents before getting the subpoena. He's probably too stupid to take a plea deal now.
Anonymous wrote:I really think many of you are missing the obstruction. He had ample opportunity to work with NARA to return everything. He purposely mislead everyone. It never had to end this way had he returned everything.
Joking aside, they aren't missing the obstruction. They are choosing to willfully ignore it. The truth is that the security powers that be are willing to work with you if you honestly screw up and come to them with a mea culpa. Not only was Trump taking the documents not a screw up, but intentional, he then chose to lie, have others lie on his behalf, and hide them.
People like to point at the Reality Winner case. She's not in jail because she accidentally took a document out of the building that got mixed in her personal stuff. She's in jail because she removed it intentionally.
Reality Winner had no ability to declassify documents. Trump did and no, he doesn’t have to ask permission of anyone to do so.
You people have some weird mythology in your heads about "the President can declassify." There's a process for declassifying documents, even for the President. The process is NOT the President waving his hands and gesturing broadly, saying "I declassify this stuff' or simply willing it to be declassified with his mind. And if the process isn't followed, there is no way of knowing what is or isn't declassified and it would be chaos. If the downgrading and declassification process isn't followed or there is no evidence it was followed then it remains classified.
You are incorrect.
Nope. There is a legal process for declassification. Please provide a link that shows a president can think it or will it, and it becomes so.
Per Constitutional lawyers:
A former president has the legal right to access any and all of the documents created during his presidency, classified or otherwise. The second before a President leaves office, by his very actions alone in taking documents he can be said to have declassified them.
“Therefore, the former president cannot be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for this reason and more,” said Levin, who served as chief of state to Attorney General Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration.”
In addition, Trumps’ lawyers had been in active negotiations regarding the documents, starting only a year after Trump left office. Like with Obama, this kind of back-and-forth is the norm and can go on for years. And the National Archives is already in possession of the vast majority of documents created during the Trump administration, and the ones at issue are a very relative few, so yes, he has cooperated. Under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the president is “the executive branch and he’s the commander in chief.” So Trump is not guilty of violating the Espionage Act, which was invoked in the affidavit to obtain a search warrant. In addition, there are no criminal penalties associated with the Presidential Records Act; that has been cited by the FBI.
Now let’s talk Espionage Act and Clinton: Clinton had classified documents on an unsecured email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York/. Clinton wasn’t president, so she didn’t even have the protections presidents do.
“That violates the Espionage Act,” Levin said of failing to properly secure the documents, some highly classified, from foreign adversaries”.
Mark Levin is the source of this take? You may as well quote Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon.
Can you please tell me what disqualifies Levin in your mind? Not educated enough? Not enough experience?
He is misrepresenting the law, as he has done many times before.
Why would a president choose to declassify such material on a whim? What about these documents did not need to be classified any more? Why are they no longer sensitive information? What arguments for declassifying them is Trump's great brain making other than he likes to impress other people?
Because he thinks he is the king and the US is a banana republic.
Anonymous wrote:The indictment is online at NYtimes and it’s nuts. This mofo kept these secrets in a shower and on stage at Maralgo.
This photo is even worse than the shower and ballroom ones IMO.
Jesus; what a dump.
I agree
The people here are too evil and crooked to even care.
Even you guys aren’t stupid enough to think the cases are similar.
They aren't. Biden should never have removed classified documents, given he never had to power to declassify - ever. So finding them in his garage is worse. Removing the photo from this thread is an admission of that.
I'd really encourage you to read the full indictment. The Biden "case" and this one aren't remotely similar. In fact, none of the Trump charges involve the initial removal of the classified info. They only charged what he did after the subpoena.
They never are. Again, because you seem to be too dumb to understand. Biden should NEVER have had classified documents ANYWHERE in his home. EVER.
But Trump should have? The documents were taken to his home after he was no longer president. That was okay?
He had the power to declassify. Biden never had that power as VP or as a Senator.
“This is secret information. Look, look at this.” —Donald J Trump, post-presidency
Please, can I hear that tape as well?
So arrest Biden too, right? Trump had the power to declassify and no, he didn’t need permission.
Could you translate that into rational language?
Biden, as then senator and then VP, had classified documents that he could not have declassified at any point in time. So he should be arrested right?
Please read up on what Trump did. He is not being charged for what Biden did. You sound incredibly uninformed.
What’s uninformed is you not understanding that Biden broke the law. You all seem to be misled into thinking that it’s not about breaking the law, it’s about how the law was broken. That’s why this case will end up being decided by the SC. What this indictment is all about is tying up Trump from rallies and campaigning. I was actually thinking of voting for someone else but now, I am 110% behind Trump. I don’t’ like the man but I HATE miscarriages of justice more. And it has been three years of not prosecuting hardened criminals leading to the deaths of others. Three years of blatantly not protecting our borders. Three years of seeing FBI agents placed in churches and other institutions to spy on Americans. Three years of watching people lose jobs, being dragged off to jail for defending children, coverups of attacks on women in public schools, being lied to by some of our most prominent medical institutions so they could be bought off by big Pharma.
Imagine how big the crimes in government have to be in order for government to want to put Trump away this badly, how big those crimes must be to want to turn on a huge part of the population of the US. How big the payoffs are going to be if we just dispose of our Constitution. I wonder how far this government will go to ‘put down’ an ‘insurrection’. Remember, the very definition of tyranny is when the guns of the government turn inward.
You are delusional. Show us where Biden refused to comply with investigators regarding documents, where he deliberately hid them, got others to help hide them, repeatedly told lies about all of it - you can't. And as for all your other supposed government lies and coverups and malfeasance, it happened on Trump's watch - yet somehow you still think Trump is the solution?
JFC, Biden should not have even have the opportunity to comply. A US Senator or VP does NOT have the powers of declassification. Trump did under the Presidential Records Act. And btw, neither did Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Those were blatant violations of law. Not ‘hiding them’ , as you say, isn’t even a consideration. It was illegal for them to possess those documents
Under Trump’s watch? No (I’d call you Ma’am or Sir, but who knows how you identify and Lord knows, I would not want to be ‘impolite’).
Someone who doesn’t know that the Secretary of State, as an original classification authority, does in fact have declassification powers, or that declassification powers have nothing to with the PRA, should probably sit down and shut up about this.
She can only declassify her own stuff. It’s not near as broad as the President’s:
“ The Department of State, to include Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State, does have Originator Classification Authority. This means she carried the authority to control the level at which material generated by the Department of State is classified, within the boundaries of applicable doctrine. There is some material that must be classified as a matter of course, to include correspondence with Foreign Governments, controlled schedules, and information garnered from classified material.
However, there was information contained within her emails that had been classified by government agencies outside of the Department of State, beyond the scope of her OCA. Among her emails on the 'private server' were satellite imagery of foreign countries, classified by the intelligence agencies. These images are controlled as Top Secret, Special Compartmentalized Information, Talent Keyhole, but were located on her personal email server and mislabeled as unclassified. These items should never have been present on an unclassified, or general use, information system. The Government uses specially developed cyber enclaves to protect this data, segregating it from everything else. In order for these pictures to exist on an unclassified system, someone illegally copied them from a system cleared Top Secret information, crossed the physical air gap to a general use computer, and then emailed them to her. The situation is further complicated by the use of the personal server; if these communications had been made via a Government Information system, there would be a firm management and accounting of the emails. This would have satisfied the requirements of the Federal Records Act. By operating on via a personal server, she bypassed the established mechanisms for information assurance and accounting.”
Bolded is false. At the time she turned her server over, nothing on it was classified. During inspection, there were news articles shared that staff with clearance verified based on their knowledge, not on the articles, and those items were post-facto classified.
Anonymous wrote:I really think many of you are missing the obstruction. He had ample opportunity to work with NARA to return everything. He purposely mislead everyone. It never had to end this way had he returned everything.
Joking aside, they aren't missing the obstruction. They are choosing to willfully ignore it. The truth is that the security powers that be are willing to work with you if you honestly screw up and come to them with a mea culpa. Not only was Trump taking the documents not a screw up, but intentional, he then chose to lie, have others lie on his behalf, and hide them.
People like to point at the Reality Winner case. She's not in jail because she accidentally took a document out of the building that got mixed in her personal stuff. She's in jail because she removed it intentionally.
Reality Winner had no ability to declassify documents. Trump did and no, he doesn’t have to ask permission of anyone to do so.
You people have some weird mythology in your heads about "the President can declassify." There's a process for declassifying documents, even for the President. The process is NOT the President waving his hands and gesturing broadly, saying "I declassify this stuff' or simply willing it to be declassified with his mind. And if the process isn't followed, there is no way of knowing what is or isn't declassified and it would be chaos. If the downgrading and declassification process isn't followed or there is no evidence it was followed then it remains classified.
You are incorrect.
Nope. There is a legal process for declassification. Please provide a link that shows a president can think it or will it, and it becomes so.
Per Constitutional lawyers:
A former president has the legal right to access any and all of the documents created during his presidency, classified or otherwise. The second before a President leaves office, by his very actions alone in taking documents he can be said to have declassified them.
“Therefore, the former president cannot be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for this reason and more,” said Levin, who served as chief of state to Attorney General Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration.”
In addition, Trumps’ lawyers had been in active negotiations regarding the documents, starting only a year after Trump left office. Like with Obama, this kind of back-and-forth is the norm and can go on for years. And the National Archives is already in possession of the vast majority of documents created during the Trump administration, and the ones at issue are a very relative few, so yes, he has cooperated. Under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the president is “the executive branch and he’s the commander in chief.” So Trump is not guilty of violating the Espionage Act, which was invoked in the affidavit to obtain a search warrant. In addition, there are no criminal penalties associated with the Presidential Records Act; that has been cited by the FBI.
Now let’s talk Espionage Act and Clinton: Clinton had classified documents on an unsecured email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York/. Clinton wasn’t president, so she didn’t even have the protections presidents do.
“That violates the Espionage Act,” Levin said of failing to properly secure the documents, some highly classified, from foreign adversaries”.
Mark Levin is the source of this take? You may as well quote Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon.
Can you please tell me what disqualifies Levin in your mind? Not educated enough? Not enough experience?
He isn't de facto disqualified, but he is arguing this case through a lens of supporting Trump rather than through a lens of what the law says, and what the case law supports.
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