Quote (Goomshill @ May 16 2019 08:38am)

It doesn't really matter what the Logan Act says if its been defunct for 220 years and never enforced. Even CNN who yapped about miniature black holes swallowing flight 370 had no problems dismissing the Logan Act on Flynn as "a relic of a bygone era" and said ""It gets trotted out every time there's a political disagreement when someone who is not the president touches on foreign policy," Vladeck said. "It's the old chestnut that everyone quotes and no one understands."
If you need to hinge your understanding of the affair on taking the Logan Act seriously, you're doing something wrong.

Again, it shouldn't matter if democrats can make some hissy argument about Trump's transition conducting diplomacy after being elected and before being sworn in and saying its improper and violates some law that's about as enforceable as anti-sodomy statues. It shouldn't matter if republicans can make some hissy argument about Obama trying to use his last few minutes in control to sabotage Trump and strip all the "T" keys off the keyboards. What should matter is the fact that absent a clear violation, absent a smoking gun in an unambiguous malfeasance- there cannot be any justification for the FBI taking extreme and dangerous steps that threaten the very fabric of our government. And its easy enough for me to criticize them for spying on Trump now that we know he was innocent and I can say 'neener neener, told you so~', but what matters was what they knew and didn't know at the time. And they did not have any suitable justification for their actions against Trump or Flynn at the time. It reeks of political animus and abuse of power. It was committed by people we later learned held deep political animus and committed other abuses of power.




They sent a couple agents over there to ask Flynn about that very subject, already knowing what he had said and what he would say and that they would have a criminal case against him as soon as he answered their questions in the way they expected him to answer. They already knew that he had lied about it in public and they knew that he had no reason to suspect they knew he lied in public, or suspect any adversarial motive from them for that matter. To deviate from what he had said publicly would be to admit it was a lie. That's a setup. If you knowingly create the circumstances that will incriminate someone who otherwise would not commit the crime, then its a setup. And that's true irrespective of any technical definition of entrapment.

And again, since this doesn't get through: They already openly admit it was a setup. They already talked about the motivation for the setup, they already admitted they were exploiting his presumption of cooperation, they convinced him he wouldn't need a lawyer. They justified setting up Flynn by arguing that the Russians would hold leverage on them since they could theoretically expose that he was lying in order to embarrass him, and hold that threat over his head. Of course, in a rational world, that's an absurdly thin pretext and Flynn simply wouldn't care if Russia said such a thing in public. Why would anyone believe them and it simply wouldn't matter much anyway. It might have caused him a black eye in the media for all of a 48 hour cycle during a period in which the MSM was melting down with team coverage every time Trump farted on an elevator.


We're talking about actions committed by the FBI that have caused severe damage to our institutional credibility and government function. Even with the leadership slate wiped clean and facing their own OIG probes, its going to be a long time before IC partners are at ease with each other and not looking over their shoulders to see who's going to stab them in the back. The reputation of the FBI was nuked to a crisp and its going to harm public trust, willingness of potential informants and allies, and lower recruitment. And they're bleeding FBI agents who get ousted for misconduct after Comey & McCabe led a politicized culture from the top down. How many heads have rolled already, and how many are on the chopping block?

Quote (Goomshill @ May 16 2019 09:38am)

tl;dr

Quote (IceMage @ May 16 2019 09:39am)

We've already argued this shit numerous times before. We get it. You really don't need to write essays on it... just be pithy and say "what Trump and his people did was right, and what the FBI and Obama people did was wrong". And then apply that to whatever topic comes up.

Quote

I mean, I'd like to live in a world where we could agree on some things. Like it's wrong to take a meeting during a campaign to accept dirt from the Russians, or it's wrong to interfere in US foreign policy as a transition official and lie to the FBI about it, or it's wrong to smear the FBI/DOJ every other day as president because a properly predicated investigation was a nuisance.

At least you're consistent I guess.

Quote (IceMage @ May 16 2019 09:39am)

We've already argued this shit numerous times before. We get it. You really don't need to write essays on it... just be pithy and say "what Trump and his people did was right, and what the FBI and Obama people did was wrong". And then apply that to whatever topic comes up.

I mean, I'd like to live in a world where we could agree on some things. Like it's wrong to take a meeting during a campaign to accept dirt from the Russians, or it's wrong to interfere in US foreign policy as a transition official and lie to the FBI about it, or it's wrong to smear the FBI/DOJ every other day as president because a properly predicated investigation was a nuisance.

At least you're consistent I guess.

Quote (Thor123422 @ May 16 2019 10:05am)

But.... if he doesn't write giant essays how will he convince people he's got something valuable to contribute?

Goom has been one of my metrics for evaluating poster value for a long time. It's painfully obvious if somebody mistakes length for insight based on if they find his essays valuable.

Quote (Goomshill @ May 16 2019 10:08am)

and then I keep turning out right and you two keep turning out wrong

Quote (Thor123422 @ May 16 2019 10:11am)

Tell me what specifically I turned out to be wrong on?

Quote (Goomshill @ May 16 2019 11:05am)

But that's not what I'm saying. You're the one here taking a partisan sides and trying to rationalize two years of hoping to find out Trump colluded with Russia
Ive said every time, over and over, that Obama and Trump got in a power struggle and its not a one-sided affair. The transition was bitter and messy, and it took both of them to achieve that. An objective lens would recognize the moral and legal ambiguities of the case, not just assume that whatever Trump and his officials did was wrong and whatever anyone did against them was justified, legal and proper.


You won't even accept the dry statements of fact that aren't even controversial, the things they already openly admit and try to justify.
It shouldn't be pulling teeth to acknowledge what Comey already laid out in his justifications of his actions

Over the past couple years, we've learned that from Trump's camp there was no collusion, and there was no case for obstruction against Trump. We know that there was no 'there' there. And yet from the FBI, there was a culture of misconduct and wanton political machinations. We're only discussing Flynn at all because someone illegally violated the firewall designed to insulate the surveillance apparatus from politics and leaked wiretapped transcripts to the media. How many leakers were arrested, and how many active IG probes are there? We learned that the top FBI heads were clearly abusing their authority, whether professional or criminal misconduct. We learned about all the wanton actions taken on a shred of pretext, the prosecutorial overreaches, the absurd levels of political animus.

If we're going to talk about consistency, then lets talk about how I've been consistently right as this all unfolded. Or how you'll defend the actions of authority figures with no regards to their conduct as long as they share your hostility to Trump. Or how I consistently lay out analysis of the motivations of actors and their dynamics to try to assemble a logical understanding of each affair, and how you consistently retort by ignoring any arguments and impugning my motives.

Quote (Goomshill @ May 16 2019 10:43am)

for starters, you thinking the Mueller investigation was going to be the Trump family watergate, or thinking it was just a lingering Obama economy that was about to crash and burn under Trump