To be pedantic, it is illegal to incite people to imminent lawless action. Walz is technically correct that you could be prosecuted for willfully creating a false emergency.
The part that's wrong is that quote was used in conjunction with suppressing protests to the Vietnam War, edit: WW1, which the comparison to "Shouting "Fire!" " is nonexistent and was terrible law. And Walz is still wrong for the same reason. I'm not disagreeing with you so much as specifying which part of that was terrible law.
Tiber727
3d ago
No, this isn't that big of a problem
Anti-discrimination laws already forbid basing hiring decisions on race or gender (with exceptions for specific jobs). White is a race and male is a gender. But to have standing you have to have a person who didn't get a job, and you have to prove that person specifically would have been hired if not for DEI.
Forcing companies to fire pro diversity ideologues and to enforce controls to make sure these kind of people don't decide, is something that can be done.
Why not force companies suspected in engaging in discriminatory practices, such as companies that have engaged with ESG, Woke, policies, or followed AA policies, to demonstrate they have change course.
This can be done culturally, but to attempt legally would be likely illegal (with maybe some exception for state-run universities) and I would never support it. Sorry I'm not up for "government should not exceed its authority, except when I really feel like it." Not having a totalitarian government is more important to me than beating annoying people.
I would also add that the agenda that favors massive waves of mass migration that would demographically change the country that makes whites a minority and claims that is a good thing to demographically change the country is another woke policy.
I think you need to get off the internet a bit. Progressives want to help poor people, to the extent that they're willing to let a bunch of people in from other countries, legally or otherwise. You want to think this a bad idea? Absolutely fine. But it is not "We are doing this to ethnically cleanse white people." I oppose illegal immigration (but don't hold it against the kids brought along by their parents) and want people to culturally assimilate, but I'm going to blunt that I don't give a flying fuck what the racial makeup of America is, now or in the future. I want everyone to stop making a big deal over what race someone is.
Jackson has ruled a dissenting opinion in favor of retaining affirmative action. So there would have been a different rulling if the Democrats picked supreme corut justices.
Fair. I was mostly thinking in overall terms. Jackson has a bent against prosecutor and administration overreach, to the point of ruling in favor of some of the J6 people because the government was taking creative liberties on what to charge them with. I wasn't remembering some of her specific actions.
Being anti-woke is not consistent with supporting the Democrats on the issue of wokeness over Trump. This inconsistency is there, however someone wishes to identify as.
There is no reason to have hope in the Dems changing from their trajectory. The ideologues are running the show and Kamala Harris who is especially woke even for Democrats woke standards is part of that. If someone hopes that Dems learn from that and change and have demonstrated their change in ideology and deserve support, only after they have changed a case can be made.
Welcome to the two party system. I am not a single issue voter and quite frankly, believe Trump should be in jail for election fraud and to a much lesser extent obstructing the return of classified documents. Any chance of me flipping parties was toast the moment he was nominated again. There is no path for me to "follow through" on opposing wokeness without also sabotaging other principles and beliefs I hold more important.
Dems are no more a monolith than Reps. There are plenty of Republicans even here in this thread that despise Trump but are voting for him anyway because to them the alternative is worse. That's me with Kamala. I don't care to dig it up, but I remember an old survey that claimed that progressives were only like 8% of the population. That's a minority even among the Dems, but just big enough that if they don't vote then you end up with a Republican in that seat. And Dems are currently in an awkward position where usually the party supports a first-term President for the renomination. Biden should have dropped out, and had to be forced out too late that the Vice President was the only real pivot they had. And said pivot was a pointless diversity pick because Vice Presidents don't really do anything.
Tiber727
4d ago
This is not some blanket call to prosecute Hillary: this is the observation that, far from being a Justice Department that claims to be neutral, they are seriously investigating Trump while not touching amyone else. Hillary ran her own classified email server, Trump did not collude with Russia, which did Jeff Session's FBI investigate? Remember that Sessions was coerced into recusing on the logic that since he participated in Trump's campaign he couldn't be a neutral observer. Thankfully, after that, the FBI was totally politically neutral throughout the Trump presidency.
Yes, and "touching anyone else" in this context meaning investigating Democrats. Such as Hillary Clinton, who is mentioned twice in this tweet ("deleted emails" and "Clinton Foundation"). The same Clinton who he ran on prosecuting. Investigations being the first step of prosecuting, particularly when your boss has already publicly stated the desired outcome. And when Trump did not get what he wanted, Sessions was out. And now that Trump ended up never getting it, he claims he didn't want it in the first place.
The Mueller Report was based on George Papadopoulos letting slip that he had Russian contacts, then lying about it to investigators. He eventually took a plea deal admitting to the above but claiming that he acted alone. But since he lied about it, they had to investigate the people he was in contact with, meaning the Trump campaign. A bunch of other people lied to investigators, including Manafort having a connection to Russia-aligned elements in Ukraine.
Tiber727
4d ago
I watched the section you highlighted, and yeah that was bad. The witness to me like someone who knew he fucked up and was trying to give technically correct answers. To play armchair lawyer for a sec, I think the lawyer, rather than trying to get the witness to speculate on why X happened, I might have phrased it as "In a typical scenario what measures are taken to prevent X?"
As far as some of the other anomalies, as a team lead and someone who teaches a lot of board games, you can teach someone something but they don't know it until they've done it. You're in a situation you don't really know how to deal with and you're trying to avert a crisis which leads to more fuck ups. And they can't just do a redo of the election.
An audit definitely seems called for here. Who set the machines should be pretty damn traceable. I'm not convinced it was intentional rather than incompetence because that would be pretty damn brazen. It would be very easy to end up with a target on your back.
Tiber727
5d ago
For context for the low, I consider myself center-left and anti-woke.
I think wokeness is both cultural and political. My starting point I would say is this survey, which I think puts a major shift at around 2014. I do wish there was a more up-to-date chart, but I can't find one. Anyway, I don't think it means that wokeness is defeated if we get a Republican President for 4 years, then a Democrat brings it back. I think it has to be defeated culturally.
I was disappointed in Biden in that he was probably the most centrist of the 2020 candidates, and, well, we see the results. As far as Trump goes, there's a concept called reciprocal radicalization. That is, something that drives recruitment for X also drives recruitment for opposition to X. Trump was also a uniting force on the left. Even as a Dem I'm not excited for a potential Harris win, I simply find Trump's behavior completely disqualifying.
As far as the Supreme Court goes, Barrett has actually been pretty good. As has Jackson overall, even I oppose the reason she was picked. I do support their affirmative action ruling, though that has been overshadowed by my strong dislike of their presidential immunity ruling.
The problem with having the DoJ go after anti-racist companies is the same as the difficulty going after racist companies - dog whistles. They can always just say that promoting diversity is innocuous free speech and that it just happened to work out that the best candidates aligned with their diversity goals. You have to prove something like them saying they're not hiring you because you're white, and no intelligent person would do that.
The polls have noted a dramatic rightward shift for young men. My hope is that Dems will learn from that.
Tiber727
5d ago
Guy goes to a funeral for families of veterans killed during the current administration. You have to dismiss this as a "photo op" because it's very good evidence that Trump has respect for the military.
It's also good evidence that a guy running for President is going to go to places that make him look good to a target demographic
McCain was a horrible person who used his military service as a rhetorical shield to make war anywhere the MIC could make money. Trump rightly points out that McCain's service wasn't even all that honorable, he was a rat.
There are ways to do that without saying that getting captured as a soldier is worthy of scorn.
Name a person you think would not have been fired except for Trump being a manchild. The reason Trump got rid of so many people is that so many of them were horrible. The reason so many of them were horrible is that DC is full of them.
I just posted a public tweet where Trump complains about Sessions not investigating Hillary, 2 months before Sessions was out. You know, that thing we were talking about that Trump supposedly dropped the investigation out of the kindness of his heart? Any response to that?
Tiber727
5d ago
The guy has done dozens if not hundreds of events with vets and their families, he loves them, they love him, what are you talking about? He got attacked for going to Arlington and all of the vets there defended him.
He got attacked for using cemeteries for photo-ops, which is the opposite of respecting the military.
McCain was a horrible person!
I'm not referring to your or Trump's general impression of McCain as a person. I'm referring to Trump's comments on McCain's military service. Coming from a guy who couldn't serve due to "heel spurs."
The guy has been in business for sixty years, that involves doing a lot of business, a lot of deals. Supposing that Trump is just this manchild-lik baby who is "used to getting his way" is TDS.
I'm not referring to his business deals, I'm referring to the way he treats his staff. Trump is unusually unable to retain staff. And they have a lot to say about him in return. Could they be lying? Sure, but so could Trump. And to me the accusations they are making seem consistent to me with observed behaviors about Trump that I would at least consider them circumstantial evidence.
Obviously Trump is a political actor so we can't take his word at any sort of face value, but Robert Mueller, the esteemed Robert Mueller, not at all a political actor, his report says that Trump is bad! And we have to believe that.
It sounded to me like you were in fact taking his word at face value. Mueller is a political actor, sure. But this also wasn't something like Mueller giving his opinion. This was Mueller conducting a government investigation and publishing his finding in a report. That comes with penalties for lying. We know that Trump campaigned on "locking up" Hillary. Then after being in office he stopped. We're not in dispute about that, are we? Trump claimed he didn't want to hurt the Clintons, which makes no sense. Was he previously confused about what "locking her up" implied?
Mueller reports allegations that Trump on multiple occasions attempted to persuade Sessions to go after Hillary, and that Trump made several public comments on Twitter and to the New York Times that would align with said attempts. For instance:
On June 5, 2018, for example, the President tweeted, “The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself. . . . I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined . . . and Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!” On August 1, 2018, the President tweeted that “Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now.” On August 23, 2018, the President publicly criticized Sessions in a press interview and suggested that prosecutions at the Department of Justice were politically motivated because Paul Manafort had been prosecuted but Democrats had not. The President said, “I put in an Attorney General that never took control of the Justice Department, Jeff Sessions.” That day, Sessions issued a press statement that said, “I took control of the Department of Justice the day I was sworn in . . . . While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” The next day, the President tweeted a response: “‘Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.’ Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the ‘other side’ including deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, FISA abuse, Christopher Steele & his phony and corrupt Dossier, the Clinton Foundation, illegal surveillance of Trump campaign, Russian collusion by Dems – and so much more. Open up the papers & documents without redaction? Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!”
breaking up subjects
You sound like someone who hasn't actually watched Trump speak. Go watch any of his recent podcasts or interviews. He talks about it. He feels genuinely saved by God. He talks about religion in terms he didn't talk about before. It's not that cynical.
Trump is good at lying and has speechwriters to help. Religious belief is unfalsifiable and something many politicians who cheat on their wives (including Trump himself) claim.
North Korea, ISIS, border wall, tax cuts, border security, tariffs, NAFTA renegotiations, deregulation. The political class in DC spent years fighting this guy, he got a lot done, and now everything that the politicians spent years kicking and screaming trying to fight gets counted as a flaw of Trump's because we can't admit that Trump was actually competent. You just linked me a document written by Robert Mueller as part of a 3-year hoax meant to completely undermine Trump's presidency, and then rhetorically throw up your hands, gee, boy, Trump couldn't get a lot done, must because he's not a get-a-lot-done kind of guy.
North Korea I don't think he got anything done. ISIS I don't recall anything but a continuation of government policy and Obama era drone strikes. Border wall I guess some sections were added though if I recall he wanted across the entire 2,000 mile border (which is a stupid idea because that would cost an insane amount of money and getting past a fence with delusions of grandeur is easy). I suppose I'll grant you tax cuts, border bills, tariffs, and USMCA, though I would argue that a lot of that was more due to Republicans in Congress (a.k.a. the elites) than Trump.
You accuse me of TDS and then turn around and definitively state the Mueller report is a hoax. If I have TDS then you have the opposite.
Tiber727
6d ago
That was literally just explained, so that citizens have time to catch that they have been removed and be added back on. It's that part you just said about fortifying the election, only unironically.
If Youngkin objects to the law, he should lobby for its repeal. Instead he went ahead and did something he's not allowed to do and got smacked down. It turns out you can't just ignore laws you don't like.
Tiber727
6d ago
That's just TDS with extra steps. You think Donald Trump doesn't love America? You think he wants to become a dictator?
As a place where you can get rich? Sure. But he also seems to sneer at military service. Remember his attacks on McCain? As for being a dictator, depends on your definition of dictator. I think he's used to getting his way, though his wants tend to be more impulsive and pettier than most dictators.
he talks about not wanting to charge Hillary for precedent it would set, not wanting to replace the Secret Service with his own bodyguard, how the assassination attempt has made him reconsider his relationship to God, etc.
He spent a significant amount of time where he did in fact want to go after Hillary. According to the Mueller report he tried to get Sessions to go after Clinton but Sessions refused (pdf page 319). It would easily fit that he wasn't actually able to go after Hillary and is under investigation himself, so of course now he's going to say investigating former presidents is bad. Similarly he's running as a Republican, so mentioning the assassination and using it to talk about religion is pretty much what I'd expect any politician to do.
I cannot possibly imagine what your definition of "skilled politician" would be that completely excludes Donald Trump.
Credit where credit is due, few manage to be President. Obama was a politician with barely any record but knew how to give a speech. Trump knew how to channel the sorry state of the Republican field and frame himself as an outsider. Once in office, I think those same Republicans in Congress called the shots and he signed his name on things. Most of the things he tried on his own initiative didn't seem to go anywhere.
Before Trump, we were wailing about wokes and the death of civilization and riding the decline. Now a significant part of the country not only believes in Making America Great Again, but Greater Than Ever Before.
Wokeness arguably accelerated in response to Trump. I'm not sure how much of its decline is due to Trump as opposed to the left themselves. And both candidates are arguably among the most disliked in history
Tiber727
7d ago
Judicial power trumps state power, and left-aligned judges have been prolific at stopping Republican attempts at legislating electoral security; why would they be any more cooperative in investigations obstructed by hyperblue municipal bureaucracies? Beyond that, while fraud has been something generally talked about, it was not a matter du jour of the 2016 electoral cycle or the 2020 electoral cycle, its prominence today is novel to post-9/11 American political discourse.
Republicans would still likely take the matter to court if they believed fraud existed. Also, Bush v Gore was famously decided in Bush's favor. Kerry supported a lawsuit by Green and Libertarian candidates. There was an interesting result in that one in that the random recount was found to be rigged but beyond that didn't seem to go anywhere.
I would note a correlation between its recent prominence and a candidate who makes a lot of wild claims.
Money is an incentive for defection, but there must be an interested purchasing party and goods to deliver. Daniels is a porn star who had evidence of having had sex with the President, of course she was going to be handsomely compensated for the story. A poll worker would have no story merely saying "This many ballots were fraudulently filed," even an interested party would not likely pay them, because that testimony is worth nothing.
I covered the interested party aspect already - Fox News. Or how abut the Heritage Foundation? Or Donald Trump himself? Hell, even without any evidence, claim to be a poll worker who found fraud and Trump will organize a parade for you.
9,999 hearings to go, because every single ballot must be individually proved as fraudulent, else a legal ballot be illegally struck. See the scope of the problem?
I won't claim to be a legal expert, but this doesn't seem right. And even if it were, again the news itself would be something Trump would never ignore.
You also assume this as a complex process requiring many people be aware. We don't know how many people are required to flip elections because the process is closed to audit. It could take dozens, it could take hundreds, it could take a handful of people placed at the exact link in the chain where boxes of fake ballots can be introduced and laundered with boxes of legal ballots. We don't know, and this by the way is and has been my entire point throughout my time talking about fraud on this site. When I say "We have no way of knowing" I am describing the act of criminal fraud. It is tax fraud for a corporation to have numbers closed to audit and it is electoral fraud for a government to have ballot numbers closed to audit.
Yes, I do think it would lean on the complex side. Even a precision strike requires getting said people into that exact position. I don't think election fraud is 100% impossible, but I think this is a Russell's Teapot situation. I don't think that equal skepticism is being applied to claims of fraud being true as is applied to claims supposedly disproving said claims.
I can't say I strongly oppose more auditing, outside of that I suspect the only result of it would be that the people predisposed to believe in election fraud will latch on some innocuous detail and/or create a new appeal to missing information. I don't agree that Democrats have as much of a stranglehold on the gears of politics that their opponents can't and/or won't stop them. If they did Trump would be kept nowhere near power.
Tiber727
7d ago
Fair, I do know the list is only what was proven, and "found" was not the best word. It's still a rounding error away from 0 in the context of elections.
I'm willing to give my opponent's arguments a read, but an 8-hour video of one day of a trial is rather more than I'm willing to commit. So I looked up that trial and Lake lost, because her main evidence was some bad printers that someone claimed they believed were tampered with but could not prove. That and some claims about a secret tally that were actually livestreamed and Republicans were participating in.
Tiber727
7d ago
I would say that it is a real phenomenon, in the same manner that chronic pain is a real condition even if no cause is found. If you feel you're experiencing it, you're experiencing it, even if it were psychological in nature. Body dysmorphia doesn't go away by saying it's not real any more than you can cure depression by simply telling someone they don't actually have it that bad.
The way I see it, I don't care if an adult wants to get bolt-on boobs for any reason. My breaking points are:
A) Children. In particular, the constant framing of trans children as suicide risks I believe is social contagion. If "there have always been trans people" then why is this danger of suicide only talked about now?
B) The elevation of the meaningless concept of "identity."
C) The accompanying suppression of noticing or speaking about a person's sex.
D) That any research towards curing gender dysphoria without transitioning would be framed as genocide.
Tiber727
7d ago
I wouldn't expect Republicans of a given swing state to be able to thoroughly investigate the electoral procedures of their blue island cities.
Why not? State power trumps local power, and a swing state likely has enough Republican power to have a decent shot at investigating it. I also don't buy that the right is only just now thinking about election fraud. This has been a talking point for decades, even if it ramped up in 2020.
A low level government bureaucrat probably belongs to the group of people least likely to defect, save for those in criminal groups where defectors are killed. It's their job, for many it's the best they can get, why would they defect? Moral concern begs the question.
It's a low level job, and low level jobs typically cycle a lot of people in and out. Hell, isn't it a common saying that young people have no respect for their jobs and barely even show up? Plus for many it's a temp job.
As for why they would defect, let me put it this way. Stormy Daniels got $130,000 for the rights to her story about sleeping with Trump. Let's say I have solid proof of voter fraud. If I took said evidence to Fox News, how much do you think I could get them to pay for it?
With regards to moral concern, it's a numbers game. According to a quick search there were 774,000 poll workers in 2020. And some states like Ohio and New York explicitly require a mix of party affiliation. The point is that a conspiracy requires pretty much everyone at a given location to be in on it.
Tiber727
8d ago
Personally, this is close my philosophy of Trump (minus the "this is a good trait" part). He has a different relation to the truth.
There's a certain type of boss where he tells his employee to do something. The employee says it's not possible. But he keep telling him to do it and he finds a way to say yes. There may or may not be steelman reasons he tried to say no. It may be possible but stupid. It may come with some major caveats. He might just come up with something that looks vaguely like what the boss asked for thinking it will shut him up. But to said boss, he doesn't care about the details. It's indistinguishable from the employee just not wanting to do it.
I think Trump's way of doing things is that he can get anything with the right amount of influence and schmoozing, and the details can be fudged. An example would be that in his NY fraud case, he argued:
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That different forms of measurement can come up with different results, therefore it's subjective whether a property is 10,000 sq ft or 30,000.
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When Trump bought Mar-a-Lago he agreed that the property was for a private social club, and this zoning could not be changed without approval. He listed it without any restrictions, on the basis that he thought he could renegotiate that if needed.
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That things he own are worth significantly more simply by having his name attached.
I think he doesn't care about facts, he cares about people, because he can get people to do whatever he wants. So when he calls Raffensperger, it's not actually about whether there was fraud. He just has to convince him to find 11,000 votes. Whether those votes exist or not doesn't matter because there's always a way to accomplish something. Claiming fraud exists is no different than flattering your business partner. It's a thing you say that gets you a good result.
Tiber727
8d ago
there was no basis for which Trump to even suggest that the election was fraudulent. Yet he was making these allegations before they had even finished counting the votes.
Correction: He was making these claims before the election even happened.
Tiber727
8d ago
I will say I am familiar with that link, because I recently used that same link to disprove the supposed effectiveness of voter fraud. The person whom I had argued with had suggested that 200K fraudulent votes in the right locations would overturn the election. I took him at his word on that number, but argued that an organization whose goal is to find as much fraud as possible found less than 1% of that number over 30 years.
It also establishes that the government does have methods of detecting fraud, thus establishing that the fraud would have to either evade said methods or the audits themselves would also have to be fraudulent. This matters because the claim often pushed is that voter ID is necessary; which, even if we say elections are being stolen, if voter ID wouldn't catch it then what's the point of focusing on it? Trump repeatedly claims fraud in states that already have it.
I will say on a personal note that with regards to the whole, "if evidence existed the public would see past any attempts to bury it" idea, I'm not even sure. My personal view is that, similar to the Haitians eating cats story, I've generally become numb to claims of evidence. This is because quite frankly I've heard too many stories online that end up being bullshit with an unrelated or AI generated pictures that I figure someone with more time will sort them out. I don't even remember how many are the same ones I've already heard and have been debunked but still manage to circulate or get twisted by the repeated retellings. If you want to say I'm intellectually weak or biased, sure. I'm just telling you how humans work.
Tiber727
8d ago
I can think of 2 counterarguments about being unable to at least do so secretly:
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The U.S. has an oppositional system. Corrupt states generally have one party so entrenched that the opposing party can't really do anything about it. Whereas if Republicans have strong evidence of Democratic cheating, they should likely have the means to either uncover it, or to cheat right back.
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An internal defector would also be likely. The election system involves so many people that it would be difficult to not encounter someone with moral objections or simply wants the fame and cash that would likely result in running to Fox News. I know you precluded this with your link, but your link only establishes it as theoretically possible rather than likely. Becoming a poll worker doesn't require the same level of background checks as secret clearance, and seems much harder to ensure a cohesive conspiracy.
Tiber727
14d ago
I'd argue we should do neither. whether the amount of homeless went up or down, it may not have anything to do with the homeless orgs at all. They didn't make the problem, and they may deserve anywhere from 0-100% of the credit for each person who is no longer homeless, or 0-100% of the blame for failing to solve the problem.
For best results, you'd need metrics that represent what the homeless org did, how well it worked, and the reasons why it didn't work better. In the FBI's case it would be things like the number of cases investigated vs solved, time spent per investigation, etc.
Tiber727
15d ago
There's evidence suggesting some Russians are shooting Ukrainian soldiers after they've surrendered, which is a very stupid thing to do from a tactical perspective. Drawing a parallel, if this claim is true it needn't be for tactical benefit, it could be purely emotional and because they believe they are immune from consequences.
Tiber727
16d ago
Except that, even after spending trillions in Terraforming Mars, you'd end up with land worth less than land than Earth due to extreme cold, proximity to amenities, ability to grow things, etc. No one but crazy rich people would want to live on Mars until Earth becomes largely uninhabitable.
Tiber727
16d ago
It’s not nefarious no, but it’s also completely absurd that people aren’t allowed to distrust the organs of state that rarely serve their purposes, and quite often serve to stymie peasant attempts to better themselves economically. The organs of the deep state are finely tuned to follow procedures that protect themselves from scrutiny, and provide deniability to anyone that might be blamed if something goes wrong. It is not geared to serving its purpose and regulating without being destructive.
Whether you admit that, people do believe it is nefarious, or at least speak as if they genuinely believe it. And that it is organized.
Agencies are built to be standardized, both due to logistics of coordinating between agencies and at scale, and to try to prevent both actual and perceived bribery or kickbacks.
They’re not necessarily “crazy”.
I would apply that term to a Trump supporter that tries to assassinate Trump. Unless it was some 4D chess move to pretend to try to assassinate Trump to give Trump a polling boost.
I've found myself in a lower managerial position of a large corporation. I've had my share of processes that are meant to add traceability to both the tasks themselves and my workload, and the incremental increase in the number of steps added. I hate it, but I'm not throwing away my job over it.
A better way of asking something you have failed to answer - under your definition, is intent required in order to declassify something? In other words, if it could be proven that Trump's frame of mind when taking the documents home was not to declassify them, but to hoard secret information, would that establish that the documents were not declassified? Or is it literally impossible to him to steal documents for use outside of his Presidential term, even if he tried?
Tiber727
17d ago
Your argument is that the only "process" that Trump needs to follow to declassify is to decide, entirely in his own head, that something is declassified. In said recording, he admits he never did that. Therefore, even by your own lowest-of-the-low bars, he did not do that. And all of his actions over one and a half years regarding the return of said documents contradict the actions of someone who believes he declassified it. Literally 0 people involved in this case agree that it was done, including the person you argue is the only person that matters. Let's start by stating my argument is simply that the "process" is at least 1 person involved in Trump's government can make a subjective determination that it was done. Let's call that the law of basic logic. If not, the document remains classified.
You continue to completely ignore the question of why Trump went through all of this when by your own argument he could have saved himself a lot of time and energy because you know your "strongest" argument is to insist that something that doesn't exist but isn't required is in fact required.
My apologies. You are correct.
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