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I personally would be in favor of far less apprehension with prosecuting government officials. If we assume that Clinton, Biden, etc. all get prosecuted for mishandling records with a similar zeal, how much of an effect would it have in mollifying those that believe Trump is the victim of unwarranted legal action?
It would (mostly) dispel me of the idea that Trump is being treated unfairly by the legal system, but I don't think that would be good policy. Anyone in charge of large amounts of money, important records, or other sensitive material almost certainly commits multiple felonies over their career. There's just no way to be effective at your job while following all of the rules all of the time, and some of the federal fraud statutes are very broad.
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I think that's the end result of what's happening now -- if someone isn't willing to indict Biden (and/or Newsom, and whatever) in the next six years, grassroots Republicans will find someone nutty enough to do so, whether or not the law supports that particular matter. It's possible that this turns out to be a sword that doesn't cut both ways, but if so, they're going to go up a rung and chop out sections of the FBI or DoJ until it happens. There's ways you can separate each and every other big-wig politician or politically-connected actor who violated the law and got off scot free, but there's few ways to do so and not seem post-hoc justifications -- and it's far too dangerous a tool to be only available to one team.
And I think that would mollify conservatives, if not necessarily as many Trumpists.
Of course, the flip side is that it'd be extraordinarily bad on its own merits. Even the steelman of 'just' going after 'genuine' cases will result in federal officials facing a barrage of 1983 suits, but conservatives have fifteen or twenty years of genuine or imagined overlooked misbehavior to bring forward.
Is Newsom corrupt? Beyond the usual run of Californian politics, I mean. I was less than gruntled by the description of Ivy Getty's fairy tale wedding, where all the Democrat big names in California were pretty much at the beck and call of the Gettys - there's a thin line between "attending as friend of the family" and "performing favours for the grandees who bankrolled my political career".
He's grandstanding about DeSantis and Florida, but that's par for the course. He avoided the recall due to having the party swing in behind him and campaign on his behalf, but is there any gossip about him being a naughty boy? Apart from the 'dining during Covid' stuff which politicians everywhere were doing (including in my own country).
I don't know that he's (unusually) corrupt, and I doubt most political corruption goes from blue states into deep red ones.
I just don't think corruption is the only or even most available avenue for political indictments. Make a false statement during online fundraising? (State) wire fraud statutes could be written expansively enough to cover anything close to them. Harass a business in another state? Many states, especially southern states, have laws against deprivation and attempted deprivation of right under color of law; these are mostly civil for now, but that's mostly so they're available for private rights of action (and for lower standards of proof) rather than some deep requirement. There's some 11th Amendment complexities, here, but they largely reflect needing to pursue state officials as individuals rather than states themselves -- but if your intent is to harass rather than to get an injunction, that's kinda besides the point.
This isn't something states do, right now; there's a reason that all the handwringing about DeSantis kidnapping charges didn't have people bringing up a potential constitutional crisis. And there's very good reasons that they don't! But it's a weapon on the table.
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And how are they going to do that with the Democrats in control of the Deep State and the presidency? This is the endgame; the Democrats aren't worried about tit-for-tat because they don't intend to relinquish power again.
Naively, there's a chance people will recognize the tooling; politics is at least theoretically anti-inductive. To an extent, this is currently one of Trump's biggest selling points, damning with faint praise as that might be. Given past events, I'm not that optimistic.
More pessimistically... there was a case in the late 90s where a federal agent shot an unarmed woman holding a baby. That case was somewhat complicated over past Supremacy Clause questions over where a federal officer's official processes start and where reasonable behavior ends. But states do not have to limit themselves to good, fair, or honest laws, that a federal employee might only violate when taking their duty to its most extreme edges.
States just don't do that, and that's why you've not heard much about the few cases that even started. And the feds can put the pressures in; the Clinton-era fed put a lot of pressure to get Lon Horuchi's prosecutor limited as much as possible. It's even possible that federal judges will quickly develop new immunities or theories of impossible requirements of standing. But taking it off the table entirely as a threat requires taking every state, not just the federal gov.
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I can't speak for anyone else but seeing Clinton and/or Hunter Biden go to jail would go a good way towards convincing me that the FBI isn't just a bunch of DNC thugs.
I'm honestly not sure that sending Hunter to jail would achieve anything. He's got the connections and the pull to get the Club Fed version rather than "thrown in with the ordinary criminals" and I can't see him learning anything from that, indeed I could see him boasting about how he's done time and is now a bona fide tough guy (because he strikes me as that much of an idiot).
Joe will always protect him. That's family love. How far he's gone to do that, and how much real interference with the law that entailed, we won't know unless someone does go after it, and why would the Democrats just sit back and let that happen?
It would at least provide the implication of consistency and rule of law. I don't blame Biden for defending his kid but I do blame the rest of the Democratic party for trying to gaslight us into believing that this is anything other than what it very obviously is. What I want to see Cimafara, HeelBearClub, GDanning and the rest of the partisan hacks here who were defending Clinton back in 2016 but are now bitching about Trump admit that they were wrong.
If Trump is guilty, Huma Abadien, Andrew McCabe, Hillary Clinton, and John Podesta are even more so what say we clean house?
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Look, it seems patently obvious that hunter Biden committed some serious crimes. It seems simply true that Joe was somehow involved in those crimes, at the very least intervening illegally to protect his son, although I don’t think the evidence is strong enough to convict him and furthermore may not be strong enough to indict.
I totally understand why Joe Biden is so willing to protect his son. What I don’t understand is why so many other prominent democrats seem to think it’s so important- after all, Joe is probably not going to get prosecuted.
I think we are in agreement.
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