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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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So if the longstanding norm against prosecution can indeed be broken, then under which circumstances?

The answer, quite obviously, is that if the Biden DOJ wanted to signal it was serious about document abuse and not just serious about getting Trump, is they would have combed through all the previous administrations (probably starting with Bush II). Start by nailing someone like Bolton, Condi Rice, etc. Move onto Obama admin bad actors. Clapper and Brennen strike me as particularly arrogant so a raid on them would probably get you 1 of 2. The culmination of going after Obama staffers crescendos with the obvious indictment of Hillary Clinton. Then you go back to some workmanlike prosecutions of Trump staffers (hey maybe a double tap on Bolton) and then the pot o gold at the end of the rainbow is Trump.

That is how a serious person would go about breaking the norm.

When have our current political actors displayed this level of forward-thinking and political gamesmanship? Till I see evidence that they're capable of it, I'm believing that the monster won't swallow its own. I'd expect it from a Stalin or a Mao. Not whatever we have now.

Unfortunately, I think we can both agree that we are not talking about serious people.

This. Get them all, or get none. But above all else, the law should be consistent and predictable.

We'd have to dive deeper but SOL usually start from some action point. Sometimes that is the government's discovery of the crime. And a crime like mishandling documents is essentially ongoing until it is cured.

More importantly, the statute is short for a reason. It’s not a healthy democratic activity to perpetually start jail hunts for defeated politicians.

Hillary wasn’t jail-punished, but she was election-punished. She lost it in large part because she couldn’t shake the liar-insincere (plus “rules don’t apply to me”) label she picked up primarily because of the email saga and her changing answers.

The whole point of this saga is that Trump had an easy way to avoid all of this. Give back all the damn documents! He does this, there’s no case. It’s also presumably what every other former president does when asked to do something like that.

You could retroactively change the statute of limitations for political purposes, like New York did to get Trump in his sexual assault case.

Ongoing possession will extend the SoLs for every crime that I can think of, so it should apply to gov document type stuff like what is happening with Trump.

Yeah, that's what I meant. As in, possessing something for 5.1 years doesn't mean you get away with it. Possessing it 5.1 years ago, then stopping at 5.01 years ago, means you get away with it. But with that, I'd assume all politicians would have returned the docs they kept, after making a few copies and burying them somewhere safe. Not sure wtf Trump was thinking, since it's ridiculously easy to get away with making digital copies and hiding them where no one could ever find them.

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