Revenge is the best way to make it stop happening. Not getting revenge just invites more abuse's
Well, there’s a difference between “going after Joe Biden for public corruption” vs “siccing the IRS to harass political opponents.” The former is fair game since there’s plenty of evidence already to suggest a case could be won (including from members of IRS-CI who have made that exact allegation that Garland is obstructing justice and lied to Congress because they have Biden dead to rights), vs. having the IRS harass James Comey because he lied to Trump (note that that is actually against the law for a president to do that because of Nixon; in fact that’s something
else Trump is being investigated for, along with a securities violation, plus the Georgia stuff).
Judicial Watch vs NARA set precedent that the President gets to decide what is and is not his own personal records, and he gets to keep said records.
Read Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Nat'l Archives & Records Admin., 845 F. Supp. 2d 288, see flags on bad law, and search Casetext’s comprehensive legal database
casetext.com
Given that he declassified anything, there is no grounds for saying 'he can't have that because it's classified and therefore unsafe to be out in public either.'
In the same post that you quoted, Airedale addressed this case by saying
3) The lawsuit with Clinton you're referring to (Judicial Watch v. Clinton) was over a series of audio recordings Clinton himself had made to keep a personal record of his time in office. They were personal notes produced by Clinton the individual; they were not records produced by government agencies at his best or in his official capacity. That was why he wasn't compelled to turn them over.
I'm curious what your response to this is.
Sorry for the weird formatting. I thought the case name was v. Clinton, not v. NARA.
That said, I am also curious why you ignore not only my explanation of why the lawsuit failed (and am betting you didn’t actually read the text of the case itself, because the part of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that provides a difference between official records vs personal notes:
“Enacted in the wake of controversy surrounding the disposition of President Richard M. Nixon's Presidential records, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 ("PRA"),
44 U.S.C. §§ 2201–2207 (2006), governs the preservation and disclosure of Presidential records. The PRA defines "Presidential records" as:
[D]ocumentary materials, or any reasonably segregable portion thereof, created or received by the President, his immediate staff, or a unit or individual of the Executive Office of the President whose function is to advise and assist the President, in the course of conducting activities which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.
44 U.S.C. § 2201(2). The statute provides that "[t]he United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records," id. § 2202, and it directs the President to "take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records,"
id. § 2203(a).
The PRA distinguishes Presidential records from "personal records," defining personal records as "all documentary materials, or any reasonably segregable portion thereof, of a purely private or nonpublic character which do not relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President." Id. § 2201(3). The PRA provides that "diaries, journals or other personal notes serving as the functional equivalent of a diary or journal which are not prepared or utilized for, or circulated or communicated in the course of, transacting Governmental business" should be treated as personal records. Id. § 2201(3)(A). The PRA requires that all materials produced or received by the President, "to the extent practicable, be categorized as Presidential records or personal records upon their creation or receipt and be filed separately."
Id. § 2203(b).”
Note the bolded parts. I’m curious as to your response on this as well. And I’m
also curious as to why you keep bringing up the “declassification” argument, when I’ve explained exactly why whether the documents were declassified or not (more on this in a moment) is irrelevant to the charges, but here’s an article from National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, himself a former longtime federal prosecutor:
He’d have no real defense against an indictment — but bringing one would also likely rob Democrats of the nominee they’d prefer Biden to face in 2024.
www.nationalreview.com
“To prove a violation of the
Espionage Act, the government merely has to show that the documents Trump mishandled contained national-defense information. There is no requirement that they be formally classified. Now, the fact that they are classified (or, in Trump's telling,
were classified) is strong evidence that the documents did indeed contain national-defense information. But it is not evidence necessary to prove the government's case. Documents need not be stamped with classification markings for their mishandling to be actionable under the Espionage Act; ergo, declassifying them would not strip them of their status as national-defense information.
Declassification would be similarly irrelevant to the suspected
obstruction crime, of which the magistrate judge who issued
the Mar-a-Lago search warrant also found probable cause. That offense appears to involve the concealment of documents from the investigation — specifically the false claim, made by Trump's representatives on June 3, that the 38 documents they were surrendering to investigators were the only ones on the Mar-a-Lago premises responsive to a grand-jury subpoena issued the preceding month. The grand-jury subpoena at issue did not command the production of documents that necessarily
were classified at the time of the search; it commanded the production of documents that
physically bore classification markings. Again, even if there were credible evidence that Trump had declassified the documents, that wouldn't be a defense.
In other words, the declassification claim, beyond signaling recklessness, is just plain stupid.”
And, side note, even when pressed under oath, Trump’s lawyers refused to actually state they were in fact declassified, for the simple reason that in a criminal case, one has to put up or shut up, and lying about it not only lands the client in massive hot water, but also lands the
lawyers in deep shit as well, and the average lawyer is not going to risk jail time for something so stupid.