This is not what the State Department is supposed to do. I’m not surprised this lot would stoop this low with such a desperation play, but for the State Department to be leading it…It is difficult to express how fucked up that is.
One of the things to keep an eye out for, is that this lot have an establish track record of selectively releasing information to support the context they want to present. For instance, one fo their biggest talking points are the Peter Strzok “resistance” text messages, which they argue demonstrates the Crossfire Hurricane investigation he was leading was politically motivated. That is not supported even by the information they present, but you could see why some people buy it. The reality though is there is another trove of text messages of him criticizing Clinton while running the Clinton email investigation. What this paints is an FBI agent who says derogatory things to his inner circle about the people he is investigating. More importantly, if you present the Hillary text messages, the contrast between his position on the two investigations is really damaging for Trump (i.e. he really disliked Clinton as well but knew there was nothing there, Trump on the other hand…). So they pretend he only ever shit talked Trump. They, or the Russians at least (with almost certain help from someone in Stone’s orbit to identify which pieces to release) did the same about the DNC giving Hillary debate questions, when in reality it was giving them to both candidates so as to present the best presentation of their ideas as possible.
This is precisely the calculation Obama made in 09. He chose to not pursue any investigation of the Bush administration for war crimes as an act of reconciliation. It earned him absolutely nothing with the Republicans he was signaling to. We’ll see if Biden has learned any lessons from that. However, I think the more important point is that many of Trump’s issues have been farmed out to the States, in large part to protect the cases from Federal interference. That means that Leititia James is going to have more say in whether Trump gets criminally prosecuted than Biden will.
Christie’s out of the hospital. Good news for him and his family. Says he’ll have more to say next week. Potentially bad news for the Republicans. Likely he got the same favorable medical attention as the president. Likely he’ll come out and parrot what Trump said about living with the virus. Not going to go down well with women and old people, the two groups shedding Trump in measurable numbers these past two weeks.
I do think his COVID superspreader event and how he handled it combined by his borish (even by his standards) debate performance has hurt him with those two groups. Mind you, we’re talking about peeling off people at the margins. Women generally are very healthcare conscious, and I think the superspreader event was something even they could not gloss over in their minds.
Or, because he would have to prosecute his Vice President and other top Democrats at the same time… Obama was fully cognisant and couldn’t have cared less. Current body count estimated at 2.5 million.
On what basis? The war crimes arguments stem from the way intelligence was manipulated to create a false pretense for law that gets it in under the UN charter, and, more arguably, for the conduct of the war itself. Those are issues that lie purely within the Bush administration.
To poke Trump into further irrational outbursts, fairly plainly. She and everyone else know full well it won’t come into law, but DC rumour has it that it infuriated Trump and briefly had him worried that a 25th Amendment action was imminent.
Man, you really have a lot of time and energy for Democratic infighting? Are you sure you aren’t really a Democrat? It seems to be a specialty of theirs.
