(h/t jqjacobs)
If T***p’s “national emergency” carnival show (9 p.m. tonight on your favourite network, suggest one of the ones allowing a Dem response) is meant at least in part as a distraction, here's one thing it might be intended to distract from.
Rachel Maddow, as she so often does, connects the dots: show link: scroll down to find the clip. Over the past couple of weeks, including the holiday, she says: “Leading Democrats in key positions in the new Congress are actively trying to disabuse us, the public, of the notion that a sitting president cannot be indicted.”
First, Jerry Nadler, now Chair of the House Judiciary Committee—which would commence any impeachment proceedings—said on Rachel’s show on Dec. 20 that he doesn’t believe that the Justice Department guidance on the question, which states a sitting president should not be indicted, is correct.
Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told NBC News last week that indictment “is an open discussion in terms of law” and that she doesn’t believe the Justice Dept. memos are conclusive.
The CNN interview with Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is played, starting at about 1:48, where Jake Tapper points out that the guidelines are “not a rule, not a law, but a suggestion from the Justice Dept.” Schiff says:
There is a very powerful case to be made that you can indict a sitting President... it’s more difficult to make the case that they should be tried while they’re in office because that would very disruptive of the President’s responsibilities... The only argument that was made [in the Justice Dept guidelines] was that it would stigmatize the president. Well, the Department of Justice already crossed that Rubicon when they said Individual 1—the President—was implicated in these two crimes. That bar has already been passed.
In other words, T***p has already been identified as a crook, so indicting him won’t make him look any more crooked. I’m hard-pressed to imagine anything that could make him look more crooked than he already does, except perhaps orange jammies and two pretty steel bracelets chained together, but that might just be me.
(The two campaign-finance felonies referred to are the hush-money payouts to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal that former T***p fixer Michael Cohen pled guilty to last year, revealing in the process that T***p had directed him to commit them, which is also, of course, two felonies.)
Schiff went on to say, as paraphrased by Rachel:
If prosecutors have a solid case against the President on those felonies, not only can the President be indicted, but prosecutors by rights should go ahead and indict him, now, to make sure he doesn’t run out the clock on the statute of limitations of any crimes he has been charged with while he is in office.
Damn straight.
Finally, Rachel points out, Rep. Eric Swalwell, who sits with Schiff on the House Intelligence Committee, has been saying in the last few days that prosecutors in the Southern District of New York may already have indicted T***p in a sealed indictment.
She goes on to speculate that Dems may be doing this as a sort of punt to the Special Counsel; rather than forge ahead on impeachment yet, they’ll wait until an indictment, or a bunch of indictments, against T***p, forces their hand.
I think it might also be a trial balloon in aid of Mueller and other investigating prosecutors, to see what sort of reaction these pro-indictment arguments get from Rudy Giuliani and whatever other incompetent tatters of a legal team T***p has left, and/or Congressional Republicans, and/or the media and/or the public. Maddow didn’t report on any official reactions and I haven’t heard of any from anywhere else. With any luck they’re all standing frozen like deer in the headlights because they know they really have no arguments, hoping no one will notice while T***p screeches and babbles about the wall and the shutdown.
Note the Dems are able to walk (work to end the shutdown) and chew gum (make pro-indictment arguments) at the same time.
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