The Walls be Closing

[BillsFanNC]

 

Edited June 12, 2023 by BillsFanNC

[Kemp]

2 hours ago, Westside said:

But but but but Trump!!!!

You're so predictable. 

 

Mark that down as another no-answer.

[Kemp]

58 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

You do realize that the dispute is over whether a President (not a VP, Secretary of State, or Senator) is actually required to return them….right? 

 

Have you read the law?

 

The Presidential Records Act (PRA) requires the President to separate personal documents from Presidential records before leaving office. 44 U.S.C. 2203(b). The PRA makes clear that, upon the conclusion of the President’s term in office, NARA assumes responsibility for the custody, control, preservation of, and access to the records of a President. 44 U.S.C. 2203(g)(1). The PRA makes the legal status of Presidential records clear and unambiguous, providing that the United States reserves and retains “complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records.” 44 U.S.C. 2202. There is no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through, such as for a two-year period as described in some reports. If a former President or Vice President finds Presidential records among personal materials, he or she is expected to contact NARA in a timely manner to secure the transfer of those Presidential records to NARA. 

[leh-nerd skin-erd]

7 minutes ago, Kemp said:

 

Have you read the law?

 

The Presidential Records Act (PRA) requires the President to separate personal documents from Presidential records before leaving office. 44 U.S.C. 2203(b). The PRA makes clear that, upon the conclusion of the President’s term in office, NARA assumes responsibility for the custody, control, preservation of, and access to the records of a President. 44 U.S.C. 2203(g)(1). The PRA makes the legal status of Presidential records clear and unambiguous, providing that the United States reserves and retains “complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records.” 44 U.S.C. 2202. There is no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through, such as for a two-year period as described in some reports. If a former President or Vice President finds Presidential records among personal materials, he or she is expected to contact NARA in a timely manner to secure the transfer of those Presidential records to NARA. 

Joe Biden maintained control of records dating to his time on the senate, which ended in 2009.  He became VP in 2008, which was 15+ years ago.  
 
🤦🏼‍♂️

[SoCal Deek]

13 minutes ago, Kemp said:

 

Have you read the law?

 

The Presidential Records Act (PRA) requires the President to separate personal documents from Presidential records before leaving office. 44 U.S.C. 2203(b). The PRA makes clear that, upon the conclusion of the President’s term in office, NARA assumes responsibility for the custody, control, preservation of, and access to the records of a President. 44 U.S.C. 2203(g)(1). The PRA makes the legal status of Presidential records clear and unambiguous, providing that the United States reserves and retains “complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records.” 44 U.S.C. 2202. There is no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through, such as for a two-year period as described in some reports. If a former President or Vice President finds Presidential records among personal materials, he or she is expected to contact NARA in a timely manner to secure the transfer of those Presidential records to NARA. 

Ridiculous! So by the letter of the law then the President can’t have any papers. It is the Trump Team’s position that the government was INDEED given access to the documents. The documents were neither being hidden, moved around, or stolen. The PRA, as you quoted it, doesn’t say that the records have to be in a specific building. If it did there’d be armed guards at the White House searching everything before it left the property. 

[ChiGoose]

2 hours ago, SoCal Deek said:

Ridiculous! So by the letter of the law then the President can’t have any papers. It is the Trump Team’s position that the government was INDEED given access to the documents. The documents were neither being hidden, moved around, or stolen. The PRA, as you quoted it, doesn’t say that the records have to be in a specific building. If it did there’d be armed guards at the White House searching everything before it left the property. 

The president doesn’t personally retain any presidential records once they leave office. They become the property of the government. The president can work with NARA to access the records or put them in a presidential library, but the president does not own them, nor do they have a possessory right to them. 

[SoCal Deek]

2 minutes ago, ChiGoose said:

The president doesn’t personally retain any presidential records once they leave office. They become the property of the government. The president can work with NARA to access the records or put them in a presidential library, but the president does not own them, nor do they have a possessory right to them. 

That’s pretty much exactly what I said. The challenge is what ‘ownership’ means. 

[ChiGoose]

5 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

That’s pretty much exactly what I said. The challenge is what ‘ownership’ means. 

Ownership means that they belong to NARA, not Trump or his office. To possess them, he would need an exemption from NARA, which he did not obtain. 

[The Frankish Reich]

4 minutes ago, ChiGoose said:

Ownership means that they belong to NARA, not Trump or his office. To possess them, he would need an exemption from NARA, which he did not obtain. 

And again, the outgoing President himself is not expected to read the Presidential Records Act.

That's what the White House Counsel and/or the National Archives officials advise him on! 

But the absolute refusal to take sensible advice is the defining characteristic of Donald J. Trump and the Trump Administration. He didn't like what his advisors/cabinet officials were telling him? "You're Fired!"

And that's how he winds up getting indicted. Damn fool gonna damn fool.

[BillsFanNC]

🎯

 

Mollie nails it.

 

@ChiGoose can bloviate here day in and day out and he will never be taken seriously. 

 

Read the law, read the indictment, its about intent blah blah blah blah.

 

@ChiGoose @The Frankish Reichand their ilk are lackeys for the FBI, DOJ etc.

 

The problem is that NOBODY BELIEVES ANYTHING coming from those agencies anymore and its wholly and completely justified to reject everything they attempt to sell us. Most of all when it's about Trump.

 

 

Edited June 12, 2023 by BillsFanNC

[The Frankish Reich]

And it's not just Trump's unwillingness to listen to the advice of people who know what they're doing.

It's also the insane (dementia? psychiatric disorder? both?) idea that he seemingly convinced himself of - the Q Anon concept that he would somehow be "restored" to the Presidency. Yes, I believe his behavior started to show that he at first used the Q Anon nuts in a selfish/disingenuous attempt to further his political career, but that at some point he actually started to believe his own bs. So since I'm kinda/sorta still the once and future President, I can continue to do what a President can do.

Read or watch Bill Barr's assessment of this uniquely childish person.

[leh-nerd skin-erd]

25 minutes ago, The Frankish Reich said:

And it's not just Trump's unwillingness to listen to the advice of people who know what they're doing.

It's also the insane (dementia? psychiatric disorder? both?) idea that he seemingly convinced himself of - the Q Anon concept that he would somehow be "restored" to the Presidency. Yes, I believe his behavior started to show that he at first used the Q Anon nuts in a selfish/disingenuous attempt to further his political career, but that at some point he actually started to believe his own bs. So since I'm kinda/sorta still the once and future President, I can continue to do what a President can do.

Read or watch Bill Barr's assessment of this uniquely childish person.

Bill Barr might be the most sensible, believable person in the country.  It’s a shame the Dems wanted him exiled after he spoke sensibly the first time. 

[BillsFanNC]

 

[SoCal Deek]

2 hours ago, ChiGoose said:

Ownership means that they belong to NARA, not Trump or his office. To possess them, he would need an exemption from NARA, which he did not obtain. 

So let’s say he believes there may be important personal or other information within all of those many boxes and he just hadn’t gone through them all yet, but he feels he’s cooperating with the feds on both their location and their security….Which you’ll recall is exactly what the Trump Team stated when the raid occurred. Would it still be appropriate to indict the former President for having them? Maybe you believe so, but as a functioning adult…I do not. 

[ChiGoose]

2 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

So let’s say he believes there may be important personal or other information within all of those many boxes and he just hadn’t gone through them all yet, but he feels he’s cooperating with the feds on both their location and their security….Which you’ll recall is exactly what the Trump Team stated when the raid occurred. Would it still be appropriate to indict the former President for having them? Maybe you believe so, but as a functioning adult…I do not. 

I fundamentally do not understand how you can believe the following is cooperating:

-Refusing to return them when asked

-Returning some documents and lying to the government by saying he had returned them all

We are talking about a guy who, upon learning that his lawyer would be reviewing the documents in the storage room for government documents, had someone go into the storage room and remove documents before the lawyer could find them. 
 

If he truly and honestly thought that he wanted to keep personal documents, he could have cooperated with NARA from the start. Their remit is only for presidential records, they would not take his personal documents. If there was a dispute over a particular record, it could have been resolved.

 

Instead, he literally obstructed the investigation and yet people someone see obstruction as cooperation. 

[Doc]

29 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

So let’s say he believes there may be important personal or other information within all of those many boxes and he just hadn’t gone through them all yet, but he feels he’s cooperating with the feds on both their location and their security….Which you’ll recall is exactly what the Trump Team stated when the raid occurred. Would it still be appropriate to indict the former President for having them? Maybe you believe so, but as a functioning adult…I do not. 

 

They don't care.  Joke gave back some of the documents back immediately after discovering they were with him for decades.  You see, there's a time limit for some people but not others.

[TH3]

7 hours ago, SoCal Deek said:

You do realize that the dispute is over whether a President (not a VP, Secretary of State, or Senator) is actually required to return them….right? 

No …it’s not….apparently …..according to you know…the law….But keep telling yourself that if feels better being brainwashed

[The Frankish Reich]

3 hours ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:

Bill Barr might be the most sensible, believable person in the country.  It’s a shame the Dems wanted him exiled after he spoke sensibly the first time. 

I worked for Barr's DOJ the first time around, under Bush 41. He was viewed as an honest broker, clearly a Republican (of course) who supported executive authority under the constitution, but not someone with any political ambition of his own (could a guy who looks and talks like him ever be elected anything in post-media saturation America?) or any particular axe to grind.

 

When Trump brought him in after Sessions, that was still the general perception of Barr: boring, predictable, a straight shooter. No one's reputation survives intact after working for Trump. But let me try to explain the kind of law geek perception of how I see him now.

 

Barr has always been consistent on one thing: a clear constitutional theory that Executive power must be asserted and protected. The strongest perspective on this is called the unitary executive theory: all of the Executive power is vested in the President; hence, all our post-FDR administrative state creations ultimately exist at the pleasure of the President, who has an inherent power to override administrative agency decisions and to replace administrative agency officers. Barr isn't the classic unitary executive theorist, but he was highly influenced by that concept when it came to the forefront under Reagan.

 

So how does that explain his actions? How does it explain his seeming defense of Trump up until the election, and then his seeming abandonment of Trump afterwards? It's really not that hard to explain. Barr believes in protecting the authority of the Executive, of The Presidency, not necessarily of the human embodiment of that authority (President George H.W. Bush, President Trump, etc.). He was excoriated for his pre-release spin on the Mueller Report. And of course, it was a bit of spin. But in there too was a defense of the Executive's authority to do certain things no one else in our constitutional system is allowed to do -- strong-arming foreign government (Ukraine) for an arguable diplomatic/military advantage, even if that also brought a possible election campaign advantage. The Executive is authorized by the constitution, Article II, to do a whole lot of things that in the abstract may seem unseemly or even undemocratic. And Barr consistently defends Executive Authority. When I was in law school, the conservative take on things was that the powerful Executive we had up through LBJ had been supplanted by a kind of Legislative Supremacy after Watergate, as Congress asserted its supposed constitutional authority in all sorts of areas it previously kept out of; conservative thought the War Powers Act, for example, was unconstitutional. Conservatives therefore wanted to tilt the balance back toward Executive authority. Barr was part of that movement.

 

So what about the post-election mess? There's really nothing inconsistent in Barr's behavior unless you believe that he should be acting as a political loyalist rather than as a strong-Executive constitutionalist. He saw nothing exceptional about the 2020 election that would have warranted the extraordinary measures Trump and his supporters were advocating. And what about the national security-related papers? Again, those papers belong to The Executive, to The Presidency, to the Article II constitutional Office, not to Donald J. Trump individually. He is therefore not bothered at all by the assertion of Executive authority under the Biden Administration demanding that they be returned. And he seems genuinely flabbergasted by Trump's refusal to do so quickly, honestly, and completely.

 

And again: he doesn't care about his public reputation. His defense (and that's what it was, not officially but in fact) of Trump's actions in the first impeachment basically destroyed his ability to go back to the private sector and resume making big bucks. He didn't care. He will never hold elected office; no one would vote for a lumpy old Eyore-voiced character like him. He could have been a hero to Trumpies by supporting the election fraud claims. He never needed that or wanted that. He doesn't need to be loved. In today's world, where everyone wants attention and to be treated like someone's hero, that's kind of an admirable trait.

Edited June 12, 2023 by The Frankish Reich

[Wacka]

Barr knew of the recordings the Burisma official had of Hunter and the Big Guy, but did nothing.

[SoCal Deek]

1 hour ago, ChiGoose said:

I fundamentally do not understand how you can believe the following is cooperating:

-Refusing to return them when asked

-Returning some documents and lying to the government by saying he had returned them all

We are talking about a guy who, upon learning that his lawyer would be reviewing the documents in the storage room for government documents, had someone go into the storage room and remove documents before the lawyer could find them. 
 

If he truly and honestly thought that he wanted to keep personal documents, he could have cooperated with NARA from the start. Their remit is only for presidential records, they would not take his personal documents. If there was a dispute over a particular record, it could have been resolved.

 

Instead, he literally obstructed the investigation and yet people someone see obstruction as cooperation. 

Goose....that's what the national discussion is about. We get it. Everyone gets it. What, in many people's opinion, is a bridge too far, is indicting a former President over a stupid matter of government document retention.  Especially when it's subsequently been discovered that virtually EVERYONE has had documents in their possession after leaving office.