Saturday, June 02, 2018

Only trump Could Make the Legal Institution Dumber

Oh ye Gods, this will never end in a sane and rational manner. Via Adam L Silverman at Balloon-Juice, picking up on the story out of the New York Times:

Legal turduckens Jay Sekulow and John Dowd prepared a twenty page legal memo explaining why the President could not obstruct justice and therefore should not be interviewed by the Special Counsel as part of the Special Counsel’s ongoing investigation. Someone leaked it to The New York Times...
As one would expect of a legal memo produced by a well-past-his-prime John Dowd and a never-was grifter of the religiously devout Jay Sekulow, the memo is full of errors in legal reasoning. Again from The New York Times (emphasis Silverman's):
“There could not possibly have been intent to obstruct an ‘investigation’ that had been neither confirmed nor denied to White House counsel,” the president’s lawyers wrote.
Moreover, F.B.I. investigations do not qualify as the sort of “proceeding” an obstruction-of-justice statute covers, they argued.
“Of course, the president of the United States is not above the law, but just as obvious and equally as true is the fact that the president should not be subjected to strained readings and forced applications of clearly irrelevant statutes,” Mr. Dowd and Mr. Sekulow wrote.
But the lawyers based those arguments on an outdated statute, without mentioning that Congress passed a broader law in 2002 that makes it a crime to obstruct proceedings that have not yet started.
Samuel W. Buell, a Duke Law School professor and white-collar criminal law specialist who was a lead prosecutor for the Justice Department’s Enron task force, said the real issue was whether Mr. Trump obstructed a potential grand jury investigation or trial — which do count as proceedings — even if the F.B.I. investigation had not yet developed into one of those. He called it inexplicable why the president’s legal team was making arguments that were focused on the wrong obstruction-of-justice statute...

If I could interpret: trump's legal team has the conclusion that trump wields broad executive power under Article II of the Constitution, and it was merely their job to fit the best possible legal history to defend that conclusion. They probably don't even care that they're basing it on a law that no longer exists, a law that most judges - even Republican ones - would ignore in favor of the 2002 law that supplanted it.

What the lawyers are arguing is that trump as President can never obstruct justice, and indeed can shut down any criminal investigation at any time and by his whim.

As pointed out on Southpaw's tweetUnder this logic, the president could open a booth on Pennsylvania Ave to accept bribes, people under federal investigation could stop by with a briefcase full of cash, and he could order their investigations closed—all without incurring any criminal liability for himself.

There is no goddamn way the Founders intended Article II to grant any President the power to be a crook.

Silverman also points out that trump's own lawyers make the argument that "the President did, indeed, author the fraudulent statement for his son (donald jr.) regarding the 9 June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Jr, Jared, Manafort, and a variety of Russian assets and agents." Another potential obstructive act, but also creates a situation where donnie junior is on record lying about that meeting to Congressional committees.

This remains the major problem of working with an unrepentant bullshitter like trump: He lies so often that you can't keep track, and his current statements / arguments will undermine previous ones with reckless abandon.

It would be frivolous to make mention that the leaked memo from Dowd's office was reportedly typed up in Comic Sans font.

Comic Sans font.

COMIC SANS FONT?!

The only font more evil than Papyrus.

PAPYRUS!!!


When you have a lawyer that works with the most unprofessional font in human history, you are not working with the best and brightest from the Martindale-Hubbell directory.

What is horrifying is how trump will push this argument to all ends, bully the system into accepting his interpretation, because he alone profits from it - both literal and metaphoric - on his path to Authoritarianism.

But how can we thrive when the would-be dictator is an idiot of the highest order, twisting his own legal help into idiots as well?

Troubling thoughts for troubling times.



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