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This Is… Disturbing
How do we know American democracy works? Because it survived this:
.@ScottPelley on what McCabe told @60Minutes: "There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment." pic.twitter.com/iVAyrEV4MF
— Norah O'Donnell🇺🇸 (@NorahODonnell) February 14, 2019
Jesse Kelly breaks it down:
https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1096053542664765441
Published in General
Moving to undo the outcome of an election based on not liking said outcome is treason in my book.Â
A coup is a coup.Â
Now, it it prospers….
Yeah Trump may have been erratic and MDB may be downplaying his behavior. None of the behavior was criminal. So to me Trump’s behavior at the time might not be something to cheer but is irrelevant to the overboard response of the FBI.Â
If you think your boss, the President, is a jerk you deal with it or your quit. You don’t try to get the duly elected President removed because you don’t like is attitude. Â
Are you sure? You don’t seem confident in what you’re writing. Tell us what you really meant. Because I really didn’t quite get it… :)
Sure.Â
But what does that have to do with what we’re talking about.
Again, the date of this matters.
So you have a President, who spent the year leading up to the events we’re discussing displaying how he was unfit mentally and temperamentally for the job.
Then he gets elected (barely) and — lo and behold — he acts exactly that way.
So we get to Spring 2017.Â
The President fires the FBI director.
Let’s talk about how this goes down. First, he orders Rosenstein to write up a reason for firing the FBI director. Rosenstein doesn’t like it, but does it because that’s his job.
But Trump doesn’t do fire Comey in person because he’s a coward and the whole “You’re fired” thing is just a bull [expletive] act for the rubes.
Instead he writes a letter, waits till Comey is on the other side of the country. Sends his sleazy bodyman to deliver it. But in the meantime, leaks the firing, so Comey sees it on TV instead of learning about it by letter. Then Trump tries to strand Comey there by saying he can’t take a government aircraft back.
Then, a few days later, the President of the United States publicly threatened his former FBI director with non-existent tapes of their Oval Office conversations.
Then a few days after that, when asked by Lester Holt, he says that he fired Comey “because of the Russia thing.”
Now, at that point, does Donald Trump look like a stable genius to you? Or does he look like a freakin’ lunatic who is actively trying to obstruct an investigation into Russian interference in the election?
Â
This story is reminiscent of the attempt by Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, to entrap GW so as to see him removed from office. At one point in the legal proceedings, it came out that the CIA actually altered some intelligence reports it gave to GW. In other words, they gave one set of “facts” to the press, another to GW. They did this on purpose, as I recall, to destroy GW’s credibility.
Trump pardoned Scooter Libby on April 13, 2018. I am so grateful he did. I am an admirer of GW, but this is one thing he did wrong, I think. I like that Trump stood up to these reprobates and got Scooter Libby released.
This is not our first time in this rodeo. As many Republicans detested GW as now detest Trump. It is exactly the same exploitable political dynamic. The names have changed, but the politics have remained the same.
So they want to talk to people about using a constitutional mechanism to remove a President who seems unfit for the job?
Those treasonous bastards!
You don’t have proof of that Fred. He is fit to conduct the job of President. He has been doing it sucessfully for two years now.Â
You don’t get to change the meaning of the word “unfit”. He clearly can do the job. The whole point is to remove someone who has become incapacitated. It is not to undo an election, which, is something you have wanted since he was elected. You wanted to overturn how the Electoral College has been used for over a century because you did not like how the People voted.
You are not libertarian, because you believe in a technocratic rule of people like you. God help us if someone like you ever gains power.Â
If it’s done constitutionally, it’s not a coup.
Thanks. Good point. What would you call a so-called soft coup using manufactured evidence by subversive elements within the government itself. And is this illegal by any definition?
Actually the Plame investigation is much worse than that and ties into the current Mueller investigation. When the story of her CIA connections went public, George W Bush mistakenly ordered everyone in his administration to cooperate with an investigation. In another mistake, AG John Ashcroft recused himself, leaving his deputy to make the appointment. The deputy was James Comey. Comey (and Mueller, then head of the FBI) hated Dick Cheney with whom they also had big disagreements on legal issues around terrorism (on most of which I agreed with Comey) and saw this as an opportunity to damage Cheney, who they also thought the source of the leak on Plame.
To accomplish this, Comey appointed his friend (and godfather to his daughter) Patrick Fitzgerald as special counsel. Within weeks Fitzgerald found the real source of the leak was Richard Armitage (another enemy of Cheney’s, and Colin Powell’s deputy). That was not the answer Comey and Fitzgerald wanted (Armitage was not prosecuted) so the investigation continued for months until they could entrap Scooter Libby (Cheney’s deputy) into a false statement indictment, thus accomplishing their goal of paralyzing the administration during the course of the investigation and damaging their political enemy.
Sound familiar? Comey has attempted to destroy the last two GOP administrations.
Yep. Please, Lord, let Trump trump Comey and Mueller and Fitzgerald. :-)Â
What if the soft coup is not addressed at all in the Constitution but is done by clearly illegal means. Does that have any bearing on it’s legality? On it’s validity?
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If it’s illegal to convey fraudulent information to the Vice-President, members of the cabinet, and/or members of Congress, even when one is not under oath, nearly every politician and lobbyist in the country is guilty.
It seems to me that this is where the disagreement lies within the thread: the question of whether or not then-Acting FBI Director McCabe and his underlings had the authority or duty to avail themselves of the 25th Amendment process to seek the removal of a President they disapproved of?
I believe that they did NOT have such authority or duty. If McCabe thought he had sufficient legally-admissible evidence to question the President’s mental fitness for office, his duty was to take this to his boss, the AG. Discussing it with subordinates in any setting other than an off-duty, off-site “bull session” as a purely conjectural thought exercise was grossly unprofessional conduct.
The fact that McCabe is now on a national media tour bragging about such conduct is all the more alarming. Either he is really unaware of how wrong his conduct was, or he is cynically trying to obscure the degree to which the entrenched bureaucracy of the FBI was considering going to protect one of their own. In either case, his behavior now is evidence of his own unfitness for the position he previously held.
I am guessing the former which also supports the latter. Inspector Jabert from Les Miserables is the archetype for the self-righteous law enforcer. We have far too many Jaberts who are in need of being called to account rather than being given license to afflict so long as the target of the affliction is politically vulnerable.
I meant collaborating with agents of foreign governments to creating false information to affect a predetermined change in the government and nullify an the results of an election.
Including falsifying affidavits to federal courts, specifically the FISA court, and illegally leaking these fallacious facts and illegally obtained information to The Press to fraudulently subvert and change a duly elected president. Is that allowed under the Constitution or federal law?
I agree with your conclusion as an abstract matter. However it is the actual situation that makes this plot truly disturbing. McCabe and his cabal whitewashed Hillary Clinton in order to pave the way for her election. They then fraudently concocted the Russian conspiracy and abused the FISA process to prevent Trump’s election or to provide an “insurance policy” on the odd chance he won. Once Trump was in office they then supported Comey in his plans to remove Trump or disrupt his presidency and then, only when Comey was removed, decided on this rather desperate strategem.
In the end, trying to use the 25th Amendment, the Logan Act, lying to FISA Courts, lying to Trump cabinet officials about the purpose of FBI interviews, lying to Trump as to whether he was a target of an criminal investigation, leaking and lying about leaking, …. I could go on …. tells you all you need to know about what kind of people ran Obama’s DOJ/FBI/IC.
They were ethically challenged partisan hacks playing the role of “law enforcement official”, willing to cross the line into criminal behavior to get their team elected so they could go on playing “law enforcement official”.
Now with Trump elected, having crossed the line, with the huge aid of the Mueller investigation, a complicit MSM, and now a (D) House, they need to keep up the ruse that Trump and Putin threw the 2016 election in Trump’s favor, and basically stall this thing out to bore the public silly, make it so complicated no one can follow the multiple DOJ/FBI/IC scandals, and maybe Mueller can take this thing all the way to the 2022 election, so all the scandals can die a comfortable quiet death(ie: Fast and Furious, IRS targeting of Conservatives a la Lois Lerner, HRC server mishandling classified documents, Benghazi, ect)
No, it’s that they did it fraudulently and illegally. Lying to the FISA court and employing foreign agents to undermine your president sure seems like treason to me, now that you mention it.
And I bet that stands up in court, and that’s why Trump hasn’t released the unredacted documents implicating the roles of Steel, MI6 and the Russians.
No argument from me on this point – agree 100%.Â
My previous post is an attempt to answer Fred Cole in good faith.
Based on Trump’s behavior during his first month in office it would have been a dereliction of duty for those discussions not to be held.
There are presumably lotsa laws broken in all those hypotheticals.
Don’t slam all Libertarians. It is OK to slam all NeoCons.
What hypotheticals? All that stuff is documented by journalists on both the right and left.
He’s a racist, too.Â
@fredcoleÂ
Here’s where you’re not just wrong, but egregiously so. No reputable psychiatrist or other medical professional would certify anyone mentally incompetent from one meeting, let alone doing it from afar. You, however, have no compulsion with that.
And for political reasons. You don’t like his style, his policies, his very being. I get that. But using psychiatric fitness as a premise for removal is dangerous and should not be taken lightly.Â
And look how he wears his tie!Â
Well, yeah. But everybody knew that. (Unless they stick their head in the sand or chose to ignore it, which millions of people did.)
Unfit for office because he is unlikable, vindictive, and incompetent?  That describes half of Washington D.C. What evidence do you have that he is/ was clinical insane and therefore impaired and incapable of doing his job? None because it doesn’t exist. If it were obvious than he likely would have been removed. There were and still are serious individuals in the cabinet and the VP is a serious individual. This was a group of people miffed that their preferred political outcome hadn’t come to pass and looking to get a little revenge.  It is not good for the Constitutional government of the country for a group of bureaucrats to decide they can use their position in an attempt to subvert the elected government. If they feel they can’t work for the president because they don’t like his temperament or decisions he is making they should resign. If the feel strongly enough then they can argue for his impeachment and removal. Doing it behind the scenes is not good for the system.
I can back that up, as a professional.Â
Again, Trump has proven he can do the job over the last two years. It is not like he was Wilson or FDR at the end.Â