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The Johnnie Cochran School of Impeachment
My friends, while conducting a séance at the witching hour, a spirit from beyond the grave contacted me, and here is what he had to say about President Donald Trump:
If he’s on the beach, you must impeach.
If he’s within reach, you must impeach.
If he’s able to teach, you must impeach.
If he tries to preach, you must impeach.
If he hangs with Cheech, you must impeach.
What’s your best Johnnie Cochran impeachment line?
They do actually do this. Once in Chicago when I was on jury duty, the defense asked each one of us what our education level was, and they rejected anyone with a degree. I mean I was in the middle of a sentence and the guy cut me off and said “This juror is excused.” It was two young thugs on trial for murder. They just wanted people they could bamboozle.
We have all watched TV. Each side gets a number of rejections with no established reason. After these are exhausted, one side or the other must convince the judge that the juror will not be capable of doing the task.
Trump will face a different type of “jury”, one that does not have to actually consider evidence or be convinced at any level. He will have a jury whose members are either predisposed to convict or to acquit.
And right now, Trump does not seem to be disposed to courting those jurors.
That speaks well of him.
Uh. @billnelson. Mongo doesn’t even know what this means. Please expand and explain.
In the first part, he is talking about the limited number of peremptory challenges each side has in empaneling a jury. Each lawyer also can challenge a venireman to be dismissed for cause. (In criminal cases, that is usually me, who is directly related to four LEOs and has known hundreds.)
Trump’s jury, if he is impeached, will be the United States Senate, that body containing Senators Sanders, Warren, Booker, etc. Most of the Democratic Presidential field. Also, some Republicans who are not necessarily Mr. Trump’s best buds.
I was a venireman once, but penicillin cleared it right up.
Does running from LEOs count?
“And then they tackled me and wrestled me into the back seat of their car…I guess you could say we were really close.”
And Trump has put considerable effort into this. How many republican Senators has Trump bashed? A fair number. Trump demands personal loyalty, and that is not something that Senators are prone to be for others.
And Sen. McConnell will be more interested in preserving his majority in the senate, which is now at risk, than in saving Trump. He will likely make a calculation that Trump is done for in 2020 (not a bad bet).
I keep hearing this said, but it seems to me that it is more a case that if someone hits him, he hits back.
Recall the 2016 primaries? Trump came out slugging when none of the other candidates were even paying any attention to him.
True, but that isn’t “demanding loyalty.” That’s just taking out one’s lackluster opponents. It’s not as if the others weren’t going after each other in their way. Trump’s way is a lot more crude and blatant. The man was involved with television and pro wrestling entertainment.
Also; effective – and it doesn’t get more uncouth than that.
Yes, and…the term “personal loyalty” is being misused all over the place. The person of the President deserves all the loyalty due that office. If their is a public servant that feels he cannot give the amount of loyalty due to the office of the President, then that individual needs to resign.
Trump has not received the loyalty due to the office from many of those that surround him–see the leaks, the anonymous editorials et. al. I think that Trump asking Comey for his loyalty was, in a way, an olive branch, “Look, the campaign was rocky, you were appointed by the other party, but I expect us to put it all behind us and do the nation’s business.” Comey’s subsequent actions and communications were disloyal to the President by any definition but the most tortured. His book title is a perverse joke.
What was said to Comey:
“I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”
“I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy,” Trump once said.
“Fox News Stars Push Back as Trump Demands Loyalty: We Don’t ‘Work for You’“
Should Trump have flat-out asked Comey if he was conducting an investigation of him? Comey was, but would Trump asking the question straight have resulted in a truthful answer?
The FBI/DOJ/CIA was running an op on the President of the United States. What was the predicate for that? There has never been a straight answer to that question.
Given that, why are you obsessed about Trump requiring “loyalty?”
The why is well known. They had been told by at least 2 sources (one was Australia) of some type of conversation between the Trump campaign and foreign governments. They used the dossier from the Clinton campaign as the “evidence” for the FISA warrants. All illegal and wrong. You cannot start an investigation without actual evidence of a crime being committed (now keep that in mind for Hunter Biden).
And loyalty came up in a discussion of Trump’s adversarial relationship with many republican senators, who will be his jury in an impeachment trial.
Halper and Downer? Oh, that is rich. Who was their source? George Popadopoulos, a kid so green that he still had participation in a mock United Nations on his resume. And who was his source? International espionage mastermind Joseph Mifsud. All of this because Mifsud told Popadopolous that “the Russians had Hillary’s emails.” You know who might have been the source? Me. I told that joke ten minutes after I heard that Hillary was keeping top secret State Department communications on a mom-and-pop server in Colorado somewhere. Russia has the emails. China has the emails. The Norks have the emails. The Mossad has the emails. The French — well, the Poles felt sorry for the French, so the Poles gave them the emails, but only Hillary’s yoga routines and Chelsea’s wedding plans.
The predicate as stated sounds like the outline of a spy novel. A bad spy novel.
Are Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin, and Bob “Thank Heaven For Little Girls” Menendez going to recuse themselves from this jury determining that strong-arming Ukrainian officials with threats to continued military aid? Should they?
I laughed.