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Trump’s Legal Tweets Are Not Good
President Trump is tweeting once again about the Roger Stone trial and the need for a retrial. I suppose he thinks he’s clever because he is just quoting noted bonehead Andrew Napolitano. It’s bad for two reasons:
First, Barr has asked him to knock it off. If Barr ends up leaving over this it is all over – any chance of getting to the bottom of the Russia story is done. There is no Plan B at this point.
Second, Justice Department guidelines forbid prosecutors from tweeting or talking about cases outside of the pleadings and court proceedings, except in very general ways. The President, who oversees DOJ, should be abiding by the same rules.
The President has been fortunate that his enemies have made so many mistakes and consistently overreached because of their blind hatred. But the President’s lack of discipline and impulsiveness creates its own problems.
There are plenty of things the President can, and should, tweet about. This is not one of them.
Published in General
This particular point is the path to passive ruin that we’ve been on for so many decades. I’ll try to unpack a few of the major points:
I prefer it in the open. Doing it privately smells of hiding something. This opinion is neither illegal nor immoral – it doesn’t need to be hidden. It shouldn’t be hidden. Cower from the criticism and that emboldens the critics. The critics will criticize no matter what.
Excellent post!!! President Trump is not above criticism nor is the presidency. Just because you disagree with the President on some issues does not mean you support Bernie or Biden or The Green New Deal. There is no doubt that the main stream media and academia criticisms of President Trump are on many occasions off the rails but that does not mean all are wrong or that supporters of the president should not keep a critical eye on his policies and actions. Conservatism demands it.
No one is claiming any of that Bill.
What is being criticized? 1) That it’s wrong, per se I infer, for the president to get active in DOJ matters. 2) That it’s unwise in this particular case because it invites criticism. I disagree with both of those propositions.
Actually on the 2nd point you are mischaracterizing my point in the OP. I don’t care what his opponents criticize. I do care about the impact on Barr and his ability to manage DOJ and deal with the judiciary.
GM, I wasn’t responding directly to that point. However, since you rightfully mention it, tweeting has zero impact on Barr or dealing with the judiciary except for whatever outside criticism arises. So, to that point, the criticism is both wrong and politically motivated. How will Barr respond to that? By justifying it? I think he will continue on unperturbed.
If it has zero impact on Barr why did he go public asking the Prez to knock it off?
Maybe a tactic to feed those Lefties.
It has zero impact except for the outside criticism and hackery claiming to be scandalized by it all. Otherwise it doesnt affect how Barr does his job. I can’t speak to why Barr has or hasn’t done this or that. I don’t believe that Barr thinks that a tweet would make his job harder directly. Would Eric Holder have said the same about Obama? Would he have felt the need to rebuke Obama in this same way? It’s a hypothetical, but I doubt it on both counts.
Thanks to those of you who commented on my comment. I created my comment because I was curious whether attempting to collect what I thought the first 54 comments to @gumbymark’s post were saying. I wasn’t arguing that each point was correct, but did seeing them together help me to make a judgement on President Trump’s tweets on DOJ, federal judges and current litigation. I believe it did. I had already come to my opinion prior to reading the post. My comment helped me to see if I had overlooked something.
I am not an expert on the president’s tweets, but I had read dozens of articles and listened to dozens of podcasts on these particular tweets. I was strongly influenced by Kimberley Strassel, Andy McCarthy, Ben Shapiro, and John Solomon in coming to a conclusion.
I think Kim Strassel is one of the best political reporters writing today. I have found her to be factually accurate and very insightful. She was one of the first people trying to understand the extent of the Trump-Russian-DOJ hoax which I think is the greatest political scandal in the history of the United States. How did it start and what does it mean? If you listen to today’s WSJ Opinion: Potomac Watch podcast, Strassel summarizes the argument that I find most persuasive about Trump’s DOJ tweets. It’s complicated and ultimately you have to make a judgement. For me it was trying to answer the question of whether these types of tweets were helpful to the president and his agenda or whether they were not helpful. Trying to take all the facts I knew into account, I concluded they were not helpful to him or what he was trying to accomplish and in fact could damage his chances at reelection.
I think if the President could just restrain himself ONCE IN A WHILE, he could win over a lot of undecideds who cringe at some of the stuff he says, and then win in a landslide.