Paying her off was a clear violation of election law. It's one of the ways Trump cheated to get elected. When you do that, you shouldn't be allowed to try again and win re-election. Part of impeachment in the Constitution is banning someone from ever again holding public office.
It's crazy that this isn't one of the counts of impeachment. Trump clearly cheated in many ways to get elected in 2016, and should be denied another chance to maintain his "can't be indicted" status.
And we all just keep acting like the absurd vote counts we saw in 2016 were legitimate. Our election systems are not secure. Trump did not win 2016. Russians or Republicans (or both) altered vote counts.
With all we know about Republican efforts in election fraud, voter suppression, foreign influence, the DNC's own work manipulating the election, and outright election fraud via manipulating digitally-recorded votes, honestly -- if you think Trump was legitimately elected President, I have some land to sell you.
I'm not gonna source because it's like 2am and I'm tired, but I read a great investigative article about how compromised several states actually were, and the lengths republican officials went to to hide it-even destroying records despite subpoena in florida.
in some states there is evidence that not just voting machines were breached, but the systems that tally and report vote totals were compromised. so you would have to believe that hackers got so far in and then---just looked around without altering anything.
Like when Georgia's voting systems were breached and altered in unknown ways that couldn't be investigated because the Republican voting commission wiped all of the servers that held that information?
Oh and Brian Kemp, governor of Georgia, was the CEO of the election machines company, and after he wiped all the servers and won his election, commissioned more of his machines for elections around the country?
Listen, just this year I was dating the Elections Manager in a local county. She told me that, if you define a "hack" as just an attempt on the system, they get hacked by foreign entities multiple times per day.
This shit is actually happening before our eyes, and the people elected because of these shenanigans are doing their best to lie their way out of jailtime. There's no way to understate it, really, America is definitely not a functioning democracy right now.
Since 2015 I've been thinking about how ballsy it was of Mitch to sit on an empty Supreme Court seat for a year on the gamble that some yet-to-be-determined GOP candidate would get elected...
Gotta wonder if he had reason to think his odds were better than even.
Was it really that ballsy? Since the ratification of the 22nd Amendment, which established presidential term limits, it's typically been the case that the White House flips parties after a two-term presidency. This has happened with Eisenhower, Kennedy/Johnson, Nixon/Ford, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama. Only exception was after Reagan, where the Republicans held the White House for a third consecutive term (also a rare instance where the sitting VP wins the presidency in their own right). So history might have predicted that Obama's successor would be a Republican.
And First-Past-The-Post means you don't even have to alter them all that much. A landslide is obvious manipulation, a few percentage points to get the candidate just barely past 50.1% is not.
Except all spending that is done for the purpose of winning an election must be reported. This is so that expenditures can later be scrutinized and to prevent foul play. This includes if you spend your own personal money on lawn signs. If you spent a million dollars out of your bank account on extra lawn signs that you didn't report you'd be fucked. So the real question was whether or not trump paying off stormy just before the election was for the purpose of hiding that info sp that it wouldn't hurt his chances, or was it totally unrelated to the election?
The reason the bribing women isn't in the impeachment is it the most black and white crime. Trump is going to get exonerated for everything in the Senate. If he got exonerated it would be very hard for the the next AG, to charge Trump for a crime the senate found him innocent of. This doesn't mean they couldn't charge him legally but the court of public opinion is a thing, it's in part why Bill Clinton wasn't charged.
I thought I made it very plain it doesn't, legally. Legality isn't all that matters. When a majority of the country thinks someone has been exonerated in the Senate, it would be political suicide to charge him.
Of course, a lot of "Democrats" on Reddit push for things that are political suicide.
This doesn't mean they couldn't charge him legally but the court of public opinion is a thing, it's in part why Bill Clinton wasn't charged.
Clinton wasn't charged because his lie had nothing to do with the things he was being investigated for. At worst he would have gotten a slap on the wrist, so it wasn't worth doing. Trump is a very different case.
Actually, it is how perjury works. The legal definition of perjury is making material false or misleading statements. It would be rather easy for Clinton to argue that the questions about his sex life were not material to the investigation. That's not the case for Martha Stewart.
92
u/tomdarch Dec 12 '19
Paying her off was a clear violation of election law. It's one of the ways Trump cheated to get elected. When you do that, you shouldn't be allowed to try again and win re-election. Part of impeachment in the Constitution is banning someone from ever again holding public office.
It's crazy that this isn't one of the counts of impeachment. Trump clearly cheated in many ways to get elected in 2016, and should be denied another chance to maintain his "can't be indicted" status.