It’s always fascinating to me when one of these guys reveals the highly specific evidentiary standard they’ve quietly been using to justify the complete lack of accountability their friends are presiding over.
Let’s say they didn’t plan the violence inside the Capitol blow by blow; they just assembled and riled up a mob, put them on the march to the Hill, and when it turned into the fight their speeches called for, either took no action or restrained efforts to lift the siege. No case?
This sort of thing happened in the Russia case too. It became entirely about cloak and dagger collusion, and the allure and difficulty of proving that scenario subsumed everything else that was right in front of our eyes — like a president welcoming an attack on the United States
Anyways it’s highly effective and I have no doubt it will work again.
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fun to watch the elite legal community try to smash congress's interests into powder and endorse an impossibly expansive interpretation of what the executive even is based entirely on the courts' prudential reluctance to wade into separation of powers issues in the past.
the courts have never ruled on whether a former president can assert, contrary to the wishes of the sitting president, executive privilege over his communications with a man not employed by the government about obstructing the transfer of power so this is a really thorny question
without sarcasm, I will say that the courts' historical discomfort with being the arbiters of anything touching presidents, their susceptibility to tendentious OLC memos, and the unpredictability of what a largely Republican judiciary will do with an unplowed field...
Here’s a big one—A grand jury has indicted Boeing’s chief technical pilot on the 737 MAX launch for defrauding the FAA justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…
They have some receipts.
Notably for the civil plaintiffs’ bar among others, the indictment states that the FAA didn’t learn of the true operating parameters of the MCAS system until 737 MAX planes started crashing overseas. Boeing had never, apparently, corrected the bad info.
Here’s a more representative excerpt of the commission’s treatment of expansion. Still not great, imo.
A blind spot of the report is its elevation of shoring up “the court’s legitimacy” as the main goal of reform, rather than the law’s legitimacy and integrity.