Posted on 06/14/2023 4:24:58 PM PDT by randita
Yeahhhhh..... the lawyers who don’t like Trump have shown up with their usual anti Trump stupidity.
This idiocy is just like every other Trump take down effort. In other words, a bunch of retarded monkeys playing with spaghetti & calling it “the law.”
However, the PRA is not a criminal statute. I have seen no indication anywhere that President Trump has been charged with stealing records that don’t belong to him.
Should be renamed the National Liberal Review.
It doesn’t take a lawyer to read the Presidential Records Act and realize what Trump and his lawyers are saying is completely bogus.
Go forward to 7:15 in this video to see what Real America’s News showed Kash Patel saying with regard to the law just tonight:
https://americasvoice.news/video/ZkPM0ZefzZepHTe/
Then compare that to the actual text of the law I posted in #74:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4160931/posts?page=74#74
There is no way to reconcile what Patel said with the text of that law. It is nowhere even close to what it says. Even Dershowitz was questioned point blank on that segment and refused to back up what Patel said.
Sure, there are other arguments on Trump’s behalf, and I hope he’s able to successfully use them. But all this misquoting of what the law actually said is in no one’s interest. Short term or long term. It just makes Trump and his team look dishonest.
Trump’s claims may be more solid than you think, especially if the report yesterday — that the “sensitive information related to a foreign nation’s nuclear capabilities” described in the indictment are actually personal letters to Trump from Barack Obama and Kim Jong Un — is accurate.
Andrew McCarthy has been really busy lately. Him and Turley must be on Fox/Murdoch/Dominion overtime.
Why don’t you read Mark Levin’s thorough Constitutional scholarly work on the FACT that the indictment cannot square the 1917 Espionage Act with the Presidential Records act— BECAUSE nowhere in the indictment is the Presidential Records Act mentioned- BECAUSE it supercedes and negates the Espionage Act. Hence the reason this indictment will be thrown out and escalated as Prosecutorial overreach, misconduct and probable proceedings against the prosecutor(s) and on up to the knowing fraud of the AG Merrick Garland. For, what they are doing IS against Federal Law right down to the leaking of documents from the Special Counsel and DOJ.
The “Law” does not exist to beg to differ to the indictment which nowhere references the power the President (and all Presidents before him) to take documents and keep them under his control with custody maintained by Nat. Archives. Still under the President’s control. There is NO LAW broken here- they are making it up.
President Trump exposes another Swamp POS here in Andrew McCarthy.
This is why when that skank Dana Leosch starts talking, I change the channel.
A dismissal is not a decision on the merits. When a motion for dismissal is made by the defense, the judge has to evaluate the request assuming everything the plaintiff says is true. So the arguments from the defense are limited to what is in the motion to dismiss. I read the decision, and the judge did not say what Trump said. What she said was that there was nothing in the statute that could force NARA to try to retrieve the tape from Clinton, so the case was dismissed. Clinton had designated the tapes as personal. When asked by JW to reconsider classifying the tapes as presidential records, NARA agreed that they were personal and declined to try to recover them.
In the decision, when discussing whether or not the court had any ability to get involved in the case, she cited the DC Circuit court:
“Courts are accorded the power to review guidelines outlining, what is, and what is not, a ‘presidential record’ under the terms of the PRA. The PRA does not bestow on the President the power to assert sweeping authority over whatever materials he chooses to designate as presidential records without any possibility of judicial review.
Id. at 1290. The court stated that Armstrong I only barred judicial review of “creation, management, and disposal decisions” of the President and not “the initial classification of existing materials.” Id. at 1294.
Nowhere in the opinion does the judge rule that the records a president has are his to keep. She does say that in her opinion there is no mechanism in the PRA to require a change in the classification of documents after the fact. It also does not say that any documents not classified as personal or presidential are automatically classified as personal just because the president takes them with him. It seems if the documents were not classified either way, NARA could choose to take actions to recover them. So I think part of the question will be if Trump bothered to classify the documents as personal before he left office, or just took them.
And there is still the issue that the PRA excludes agency records from both presidential and personal records under the Act. To change that would require getting a court to rule the PRA unconstitutional, which would remove using the PRA and the Clinton Socks case as a defense, leaving only the Espionage Act.
That would be even more direct evidence that these charges are trumped up, and Trump is being unfairly targeted. And he has other ways he can hopefully prove his innocence. But he’s not helping his case by misquoting what the Presidential Records Act actually says, and misleading his followers to repeat those misrepresentations. Look at that video of Kash Patel I just posted, it’s laughably incorrect.
I would add that ConservativeinPA has also raised a valid point about the constitutionality of some provisions of the Presidential Records Act. It wouldn’t be the first time Congress passed — and a President signed — a law that was unconstitutional on its face. There was a similar discussion here back in early 2017 when James Mattis was under consideration for Secretary of Defense. It was pretty firmly established here that the waiver passed by Congress to allow him to serve in that role — which was deemed necessary because he hadn’t been out of the military for a minimum of ten years as required under 10 U.S. Code §113 — was completely unnecessary because that ten-year “waiting period” is clearly unconstitutional.
But if they get the PRA declared unconstitutional, they lose the argument that the PRA should be the law that applies to Trump taking the documents as opposed to the Espionage Act.
So you think he should not use the PRA as a defense and just fight the Espionage Act charges? The advantage if he can persuade a judge that the PRA is the law that applies, it is a civil statute.
Total agreement. And I would attest that would probably be an even better plan for him to use, than what he is currently doing, as that law, as written, is NOT in his favor. He and his team keep saying "Look at the Presidential Records Act, Look at the Presidential Records Act!!!" And if he tries that in court, the judge is likely to actually review it and say, "OK, I looked at the Presidential Records Act, and it says you can't claim ownership of any of these documents in question, classified or not."
He should definitely use the PRA in his defense where it is applicable. He’s not arguing that the PRA is unconstitutional. I’m simply pointing out that some provisions of it may very well be.
Maybe that's his ultimate angle, to try to plead guilty to violations of the Presidential Records Act, in lieu of being found guilty of harboring classified, which would carry a significantly less penalty. But that is not the case they are making to the public. They are attempting to claim the PRA protects what he did, when it clearly doesn't.
It excludes FOIA releasable documents. Also, Trump had COPIES of documents. The government has the originals in its possession. Trump had the authority to rip up these copies while he was President. If he could throw them in the garbage, he also had the authority to determine that the documents were no longer relevant to the national defense. They were presidential records and under the Sock Drawer case and others Trump had absolute authority as to how to dispose of the records.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.