ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

Hoda is not being let in because she isn't a US citizen (or that is what they say) due to diplo visa. Not a good test. They will find a US citizen in that rabble and you can have your test.

A distressing number of born US citizens (not to mention Brits, French, etc.) went there to cut people's heads off and have fun torturing people.

You have to formally renounce US citizenship (as in go to a US consulate or embassy and do it with witnesses) or have it legally taken (which is rare). UK has different laws. Very different.

Since no one is US to my knowledge has ever opened up an embassy in da'esh territory this is not possible.

Oh, they will come back to their respective countries. I have no doubt. Some morons will let them in to become useful psycho members of the society (like Trudeau said), some will let them in to prosecute, and some of these evil people will just slip in.

They should all be prosecuted for genocide and crimes against humanity but I am not aware of anyone pursuing that for some reason.

Sad.

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Turtledove wrote:

Trump says ‘there should be no Mueller report’ a day after House unanimously votes to make it public

Hilarious!

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Trump said the special counsel “should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report.” He also claimed Mueller’s investigation was “an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime.”

In search of a crime! After dozens of indictments, a bunch of guilty pleas, as well as a few convictions, wouldn't that mean that much crime has already been proven?

For someone that claims to be completely innocent, he sure acts like he's guilty.

Isn't it sorta the entire point of an investigation to figure out if a crime occurred?

Any russian collusion yet?

It doesn't matter whether you've committed treason or not — every US citizen should have an unalienable right to due process. Period. This doesn't necessarily mean that officers of the government (police or military) cannot shoot and kill such people, but those officers need to prove they were met with force when they tried to take the suspect — who is presumed innocent — into custody pending trial, and forced to respond to that force with lethal force in self-defense. Failure to demonstrate the need for lethal self-defense, where evidence otherwise shows the killing occurred, should be grounds for murder.

I'm not saying our military should be incapable to act, only that we should be taking prisoners of war (when appropriate), not racking up confirmed kills.

I see no reason to loosen these requirements an iota until and unless Congress officially declares war — at which point the presumption of peaceful surrender can be safely discarded. Frankly, I think this concept of due process should apply to non-citizens in a technical peacetime situation as well. The idea that the US military can just go around the world killing whomever it wants without a shred of judicial action against them is horrifying, imperialist, and all too real. Americans have become utterly numb to how its military routinely commits, and gets away with, war crimes.

I would like to see all military involved in the drone strikes that killed US citizens charged with conspiracy to murder. Not sure if that goes all the way up to Obama or not.

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Turtledove wrote:

Trump says ‘there should be no Mueller report’ a day after House unanimously votes to make it public

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Trump said the special counsel “should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report.” He also claimed Mueller’s investigation was “an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime.”

Well, Trump couldn't be more wrong on that one. Especially if it's conflicted, especially if it's illegal, especially if it never should have even happened — the report should be released to the public. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. There's a good reason the House vote was unanimous.

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Chadwixx wrote:

Any russian collusion yet?

None proven that is public knowledge. A final set of indictments might be part of Mueller's final actions. An ominous potential clue as to what might be in store, Mueller made a statement in the indictment of the Russians that the Russian attempts to hack into Clinton's servers first started the same day or day after Trump pleaded in public for the Russians to find and release Clinton's 30,000 emails, for which they would be rewarded mightily.

That Mueller statement obviously means that they can prove that to be true. It was a gratuitous statement thrown into that indictment. Presumably foreshadowing more to come when they "paint the big picture" for us.

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kolyaboo wrote:

Hoda is not being let in because she isn't a US citizen (or that is what they say) due to diplo visa. Not a good test. They will find a US citizen in that rabble and you can have your test.

Fair enough. I don't have enough facts on what's going on with her father's diplomatic visa or the knowledge of the law surrounding how that works.

At any rate, I agree that either such people should lose their citizenship, or they should keep their citizenship and be thrown in jail for an inordinately long time.

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MrCoo1 wrote:

Isn't it sorta the entire point of an investigation to figure out if a crime occurred?

In a normal trial, yes, there'd be an investigation underneath a grand jury to determine the existence of a crime, and then an indictment for that crime. (Then an actual court case to determine fact. Indictments are not convictions.)

The problem is that the scope is infinite, so there is no one crime or set of crimes that the special investigators are focusing on. There is no criteria to end the investigation, and the investigation is not limited to a single field or a single event or timeframe.

Normally an investigation is bounded by the damages, but I'm still waiting to hear a convincing case that there were damages. Manafort's actions in Ukraine and Cohen's taxi crimes had real damages (albeit absolutely nothing to do with Trump), but as for all the rest...

There is a presumption of damages coming from one side -- that Trump only won because of some nefarious Russians. Where's the proof of that claim? Why is it impossible to believe Trump would have won regardless?

Certainly the tens of thousands of dollars the Russian troll propagandists threw at facebook ads is utterly negligible compared to the billions that were spent in domestic advertising. Similarly, was 2016 markedly different than previous years in terms of foreign meddling attempts? Was it about the same it always is? Was it less?

Certainly the release of the hacked DNC e-mails by Wikileaks has zero proven ties to the Trump administration, and there's every reason to believe that Wikileaks wanted to do this purely out of hatred for Hillary (as opposed to desire for Trump). The same Hillary that said "can't we just drone [Assange]", jokingly. Was there even conclusive proof that Russians hacked the DNC despite the servers never being handed to the FBI for forensics? The sec firm that ran the audit (CrowdStrike) has historically acted in a pro-Ukraine/anti-Russian biased way, and was forced to recant a previous audit as a result.

Certainly the payoff of a porn star changed virtually nothing about Trump's image pre-election. Did anyone think he was a devoted husband and gentleman despite his multiple marriages and self-made "playboy billionaire" image? He routinely paid hush money, as we now know, so how was Stormy's payment specific to this campaign?

I think these questions are just as valid as "what does Trump know and when did he know it?", especially after two years. And this is before even getting into all of the beshitted FBI investigators that have been fired for their own lies and abuses of power.

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The more he denies it, refuses to cooperate, lies and obstructs, the more it looks like there's A LOT to hide from and be worried about.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is a long-disproven argument. It's the same justification that the NSA uses when they run a quasi-legal dragnet.

When the chickens come home to roost and Trump is exonerated, will you accept it? Or is that just yet more evidence of the grand conspiracy?

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I'll ask the same of you. Will you accept his crimes when he's found guilty?

They won't accept it, they'll say it was a conspiracy orchestrated by the "Deep State". This is exactly what Trump is preparing his base for and what Cohen pretty much said in his testimony.