Excellent overview of the constitutional issues raised by the recent federal indictments againt Trump, the leading challenger in the 2024 Presidential election. It all appears to hang on Article II powers conferred on every President, including classified material.
Barnes on the federal Trump indictments
39 responses to “Barnes on the federal Trump indictments”
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The blatant hypocrisy of giving Hillary and Joe free passes has pretty much discredited this rubbish.
Poll: 80% of Republicans Say Donald Trump Should Be Able to Serve as President if Convicted (12 Jun)
Which pretty much means 80% of Republicans know this to be a partisan hit job that would be embarrassing even in a banana republic.
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I can’t find link but was either on Redstate or Hotair saying the document of the war plans for invading Iran that the Left and the prosecutor have got so excited over, because Trump is recorded showing it to someone, has NOT been found. Leading to some to suggest this was Trump just being Trump and bulldusting some aide or Journo. Whilst that makes Trump look a little bit silly it is going to make the prosecutor look far more silly as obviously no offence committed.
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Americans have to find a way to limit their politician’s terms in office, that’s the only way for people entering their system, to accomplish anything. (Mitch the Turtle, is a piece of work, as is Schumer, Nancy and the Clintons, oh my)
It’s amusing watching and listening to Americans talking about democracy in the rest of the world, that they sure don’t have, but somehow still believe they are the arbiters of it.
I don’t think Trump has a chance of actually making it to the next election in any state to play a part.
That’s sad, but their DOJ and DOS simply won’t have their plans and ambitions thwarted again.
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Biden’s DoJ established four different Grand Juries to look for “crimes” that Trump, his presumptive opponent in the next presidential election, might possibly be charged with.
One would have to be incredibly delusional or utterly stupid not to see that for that it is.
Barnes is spot on in his analysis and I hope he does join a team of smart, aggressive, courageous, politically savvy lawyers to take up Trump’s case because that’s what it’s going to take.
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Barnes’ entire argument is that Trump is the King and his word is law, because he alone possesses the divine right to represent the will of the people. Even when Trump himself is on tape saying that he didn’t declassify the documents and that he knew what he was doing was illegal.
Trump’s only redeeming quality is that he ends up making all of his most devoted disciples look stupid by undermining their dumb talking points defending him.
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Barnes’ entire argument is that Trump is the King and his word is law
That is the prerogative given to the Executive, which the President personifies, by Article II.
because he alone possesses the divine right to represent the will of the people.
No, he is conferred that right via an election and thus by the People.
Even when Trump himself is on tape saying that he didn’t declassify the documents…
It really doesn’t matter what he says. The argument will be, I think, that his acts were sufficient.
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That is the prerogative given to the Executive, which the President personifies, by Article II.
The American Founders did not fight a war to get rid of a King just to appoint their own.
No, he is conferred that right via an election and thus by the People.
Leaders are bound by the same laws as any citizen. What you are arguing for is not democracy.
It really doesn’t matter what he says. The argument will be, I think, that his acts were sufficient.
Barnes reckons a President declassifies documents by… taking them home. This is ridiculous at every level, anyone who pushes it can not be taken seriously. He is a loudmouth clown in a stupid bowtie.
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Barnes is a dumb son of a bitch, but at least he knows his bullshit wouldn’t fly in an actual court. He’s less reputable than Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, whose careers have ended in disgrace.
His rubbish is for gullible rubes like you, db, who desperately want to be told something other than the truth.
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m0nty seems quite upset this could fizzle out. Poor little screaming baby.
What say you on the only legal precedent of Clinton taking home tapes and that alone, without any formal declaration, was sufficient to render them personal not protected State secrets? What say you m0nty?
Is there 1 rule of law covering this or 2?
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What say you on the only legal precedent of Clinton taking home tapes and that alone, without any formal declaration, was sufficient to render them personal not protected State secrets? What say you m0nty?
Is there 1 rule of law covering this or 2?
If you are too thick to understand the difference between tapes of private interviews for the purposes of a book and classified national security secrets marked as top secret, pete m, then I can’t help you figure it out.
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Barnes’ underlying narrative is that the Presidential Records Act is null and void. He claims that Article 2 trumps it entirely, even though there is no case law at all to support his view. Armchair constitutional law is worth as much as the toilet paper it is written on.
If Barnes is so sure he’s right, obviously he will volunteer to represent Trump in court. Seems like no one else wants to defend him.
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Bruce says:
June 14, 2023 at 2:29 pm@ Muddy:
“Precautionary Justice”?
It’s safer to judge things before they happen.
We don’t like him.
He’s our enemy.
Enemies are bad, mmmmkay.
Stop the bad before the bad happens.
We’ve done that with Primate Change (and are getting away with it), why not with Trump?
Pre-hurt hunters.
That’s who we are.
Yes, you do need to applaud.
We’re keeping you Saef.* Interesting video, by the way, Dover. Cheers.
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If a piece of U.S. legislation is found (presumably by the Supreme Court?) to contravene the U.S. Constitution, the former can be effectively cancelled/overridden, correct?
Sure. Do you reckon Robert Barnes is an experienced constitutional lawyer good enough to make that argument stick before SCOTUS? Or is he a two-bit hustler who dresses like Peewee Herman?
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From the OT: Clear statement of the central problem with the Trump indictment:
Mike Davis ??
@mrddmia
Presidential Records Act v. Espionage Act:The Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA), 44 U.S.C. §§ 2201 through 2209, generally controls the handling of the President’s records.
Generally, records created or received by the President or this White House staff are presidential records.
This includes classified records sent to advise the President or his White House staff.
Before the Presidential Records Act, Presidents owned their presidential records.
Congress changed the law after Nixon won a legal fight on this issue.
After the Presidential Records Act, the U.S. government owns Presidents’ presidential records.
Per the 2012 Obama judge ruling in the Clinton sock-drawer case, where President Clinton stuffed 8 years of highly classified audio recordings of his presidency in his sock drawer (see picture 1 below), the President solely decides what are:
– “personal” (belong to him)
v.
– “presidential records” (belong to government).
And if the President doesn’t designate them as presidential records and then takes them when he leaves office, they are deemed personal records.
(Read news story and linked opinion here: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/old-case-over-audio-tapes-bill-clintons-sock-drawer-could-impact)
But even if people think this 2012 Obama judge ruling protecting Clinton is incorrect or Trump (somehow) shouldn’t have the benefit of this ruling (because they hate and fear Trump):
“[T]he Presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representative.”
44 U.S.C. § 2205(3) (see picture 2 below).
Former Presidents do not have the right to have any classified record they want.
But they have the absolute statutory right to have (not own) their presidential records, classified or not.
There is no criminal component to the Presidential Records Act.
Disputes are settled with negotiations and civil lawsuits.
Not unprecedented and unlawful raid and indictments.
How can Trump violate the Espionage Act for retaining his presidential records he is allowed to have (not own) under the Presidential Records Act?
Garland must allege and prove more than mere retention, in order to charge a former president for espionage for having his presidential records he’s allowed to have (not own) under the Presidential Records Act.
One way a court may attempt to harmonize the Presidential Records Act with the Espionage Act is requiring the government to allege and prove the former President intended to cause “injury to the United States or aid to a foreign nation result from the disclosures.” United States v. Rosen, 520 F. Supp. 2d 786, 793 (E.D. Va. 2007).
There is zero evidence–not even an allegation–Trump intended to harm America by retaining his presidential records.
It is not a crime to be a jerk.
It is not “espionage” to fight with librarians and other bureaucrats.
We do not send former presidents, who happen to be your boss’s chief political enemy, to die in prison over presidential-records disputes.
This is one key reason Garland’s indictment of Trump is fatally flawed as a matter of law.
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Yes, Davis and Barnes agree. And they are both dead wrong.
One might have thought you lot might have learned after your horrifically embarrassing experiences with the Kraken, where you spent months making the most ridiculous arguments and got proven hilariously wrong in case after case, over five dozen of them. Evidently, you just like the punishment.
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One might have thought you lot might have learned after your horrifically embarrassing experiences with the Kraken, where you spent months making the most ridiculous arguments and got proven hilariously wrong in case after case, over five dozen of them. Evidently, you just like the punishment.
Barnes nor I ever supported the Kraken claims. Instructive you have to lie in order to defend this present case.
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This is a far more sober look at the Clinton case, including extensive comments from a Judicial Watch dude.
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It is particularly funny that the theory that Trump’s lawyers are putting forward is that the Presidential Records Act empowers the President to declare any and all records as his personal possessions… when this was exactly the opposite intention of the act in the first place, as it was enacted under Carter to prevent the abuses Nixon made of the system during Watergate.
They should get laughed out of court. The only reason they wouldn’t is because corrupt Trump judges are running the show.
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I don’t doubt that Judge Cannon has the capability to run with your bulldust line in her rulings. She has proven herself to be a shameless partisan hack already in that other Trump ruling which got smacked down.
It remains to be seen how high Trump’s judicial corruption has spread. Will SCOTUS vote in a fascist Trump regime?
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Looks like Trumo’s first line of defence, a very powerful one, is the Clinton Sock drawer defence.
President Bill Clinton classified whatever he liked as whatever he liked because a President can do that. No one has ever challenged him on it apparantly.
To now try to charge Trump with the same behaviour and call it a crime, is against the US Constitution it may seem.
Some fascinating bunfights coming up I’m sure.
The Democrats though, will have a conga line of charges for all manner of frivilous accusations because the punishment is the process. The inticacies of US constitutional law and their many layered system, to be fair, is beyond the understanding of us in the peanut gallery in Australia.
The endless charges , in the minds of the Dems, will convince people Trump is no good I suspect.
It could also have the opposite effect, and add to the support for him, who knows how American’s think.
However, at the end of the day, who ever controls the voting, tends to control the voting outcome.
If it all turns to crap for the Dems, will they do something fresh and creative to Trump?
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President Bill Clinton classified whatever he liked as whatever he liked because a President can do that. No one has ever challenged him on it apparantly.
It’s more like there is system of classification that is applied to gov info by executive officers that binds them but not the President when that gov info flows into the White House. The problem for Hillary and Biden but not Bill or Trump is that the former were not President relating to the info they are argued to have illegally retained.
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This is a far more sober look at the Clinton case, including extensive comments from a Judicial Watch dude.
Problem with the Reuters ‘but this is different ‘ claim
“were in the nature of a diary or journal in recorded form,” fitting the definition of a personal record in the Presidential Records Act. But the documents with classified markings that were seized from Mar-a-Lago, Baron said, “were official government records that should never have been transferred out of the government’s hands.”
Is the suggestion here that if I include classified info in a diary this ceases to be a presidential record and becomes a personal record because Clinton diaries did involve a lot of classified information.
That argument could have political salience among Trump backers asserting that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” to pursue the former president. But as a matter of law, said professor Margaret Kwoka of Ohio State University, Jackson’s ruling in the Judicial Watch case isn’t going to be much help for Trump. “These are completely different kinds of records,” she said. “And there are different legal obligations when it comes to the handling of classified records.”
No one is disputing that different kinds of records impose different obligations, but the question here is really whether that applies to the President.
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