[Vision2020] Trump can be impeached for his charge about Obama Wire Tapping

Tue Mar 7 14:29:01 PST 2017

Roger is a pretty smart guy. He will research this, not be suckered by 
the smoke and mirrors, and figure it out! He isn't really a "march in 
lockstep" sort like some others on the political right.....Having 
respect for the Office of the President means calling into question a 
president who has no respect for the office!

Debi R-S

On 3/7/2017 12:45 PM, Saundra Lund wrote:
>
> Roger, is this the article you are referring to?
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html
>
> The article *does not state* that Manafort was wire tapped in Trump 
> Towers but rather that some of his Russian contacts were under 
> surveillance.  If you, me, or anyone else has contact with foreign 
> operatives under legitimate surveillance by US intelligence agencies, 
> our communications with those targets will – hopefully – be captured, 
> whether we are in Trump Tower or not.  That is a *far, far* different 
> thing than claiming you or I were the *subject* of a wire tapped.
>
> Oh, and Trump Tower is *not* mentioned in the article at all.
>
> I’m not sure where your misunderstanding comes from, but I have seen 
> that incorrect spin from several biased sources.
>
> With the rise of the dangerous alt-right and Trump’s “alternative 
> facts” nonsense, it’s incumbent on each of us to work diligently to 
> avoid being suckered.
>
> HTH,
>
> Saundra
>
> */The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the 
> dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the 
> aged; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy 
> and the handicapped./*
>
> ~ Hubert Horatio Humphrey
>
> *From:*vision2020-bounces at moscow.com 
> [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com] *On Behalf Of *lfalen
> *Sent:* Tuesday, March 7, 2017 11:49 AM
> *To:* Nicholas Gier <ngier006 at gmail.com>; vision2020 
> <vision2020 at moscow.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [Vision2020] Trump can be impeached for his charge 
> about Obama Wire Tapping
>
> I do not know if the Obama administration wire taped Trump or not. The 
> New York Time in January had an article that said The Obama 
> Administration Wire taped Monafort  in the Trump Tower.
>
> Is this true or not. If it false, what is their liability?
>
> Roger
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Subject: [Vision2020] Trump can be impeached for his charge about 
> Obama Wire Tapping
> From: "Nicholas Gier" <ngier006 at gmail.com <mailto:ngier006 at gmail.com>>
> To: vision2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com <mailto:vision2020 at moscow.com>>
> Date: 03/07/17 18:14:10
>
> www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-06/trump-s-wiretap-tweets-raise-risk-of-impeachment 
> <http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-06/trump-s-wiretap-tweets-raise-risk-of-impeachment>
>
> *Trump's Wiretap Tweets Raise Risk of Impeachment *
>
> MARCH 6, 2017 1:42 PM EST
>
> By Noah Feldman 
> <https://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/AFZ_b1F72Xw/noah-feldman>
>
> The sitting president has accused 
> <https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-04/trump-calls-obama-sick-claims-trump-tower-was-wiretapped>his 
> predecessor of an act that could have gotten the past president 
> impeached. That's not your ordinary exercise of free speech. If the 
> accusation were true, and President Barack Obama ordered a warrantless 
> wiretap of Donald Trump during the campaign, the scandal would be of 
> Watergate-level proportions.
>
> But if the allegation is not true and is unsupported by evidence, that 
> too should be a scandal on a major scale. This is the kind of 
> accusation that, taken as part of a broader course of conduct, could 
> get the current president impeached. We shouldn't care that the 
> allegation was made early on a Saturday morning on Twitter.
>
> The basic premise of the First Amendment is that truth should defeat 
> her opposite number. "Let her and Falsehood grapple," wrote the poet 
> and politician John Milton, "who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a 
> free and open encounter?"
>
> But this rather optimistic adage only accounts for speech and debate 
> between citizens. It doesn't apply to accusations made by the 
> government. Those are something altogether different.
>
> In a rule of law society, government allegations of criminal activity 
> must be followed by proof and prosecution. If not, the government is 
> ruling by innuendo.
>
> Shadowy dictatorships can do that because there is no need for proof. 
> Democracies can't.
>
> Thus, an accusation by a president isn't like an accusation leveled by 
> one private citizen against another. It's about more than factual 
> truth or carelessness.
>
> The government's special responsibility has two bases. One is that you 
> can't sue the government for false and defamatory speech. If I accused 
> Obama of wiretapping my phone, he could sue me for libel. If my 
> statement was knowingly false, I'd have to pay up. On the other hand, 
> if the president makes the same statement, he can't be sued in his 
> official capacity. And a private libel suit mostly likely wouldn't go 
> anywhere against a sitting president -- for good reason 
> <https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-11/supreme-court-never-imagined-a-litigant-like-president-trump>, 
> because the president shouldn't be encumbered by lawsuits while in 
> office.
>
> The second reason the government has to be careful about making 
> unprovable allegations is that its bully pulpit is greater than any 
> other. True, as an ex-president, Obama can defend himself publicly and 
> has plenty of access to the news media. But even he doesn't have the 
> audience that Trump now has. And essentially any other citizen would 
> have far less capacity to mount a defense than Obama.
>
> For these reasons, it's a mistake to say simply that Trump's 
> accusation against Obama is protected by the First Amendment.
>
> False and defamatory speech isn't protected by the First Amendment.
>
> And an allegation of potentially criminal misconduct made without 
> evidence is itself a form of serious misconduct by the government 
> official who makes it.
>
> When candidate Trump said Hillary Clinton was a criminal who belonged 
> in prison, he was exposing himself to a libel suit. And the suit might 
> not have succeeded, because Trump could have said he was making a 
> political argument rather than an allegation of fact.
>
> But when President Trump accuses Obama of an act that would have been 
> impeachable and possibly criminal, that's something much more serious 
> than libel. If it isn't true or provable, it's misconduct by the 
> highest official of the executive branch.
>
> How is such misconduct by an official to be addressed? There's a 
> common-law tort of malicious prosecution, but that probably doesn't 
> apply when the government official has no intention to prosecute.
>
> The answer is that the constitutional remedy for presidential 
> misconduct is impeachment.
>
> That would have been the correct remedy if Obama had "ordered" a 
> wiretap of the Republican presidential candidate's phones. The 
> president has no such legal authority. Only a court can order a 
> domestic wiretap, and that only after a showing of probable cause by 
> the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
>
> Breaking the law by tapping Trump's phones would have been an abuse of 
> executive power that implicated the democratic process itself. 
> Impeachment is the remedy for such a serious abuse of the executive 
> office.
>
> That includes abuse of office in the form of serious accusations 
> against political opponents if they turn out to be false and made 
> without evidence. These, too, deform the democratic process.
>
> The Constitution speaks of impeachment for "high crimes and 
> misdemeanors." A lot of ink has been spilled over these words, which 
> date back at least to impeachment proceedings 
> <http://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.MSS.3.1152>in the 14th 
> century. This isn't the place for a detailed analysis.
>
> Suffice it to say that what makes crimes "high" is that they pertain 
> to the exercise of government office. That's exactly what accusations 
> by the executive are: actions that take on their distinctive meaning 
> because they are made by government officials.
>
> What's more, government acts that distort and undercut the democratic 
> process are especially serious and worthy of impeachment. The 
> Watergate break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters 
> was part of an effort to steal the 1972 election. A wiretap of Trump's 
> campaign would've had political implications.
>
> And accusing the past Democratic president of an impeachable offense 
> is every bit as harmful to democracy, assuming it isn't true. Obama is 
> the best-known and most popular Democrat in the country. The effect of 
> attacking him isn't just to weaken him personally, but to weaken the 
> political opposition to Trump's administration.
>
> Given how great the executive's power is, accusations by the president 
> can't be treated asymmetrically. If the alleged action would be 
> impeachable if true, so must be the allegation if false. Anything else 
> would give the president the power to distort democracy by calling his 
> opponents criminals without ever having to prove it.
>
> -- 
>
> A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know 
> they shall never sit in.
>
> -Greek proverb
>
>
> "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. 
> Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without 
> guidance from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause 
> lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage 
> to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! 'Have courage to 
> use your own understand-ing!-that is the motto of enlightenment.
>
> --Immanuel Kant
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> =======================================================
> List services made available by First Step Internet,
> serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
> http://www.fsr.net
>          mailto: Vision2020 at moscow.com 
> <http://index.html?_n%5Bp%5D%5Bmain%5D=win.main.tree&_n%5Bp%5D%5Bcontent%5D=mail.compose&to=Vision2020@moscow.com> 
>
> =======================================================
>
>
>
> =======================================================
>   List services made available by First Step Internet,
>   serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>                 http://www.fsr.net
>            mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20170307/50fd3ca2/attachment-0001.html>