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

Thu Mar 16 19:54:10 PDT 2017

I suppose I'm pointing out the obvious, but the Trump assertions about
Obama "wiretapping" (outdated terminology, of course) could be primarily
aimed at creation media distractions away from other stories (for example,
Sessions lying in his confirmation hearing about contact with the Russian
government) while continuing to cast a cloud over the Democrats and Obama.

Trump was a birther conspiracy promoter who denigrated the integrity of
Obama while he was president, and Trump now appears to be continuing with
the same propaganda tactic.

A certain number of Trump supporters will believe that Obama did wiretap
Trump, regardless of the facts, when this claim is repeated in the media
over and over.

The media should stop reporting on this story over and over, unless there
is substantive new evidence.  They are merely playing into the propaganda
model of Trump media spin.

Don't  believe me?

Read cognitive psychologist George Lakoff on the propaganda tactics of the
Trump campaign:

https://georgelakoff.com/2016/12/15/how-to-help-trump/

George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of
Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at
Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972.

How to Help Trump

Without knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news
media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they
spread his message.

Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking
statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters
make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours.
Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure
to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this
response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.

When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message
wide and far.

---------------------------------------

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 9:13 AM, Nicholas Gier <ngier006 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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