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

Fri Mar 17 00:51:34 PDT 2017

As a long-time Lakoff reader, I quasi-agree.  I personally find the media’s role pre-election most odious – I personally dramatically cut my media time when certain outlets on both sides of the spectrum went “all Trump all the time” many months before the election.  It was ridiculous.  But for that, America wouldn’t be anywhere as near disaster as we are now, IMHO.

Note, however, the sig I’m choosing for this post:  I believe crucial for Americans to continue to speak out loudly & strongly against the recent wickedness, misogyny, racism, hatred, bigotry, etc. that has infected our government from the highest levels to the lowest.  For me, things like “securing our borders” and “growing our economy” and “reforming government” are utterly worthless if we lose our humanity, compassion, and empathy along the way.

Saundra Lund

Moscow, ID

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com] On Behalf Of Ted Moffett
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 7:54 PM
To: Nicholas Gier <ngier006 at gmail.com>
Cc: vision2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Trump can be impeached for his charge about Obama Wire Tapping

I suppose I'm pointing out the obvious, but the Trump assertions about Obama "wiretapping" (outdated terminology, of course) could be primarily aimed at creation media distractions away from other stories (for example, Sessions lying in his confirmation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 <mailto:ngier006 at gmail.com> > wrote:

 <http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-06/trump-s-wiretap-tweets-raise-risk-of-impeachment> 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  <https://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/AFZ_b1F72Xw/noah-feldman> Noah Feldman

The sitting president  <https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-04/trump-calls-obama-sick-claims-trump-tower-was-wiretapped> has accused 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  <https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-11/supreme-court-never-imagined-a-litigant-like-president-trump> good reason, 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  <http://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.MSS.3.1152> proceedings 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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