The question is sort of vague. Are you asking about the President's legal liability if he's found complicit in committing a crime (his "telling someone to commit crimes")? Generally speaking, the President is still legally liable if he's an accomplice or complicit to a crime, even if he pardons his co-conspirators. You'd get better answers if you filled in the gaps of what it means to "tell someone" to commit crimes. There is of course the statutory answer (what the law says) versus legal positivism (e.g., what might actually happen). That is, assume a President's Attorney General say, approves the use of waterboarding on prisoners in violation of tons of international laws and treaties America has signed. Legal nerds will tell you that a strict reading of the law would make the President guilty if say they were briefed by the Attorney General of some practice like torture that violates the law and the President gives even a ham-handed acquiescence to it. The reality of such a situation is the President is ~never going to be charged. See my post above about how President Bush is now almost a fully redeemed master oil painter rather than sitting in The Hague or whatever.

Knowing the statutory angle is interesting but I suspect you are actually asking more about the legal positivist aspects of such a case which no one is going to be able to answer confidently without tons of context that you aren't providing.

GIGO, basically.

HOT TAKES from Charlie Krauthammer on the sacking of Scarabbeetle:

I think LOOOOOOOOLLLL about covers everything I want to say in response to this.

I expect "yesterday was rock bottom, but this, THIS is the sign of the turnaround" will be a perpetual Trump apologist take for the next 3.5 years. I mentioned it earlier ITT but it has all the shades of reflexive Iraq War defenders who proclaimed over 4 years that the situation in Iraq had turned around and the next 6 months would prove it. Nothing ever changes much in punditry.

Always winning the respect of world leaders.

https://twitter.com/VicenteFoxQue/st...31310722064384

This is actually a helpful answer. I may watch the hearing. One reason I avoided is that I knew there were a lot of BS "deflection" questions from people like Grassley. Thing is, regardless of the optics and the existence of people like Nunes in the House, the Senate did pass a new, tougher Russia sanctions bill 97-3. Despite the sound and fury, that is where the rubber meets the road and is a pretty serious rebuke of Trump and his whole "nobody knows" about Russia schtick. The generals around Trump are also not fans of Russia, and Russia has been an essential ally of North Korea, which even the Cheeto seems to comprehend.

Another thing, due to resources, personnel, staff, competence, and politics I don't expect the House or Senate investigations to produce a lot of interesting stuff. Mueller has 20+ professionals with subpoena power and deep investigatory and prosecutorial experience digging through this stuff all day every day. The Congressional stuff is nice, and it's public (for the most part), but the action is what's going on behind the scenes, and I expect it will be at least 6 months before we know what's up with the Mueller investigation--and I expect there will be plenty of surprising, unknown information that comes out.

Finally, I don't expect huge revelations about Russia and cooperation/meddling in the campaign. There may have been some sort of tacit or even explict "agreement," but Putin isn't pushing a much worse agenda than the Mercers and the Devos' and Sessions/Bannon, and the Trump campaign was already taking lots of money from the first two and pushing their agenda.

When I say "behind the scenes", I'm talking about things that are happening but not reported. Stuff like hearings, bills, EOs, whatever are happening, and suppressing it is very bad for the country. Maybe that's part of the confusion.

When Trump or GOP take an action in the current govt, they promote the everliving **** out of one small publicly appealing part, then tuck the horrible rest of it away.

mooch is basically forgotten already and we're moving on to other stuff. but the bloke laid his job and his family at the altar of drumpf, for nothing

a tremendous faux-pas u made there m8

Really figured there'd be a whole Scaramucci story arc. Turns out he was only in one episode, though he was prominently featured.

He may get hired on another show, but he's probably already been type cast.

Second most popular article on the Atlantic is a transcript of Browder's congressional testimony https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...mittee/534864/

On the front page of the NY Times is an article about Russian military exercises on Nato's border. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/w...T.nav=top-news

(I mean, I kinda get Putin's pique--ever since the Balkan conflict the West's sphere of influence has pushed further into traditional Russian space. Nato has expanded essentially to Russia's border and includes former Soviet client states. If I was a supporter of the scope, power, and influence of Mother Russia, I would be pretty damn aggrieved as well. However, Russia has always been pretty clumsy dealing with its allies, with little positive to offer, especially since Putin's antics and extortion have effectively prevented the development of the Russian economy and society. One man running the show works ok for a mafia enterprise but is a lousy way to run a government.

The Generals get a further assumption of a lot of good characteristics as well. Kelly is also a war criminal who was subverting his commander in chief by working against Obama's efforts to close Guantanamo.

When many Pakistanis, Argentinians, Thai, or Egyptians go for military rule (all government needs a fair amount of consent of the governed) I don't think many of us have the automatic reaction that their generals are the intelligent, diligent, scrupulous and uncompromising men of honor that we have for our military leaders.

If this Krauthammer take is prescient and the Kelly appointment is to be remembered as a significant event, I want to move. You say Australia's nice?

Found this funny since the topic came up yesterday.

https://twitter.com/PKBlake/status/892157760984330241

NATOs expansion has been immensely threatening to Russia. If the shoe were on the other foot and The Czech Republic and East Germany joined the Russian Federation we'd be back to 100% cold war including the additional 30000 nuclear weapons.

And of course NATO just had war games in the Ukraine and the Russians at least think we simulate invading Russia.

Yeah, this would be just gem dandy.

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/892346968789463040

A big thing here is that we don't actually know a lot of the answers to questions around pardoning. People (even experts) can tell you their opinions about what the President is constitutionally allowed to do, but there's just not a ton of precedent in these cases, and so there aren't a lot of definitive answers.

So we know Pence could certainly pardon Trump "preemptively" if Pence became president. But when it comes to Trump pardoning himself or Trump 'abusing' the pardon to insulate himself from investigations (say a sweeping 'preemptive' pardon for all of his aides / staff / family / etc.), we're in mostly uncharted waters.

Wait, I thought the GOP was dead set against executive action? So confusing.

I'd be surprised if Pence pardoned Trump. From the GOP point of view Trump has to be painted as an enemy who lied and betrayed the party and the country. He has to be severely punished. If they effectively try a grand cover-up, they are surely saying that his behaviour is fine in the GOP.

Yeah I read that post and would have dug it out and quoted it if I were less lazy, but it's such a perfect example of the genre. Firing a guy 10 days after you hire him is just great evidence that things were chaos before but NOW, with this one final act of chaos, we will magically bring order!

I hadn't even considered the military worship stuff, I was too busy laughing my ass off at Krauthammer pretending to think that hiring a clueless douchebag and firing him again after 10 days is the harbinger of order in the Trump administration.

Yeah, it's pretty nice. We still have to do whatever the US says militarily, so you'd still be a US citizen once removed.

Don't worry, if it actually happens, you can count on the National Review to be Deeply Concerned.

I recall all the pundits said the same thing about McMaster: that this is a MILITARY guy and we all know that guys with years of MILITARY experience will bring much-needed MILITARY discipline to the White House and maybe he will make Trump stop Tweeting.

Trump giving some Vietnam veteran the congressional medal of honor was interesting yesterday. Especially when he felt it necessary to explain to the audience that steel rain was bullets. He obviously got the speech from the writer and because he needed it spelling out decided that everyone would want it spelling out.

It's got to seem somewhat ironic that the fella who gave you the medal swerved the war regardless of whether swerving war is okay, personally I think it is but going on to be CIC afterwards is going to make it slightly weird.

I don't think there's any appetite to really stick it to Trump and I don't see Pence getting a lot of heat for following Gerald Ford's prescedent. The GOP just needs to distance themselves from his brand and insist that Trump was never really a True Republican, he was just a smooth huckster.

He could preemptively pardon Trump and Hillary, and frame it as the country moving forward from the circus of the 2016 election. Wouldn't put it past the GOP.

Two minutes later....



https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...66646542782464