Breaking 1-06-21: MAGA terrorist attack on Capitol

I agree that it would have been nice to have more evidence for the impeachment.

 

You'd think after getting the fear of God put in them by having their lives in danger would be all the "evidence" they needed...not to mention would have been in their best interest to deny him the ability to be kingmaker.

 

In a normal environment, Trump would be immediately impeached and removed for his behaviors that eventually lead to the storming of the capital. I believe that if Congress voted that very day or a few days later on impeachment, he would be removed. Two weeks later was plenty of time for political calculation/fear to seep back in. 57 voted to remove him. Only needed 10 more Senators, which I think would have happened if not for the delay.

 

Yes. I don't know that it would have changed the results. But it might have.

 

Yep. I get the purpose of the rush at the time that they first voted to impeach. (Obviously to kick him out of office since he had proven himself to do cool with a coup to stay in power), but once it was clear that the Biden admin would be able to take office, they should have postponed the Senate Trial and given themselves investigative powers to have a committee produce the full evidence to the Senate.

They went narrow and fast on something easy to prove but they miscalculated those 10 or so GOP Senators and how much power FoxNews and Trump have to strong arm them into voting no for some stupid reason. My guess is they got to them by explaining how they all need Trumps fundraisings infrastructure and they can’t vote no and deplete their revenue income machine. They probably thought that there’s no way he’ll win the nomination in 24 but we can milk his PAC to win Congress in 22.

 

I won't pretend that I thought of text messages from Secret Service agents as valuable when you're trying to piece together a picture of what Trump was doing during the riot, but now that we're talking about it, it seems pretty obvious. Asking all agencies to preserve documents was a good start as you try to wrap your ahead around the problem. But, it just seems like a dereliction to go this long without ever trying to look at these. They could have issued a subpoena long ago.

More evidence would not have made any difference. Trump's guilt was obvious. The decision of the Senators was driven entirely by their political self-interest.

 

Stating the obvious there.

 

This may actually be a good argument to lower the impeachment threshold.

At the time the Constitution was written, you needed 14 Senators.Thats every state going 50-50 save for one that goes all in.

While mathematically the same, that is a VERY different story from now especially because- as I lve said in other threads- Senators are more driven by party affiliation than state or regional concerns.

 

G. Thomas Porteous was impeached and removed from office by a vote of 96-0 in the first article (convicted in all four articles, but by different vote counts). He was represented by Johnathan Turley, whose work you may have seen posted on this forum a few times.

 

Sorry. I should’ve been more specific and said the first President to have members of his own party vote for his removal from office.

 

I would be very cautious about that . Lowering impeachment to a majority would lead to many more impeachments and likely much more chaos with presidencies falling anytime they didn’t control the majority.

Our system isn’t a parliamentary system and the President wields more power than a prime minister. We’ve also seen in Italy, Japan, Israel and several other countries the type of chaos when governments frequently fall.

While disappointed with the outcomes of the last two impeachments I think lowering the threshold might not improve things

 

Speaking of Con cooperation, Bolton crawled out of the woodwork to bumble brag about raising "legit" coups in other countries, forcing people to look into claims he peddled in his book but wouldn't under oath.

Interesting how the debate is always centered on what Dems couldn't accomplish with one arm tied around their backs while the opposition sandbags and hides.

 

That's a valid and common observation of the J6 and federal investigation of 1/6 in general. Too slow. In hindsight, there were reports of Pence refusing to get in the car with the SS agents that day (in another fking book published months after the event) because he feared leaving would 'vindicate the insurrection', according to that book. Nothing too suspicious but I think you do want to review those records to at least get a sense of how dangerous it was to the VP on that day.

The more I think about the texts being lost permanently, the more it doesn't add up. I don't know how the SS works (as in if they have their own special rules - very doubtful that they do), but federal retention policies are very strict. Data are backup regular (usually automatically) and any "retirement" of devices does not solely depend on the error-prone individuals to back them up (I think that's the current spin on the story - agents forgot to back them up before 'resetting' them). At min, if there is even a manual process, that would be done by some IT individual, not SS agents. Fishy as hell and whatever the case, heads need to row for not meeting retention policy.

Now we wait another 30 days for the SS to explain again.

 

One group was there as press.

One group was there doing recon to overturn a free and fair election.

Willfully ignorant isn't a good way to go through life. Try harder

 

This! There is no way in hell the SS would have each individual do a "MANUAL BACK UP", that makes no sense. I am sure they have there "own code" of what happens in the limo stays in the limo and the one SS agent was a trumper but come on man. Even at my company I have had people fired for inappropriate texts that they have deleted.........get with the carrier and get them back. I to never thought this was a big deal until it was pointed out and then I was like DUH, that would be relevant

 

It speaks to a lot of my worst fears that the military & law enforcement population care more about Trump than rule of law.

 

There are always bad apples. But I think they are a small minority. I think nonpoliticians in gov are by large ethical. What Trump does is elevate the bad apples to powerful positions, replacing people with high ethics, especially those that won't do his biddings. All of those people that were evaluated to carry out Trump's unethical behaviors should be gone.