Radio Yerevan: The Immunity Question

 

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Donald Trump had an Article II where he had the right to do whatever he wanted as president?

Answer: In principle, yes, but

• first of all, he didn't really have it so much as he had access to it, as we all do, in the US Constitution, which is in the public domain, and easily accessible in excellent editions online if you don't want to burden yourself with a print copy;
• second of all, it describes what the president is required to do (to take care that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed), not what he has the right to do, which may not be the same thing at all, other than issuing pardons and making his own decisions on who he wants to name as ambassadors and cabinet secretaries and the like—and it specifically lists some things that he is absolutely not allowed to do, although he did in fact do them, such as taking money in exchange for hotel rooms and food and beverage service at his businesses from representatives of foreign governments, which isn't supposed to happen because it could be an efficient way of accepting bribe money if it were allowed; and
• third of all, he isn't president any more, at least at the moment, specifically because he also didn't have the right to stay in office after he lost his reelection bid, no matter how much he wanted to. Not that he didn't try.

One of the craziest pieces of news on this newsy day filled in some details on a Trump incident we heard about back when it happened, in summer 2019, when US intelligence caught an extraordinary satellite photo of the accidental explosion of an Iranian missile at its launch site, very classified, and sent it to the White House, and Trump promptly tweeted it.

What's news about this is what ABC News appears to have unearthed from the special counsel's investigation of the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case, involving what Trump thought he was doing:

For the Record: Conspiracy to Defraud the Government

 

Donald Trump silver-plated playing cards. Spades are trumps. $11.89 from eBay.

Another dumb Xversation, this time with a very self-confident lawyer:

Emulated the supporters of Al Gore (including me) when they had exhausted every legal remedy in 2000, and agreed that the constitutional order was more important than my partisan interest. Of course if my side had lost over 60 lawsuits I'd start thinking I might be wrong.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) August 4, 2023

That last bit is sophistry. None of the cases found there was any grounds for changing or attempting to change the outcome in any of the states.

I don't think the law really cares about when people are "convinced of something". Ignorance of the law is no excuse, and...

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) August 5, 2023

... neither is ignorance of reality, unless you want to plead insanity.

If he wants to talk about a philosophical conviction, that he's fighting injustice, like Dr. King, then he's got to be prepared to go to jail, as Dr. King did from time to time. That's civil disobedience.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) August 5, 2023

It's not obvious to me. Teach me.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) August 5, 2023

"Read my Twitter," she replied. So I started doing that but all I could find were things to object to, like this:

Dream Piece

Not a dream, skydiving over Bogotá, via.

As it happens, I'm getting rid of a cataract in my right eye today, and they've scheduled it for afternoon, adding injury to insult as it were, meaning I have to spend the whole morning maintaining a fast begun last night, not just no breakfast but no lunch until past 3:00, which would be making me crabby enough, but also no liquids, even water, so I'm just altogether on strike, lying on the couch with the radio on, while famous TV lawyer and Brooklyn-Manhattan congressman Daniel Goldman holding forth on the Trump indictment when I fall asleep but Goldman continues to speak, and I'm annoyed in the usual way by that lawyerly way of focusing on the technical aspect of engineering a conviction rather than the narratology of finding out what happened, but I also want to tell him about the possibility of additional indictments in the document theft case, that could be filed in DC, not necessarily more charges against Trump but some of the guilty others I've been thinking about, like Nunes and Meadows.

It's at some kind of party, somewhere on Long Island for some reason, and in the noise I can't make myself heard—as some of you know, I lost my larynx a few years back and speak by forcing air past what's left of my arytenoid cartilage to make it vibrate, while using a finger to stop air from leaking out of the airhole in my trachea, a clumsy process but it works pretty well except if I need to get loud,  and this plays an important plot role in some of my dreams, though not the good ones.

I try people other than Goldman, but they're not listening either, and then I'm in a car with him, and I realize I've got a bigger problem than the details of the Trump charges, because I need to get to Manhattan and the surgery center (this is the first acknowledgment of reality), and my ID is in a backpack I seem to have abandoned in the place we just left. Then the car sort of opens up, revealing a whole social set up behind Goldman, of people sitting on risers, wearing headphones and carrying clipboards and iPads and the like (this seems like the second acknowledgment of reality, when I figure out I'm in a radio program), and I'm able to check my pocket and see I've got my ID (the third acknowledgment), and I start looking for other people I might be able to communicate with, and there's a young Black woman, and I tell myself, "She'll listen to me, Black people always do," and indeed she's listening as I start my explanation, and that's how I wake up.

That's a lucid nightmare where you have agency, and you escape from it by solving the problem as if it were a puzzle, to which the answer is, "Ah, it's only a dream." I've been having them once in a while for a couple of years now, and that's the format.

Literary Corner: The Defense Rests

Jean Arthur and Jack Holt in Lambert Hillyer's The Defense Rests (1934).

Rampant in January

by Counselor Bruce Castor

Article one, section three says,
“Judgements in cases of impeachment
shall not extend further than
to removal from office, and
disqualification to hold any
office of honor, trust, profit
under the United States: but
the party convicted shall
nevertheless be liable and subject,
to indictment, trial, judgment,
and punishment according to the law.”

So this idea of a January amnesty is
nonsense. If my colleagues on this side
of the chamber actually think that President
Trump committed a criminal offense, and
let’s understand, a high crime is a felony,
and a misdemeanor is a misdemeanor. The
words haven’t changed that much over time.
After he’s out of office, you go and arrest him.

For the Record: Unite the Country

 

Anybody else think this is kind of significant? The vice president effectively saying, "Behave yourself, Donald, or I'll have you fired."

Gotta say I'm a little impressed. Of course when Trump made clear he didn't care if Pence was murdered or not it prolly got Pence thinking. https://t.co/iJtpNGpijb

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 10, 2021

Not really sure it's sunk in for anybody else that Pence could be in a legitimately tetchy mood about this:

Call Me Sherlock Holmes. II

Photo via The Mary Sue.

Carrying on a bit from last night:

https://t.co/fHtFgWCU74

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 2, 2020

I know I'm an idiot but he actually was in BOP custody for a couple of weeks after his arrest in October 2019. He later said Dowd visited him there and "told him to cooperate and sacrifice himself for the president".

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 2, 2020

For the Record: Whistleblower

Everybody knows the origin. An anonymous whistleblower, relying on the protection of the law, made a complaint addressed to the chairs of House and Senate intelligence committees and submitted it correctly to the ICIG, who agreed that it was serious and important...

— Good With Rockets (@Yastreblyansky) January 31, 2020

We should all be glad that the rule of law obtained against Maguire and whoever was giving him orders to block this urgent complaint. Bringing it to light saved President Zelenskyy from the need to accept President Trump's extortion attempt and got Ukraine its funding. Period.

— Good With Rockets (@Yastreblyansky) January 31, 2020

The only relevant thing is that the complaint arrived, after some illegal stonewalling attempts, at its destination and the American people have been informed and one of President Trump's illegal dealings has been stopped. It's all good.

— Good With Rockets (@Yastreblyansky) January 31, 2020

If the whistleblower violated some article of White House protocol to get the document to the place IG Atkinson agreed it needed, urgently, to go, that's a good thing! If he hadn't done it, Zelenskyy would have gone on CNN on schedule, humiliated himself and disheartened his voters (and the rest of the world) by announcing his imaginary investigations of an imaginary crime (and Trump might have gone on holding the aid, as I suppose Putin asked him to do in the secret 31 July phone call, but you don't have to pay any attention to that). It was a win for the rule of law!

Or is somebody claiming that IG Atkinson was wrong about whether or not the complaint was credible and urgent? I don't hear Trump and his lawyers doing that. I hear Trump and his lawyers making fitful attempts to stop us from thinking about it altogether, kicking up the identity of the whistleblower like sand in our eyes. Which is kind of their only alternative, but please don't let yourself be affected by it.

While I'm up, a weird and distasteful thread on Biden and his press problems, beginning with the great Elizabeth Drew weighing in with her opinion: