Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
It's not about investigating a crime at all. If it were, they'd have, you know, started with a crime and moved from there. Instead, they've started with a target and looked for a crime.
Which is, as you should know, completely backwards to how our legal system is supposed to work.
Given that no-knock warrants to homes where no crime is being committed has led to numerous deaths of said homeowners on the strength of a freakin' anonymous phone call and you never had a problem with it but do with this is...confusing.
I have never said I had no problem with those situations. Ever. I understand the concept of no-knock warrants, and understand that there are some situations where they may be needed, however I have repeatedly stated that prior to initiating one the police should make absolutely certain of some basic things like, you know, that they're at the right freaking address, and certainly never as a result purely of an anonymous source.
I have no clue where you got this impression. I'll also point out that these are completely different things. This is not a case of accidentally seizing a lawyers papers, which just happens to contain confidential client information, one of which just happens to be the President of the United States, because you meant to go into the law office next door or something. But that they intentionally did exactly this, with what I consider to be an incredibly weak rationale.
I find that troubling because it's a case where it certainly looks like the desire to get someone on "something, anything" is more important than some of the most basic legal protections in our system. There were numerous courses they could have pursued in this instead. They chose the one that maximally weakens our legal protections. Not just his, not just Trumps, but all of ours, because it sets a precedent which certainly will be used to justify similar raids in the future.
Again. They haven't even yet gotten a determination that if what they believe he did actually would qualify as a campaign finance violation. It's a massive overreaction to the facts of the case.
And, lest I repeat myself, there's a jarring sense of the difference of how Trump has been dealt with by the FBI and DoJ (and others) versus Clinton. Clinton was nicely asked to provide documents at her own pace, and allowed to pick and choose which she turned over, and to delete anything she wanted along the way, without any consequences for this. And this was in a case where we absolutely knew that the law had been violated (we knew she had work related email on her server, in violation of the law, that she had not turned all of it over when she left the State Department, in violation of the law, and that she had lied about it in her exit paper work, in violation of the law. And on top of that, there was a strong possibility that said server contained current classified information on it, such that every single day the server wasn't seized could constitute a risk to national security. Yet... despite this, no one thought that justified a warrant and immediate seizure of the server?
But the possibility that a hush payment by a lawyer does? It's hard not to see a massive double standard in our legal system going on here. It's almost like some people are on the "inside" and are protected by the system, and some are on the "outside" and are targeted. And no, it's not about my personal likes or dislikes of either/any of the people involved. I believe that the law should be applied equally to
everyone. It's clear that this isn't happening though.