L’Etat C’est Moi

[toucana]

In the spirit of Louis XIV of France addressing the parliament of France on 13 April 1655, Donald Trump appears to have re-invoked the concept of an absolute power of Kingship and the precept “I am the state” within the US constitution in a letter sent by his lawyers to special counsel Robert Mueller in January which was recently published by NYT.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/02/us/politics/trump-lawyers-memo-mueller-subpoena.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

According to an explanatory interview given on Sunday by Rudi Giuliani to Huffington Post, the president cannot be indicted for anything while he is in office, not even murder. And even if he were to be indicted, he could apparently immediately pardon himelf, according to the ever dependable Giuliani speaking earlier to ABC and NBC news. - “It’s a hypothetical point” he conceded.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giuliani-says-president-trump-couldnt-even-be-indicted-for-murder?ref=home

According to this take on the US constitution, president Trump coud not be indicted for muder even if he shot James Comey - an apparent nod to Trump’s infamous boast that he could walk out on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone in public without putting a dent in his popularity ratings.

Other constitutional experts are not so certain. Norm Eisen, the White House ethics lawyer under President Barack Obama, rebutted Giuliani’s claim: “A president could not be prosecuted for murder? Really?” he said. “It is one of many absurd positions that follow from their argument. It is self-evidently wrong.”

Senior Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff had this to say

“The President’s legal arguments would render whole sections of the Constitution moot, and allow a president to engage in any form of criminality and obstruct an investigation into his own wrongdoing. Nobody is above the law. Not this President. Not any president.”

Meanwhile, a new report issued on Friday by Berkley California attorney Alexander Stern summarises the opinions of eight leading law professors across the country that disposes of the DOJ argument that an indictment would “impermissibly distract a president from his duties”, by pointing out that an indictment could be issued under seal without his knowledge.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/bombshell-report-reveals-trump-indicted-seal-without-knowledge/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

As well as eliminating the potential distractions that a public indictment would create, a sealed indictment could also solve any statute of limitations issues that might arise from deferring the execution of an indictment until after the president left office.

[Serpent]

Now, why didn't Bill Clinton think of that?
Just hired the wrong lawyers, i guess - or not enough of them.

[toucana]

The legal geniuses who originally wrote this memo on Trump's behalf, Tom Dowd and Ty Cobb, jumped ship and fled for the hills some weeks ago when they realised that Robert Mueller wasn't going to be intimidated or put off his stroke by any of this twaddle.

For one thing the memo cites the wrong statute on obstruction. They rely on §1505 of Title 18 which only criminalises interference in pending proceedings. But a number of legal scholars have pointed out that the more relevant statute is 18 USC §1512, which was enacted in 2002; it criminalizes corrupt interference with investigations even before proceedings have actually begun — widening the scope of liability, and making Trump’s argument about “pending proceedings” moot.

https://lawandcrime.com/opinion/trump-lawyers-cite-wrong-obstruction-law-in-letter-to-mueller/

the January letter made no mention whatsoever of 18 USC§ 1512, which is beyond stupid. Failure to even mention an obviously relevant statute in a 20-page dissertation on innocence would get any law student a D on a final exam; I’m guessing Mueller had a little chuckle over the glaring error.

[toucana]

The above mentioned 18 U.S.C. Section 1512(b) contains the following:

(b)Whoever knowingly uses intimidation, threatens, or corruptly persuades another person, or attempts to do so, or engages in misleading conduct toward another person, with intent to—

(1) influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding;
…shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Trump and his co-conspirators are about to get a crash-course on it's implications, because Robert Mueller has just filed a court motion to revoke the $10m bail on Paul Manafort and send him back to prison ahead of his scheduled trial date on 18 July.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/mueller-manafort-witness-tampering/index.html

According to reports last night by NYT and CNN, the new filings accuse Paul Manafort of witness tampering. He is accused of covertly contacting two trial witnesses named D1 and D2 who were involved with him in lobbying work for a cartel known as the 'Hapsburg Group', and of attempting to persuade them to commit perjury on his behalf.

[toucana]

Manafort iCloud account intercepts

According to the detailed court filings, Paul Manafort used both the WhatsApp and Telegram messaging apps to contact the witnesses, and he relied on the end-to-end encryption built into them to obfuscate his attempted witness tampering.

https://gizmodo.com/paul-manafort-learns-that-encrypting-messages-doesnt-ma-1826561511

Unfortunately it seems no-one warned him not to back the messages up onto his iCloud account. Message archives stored in a cloud account are no longer protected by encryption, and they can be accessed with a valid search warrant - which is exactly how the FBI got hold of them according to the tabulation of evidence.