If Trump deliberately hid classified documents.

[Franklin]

from my Christian experience+perspective, for instance, in church leadership, it’s interesting to witness various men lead.
some are popular, some seem inspired, some are gifted business managers that lead fund raising and maybe building expansion.

overall, it’s important for leadership roles to be respected (as much as humanly possible) .. respect for changes in leadership, whatever that looks like, i.e., different churches/fellowships have different methods. some leaders are chosen by lot!

the U.S. system was originally designed to work much like this. respect for the office, the system, even if any certain person was disliked, by few or many.

I agree with you here. But religious leadership is far more important than political leadership. The sequence is: good religious leaders produce a good electorate who choose good political leaders. Since most American religious leaders currently fail, the country fails.

[Ken]

What a better country we had, would have had, if Dems had simply respected the SHORT term, or two, of DJT’s presidency.

I don't see what difference this would have made. The problem is that the American people are rotten.
Political corruption is only a symptom of this problem.

i’m not going to suggest you are wrong.
from my Christian experience+perspective, for instance, in church leadership, it’s interesting to witness various men lead.
some are popular, some seem inspired, some are gifted business managers that lead fund raising and maybe building expansion.

overall, it’s important for leadership roles to be respected (as much as humanly possible) .. respect for changes in leadership, whatever that looks like, i.e., different churches/fellowships have different methods. some leaders are chosen by lot!

the U.S. system was originally designed to work much like this. respect for the office, the system, even if any certain person was disliked, by few or many.

in 2016, Dems wholesale threw all that out the proverbial window. “gloves off!”

i don’t disagree with you. i grieve the loss of any effort toward or appearance of civility in the process.
all that remains:

I think that is a very incorrect view of American history. Politics has ALWAYS been partisan and often very ugly. There was absolutely NOTHING about 2016 that was different from any other election in American history. The election of 1800 between Jefferson, Burr, and Adams was brutally fought and ugly. As was the 1824 election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Not to mention 1860 and 1876. Look at political cartoons from the 19th Century. They are brutally partisan (because most newspapers were themselves overtly partisan) and make modern ones look tame.

The actual break from American tradition came in 2020 when one candidate for the first time in American history refused to accept the results and tried to overturn them by fomenting a coup instead.

[temporal1]

from my Christian experience+perspective, for instance, in church leadership, it’s interesting to witness various men lead.
some are popular, some seem inspired, some are gifted business managers that lead fund raising and maybe building expansion.

overall, it’s important for leadership roles to be respected (as much as humanly possible) .. respect for changes in leadership, whatever that looks like, i.e., different churches/fellowships have different methods. some leaders are chosen by lot!

the U.S. system was originally designed to work much like this. respect for the office, the system, even if any certain person was disliked, by few or many.

I agree with you here. But religious leadership is far more important than political leadership. The sequence is: good religious leaders produce a good electorate who choose good political leaders. Since most American religious leaders currently fail, the country fails.

It’s not apples to apples, churches are mostly made up of folks who have a generally similar starting place, including agreement to submit+obey (which have become dirty words in the secular world). Many churches are affected.

i agree with you, many churchs are floundering, leadership is difficult, if not impossible. lots of chaos.
i pray for inspired leadership. Isaiah 55:11 https://biblehub.com/isaiah/55-11.htm

.. I think that is a very incorrect view of American history. ..

It’s an incomplete view, it wasn’t intended to be comprehensive. There were plenty of ugly campaign battles. Documented.

However, after elections, the majority of folks settled into the reality, 4 years at a time, grumpy or not, elections generally swung between parties with regularity. Representatives TRIED to do their jobs without burrowing in to do nothing. Before the internet, presidential circus elections came around every 4 years, primaries and other elections, altho arguably more important, went fairly ignored.

The internet and 24/7 news cycles have effectively brought non-stop campaigning.

Your reference to the 2020 election reveals you have ignored the many vivid examples shared of hillary+libs 100% rejecting 2016 election results .. thus, a waste of time to repeat.

True. hills INITIALLY accepted the 2016 election results, i was duly impressed. For 3 clock minutes.
Unfortunately, this was quickly followed with every possible election denial for 4 years - including her personal counsel to biden to NOT accept defeat in 2020. It’s not over, they’ve not taken a breath. Now for 6-7+ years.

You’re skating on mighty thin ice.

[JimFoxvog]

Without knowing the content of the documents we have absolutely no idea how much harm was done.

If confidential assets (spies) in other countries were possibly revealed and killed or jailed
If the government had to redeploy assets or change protocols or take any steps to respond to the potential leaking of highly classified materials
If various strategies had to be revised, etc. to respond to possible leakage.
If relations with other countries were damaged.

We have no way of knowing any of that. But it is most certainly incorrect to assert with any certainty that no harm or costs occurred.

And, in any event, that is not the threshold for determining what is a crime.

I am confused. Are you talking about the unsecured Clinton tapes or the unsecured Biden documents found in the garage, and Chinatown?

I'm confused. Isn't this against board guidelines by deliberately misinterpreting someone else's post? Look at the topic heading if you are confused.

[Ken]

Your reference to the 2020 election reveals you have ignored the many vivid examples shared of hillary+libs 100% rejecting 2016 election results .. thus, a waste of time to repeat.

True. hills INITIALLY accepted the 2016 election results, i was duly impressed. For 3 clock minutes.
Unfortunately, this was quickly followed with every possible election denial for 4 years - including her personal counsel to biden to NOT accept defeat in 2020. It’s not over, they’ve not taken a breath. Now for 6-7+ years.

You’re skating on mighty thin ice.

I'm not going to defend every stupid thing any leftist has ever said, many of whom are not even Democrats. Just like I would not expect you to defend every stupid thing that any conservative has ever said.

But we can actually look at the actions of those in power and in leadership. And compare how they behaved.

The 2016 election was much closer than 2020. Not only in the popular vote, but also in the swing states. Let's look at how the two losing campaigns responded in 2016 and 2020:

2016: How many lawsuits were filed by the Clinton campaign challenging the 2016 election results? You can look it up but the answer is NONE. The Green party did challenge the results, not by suing, but by requesting recounts. And that mostly turned out to be a fundraising grift on their part. But the Clinton Campaign? I am not aware of any lawsuits they filed challenging the results in any states. Democrats from Clinton on down did a lot of soul searching about WHY they lost (Comey, emails, Russia, poor strategy, Bernie Sanders, poor candidate, etc.). But no one in power claimed that the actual results were fraudulent as in Clinton actually got more votes in swing states. At least not that I am aware of.

2020: Despite losing with MUCH larger margins than in the 2016 election, how many lawsuits did the Trump campaign file in 2020? The answer is a whopping 63. And when they lost EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM they continued to challenge the results through a whole tangled web of extra-legal or outright illegal tactics such as putting forward slates of fake electors, trying to block the counting of legally-cast votes, arm-twisting local elections officials to delay or refuse to certify election results for spurious reasons, and trying to arm-twist Republican state legislatures to block certification of election results on spurious grounds. Not to mention trying to get state officials to commit outright fraud in places like Georgia. All of this culminating in the 1/6 insurrection attempt to block certification of the election results in Congress. None of that was normal or the way that any other losing candidate behaved in any other presidential election in American history.

[Robert]

I am confused. Are you talking about the unsecured Clinton tapes or the unsecured Biden documents found in the garage, and Chinatown?

I'm confused. Isn't this against board guidelines by deliberately misinterpreting someone else's post? Look at the topic heading if you are confused.

I simply asked a question for clarification. Discussion often gets off topic. One can not always go by the topic heading.

[temporal1]

I'm not going to defend every stupid thing any leftist has ever said, ..

not sure where this is coming from.

in another thread, and probably in several others, there are numbers of quotes, tapes, public announcements from LEADING, ESTABLISHMENT Dems saying worse-than-stupid things, even out of the ultimate bully pit, the U.S. White House .. i’m not going to copy+paste for you, you’re more adept at that than i. no need to go to lib fringes.

Election Investigations (now 193 pages)
viewtopic.php?t=3309

[Bootstrap]

Bootstrap post_id=195361 time=1686776880 user_id=67]
But who is Trump accountable to? Is he accountable to the law?

Trump has been impeached twice. He has been charged by Alvin Bragg. He now has been indicted. He has been investigated for Russian collusion and that cost the tax payers millions. He had the FBI obtain a FISA warrant based on a fake dossier, in order to illegally spy on his campaign. He is being investigated concerning Jan. 6. In 2019, the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas seeking financial details from Trump's banks. In 2022 the FBI raided his home. Never has any president been investigated a much as Trump was. To insinuate he isn't accountable, is just ridiculous.

But it's no outrage to investigate him. He had to close the Trump Foundation because of fraud. He had to close Trump University because of fraud. The Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp. were found guilty of multiple charges of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records connected to a 15-year scheme to defraud tax authorities by failing to report and pay taxes on compensation for top executives, and the Chief Financial Officer was sentenced to 5 months prison time.

Trump's first campaign chairman was under investigation by the FBI, BEFORE he was part of the Trump campaign, for working to elect a pro-Russian government, working with Russian intelligence officers as part of this.

So what, it's outrageous to think that he may be involved in other shady things? Or outrageous to investigate him if there is evidence against him?

This begs the question. Who is Biden accountable to? We know he received $5 million from foreign nationals as part of an alleged bribery scheme. Then put the money in so many bank accounts with the purpose, that it would take any investigators 10 years to find them all. We have a video where he committed a quid pro quo concerning the firing of a prosecutor that was investigating the corruption of the company his son was a part of. He had classified documents at various places, including in his garage next to his corvette. Who is Biden accountable to? Is he accountable to the law?

Absolutely. The same rules of evidence and the same law should be applied to both presidents. The same standards should be used to decide who to prosecute in classified documents cases regardless of party. And I think it is.

But you can't believe every claim you hear from the enemies of either president. And law enforcement is not required to convict someone simply because that's what the other party wants. This is not torches and pitchforks, we have processes for letting all sides be heard when something comes to trial.

Evidence. Juries. Patience.

[Bootstrap]

The FBI is not unaccountable, it is simply not accountable to the people it is investigating.

Well, precisely. That's one of the accountability mechanisms I mentioned in the post you were responding to - Congress can haul the FBI in and question them. I repeated my list and highlighted this one in blue below.

But how is the House Oversight Committee accountable? The House Oversight Committee can do many things that no bipartisan commission or court of law would ever allow, and that the FBI cannot do in court, and who has authority to reign them in? They can:

• Do hostile questioning, inserting claims that have not been proven into their questions, as though they were truth.
• Interrupt witnesses frequently, ensuring that they don't get a chance to make a case.
• Do not allow Democrats to cross examine the witnesses to give them a chance to speak.
• Promote your claims on national TV without ever having to actually prove it legally, with a media campaign around it.

And the House Oversight Committee does not have any of the protections that the FBI/DOJ have. Who are they accountable to? How do you protect against politicization, weaponization, and witch hunts if they can do this with basically no accountability mechanisms? After all, they campaigned on promises that they were going to prove these things and punish people. And they claim they have "evidence", but seems to be talk show evidence, not impeachment evidence, not court of law evidence, not something they want to have heard in a fair hearing.

Remember the McCarthy Era? What happens if a house of Congress or the president gains control over DOJ / FBI, as they seem to want, and can weaponize them and conduct witch hunts against their political enemies? I don't care whose political enemies they are, that's dangerous. And the rhetoric even sounds a whole lot like the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Trump will have his trial. There will be a jury. He will have plenty of expensive lawyers. He can object to all kinds of things on procedural grounds. He can probably continue to make it drag on and on and on.

So once again, here are the accountability mechanisms for DOJ / FBI. I highlighted the one you are talking about in blue. But it is only one of many accountability mechanisms for the FBI/DOJ.

Here are some of the key accountability mechanisms for the DOJ and FBI:

• Internal Inspections and Audits: The DOJ and FBI have internal inspection and audit offices that conduct reviews and evaluations to assess compliance with policies, procedures, and regulations. These internal entities monitor the agencies' activities and identify areas for improvement or potential misconduct.
• Office of the Inspector General (OIG): The DOJ has an independent OIG, which conducts independent audits, investigations, and inspections to detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct within the department. The OIG also provides oversight of FBI operations and investigates allegations of misconduct or impropriety involving FBI personnel.
• Congressional Oversight: The DOJ and FBI are subject to oversight by the United States Congress. Congressional committees, such as the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Committee, hold hearings, request documents, and exercise subpoena powers to examine the agencies' activities, policies, and performance. Members of Congress can raise concerns, request investigations, and propose reforms based on their oversight responsibilities.
• Judicial Oversight: The actions of the DOJ and FBI can be subject to judicial review. Courts can evaluate the legality and constitutionality of their actions, including search warrants, surveillance programs, and other investigative techniques. If misconduct is identified, courts can suppress evidence, dismiss cases, or take other appropriate actions.
• Civil Liberties and Privacy Protections: The DOJ and FBI are required to respect civil liberties and privacy rights while carrying out their duties. Laws such as the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) provide legal safeguards for individuals' rights, and violations of these rights can be challenged in court.
• Whistleblower Protections: Both agencies have established mechanisms to protect whistleblowers who report misconduct, waste, or abuse. Whistleblowers can make protected disclosures without fear of retaliation and are afforded certain legal protections.
• External Review Boards and Commissions: In some instances, independent review boards or commissions may be established to investigate specific incidents or issues involving the DOJ or FBI. These external entities can provide impartial assessments and recommendations for improvement.

[Josh]

But how is the House Oversight Committee accountable?

They are elected representatives, voted for or against by the people. That is the ultimate accountability.

I am rather tired of hearing how in a "democracy", being voted by the electorate somehow doesn't count as "accountability", and rather unelected bureaucrats should actually be the ones in charge of everything.