Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said the Justice Department would have “no choice” but to charge President Donald Trump with obstruction of justice if he finished his term without being impeached.
Speaking with NPR’s Scott Detrow in an interview published Wednesday, Harris said special counsel Robert Mueller essentially set the stage for criminal charges against Trump with his investigation into the 2016 election. Longstanding Justice Department policy says that a sitting president cannot be indicted, and Harris said that was essentially the only reason Mueller did not charge Trump was the DoJ policy against indicting sitting presidents.
All that would change in 2021 if the Democratic presidential hopeful were in the White House and the Justice Department were under her watch, she said.
“I believe that they would have no choice, and that they should,” Harris said of the Justice Department’s charging Trump with obstruction. “I believe there should be accountability. Everyone should be held accountable. And the president is not above the law.”" politico
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So, the new rule will be – if you lose a federal election in the US your victorious opponents will prosecute you and seek to imprison you. I know a lot of American political history and I really think this has never been done before. But, now, the Harpies (Pelosi, Gilliland, K. Harris) have promised the left wing foule that if they win they will seek to imprison Trump. Uncle Joe is far ahead, and unless some instance of molestation comes to light or he nods off during an interview, he has a good chance of getting the nomination.
My SWAG is that he would choose a VP nominee whose persona and age would to some extent offset his doddering foolishness.
Kamala Harris looks to me to be the most likely; woman, photogenic, California, a jurist, radical enough to satisfy the mob. If he did that then we would have a high chance of seeing a KH presidency. God help us. pl
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/12/kamala-harris-trump-justice-obstruction-1361467
Bazinga!
That’s what I have been telling my husband since she announced her candidacy at the beginning of the year. She has expectations to be selected as the VP by Biden , even before he made his own announcement ( remember their meeting on a train going to DC before her announcement at Howard Uni)
She knows that she won’t get the nomination (Warren has more oomph than her in that race)but it will be nice riding on the coat tails of Uncle Joe and be three heart beats away from the presidency.
The Arabs living along the borders with Israel should be wary about her !
This is the opinion of a Canuck looking in from the border.
I doubt any ex-POTUS will ever actually be indicted with anything. Bush and Cheney got away with torturing people, and Nixon was pardoned. There will always be the excuse that it would be “to disruptive” and the tradition of prosecutor’s discretion takes care of the rest.
The US now has the politics of a third world nation – namely Brazil. Corrupt oligarchs using news media outlets to further their own interests, corrupt politicians using the justice system to indict and jail their political opponents (regardless of whether they are guilty or not). The police and the intelligence agencies being co-opted by some political interests to hound their political rivals. In my opinion – this is what happens when wealth inequality becomes too great (and no – I am not a communist or even all that socialist, I just would like to see wealth inequality return to what it was in the US in the 1970s).
Now I see that Vanity Fair is attacking AOC using the same playbook the media has used against Trump for the last 2 years – anonymous “insiders” making all sorts of allegedly informed criticisms of AOC. Nobody can defend themselves from such anonymous mud slinging, and the idiots on the left can’t see that this is the exact same playbook they have been fascilitating against Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3dUK-Tdyuk
“..Harris declined to criticize Biden for his abrupt shift against his prior support for the Hyde Amendment..” (from the NPR piece). Is the fix already in?
As for the “lock him up” talk, I suspect it may turn out to be just that if KH did ever find herself on the other side of that particular Rubicon. The foule are a fickle lot. And besides, immediately locking up the former incumbent is the sort of thing new presidents do in shithole countries.
James T,
Your link is to some guy from “The Young Turks”, Cenk Unger of that group being one of the main backers of AOC before she won a primary election with ~7% of the vote in a race with overall turnout under 12%. Their viewership must such just as bad if they and you can’t even be bothered to link to VF article that is the source. Poor AOC should write the book while she can; unless somebody on her staff smarter than she is makes sure there are 3-4 men running against her as ‘stalking horses’ in the Democratic primary to dilute all the opposition. Otherwise she’ll be a one term member of congress.
“the new rule will be – if you lose a federal election in the US your victorious opponents will prosecute you and seek to imprison you.”
They’ll be coming after your supporters too, which is what the institutional left has been doing for a few years now.
Mark,
Joe and Barack had eight years to do something about that, just like they promised to do. “Nixon was pardoned.” Just wait ’til Trump pardon’s Barack. That will be the end of his reputation, not that he’ll have much of one when Barr gets done with his investigations.
This may or may not relate to this post. But, his prosecution had a smell to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Siegelman
You may be absolutely right Col. Lang. With Harris as the VP nominee, it certainly seems like a probable Democratic Party ticket especially since she provides gender and racial diversity. For some reason though, I have a feeling Biden isn’t going to make it to the finish line, either because he looks kind of frail to me and isn’t drawing crowds, or because Obama crony Axelrod is expressing doubts about his candidacy. Even if Biden DOES make it, he may not inspire enough younger voters to cast ballots. Plus, Harris hails from California – a state Democrats can easily take for granted – so she adds nothing on that score.
Since I doubt Sanders can get the nod, that leaves Warren. The Clinton Resistance/Sore Losers would LOVE for a woman beat Trump. If she chose Buttigieg as her running mate there’s a [slim] chance she could flip Indiana. If she chose Booker she’d attract more black voters. In both cases she’d probably inspire better turnout among younger voters.
Anyway, that’s my SWAG backup theory.
Trump probably doesn’t have too much to be worried about, even if he does lose the next election. After all, he himself never went after Hellary, so the DNC has no reason to go after him. It would be a serious breech of protocol, unprecedented in our history.
Third world politics:
1. Raid the treasury
2. Hire the relatives
Kamala is seriously courting the big unions who make decisions for the Democrat Party – funding and campaign ground troops.
She promises them the most, but they see her as unelectable. They got burned on Clinton after eight rosy Obama years being in bed with SEIU. So your instincts may be right – Biden is claiming the “union turf”, and they get her for VP as their POC counterpoint.
Only problem is Kamala Harris does not let anyone define her and whether she will let herself get defined by Biden is another story – both are very gaffe prone so each of them could be stepping all over the other as they rumble on down to the 2020 finish line. Watching Kamala Harris from my California vantage point, she is a very haughty, mean person now trying desperately to appear more relatable.
I don’t think this is what Ben Franklin and the Founders had in mind when we embarked on this excpetional experiment in self-governance.
Fred,
Trump led chants of “Lock her up!” but the first thing he did after winning was promise to do no such thing. We have entered a period of raw populism, and all that candidates say in the course of rallying their base is quickly forgiven.
It doesn’t matter who wins the next election.
Our govt agencies are more empowered to interfere in our elections. I don’t see anything that will reverse this trend. We are Color Revolutioning ourselves. The apparatus we built for other countries is turning inward. Our MSM is oblivious to it, all they care about is, ‘does it help my team’.
Yeah, I’m a blast at parties too, slumped in a chair, my catch phrase ‘it’s getting late’.
Mark,
Just when did Trump promise not to prosecute Hilary?
You mean all those NGOs can’t be trusted? “Our” MSM is not oblivious to it, they are complicit in making it happen.
The idea of prosecuting former Presidents and then jailing them or worse brings to mind the politics of Pakistan, though Brazil is catching up.
Given what the Obama administration seems to have perpetrated against the Trump campaign, and what the Clintobama lackeys continued to perpetrate against the legitimately elected Trump administration, I don’t think the Democrats have any qualms about serious breeches of protocol. Their interests lie purely in the acquisition and retention of power, and they will treat short-term, short-sighted gains as permanent wins. They lack all semblance of vision or foresight. This is true of all the die-hard leftists I talk to (I live in a college town). They can’t seem to see that in their pursuit of power, demolishing the precedents (legally defined or otherwise) that hold our country together and legitimize our system of government could somehow come full circle to be used against them by their adversaries, should their efforts to overturn legal elections, etc. come to naught.
Fred,
The point I was trying to make is that the fools at “The Young Turks” are happy to breathlessly repeat leaks from anonymous sources as fact – but only when they make Trump look bad. When the same tactic is used to make AOC look bad they push back.
The people on the left need to stop getting sucked in to believing that Trump is the problem, and the people on the right need to stop getting sucked into believing AOC is the problem. We need to work together if we are going to reign in The Borg.
I suspect Harris will be the 2020 Nominee. She stays stead while those who are nominally ahead of her steadily lose ground. She likely wins the Iowa Caucuses and perhaps NH also then goes into CA and SC where she should dominate.
The interesting question is who her VP will be? It needs to be someone who is more moderate, probably from the East Coast. I would imagine Booker or Biden (he might be the George Clinton of the 21st Century, Jefferson AND Madison’s VP, not the bassist for Parliment/Funkadelic.)
Mayor Pete or O’Rourke might work, but it is unlikely either can carry their home state.
It is a bit early, but the set-backs in the Mid-Terms in the States Trump MUST carry indicate Harris probably wins. She is very bright but her experience is mostly as a prosecutor so she needs someone like Biden or Booker with broader experiance.