DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Arresting Political Enemies

These are the things dictators do and whether trump is trying to do them:
Let me know if I have missed anything

Find a group/minority to hate target - check
Weaponizing the police/department of justice - check
Changing the court system to pack it with judges sympathetic to them - check
Changing the educational system to brainwash our children into thinking like them - check
Ignoring the rules of law as if they don't apply to them - check
Build up your own personal army - check
Undermining the election process - check
Discredit the mainstream media and use your networks to spread your propaganda - check

And now this:
Arresting their political opponents


Trump gives Bill Barr ultimatum as he demands roundup of political enemies

The Independent
Andrew Naughtie
,The Independent•October 8, 2020

During a live phone-in on Fox Business, Donald Trump complained again that not enough of his political enemies have been arrested – and said attorney general Bill Barr could find himself in “a sad situation” if he doesn’t start rounding them up.

The blunt warning comes after Mr Trump left Walter Reed Medical Centre and returned to Twitter with a blizzard of angry tweets and retweets, many of them calling for the indictment of Obama administration figures.

The president’s rambling and ill-tempered interview with Maria Bartiromo on Thursday saw him run through a long list of his usual grievances, but he was particularly rancorous on the subject of supposed Obama-era “crimes” against him for which he wants to see his predecessor indicted, along with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and many others.

“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes,” declared the president, “the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re gonna get little satisfaction unless I win. Because I won’t forget it. But these people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama, and that includes Biden; these are people that spied on my campaign, and we have everything.

“Now they say they have much more, and I say Bill, you got plenty. You don’t need any more.”

Comparing Mr Barr unflatteringly to former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grennell and successor John Ratcliffe, both of whom have released documents related to the Russia investigation, Mr Trump gave his attorney general a warning.

“To be honest, Bill Barr’s gonna go down either as the greatest attorney general in the history of the country or he’s gonna go down as a very sad, sad situation. I mean, I’ll be honest with you. He’s got all the information he needs. They wanna get more, more, more, they keep getting more, I say: ‘You don’t need any more. You got more stuff than anybody’s ever had.’”

Mr Trump has complained for years that various Democrats should be “locked up”, even telling Hillary Clinton to her face at a 2016 debate that she would be “in jail” if he won. (His administration has not investigated her in any meaningful way.)

However, in the last year or so, he has begun insisting ever more furiously that the Obama team committed crimes against him, in particular saying Mr Obama spied on his campaign.

While Mr Barr has been criticised by many Trump critics for intervening in cases against the president’s associates – including Roger Stone, whose recommended prison sentence his department sought to reduce – he has defended his independence from the president before.

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody,” he told an interviewer in February. “Whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board, or the president.”

At the time, this was seen as a stunning rebuke to Mr Trump, who routinely appears to direct policy via Twitter. However, the president reacted only with a single, level-headed tweet, raising suspicions that Mr Barr’s interview was a calculated gesture to justice department attorneys concerned about political interference.

Later in the Fox Business interview, while expounding the theme of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, Mr Trump appeared to suggest that he might take a more active role in his proposed criminal roundups.

“She should be indicted for that!” he shouted down the phone. “If people delete emails in a regular court case – she deleted 33,000 emails and nothing happens to her! Our justice system, nothing happens to her. With all of the pages of stuff, thousands of pages that we have on them, nothing happens to them, nothing happens.

“And you know, I said I’m gonna not get involved, I’m gonna have to get involved, because these people are crooked people.”


https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-gives-bill-barr-ultimatum-144940477.html

I'm glad I live in the real world.

Can you help me a little? What does that post mean?

Does that mean that we should ignore Trump's own words and rants - and just put it down to the moron in the white house having a little paddywhack and venting? After all Trump has said so many foolish things that it's just not worth commenting on one more?

Or does it mean we shouldn't ignore Trump's words and rants even though he's POTUS because as silly and outrageous as his words are, but at least we can all be safe knowing that this is American and his rants and silly outrageous comments/insinuations couldn't happen?

Or does it mean you live in the real world and in the real world Hilary and others are criminals that should be locked up?

Or is there another scenario where living in the real world means something as relates to Trump's outbursts?

Last I checked they still had not locked Hillary up.....

Nor anyone else involved in "crossfire hurricane". I hope the libs actually read those documents.

Dawg- you didn't get the memo? She's the world's most slippery, crafty, cunning, intelligent arch-villainess. An evil genius with world domination on her mind and kidnapped babies on her dinner plate. They try and try and try... but they can never bring her to justice.

S m o o t h
C r i m i n a l.

"Curses- foiled again!"

Didn't you just try to call someone out for a 'Whatabout' ! LOL. Figures.

Paul Manafort does not agree with you.... Flynn would be as well, if the DOJ did not step in. Stone was convicted and the pardoned by Trump.

I think you meant some other investigation.

Pokapornstar supporters ignore this like everything else. They think it's perfectly fine for Trump to call for his political opponents to be arrested and tried for crimes of which there is no actual evidence of. It wasn't enough he politicized the justice department with Barr. It wasn't enough that he told the Proud Boys to "Stand by". It wasn't enough that while every militia group listens to his every word and he said to "liberate Michigan".

Nothing is enough. They're too busy making up BS excuses for every terrible thing he does they simply don't have enough time to digest what he is actually doing. Maybe this will help them....

An authoritarian leadership style is exemplified when a leader dictates policies and procedures, decides what goals are to be achieved, and directs and controls all activities without any meaningful participation by the subordinates. Such a leader has full control of the team, leaving low autonomy within the group.

That pretty much covers continuing to fire anyone and everyone who disagrees with you and dictating everything by Twitter. Harassing businesses, people and anyone who speaks out with a differing opinion. You know, Trump.

I meant the perpetrators of crossfire hurricane, not the victims. Comey, brennan, clapper, etc.

.

Well if Trumps minions had not been passing pooling data to the Russians

The idea that being a member of a political campaign gives you cover/immunity from a FBI investigation is laughable, but that is what Don wants you to believe. One day they will have to create a law to cover this, but not now...

There's no evidence that anyone passed anything to the Russians, not even someone in the Trump campaign. The dems refused to give the fbi their "hacked" server. The Russia hoax was a fabrication.

That's not accurate. Nice try though.

Arresting ones political enemies is what a third world dictator does.

Yet another example of trumps's administration flouting the rules of law and ignoring the courts.


Trump's public lands chief refuses to leave his post despite judge's order
The Guardian
Cassidy Randall
,The Guardian•October 10, 2020

A controversial environment chief in the Trump administration has said he has no intention of leaving his post after a US district court judge deemed his tenure and ongoing occupation of the position illegal.

William Perry Pendley, head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), said this week that the judge’s ruling “has no impact, no impact whatsoever”.

“I have the support of the president,” he told the Wyoming Powell Tribune. “I have the support of the secretary of the interior and my job is to get out and get things done to accomplish what the president wants to do.”

Perry has served as director of the BLM since July 2019, when the interior secretary, David Bernhardt, temporarily authorized him to the post. The BLM manages 248m acres – or 10.5% of all land in the US, the most of any agency, mostly in 11 western states and Alaska. It manages public lands for conservation as well as livestock gazing and resource extraction, and critics say the Trump administration has prioritized the latter.

President Trump formally proposed Pendley for the post in July 2020, but withdrew the nomination after congressional Democrats indicated unanimous opposition to his appointment, and some Republicans seemed unlikely to support him owing to his fringe views. Pendley has never been confirmed by the Senate to serve as BLM director.

After Montana’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, brought a case claiming that Pendley’s service was unconstitutional, US district judge Brian Morris ruled two weeks ago that Pendley had “served unlawfully” for the last 424 days, prohibited him from acting as director and suggested that his decisions during his tenure be thrown out or reversed.

The interior department said it would appeal against Judge Morris’s ruling.

In response to Pendley refusing to vacate his post, the Montana senator Jon Tester accused him of a power grab “in service of his long-held goal of selling off our lands and enriching his corporate allies”.

As a former industry attorney and longtime president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), a litigation organization funded by conservative and industry groups including the Charles Koch Foundation and Exxon Mobil, Pendley boasts a deep background of legal advocacy for extractive resource industries on public lands.

He has made light of killing endangered species. The Guardian obtained a 2017 recording in which he told a group of North Carolina rightwing activists, “This is why out west we say ‘shoot, shovel and shut up’ when it comes to the discovery of endangered species on your property.”

Congressional Democrats also expressed concern with his views on social justice and racial inequality. Pendley has mocked Native American land management practices and dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as based on a “lie”.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-public-lands-chief-refuses-093032928.html

Really?

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/06/bre...sion-operation/

Top U.S. intelligence officials were so concerned heading into the 2016 election that the Russians were aware of and potentially manipulating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s plans to smear Donald Trump as a Russian agent that they personally briefed President Barack Obama on the matter, newly declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents show. CIA officials also requested that the FBI investigate Russian knowledge of the Clinton campaign’s collusion smear operation.

According to the declassified notes, Brennan and the U.S. intelligence community knew months prior to the 2016 election that the collusion smear was the result of a campaign operation hatched by the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“We’re getting additional insight into Russian activites from [REDACTED],” Brennan’s handwritten notes state. “Cite alleged approval by Hillary Clinton–on 26 July–of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to villify [sic] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”

The notes appear to have been prepared by Brennan to memorialize a meeting held at the White House with the president and his top national security advisers. Included in Brennan’s notes are the responses of other participants in the briefing — including those of former White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, and former DNI James Clapper, but those responses are redacted.

At one point, Obama asked whether there was any evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia, but any response that may have been recorded in Brennan’s notes is redacted.

Trump reportedly angry that intelligence officials warned lawmakers Russia is aiding president’s re-election bid

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-...port-2020-02-20

Putin even said he wanted Trump to win.

There are extremists trying to flip the script and still others who will believe anything to make themselves think it's so.

Trump has had almost four years in charge with his lackey in charge of the Justice Department to investigate anything worth going for. In fact they have and found nothing.

The Justice Department investigation into Trump's claims of Hillary Clinton's corruption is reportedly over, and found nothing

https://www.insider.com/doj-probe-trump-alleged-clinton-corruption-found-nothing-2020-1

And still you and places like the Federalist keep beating that dead horse.

Manafort shared the Trump Campaign's Polling data with Russia. Period.

But you keep inventing your own facts and repeating them ... It's a tried and tested pattern.

I got a handwritten note by brennan, you have the complicit lying lefty media.

Frankly calling the investigation into Russia/Putin's interference to get Trump elected a hoax at this point is one of two things: [1] A Blatant Lie [2] Willful Ignorance.

There is absolutely no other variable.

You're hilarious.

There's merit to debating the impact the Russian interference had. Which is ultimately impossible to gauge ... but what they did, and the level of contact with Trump Campaign, totally justified the investigations that took place including the Republican Appointed Mueller Investigation that found Trump anything but Exonerated despite William Barr's bald faced lies.

It's a wonderful lesson in regards as an example of just how far a president can go to politically weaponize the justice department.

IN order for a president to weaponize the DOJ, he needs a willing AG... Trump has one in Barr.

To my knowledge, that hasn't happened since Nixon. And John Mitchell ended up doing time for his actions.

I'd be very happy with the same result.

Many people aren't old enough to understand that at least to some extent we are seeing a rerun. Only worse.

So, every one of you will ignore this:
Brennan’s handwritten notes state. “Cite alleged approval by Hillary Clinton–on 26 July–of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to villify [sic] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”

There was no Russian collusion from Trump. It was made up by the dems in the fbi, and pushed by clinton. All of these people should be tried for treason, and all of you continue to support them. Every last one of you should be ashamed.

Hilarious.

No - that isn't ignored. It is filed and included with the rest of the evidence. Your use of one single aspect or one piece of evidence in amongst hundreds of known facts is what is shameful. But - it's what you do. Now, start repeating the lie and say it enough times, maybe you'll convince yourself.

And he dismisses that FACT that the Trump administration, AFTER he was elected investigated Hillary for years and still couldn't pin anything on her.

U.S. inquiry into FBI, Clinton spurred by Republicans ends without results: Washington Post

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Justice Department inquiry into Republican allegations of misconduct at the department and the FBI, including its handling of investigations related to 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, effectively ended without tangible results, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed here John Huber, Utah's top federal prosecutor, to look into matters including allegations that the FBI had not fully pursued possible corruption cases at the Clinton Foundation and during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State, when the federal government allowed the sale of a company called Uranium One, the Post reported.

The assignment has ended, but no official notice has been sent to the Justice Department or to lawmakers, the Washington Post reported washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dept-winds-down-clinton-related-inquiry-once-championed-by-trump-it-found-nothing-of-consequence/2020/01/09/ca83932e-32f9-11ea-a053-dc6d944ba776_story.html. Current and former law enforcement officials said they had not expected the probe to uncover anything, according to the newspaper.

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-t...t-idUSKBN1Z905V

It's an obsession.

You've probably already noticed that Trump needs a foil. He needs someone to rail against. Someone that he can turn his minions against.

If not Clinton it's Obama or Biden... Also he's eats his own all the time. Beating on Cruz and Sessions... When ever he feels it will help him.

Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political Rivals
The New York Times
David E. Sanger
,The New York Times•October 11, 2020

President Donald Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joe Biden, takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.

Trump has long demanded — quite publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.

He took a step even Richard Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his reelection campaign.

“There is essentially no precedent,” said Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush and has written extensively on presidential powers. “We have a norm that developed after Watergate that presidents don’t talk about ongoing investigations, much less interfere with them.”

“It is crazy and it is unprecedented,” said Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School, “but it’s no different from what he has been saying since the beginning of his presidency. The only thing new is that he has moved from talking about it to seeming to order it.”

Trump’s vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family business he presided over. “I have an Article II,” he told young adults last year at a Turning Point USA summit, referring to the section of the Constitution that deals with the president’s powers, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don’t even talk about that.”

Now he is talking about it, almost daily. He is making it clear that prosecutions, like vaccines for the coronavirus, are useless to him if they come after Nov. 3. He has declared, without evidence, that there is already plenty of proof that Obama, Biden and Clinton, among others, were fueling the charges that his campaign had links to Russia — what he calls “the Russia hoax.” And he has pressured his secretary of state to agree to release more of Clinton’s emails before the election, reprising a yearslong fixation despite having defeated her four years ago.

Presidential historians say there is no case in modern times where the president has so plainly used his powers to take political opponents off the field — or has been so eager to replicate the behavior of strongmen. “In America, our presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes — that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, wrote on Twitter after Trump returned from the hospital where he received COVID-19 treatment and removed his mask, while still considered contagious, as he saluted from the White House balcony.

Long ago, White House officials learned how to avoid questions about whether the president views his powers as fundamentally more constrained than those of the authoritarians he so often casts in admiring terms, including Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. They have something in common: Trump’s State Department has criticized all three for corrupting the justice systems in their countries to pursue political enemies.

Pompeo has always bristled when reporters have asked him to explain what the world should believe when it reads Trump’s most authoritarian-sounding tweets. He answers that what distinguishes the United States is that it is a “rule of law” nation, and then often turns the tables on his questioners, charging that even raising the issue reveals that the reporters are partisans, not journalists, intent on embarrassing Trump and the United States.

But his anger is often wielded as a shield, one that keeps him from publicly grappling with the underlying question: How can Washington take on other authoritarians around the world — especially China, Pompeo’s nemesis — for abusing state power when the president of the United States calls for political prosecutions and politically motivated declassifications?

“We’ve never seen anything like this in an American election campaign,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state who is now an informal adviser to Biden. “It reduces our credibility — we look like the countries we condemn for nondemocratic practices before an election.”

“I have worked for nine secretaries of state,” Burns said. “I cannot imagine any of them intervening in an election as blatantly as what we are seeing now. Our tradition is that secretaries of state stay out of elections. If they wanted to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, they could have done it in 2017, 2018 or 2019. It is an abuse of power by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.”

Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what Trump had ordered is “exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.”

“In dealing with Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, we would have protested and condemned such actions,” he said. “Now it’s our own government that’s engaging in them.

“The result,” said Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “is the hollowing out of our institutions at home and deep corrosion of our image and influence abroad.”

In the current cases, it is unclear whether Trump will get his wish — or whether his loyal appointees will slow-walk his requests. There is some evidence they are already looking for escape hatches.

Pompeo, the administration’s most conspicuous ideologue, Trump’s most vocal loyalist and a lawyer, was clearly taken aback when the president expressed displeasure, saying he was “not happy” that the State Department had not released emails sent through Clinton’s home server.

“You’re running the State Department, you get them out,” the president told Fox Business in an interview this week. “Forget about the fact that they were classified. Let’s go. Maybe Mike Pompeo finally finds them.”

Pompeo, one of his aides said Saturday, was in a box: The complaint about Clinton’s home server was that she was risking exposing classified emails by not using the State Department email system — a system Russia had already infiltrated — yet Trump was demanding that they be released in full. Just days before, he had announced, over Twitter, that he was using his executive power to declassify all of them, without redactions.

“We’ve got the emails,” Pompeo responded on Fox News. “We’re getting them out. We’re going to get all this information out so the American people can see it.”

But he also hinted that many of Clinton’s emails, mostly those that were stored on the State Department’s own system, have already been posted on the agency’s website, after an unusually diligent effort by the department to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests from Trump’s supporters. (They are often heavily redacted — to the point of containing no content — despite the president’s order to the contrary.)

“We’re doing it as fast as we can,” Pompeo told Dana Perino, a Fox News anchor who once served as President Bush’s press secretary. “I certainly think there’ll be more to see before the election.”

Pompeo clearly understands the problem: Even if he makes all of them public, they are unlikely to satisfy the president. Last year, the State Department’s own inspector general found that while Clinton had risked compromising classified information, she did not systematically or deliberately mishandle her emails.

William Barr may face an even greater challenge in satisfying the president. No attorney general since John Mitchell, who served Nixon and brought conspiracy charges against critics of the Vietnam War, bent the Justice Department more in a president’s direction. And Nixon himself, while urging the IRS to audit political opponents, stopped short of publicly calling for individual prosecutions. Yet in February, Barr told ABC News that Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” At the same time, he complained that the president’s tweets about the Justice Department “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

Now, clearly, the president has asked Barr to act in a criminal case — and not in a quiet phone call. Instead, he did it on Twitter and Fox News, expressing his deep disappointment with his second attorney general, for essentially the same reason he fired his first one, Jeff Sessions: insufficient blind loyalty.

His complaint appears to have been driven by Barr’s warning to the White House and other officials that there are likely to be no indictments before the election from the investigation being run by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut. Durham is searching for evidence that the inquiry into Russia was a politically motivated effort to undercut his presidency.

Trump says the case is clear-cut. He told Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host to whom he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the last State of the Union address, that Durham has had “plenty of time to do it.”

“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crime in the history of our country — then we’ll get little satisfaction, unless I win,” Trump said on Fox Business.

“If we don’t win,” he said, “that whole thing is going to be dismissed.”


https://news.yahoo.com/taking-page-authoritarians-trump-turns-151748832.html

Right in front of us, every day.

But no- nothing to see here, folks.
Balcony poses.
Jailing opponents.
Family members in official positions.
Using the office to enrich himself.

Only think missing is the over-the-top military uniform and aviator sunglasses.


yeah- like this.

"We didn't vote for a preacher of the u.s."

We all know how lame that sounds to explain this thing that was elected president.

To verify how he has used the office to enrich himself - and to show his cronyism - here is a good article from today:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administrat...ign-governments

I see the defense is that Trump let's his family manage his businesses... which of course means nothing, Trump is still profiting. Trump did not do what other previous POTUS have done which is turn his business operations and investments into a blind trust.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, which political opponents has he had arrested?

It's in the trying, not the succeeding.

So, none? Requesting his attorney general to investigate someone is not illegal.

Seriously. None?

oh, so we're back to the "no harm, no foul" excuses.

"hey, i didn't actually succeed in killing the guy, so i didn't do anything wrong."

- Erik

I see - ignore want the wannabe Tryant King says ... ignore his words, it only counts if he is successful. A bit like when he tried to interfere with the Mueller investigation but wasn't successful because whichever Trump lackey Trump instructed to do something illegal didn't do what Trump ordered him to do. No harm no foul? LOL

And directing Barr to investigate matters for his on personal political motivation is good in your eyes. Yes yes. Of course, that is what the DOJ is there for. It's Trump's own service to do with as he pleases.

All a bit like when you say the Trump Campaign didn't give Russia anything when in fact they did.... just say something enough times till you believe it.