Traitor Watch - The 45 & 47 Thread

Axaday

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A Facebook friend and retired coworker posted a meme today asking if Obama is going to prison. I tried off and on today to think of a thoughtful, non-snarky response. I can't help but wonder if Trump is just kicking himself in the teeth right now. If referring Obama to the Justice Department DOES manage to satisfy people who wanted the Epstein files, then he really has to get an indictment, right? I was thinking at first that we'll just never hear the next step because they don't REALLY have a case, most likely, but I don't think the people who didn't forget Epstein are going to forget this. So is the Justice Department for real going to indict and have a judge throw the case out and then throw up their hands and say "We did everything we can, but activist judges, amiright?"

The other thing I pondered up was that I am used to thinking of Trump as a bumbling loudmouth who often doesn't even know what he is about to say, but I think when Trump was saying he would release the Epstein file, he absolutely knew he wasn't going to. He didn't change his mind on that. How do you get dumb enough to walk yourself into that, unforced, and then cover it with this?
 

The Mighty Mollusk

Scream all you like, 'cause we're all mad here
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He was probably counting on his cultists being stupid and forgetting about Epstein in the wake of all of his other catastrophes. Which, to be fair, is how he gets out of most of the problems he causes; start a new one and let the last one get buried because it's not news anymore. For whatever reason, though, this one keeps sticking around.
 

Axaday

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He was probably counting on his cultists being stupid and forgetting about Epstein in the wake of all of his other catastrophes. Which, to be fair, is how he gets out of most of the problems he causes; start a new one and let the last one get buried because it's not news anymore. For whatever reason, though, this one keeps sticking around.
I think he didn't come across one that his base care about more, but now isn't he screwed? What can he come up with to distract them for THIS? And how many mid-term voters are NOT going to fall for the notion that the case against Obama was airtight, but the judges just saved him because he is their golden boy?
 

wonko the sane?

You may test that assumption at your convinience.
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The only people falling for trumps jive was trumps cult in the first place: and trump has literally been jingling his keys like a ******* mad man for a week now and his base has been screaming back one word. "Epstein". Normally the turn around on maga hypocrisy is as fast as trump can lie, but they aren't letting this go. It's foundational to their ideology that trump was going to release the epstein files AND! (this part of why they won't let it go.) those files will list all the democrat pedophiles and destroy the left.

They want it because they've been told it'll be a ******* hit list.

And when it hits (cause there's too many people trying to get it out there now, by hook or by crook. Seriously, johnson started congresses vacation early so they wouldn't have to vote AGAIN about releasing it.) trump will go from "maga messiah, ender of democrats" to "Co-conspirator #1" and all their little maga brains will ooze out their ears. Thankfully, it's a low volume affair.

Nothing is going to happen to obama, between the fact that they don't have anything and TACO: Barrack won't even have to get off the couch for this.
 

Axaday

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My wife pointed out that there is an earlier offramp than I imagined. A judge will have to approve a warrant and they aren't going to do that, so Obama won't even get arrested. But that is going to make this DEEPLY unsatisfying for MAGA. I think it could be worse than if he had never thought of this distraction at all.

As for the list eventually getting out, they really might have deleted it. I'm not really clear on even what the list is, but I am pretty sure they can just destroy it and it is likely they already did it. What they could NOT stop would be a large group of the victims coming out and talking.
 

Steevy Maximus

Well known pompous pontificator
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Yeah, after stuff like Pizzagate and the attempted kidnapping of a sitting US governor, and the general hostility of right wing media for anyone who bashes the “dear leader”; who also happens to be in control of the most corrupt DOJ and Supreme Court in decades…NOBODY is going to be willing to ”speak out” against Trump at this point.
 

Ungnome

Grand Empress of the Empire of One Square Foot.
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My wife pointed out that there is an earlier offramp than I imagined. A judge will have to approve a warrant and they aren't going to do that, so Obama won't even get arrested. But that is going to make this DEEPLY unsatisfying for MAGA. I think it could be worse than if he had never thought of this distraction at all.

As for the list eventually getting out, they really might have deleted it. I'm not really clear on even what the list is, but I am pretty sure they can just destroy it and it is likely they already did it. What they could NOT stop would be a large group of the victims coming out and talking.
Likely a bunch of copies of the list. It's perfect blackmail material. Anyone who had access to it likely has a copy stashed on a flash drive somewhere so they can use it as leverage.
 

KidTDragon

Now with hi-res avatar!
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wonko the sane?

You may test that assumption at your convinience.
Citizen
Likely a bunch of copies of the list. It's perfect blackmail material. Anyone who had access to it likely has a copy stashed on a flash drive somewhere so they can use it as leverage.
No, there's probably just the one, on a shared drive in the FBI's network. The epstein list the media and everyone else is referring to is an aggregate composition by the investigators tying individuals by name to dates, places people and offense. Sure, epstein had his little black book with names and contact information: but that doesn't mean anything or prove anything. Most people of his generation and era had SOMETHING akin to that book. It's literally just your phones contact list. Corroborating, sure, but nothing on its own.

The epstein list was created by trawling all the video and document information, putting names to faces, and then putting all that jive into an excel sheet. Distilling all the criminality down to a relatively easy to read source code. That's the value of it, it takes the knowledge epstein and maxwell acquired the long way and makes it travel handy. So anyone at all holding can read it, and use it for blackmail: even though they were never there and couldn't know otherwise.

It's also property of the FBI, and a crime to destroy it without permission, and permission consists of a mile long paper trail designed specifically to CYA. It would also be pointless as it's probably backed up a dozen times, and could still be recreated because they still hold all the evidence that they had originally gathered.
 

Cybersnark

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I mean, if it exists in digital form there are absolutely copies, because that's how digital works (when you "move" a file, you're not moving it, you're making a new copy in a new place and auto-deleting the old one).
 

Axaday

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If anyone wants an indication how afraid WSJ is of Trump's lawsuit, they reported today that a leaker told them that the Justice Department notified Trump in the Spring that he is mention in the files.

In other words, "Bring it, big'n"
 

Axaday

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I'm not insider. I see stuff here and there and make suppositions, but government confidential materials are not handled like my files. And Trump's handling of things last time around pushed them to start talking about making everything digital and accessible only through a proprietary tablet. I don't know how much of that has been done.

The problem at the center of this mess is there are no players in Washington handling this properly and they have all exposed themselves to hypocrisy. Random guy in the comments on Facebook doesn't see the entire picture, but makes sense when he says "Why didn't the Democrats release this a year ago when they were in charge?" The answer is that the government doesn't do this. It's not a normal thing for the government to do. The Democrat leaders are only pretending this is urgently needed because they want to get as much spectacle as they can out of Trump's reversal and get people thinking and talking about what it means.

If the police find a body and no fingerprints and it looks like it was done by someone who was angry and they investigate for months and the only thing they turn up is that someone saw Wonko arguing with him the day before, the case will go cold. They will not indict Wonko with that. If someone pressures them to prove that they investigated, it is not reasonable or just policy to release that file. The judiciary has an obligation to maintain a presumption of innocence, but the public do not. They didn't have enough evidence to establish that Wonko killed someone, but if they release that anyway, a lot of people are going to think Wonko is a killer for the rest of his life. You aren't supposed to do that.

Specific to the Epstein case, I don't know how much evidence they have. I know that some victims have testified and stuff. I don't KNOW that the Justice Dept under any President has been diligent to build cases if they can. I don't KNOW if the Justice Dept has stuck it in a closet to protect powerful people. But even if they have, it just isn't something the government is supposed to do to release suggestive, incriminating evidence about someone that they aren't charging with a crime. What the MAGA mob and that Democrats both should be doing is urging the Justice Dept to build cases and indict criminals. If they can't or won't do that, there isn't another recourse and there isn't supposed to be.
 

Ungnome

Grand Empress of the Empire of One Square Foot.
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Encrypted file accessible only via special tablets containing the key wouldn't likely stop the file from being copied, even if was by using a camera taking pictures of the tablet's screen. This also isn't secret military plans, it was a criminal investigation. This investigation started during the Trump 1.0 administration and continued through the Biden administration as well. Likely HUNDREDS of investigators and multiple legislators have seen the document and more than a few of those likely had the ability to copy the information, one way or another.. Just takes one to break this whole thing wide open.

I will agree we should be pushing for prosecution, but we don't currently have a justice department and barely have a court system, so....
 

Axaday

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Is the rest of your sentence that we should throw out people's rights and just say "We think all of these men are probably pedophiles. Or surely at least most of them"? Some of those people would get lynched.
 
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Ungnome

Grand Empress of the Empire of One Square Foot.
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Not exactly. My hope is that once trump 2.0 is over the file survives for the next admin to actually do something with it, though. My fear is they take aim at making the entire investigation vanish. I do firmly believe that those with power SHOULD be under heavier scrutiny than those without, though, and Epstein's list is mostly people with power.
 

Pocket

jumbled pile of person
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Is the rest of your sentence that we should throw out people's rights and just say "We think all of these men are probably pedophiles. Or surely at least most of them"? Some of those people would get lynched.
Now that's an interesting line of thought. Suppose the list gets released. And it's the real list. Unedited. Uncensored. Unredacted. And it leads to an actual mass uprising. Let's just pretend for a moment that Trump doesn't see himself as a target and thus doesn't order the military to stop them, because if he did it'd be a curb stomp. Let's pretend they're storming Washington, all the state capitals, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, wherever someone on the list might live or work. And somehow, they don't just get mowed down by the army like we would reasonably assume they would. Who's in this crowd? Well, realistically, no matter who turned out to be on the list, it'd be the people who have been demanding the list be released, conveniently also the people who have most of the guns in this country, and the same sort of people who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Which is to say, not our sort of people (and not the sort of people we'd be disappointed to see mowed down by the army either *cough*).

But who do they go after? Surely they'd be selective about it, right? It's what they do. They go after "liberals" and "commies" and probably anyone who belongs to a marginalized group and doesn't already fall under the first two categories, and... leave everyone else alone? All those other known pedophiles? That would mean insisting that the list is only half real, or excusing half the people on a list of known pedophiles on the grounds that they've been fighting the good fight. Or would they? They sure didn't seem selective about who they were willing to lynch on January 6. They chanted "Hang Mike Pence", not "Hang Nancy Pelosi", and we've heard phone calls from desperate Republicans begging Trump to call off the mob. As far as they were concerned, all they cared about was their Lord and Savior Donald Trump, and everyone else was the enemy at that point.

And now it's Trump they're angry with the most. The rose-tinted glasses are starting to come off. Against all odds, and against any bet I would have ever dared to make, their undying loyalty to their Immortal God-King is starting to crack. Is it enough to make them actually want to kill him? The last person who tried was a disillusioned former supporter, I hear.

---

My other, unrelated thought:

What I want to know is why Trump didn't just have a fake Epstein list ready to drop as soon as the masses started grumbling, if not sooner. Isn't that exactly his style? We just saw him conjure up an AI deepfake video of Obama getting arrested, and it's not even clear why yet. Lying to people and ruining the lives of everyone he doesn't like are his two favorite things in the world, and a fake Epstein list consisting exclusively of Democrats, the disloyal, and a handful of sacrificial Republicans that the public has long been suspicious of would achieve both those things. Even a fake list that's exactly like the real one except Trump himself is conveniently absent from it would still do him a world of good. I would have expected him to start working on it during his first term. Or am I just too good at thinking like an evil wannabe dictator compared to the one who's actually trying to become one right now? I already knew I'm better at thinking like a good President...
 

Paladin

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every Republican pretending to care about Epsteins' list & the possibility of Donald being on there will not hesitate even for a moment to vote for him a fourth time once the Supreme Court says it's OK for him to have another term.
 

Stepwise

...even Team Whirl.
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So I clicked the link - and I really think Rawstory is in the wrong on this one. That wasn't news, that was a "huh?" phone call that shouldn't have made it on the air, let alone into a click-bait article.
 


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