“The Committees’ position means that nonstop investigations into the personal lives of Presidents (motivated by the hope of finding politically damaging information) will be the new normal whenever the President is from a different political party than the House or Senate.”
Weak argument. He freely and openly puts out all sorts of politically damaging information about himself every day. In fact, some people think that’s a strategy to deflect attention away from what he really doing.
Your Honor: The subpoenas are necessary in order to get the information he is trying to deflect attention away from.
OT. Trump is proposing new immigration requirements including civics test and testing of English fluency. How ironic. He knows nothing about how the government works and has poor command of the English language.
did you read the part about the RFPA (right to financial privacy act)? I need to check the House’s submission, but if its as described, someone really needs to get all the House lawyers on the same page.
As described here, the House is claiming that Congress should not be considered an “agency or department of the United States”, and thus Congress is not subject to the RFPA. The problem here is that Congress relies on the same kind of “agency or department” language to get access to other information – specifically in the “intelligence” exception to the Grand Jury secrecy rules.
Ultimately, the RFPA issue is a hiccup, enough of a problem to force the temporary injuction – but one whose issues can be resolved before a final disposition of the case.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought.”
sorry, but unless a violation of financial law is directly related to campaign finance law, its irrelevant to campaign finance laws.
By that I mean, if money was laundered specifically for use by the Trump campaign, that’s a violation of campaign finance laws.
However, if Trump was laundering funds for Russia on a regular basis, and the proceeds wound up in his checking account, and checks for his campaign were subsequently drawn on that account, its not a campaign finance law violation.
Thus even assuming that a violation occurred, Congress would be entitled only to data from 2015 on.
Moreover, the only “legislative” purpose involved here would be pursuant to how the FEC is operating – so far, THAT has not been among the pretexts cited.
But what about the connections to Russian money, investments, for national security issues? I think the argument could be sound theoretically, but in this case …
