Hammer time. You can bet Jared, Manafort and Cohen will not be happy to hear this. Seems like a good chance it will pass. Go get 'em, Schniederman.
Quite an interesting statement by the AG. His office has been researching this issue and is looking for such loopholes.
Sounds like it may turn into a footrace between good and evil…
Come on NY legislature - hurry up!!!
Getting those ducks in a row. For Paul Manafort, perhaps a similar effort should be made by the A.G. of Virginia. Virginia has a Dem. Governor (Ralph Northam) & Atty. General (Mark Herring), right?
It appears this may be unique to New York law. But if it is also a feature of Virginia law, which I doubt, then it’s not likely to be changed with this Virginia legislature.
Now, what brilliant NY legislator is going to grab this opportunity to raise his or her profile to national level by introducing this bill to help bring Dump to justice?
I’m skeptical. Doesn’t the NY Senate have a number of Dems who always vote with the Republicans?
But…maybe not:
Hurry! Trump might issue presumptive pardons for every member of his family and all of his business associates any day now. Hell, he might just announce that he’ll pardon everyone he knows except Hillary Clinton and James Comey.
… and earlier this month he pardoned former Bush administration official Scott Libby.
TPM Editors: You got the name of the Bush administration official wrong in the passage cited above. Instead of “Scott Libby” it should read “Perjurous Asshole.”
This is where the country runs into trouble because NY Governor Cuomo, nominally a Democrat, has spent the last 8 years ensuring that the New York Senate is under GOP control–even though the GOP has been in the minority for all this time. First of all, he permitted and encouraged the GOP to take charge of redistricting the senate districts, producing a gerrymander; second, he authorized 8 Democrats to caucus with the GOP as self-described Independent Democrats (IDC). Now that he has an election coming up, he dissolved the IDC and finally scheduled special elections that he delayed to enable the GOP and him to fix the state budget. To keep a long story short, this legislative change will now depend on Cuomo’s ability to handle a NY Senate whose Republican faction has far more power than its vote share merits. It’s literally a 50-50 R-D position.
This is all in a blue state, remember. This isn’t one of those red states that need to be managed with care. This is what happens when your Democratic senator, in order to appease his rightwing donors and maximize his personal power, sells out to the GOP in the name of centrism and reasonableness.
Good point but I think the writing is on the wall for the Republican party, especially in Democratic states.
he pardoned former Bush administration official Scott Libby.
he pardoned former Bush administration official Scott Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
It’s a good thing Mitch McConnell isn’t in charge of the NY State Senate. He’d just say that he doesn’t think Trump is going to pardon anyone, so no bill to protect justice in New York will ever go to the floor.
p.s. Good catch, AG Schneiderman.
But, of course, Andrew Cuomo is a Real Democrat, so according to some people you just need to shut the hell up and get back in line…
Does anyone suspect that Chiselin’ Trump might have pardoned Libby solely because he mistakenly believed that Libby’s sole novel, The Apprentice, was an homage to Chiselin’ Trump’s ridiculous reality TV show?
Without doing so, Attorney General Eric Schniederman wrote, “a defendant pardoned by the President for a serious federal crime could be freed from all accountability under federal and state criminal law, even though the President has no authority under the U.S. Constitution to pardon state crimes.”
My memory, limited though it is, of prior discussion of this topic was not nearly as apocalyptic as it now appears to be if Schniederman is saying this. So now we learn that if Trump pardons anyone they will ipso facto be immune for any violation of NY law as well?! If that’s right, it’s a disaster, and why the hell are we only hearing about that now?!
Honestly? I figured it was revenge on the IC.
With Cynthia Nixon running to his left I think Cuomo needs to get out in front of this.