You are way off base here. I know there are plenty of trials without juries and I never said anything about it except that in trials with a jury, both sides try to get people on the jury that are not biased against them. This is an Impeachment, not a state or federal trial. Different rules. Impeachment is different. As I said previously, the entire Senate is the jury and all are biased one way or another. End of story.

Apparently you don't know diddly sqat about this impeachment if you think House lawyers were a allowed to present all their evidence. First, I don't believe the house had lawyers.
They used representatives some of whom may have been lawyers. Second, they weren't allowed to present any documents and third, they weren't allowed to call on any witnesses in the Senate trial. In fact they weren't allowed to call on some witnesses they supeneaod or even see unredacted docments in either the House investigation or during the Senate trial. If you disagree, then name the witness heard during the Senate trial. Show me that Mueller's report or any unredacted documents were allowed to be presented in evidence. The Republican majority voted to surpress anything incriminating during the Senate rule making and only allowed verbal arguements.. According to the constitution, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is to preside . The Republican rules reduced him to a reader of questions. This was not a real trial as perceived by our founders, it was a political farce trial.

Of course, the Senate "....voted that they didn't need anything more to arrive at their majority decision based on what was already presented." During rule making the Republicans decided that Chief Justice Roberts wouldn't be allowed to determine what evidence and testimony would be presented. They had the power and made sure no evidence would be presented.

The Republicans made a disgrace of this trial and set a dangerous precedent for future impeachment proceedings that greatly damaged our democracy. They have made it almost impossible to impeach and remove anyone from office that is subject to impeachment.

Not an ounce of evidence here, but a ton of BS.

Prove it, or didn't your handlers in St Petersburg tell you what to say?

Dennis and WNYShooter,
Remember this is a quasi/legal procedure. The purpose of the house was to determine if a crime was committed. It wasn’t a trial. It was a combination of an investigation and an open grand jury investigation. Dennis, you should know that at this stage the suspect of an investigation may be questioned but there isn’t a defense mounted at this time. In other words, the suspect isn’t controlling the investigation, the investigators are in control. When enough evidence is collected it is presented to the grand jury to determine if there is enough evidence to go to trial.

The impeachment procedure follows a similar path except the House conducts a combination of the investigation and the grand jury function but the outcome is the same. The House votes to determine if there is enough evidence to go to trial by the Senate. There isn’t two trials, one in the House and one in the Senate. The House does the investigation and the Senate conducts the trial.

However, what is different in the impeachment trial versus
a regular trial is that there is no jury selection and while the defense can present their evidence at this time, in this case the republicans voted that absolutely no evidence would be allowed, from either side..... no testimony and no documents. A regular trial would not be conducted like this. So this was a kangaroo court, but it was the defense that controlled the procedure and turned it into a kangaroo court by suppressing all evidence to assure acquittal.

The House did what it was supposed to do, gather evidence and write the Articles of Impeachment. It was the Senate that failed to do its job when it sabotaged the proceedings and turned the trial portion into to a sham. I hope the republicans senators pay dearly for this miscarriage of justice.

Posting this graph is disingenuous. Show the whole graph since 2008, not just the portion after 2016. You will see the slope of the graph to be the same before 2016 as it was after2016. if the Obama recovery was slow, so is the trump recovery.

Obama had to deal with 5 problems left behind by bush.
1. War in Iraq started by bush.
2. War in Afghanistan started by bush.
3. Low employment and low tax receipts.
4. Tax cuts when money was needed to pay for the wars bush started.
5. An unregulated housing securities market (that he was warned about) that brought down the major investment banks, ruined Lehman Brothers as well as nearly bankrupted AIG and the auto industry.

Trump on the other hand inherited a robust economy and is claiming credit for Obama’s leading us out of the Bush recession.

This is an interesting point since none of us have read the full report because the incriminating parts were redacted.

I don’t want to go into a marathon discussion about this, so I have just two things to say: 1. The purpose of the house impeachment was to investigate and determine if there is evidence of a crime, much like a grand jury. Trump prevented evidence to be presented both verbally and by submitting redacted documents. There wasn’t a kangaroo court when evidence wasn’t allowed to be presented.
2. Hunter Biden has nothing to do with the the the impeachment. That is a deflection from the issue.

Both sides are causing dissension and division. That’s Boris’s and Ivan’s goal. They want both sides fighting.....like we do here.

[quote=dennis2146]Of course we can John. If I made a mistake in Comey's title then I can only offer my apology. Thanks for pointing that out. I am darn near perfect but of course not REALLY perfect. That can only be said about Jesus.
Of course Comey was Director of the FBI. As such he was, as are all Directors of the FBI, at risk of being terminated by the POTUS. Surely you are aware of that with all your knowledge of all things American.

No I don't agree that Mueller found plenty of evidence of collusion. Why didn't he do something about it? We all know collusion isn't a crime. What then was the Mueller investigation about? Why a three year investigation and millions of dollars spent only to then say, as you seem to be saying, Yes we did find out that Trump colluded with Russia but that is in no way a violation of the law so Kings X, no harm no foul.

Mueller supposedly found evidence of obstruction of justice and I believe that is what Frosty pointed out as well but not collusion. Having said that maybe you can explain why Congress did nothing at all with the so called evidence of obstruction of justice. Adam Schiff said numerous times he definitely had evidence to impeach Trump and yet...not one bit of that so called evidence was used in the final impeachment of the President. I have seen cases and heard of numerous cases where the evidence pointed to a sure conviction of the criminal from shoplifting to Murder as in the O.J. Simpson case where all of the so called evidence was wrong the the so called guilty party walked. Evidence is only evidence IF the jury finds the person guilty. Otherwise it is just one side saying they THINK the person is guilty. So all of the so called evidence against President Trump proved to be nothing more than a Democratic pile of chicken shit.

Thank you as always John for your informative contribution to the thread. I know each of us is thankful for your comedic contributions. Have a wonderful day.

Dennis[/quo
You must bear mind that impeachment is not a legal process but a political/quasi legal process. There was no jury selection where the prosecution seeks people without biases. This jury (the senate) consisted of people that were all biased one way or another. Had there been a democratic majority, the rules of evidence would have been different with witnesses testimony and documents allowed to be entered as evidence. This procedure was conducted without either. Senate republicans made sure of that during impeachment rule making. Even if witnesses, documents and Muellers report were allowed, unless the democrats had 66 or 67 majority, trump would have been acquitted anyway. In the end, it was purely a political process. Acquittal means nothing.

This message brought to you from the folks, including Boris, aka Angmo, working out of a four-story building at 55 Savushkina Street, Primorskiy district, St. Peterburg.

Their job is to cause dissension among Americans. They, including Boris or Ivan or whatever their names are, are doing a fine job here at UHH.

[quote=dennis2146]You are wrong once again John. If there was no evidence then there is no crime. You Lefties persist in telling us Trump was a criminal and is corrupt. Evidence John, show us the evidence. Your problem is you cannot come up with any evidence. It is you and yours who are corrupt.

Dennis[/quot


Dennis,
Mueller came up with ten instances of trump obstructing justice. He was prohibited from indicting the president because of the OLC memo. I’m sure you know that. (In his report, Mueller did not ultimately charge the president. He made clear during his afternoon testimony that because of the OLC opinion, his team did not even reach a conclusion about “whether the president committed a crime.” This point was a major clarification of an earlier exchange in which Mueller seemed to signal that he would have potentially charged the president, were it not for the OLC opinion.)

Mueller was unable to do anything except follow the constitution and let congress do what it says congress can do under these circumstances. Every one that had any sense of our political conflicts knew the Senate would acquit trump, but the house proceeded anyway knowing some senators would have to answer to their constituents for their vote.

Twelve legal experts looked at the evidence of obstruction of justice and conspiracy and, “came to near-consensus on both questions. While Mueller may not have had sufficient evidence to charge anyone with conspiracy, the experts agree that plenty of evidence exists. The same is true of the obstruction question. As one expert put it, “the Mueller report provides a road map for prosecuting Trump for obstruction of justice, but stops short of this finding because of legal doubts about indicting a sitting president.”

“The Constitution, for its part, does not address the possibility of criminal charges against a sitting president. It only asserts that the president can be impeached for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”—and only the House of Representatives has the power of impeachment.

The notion that President Donald Trump cannot be charged while in office for criminal offenses, the obstacle that apparently prevented Special Counsel Robert Mueller from indicting him, is a shibboleth.
Mueller’s soporific performance as an unwilling witness in a pair of hearings on July 24 in the House of Representatives addressed that issue. But Mueller, whose demeanor was akin to that of a child being dragged to the dentist after swallowing caster oil medicine, vacillated on whether that was the basis for the declination to pursue criminal charges of obstruction of justice against the president.”


Marshall H. Tanick
“The reluctance to prosecute is derived from an extrajudicial, nonbinding, self-serving, outmoded memorandum written by second-tier personnel in the Department of Justice that has taken on an unwarranted mantle of legal probity. In fact, it is more vulnerable than venerable.
The concept stems from an opinion issued by a low-echelon lawyer in the bowels of a government body called the Office of Legal Counsel, known in the Beltway circles as the OLC. A unit within the Department of Justice (DOJ), it gives advice to the president and other executive departments, including DOJ lawyers who can’t figure out the answers themselves — sort of like a bench coach advising a baseball manager or a high school guidance counselor aiding an uncertain student. In some cases, the president has to approve the OLC’s actions; fat chance that one would rebuke the view that the president is criminally immune while in office.”

“The Supreme Court has yet to determine whether a sitting president can be criminally indicted, however, leaving the 1973 and 2000 DOJ memos as the only enforceable regulation.”

P.S. Nice couple of fish. I do all my writing on a small cell phone, so the picture is quite small also, but the fish look like some big tasty rainbows

I think I have you figured out. You are not a person but are several persons sitting in Moscow in front of a computer whose job it is to get on American social media and cause dissension between liberals and conservatives. Your team is probably not good enough to be on the major social media outlets, therefore your team was assigned to this low volume forum

They must have told your team to keep repeating “evil
lefties, etc. If repeated often enough someone might believe it.

This is partially correct. Although there has never been “free markets”, if they did exist, they would soon create monopolies, like the game Monopoly.
Government also creates monopolies for the public good, such as power companies and sometimes garbage collection. These monopolies need to be highly regulated by the government or prices would sky rocket.

Also the economic crisis of 07and 08 was not caused by government interference but rather because of the lack of government oversight. Government had no means to regulate banks making poor loans, bundling them up and selling these loans to investment banks who in turn divided them up some more and sold them to retirement funds etc.

By the way, Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail by Secretary Hank Paulson who had worked for Goldman Sachs before going to work for government and didn’t like Lehman Brothers for some reason. He opposed out Lehman Brothers but favored bailing out the other investment banks.

Henry “Hank” Paulson

Then: US Treasury secretary
Now: chairman of University of Chicago’s Paulson Institute
As Lehman descended towards bankruptcy, Paulson was adamant the bank should not be rescued. Stung by criticism of the Treasury’s support for other failing financial companies, Paulson said he did not want to be seen as “Mr Bailout”.
Paulson, the former boss of Goldman Sachs, was already wealthy when he became a public servant.

Easy to say but nothing backing it up, therefore, a useless comment.

Think outside of the box you are in.