So the US Attorney in New York acts on evidence originating with the Mueller team. The home and office and hotel suite of President Trump’s personal attorney are raided.
Burr Deming suggests a contrast:
Only a few years ago, conservatives were attacking President Obama for such scandals as disrespecting his office by wearing a tan suit and for putting his feet up on his desk. Those were the days.
Now we do not need to search for some whiff of corruption. It seems to exist everywhere there is an office of a department of the executive. If you could lob a tennis ball down any hall of congress, a corrupt official will catch it for you. If you pay him enough.
Infidel753 and Dave Dubya, who write persuasively at their own sites, react:
The suspected money laundering that would be involved seems to me too little to justify the enormous effort required for the raid to have taken place.
True. Rich men paying off women to keep quiet about affairs is probably pretty common. The true reasons for the raid likely extend far beyond Stormygate. We already know that for most of his adult life, Trump has been engaged in shady deals with shady characters. If Trump trusted Cohen to handle Daniels, he’s probably trusted him to handle a lot of other sleazy stuff too, and may well be continuing to do so now. The fact that Rosenstein handed this off to other officials separate from the Mueller investigation suggests that whatever they’re looking into isn’t connected with Trump’s official acts, nor potential grounds for impeachment. Nevertheless, if he’s involved in criminal activity unconnected with the government, that still matters. Anything that erodes his support among the Trumpanzees will make Congress less scared to impeach him for the things that are relevant, when the time comes.
I’d bet that the real grounds for the raid involve things that haven’t yet become public knowledge at all.
the entire criminal enterprise that, under Mr. Trump, has come to be known as the federal government.
Libertarians and conservatives have long whined about the “unconstitutional” or “criminal federal government”.
And so have liberals.
The difference being for one side, taxes, regulations, and public health care are the “crimes” and oppressive “tyranny”. Never mind the Constitution calls for taxes, regulation of commerce, and provision for the general welfare.
For the other side, illegal and unprovoked war, torture, corruption by wealth, conspiracy to engage with Russian interference in an election, voter suppression, and unaccountable brutality from law enforcement are the crimes.
None of these are sanctioned in the Constitution.
So who are the “real Americans” here?
“Illegal and unprovoked war, torture, corruption by wealth, conspiracy to engage with Russian interference in an election, voter suppression, and unaccountable brutality from law enforcement” generally don’t involve raising taxes on the wealthy or otherwise infringing the libertarian view of their property rights (especially since Republican governments pay for wars by running up the deficit, not by raising taxes). Therefore, libertarians as libertarians do not feel concerned about them.
Trump’s corruption mostly involves greed. Libertarians generally consider laws and regulations which restrain greed to be illegitimate. They might be a bit discomfited by his using the power of government to boost income via emoluments, but as long as he signed off on a giant tax cut for the wealthy, that’s what counts.
PS: As for vote suppression, I recall many years ago reading a piece by a radical libertarian arguing that any participation in the mechanisms of the “tyrannical” state is so immoral that it is absolutely morally wrong to vote, even if you had the chance to cast the deciding vote to prevent Hitler from coming to power. It was the purest example of the ideological-purist, non-pragmatist stance that I had ever seen. I don’t know how more mainstream libertarians feel about voting.
Have a safe weekend.