but he is the executive branch personified, so i'd say just let it go and pick better battles.
In other words, you clearly do not care about classified documents nor the rule of law.
It is certainly the case that prosecutors have to exercise discretion, they can’t prosecute every crime. But in this case the former president stole the documents which included top secret SC-I documents containing nuclear secrets (the most serious secrets the government holds), lied repeatedly claiming to not have them, ordered them moved to evade detection, then upon learning his video footage was about to be subpoenaed which would have given away their whereabouts - ordered his staff to delete the footage.
There is no greater battle to pick, you can’t get any more serious or blatant than that. To not prosecute here is to declare Trump above the law, full stop.
it's plausible that he can simply deem in his own head whether something is declassified
When a president declassifies something, he’s not just declassifying a piece of paper. He’s declassifying the information contained on that paper, which is almost certainly copied in multiple locations within the federal government. If the president were able to classify and declassify information within his own mind, all classification functions within the federal government would cease because there would no longer be any mechanism to determine what is or is not classified.
Drop this claim.
the incitement case i see you debating on here all the time, and it's just not the slam dunk you think it is. it's actually very debateable at best whether he incited a riot, and half of people dont think he did, myself included.
If you’re speaking legally I don’t disagree with you, the bar there is extremely high and there’s no telling how a jury would see it. But I’m not talking legally, I’m talking politically - where the bar is common sense.
If you’ve seen me debate this topic before, then what do you take issue with? What is the argument that he didn’t incite them? Let me guess, ‘he said be peaceful’?
That aside, I don’t know your position but the right wing hypocrisy on this issue is astounding. Over the past few weeks since the Kirk assassination all we’ve heard is that the left is to blame for this because they called Kirk mean names, so they clearly incited this deranged individual into doing this. But when it comes to January 6th the president telling the supporters he summoned onto the capitol to “fight like hell or you’re not going to have a country anymore”… well those people were individuals who acted on their own volition. That’s ridiculous.
the case where he was getting attacked for appriasing his property high for one purpose and low for another purpose, as if that's fraud, is another example of witch hunt. that's what anyone might do, within reason.
Correct - within reason. I’ve had properties appraised as well, the game is always to go low when it’s for tax purposes and high when it’s for business. Trump went well beyond that, going as far as lying about how big his penthouse was by tripling its size. That’s not playing the game, that’s fraud.
And yes, that was a state case, not the DOJ.
taken together, all these things just give the public the impression trump's political enemies are doing a witch hunt for political purposes.
Agreed. It’s called propaganda.
if trump is as unlawful as you say he is, you'd find slam dunks of crimes
The documents case was a slam dunk. The fraud case was as blatant as it comes as well. That aside, just because Trump is breaking the law doesn’t mean he’s prosecutable, and that’s setting the immunity ruling aside. What Trump does is play the mob boss game where he communicates to others what he wants them to do in vague terms where they understand what he wants even though he doesn’t tell them explicitly. It’s all about plausible deniability, and he learned that very well from Roy Cohn.
This is why Trump values loyalty over anything else. You can’t possibly think people like Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel are actually qualified for their jobs. He picks people like this because they would have had no shot at anything like this without Trump, so now they will do whatever he wants. You can’t prosecute Trump for the actions of his team unless there’s evidence of direct involvement, which Trump understands very well how to stay out of. The man literally does not even have an email account. Why do you think that is?
that doesn't mean there's not a witch hunt for most things against him.
They sure are finding a lot of witches.