Thursday, November 10, 2016

T minus 18 or something

In regards to this article: Daily Beast -- 75 Lawsuits Against President-Elect Trump

It's nice to have a few things be fair (Perhaps even more so since the actual reason is partisan response to a Bill Clinton scandal.) Trump's Presidential immunity to civil suits will only apply to any scams he engages in after he takes office.

` ` [Bill] Clinton and his defense team then challenged Jones' right to bring a civil lawsuit against a sitting president for an incident that occurred prior to the defendant becoming president. The Clinton defense team took the position that the trial should be delayed until the president was no longer in office, because the job of the president is unique and does not allow him to take time away from it to deal with a private civil lawsuit. The case went through the courts, eventually reaching the Supreme Court on January 13, 1997. On May 27, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Clinton, and allowed the lawsuit to proceed.[3] Clinton dismissed Jones's story and agreed to move on with the lawsuit. ' ' -- [ http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Paula_Jones#Initial_lawsuit ]

My main point of interest in this is the cases related to Trump University. [ Trump University’s Star Student: ‘It Was a Con’ and Trump University of Utah ]  Given my general and often justified lack of faith in the system, I have zero confidence in the prosecution's ability to make anything stick.  I suspect Trump will say that he had no knowledge of how the operation was actually running.  In a just Universe, this would not so easily let him off the hook because gross negligence that allows for the defrauding of a whole bunch of people is surely almost as bad as intentional malfeasance of the same.  But it's clear we don't live in that Universe.  In a Universe that valued facts, running a scam of this kind would surely count against a supposed "man of the people" since he, at the very least, rented his name to nefarious companies that defrauded "the people".







The bad part of that will probably be:  the continued American tradition of mostly ignoring the victims of these scams.  And if the public is briefly forced to acknowledge them, then they handwave a say that the victim "deserved it" -- they "should have known better".  And the thing is--this completely shifts the focus away from the con artist.  It creates a safe space where they can continue to run their scammy games.  It allows them to get elected President, for example.

Note-- the 75 lawsuits part is a bit misleading: article points out that *most* of the 75 are basically junk and meritless for example:
` ` More than a dozen of the 20 ongoing federal cases where Trump is a defendant are actual nonsense, filed against the future president along with co-defendants Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and even Walt Disney, on behalf of seemingly mentally-ill plaintiffs. (Anyone can file a lawsuit.) The complaints in the wildest cases include allegations of kidnapping by the president-elect and his son—members of the supposed Illuminati. ' '



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Furry cows moo and decompress.