Countdown Clock, Trump Going to Jail by THG

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Countdown Clock, Trump Going to Jail

POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Tuesday, November 19, 2024 15:51
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Friday, August 19, 2022 6:22 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

You have absolutely no proof of this or anything else you've accused Trump of.

And now that EVERYTHING else has failed, you're back on the tax issue.

You also pretend that no Democrats cheat on their taxes. That's hilarious.

You are an insane person.

You are already showing what Trumptards will do when Trump goes to trial. To understand what the Trump investigation might do to America, look at Israel

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on trial, and it has thrown Israeli politics into chaos. Americans should pay attention.

Trump’s legal woes have become the biggest issue in the country. There are at least four ongoing criminal investigations that touch Trump and his business interests, any one of which could eventually yield an indictment.

Politically, Trump and Netanyahu are very much alike: charismatic populists who have transformed established center-right parties into increasingly radical cults of personality. Netanyahu was prime minister for Trump’s entire presidency and emerged as one of his closest allies on the global stage, even putting Trump on one of his campaign posters.

Both men stand accused of serious anti-democratic abuses while in office. Both have responded with nearly identical campaigns against the legal authorities, accusing investigators of engaging in a “witch hunt” at the behest of liberal elites. And both appear likely to contest their country’s next general election — Israel’s in November, the United States’s in 2024 — with decent odds to win.

One difference between the two: Netanyahu is on trial now. Given the right-wing-driven, antidemocratic drift in both countries, the Israeli experience of holding a former populist leader accountable may well be instructive for Americans.

When I visited Israel this summer, the effects of the Netanyahu trial on the country were plainly on display. The proceedings have polarized Israeli politics and pushed Netanyahu and his followers to embrace a more aggressive antidemocratic stance.

“The democratic process in Israel has reached a crisis stage,” Efraim Halevy, the former director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, told me. “You have people speaking out, advocating the use of [political] violence.”

In the United States, where extreme polarization already looks like a democratic extinction-level event, the pressures of a Trump trial could cause even graver damage. It could further intensify the GOP’s anti-democratic descent while galvanizing a radical fringe that has already responded to a mere search warrant with violence.

None of this means that prosecuting Netanyahu was the wrong decision, or that Trump’s grip on the GOP should be a get-out-of-jail-free card. There are powerful reasons to believe that a failure to prosecute serious offenses can itself damage democracies, perhaps irreparably.

But the Israeli example should inform Americans of the risks of a Trump prosecution — and prompt the US to brace for more political turmoil and discord if the former president does go on trial.

How Netanyahu’s trial changed Israel

Netanyahu is not the first Israeli leader to face charges.

In 2008, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert chose to resign amid mounting legal woes, triggering a 2009 election that Netanyahu would (ironically) win. Olmert’s subsequent trial and conviction on corruption charges had little effect on Israeli politics, largely a sideshow in a country that had moved on. The Olmert affair was, in some ways, a model of how democracies should hold elites accountable for criminal behavior.

The Olmert prosecution did not lead to a political meltdown because, at the time, Israeli politics were not especially polarized along partisan lines. While there were major disagreements among the parties in the Knesset (parliament) on everything from peace with the Palestinians to the proper role of Judaism in public life, these divides did not manifest in the sort of rigid and all-encompassing feuds between rival camps that would conquer Israel by the 2020s.

So what changed over that time?

Netanyahu became prime minister.

There have long been signs of the Likud leader’s willingness to push the bounds of normal politics. After his first term in office, from 1996 to 1999, Netanyahu blamed the press for his defeat in the 1999 elections: “I need my own media,” as he put it at the time. After regaining the top job in 2009, in elections held as a result of Olmert’s resignation, he allegedly used his new position to create it.

His most notable reported offense was a deal with the parent company of Walla, a major online news outlet, in which Netanyahu was accused of approving a lucrative merger in exchange for more favorable coverage. He also reportedly attempted to reach a similar agreement with the newspaper Yediot Ahronot, in which he would receive better coverage in exchange for curbing the circulation of competitor Israel Hayom (a free, pro-Netanyahu tabloid founded by American billionaire Sheldon Adelson).

Beginning in 2016, while Netanyahu was still in office, Israeli police began investigating these allegations of media tampering — as well as evidence that the prime minister and his wife Sara had received inappropriate gifts. After two years of inquiry, Israel’s top prosecutor formally recommended that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit file bribery and breach of trust charges against the prime minister. Mandelblit, a right-winger and former Netanyahu deputy, agreed. The trial began in March 2020 and is ongoing today, with no clear end date in sight.

Netanyahu has responded by going to war with the legal system.

More at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23301390/trump-investigation-m
ar-a-lago-search-netanyahu

We need to be clear-eyed about where current investigations are taking us: not toward a Hollywood climax, where the Trump era ends with a guilty verdict, but toward dangerous politics.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, August 19, 2022 9:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Trump will be fine.

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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, August 23, 2022 4:40 PM