um sir Article 1 of Nixon's articles of impeachment was for obstruction of justice. it is a thing. it happens a lot of times in Rico cases and organized crime. witnesses who were willing to testify suddenly are "unavailable." gee i wonder why.. (by the way, my example would also include witness tampering.)
one of the things about discovery is parties are asked to disclose all relevant information. when one party, such as Trump, says fuck you to the whole process, he is liable for Obstruction of Justice. did you notice how hard trump worked to make sure that Bolton didn't testify? Bolton knew everything, Trump knew Bolton knew everything, and Trump was willing to do just about anything to make sure Bolton didn't testify. trump is basically a wannabe mafia don. Bolton would have needed an elite 24/7 security detail if he had decided to testify, and it would not have surprised me one bit if he had a sudden "accident" that kept him from testifying. that's how corrupt trump is.
i'm going to answer the other question that i think you're asking. Pelosi and company could have sued to compel Trump to produce people and documents. it would have made it to the Supreme Court eventually, but it would have dragged out til close to the 2020 election. but since their case was airtight-Trump was clearly guilty to any impartial jury- Pelosi and Schiff decided to proceed with the ample evidence already available.
Schiff put on a clinic on how you try a case, especially a criminal case. Newbie prosecutors need to take notes on how Schiff conducted that trial. it was a fucking masterpiece. but Nadler is almost as much a clown as Trump. when i watched Nadler, i was thinking to myself, dude just sit your sorry ass down and stfu already..
any more legal questions lol..
Originally Posted by pxmcc
Rico cases generally have an underlying organized crime charge or charges. Something the person actually did then obstructed in the investigation. Obstruction charges are a piling on of charges to enhance the severity of the crime, the perceived severity of the guilt and punishment. LEO do that all the time. Feds rarely charge someone unless they have a open and shut case. The Justice Department's prosecution and plea deals of FBI referred charges are in the 90 - 95 percent range because "The FBI always gets their man". There may now be some question as to their tactics but that's a matter for another debate. The point is there was no crime...Had the Democrats followed the FBI model they would have dropped that shit like a hot potato and moved on to something else.
Instead they decided to idiotically charge him with Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress. It was idiotic on the surface because there was no underlying crime that they charged him with and it was an idiotic waste of time because they knew that, at the end of the day, they had a biased jury. Their only hope was that a fishing expedition of endless witnesses might uncover something new but the house doesn't control the trial as badly as they tried. Secondarily they hoped that an impeachment trial might sway public opinion but they acted so badly in the lead up it kind of blew up in their faces. Adam Schiff should have never been the front man for that media campaign. He came off way too petulant but he must have been the only person in Congress either dumb enough or power hungry enough to take on the challenge. Nadler is a buffoon trying to ride anyone's coat tails who will feed him a scrap. Pelosi was the puppeteer caught between a rock(lack of charges) and a hard place(radical left wing socialists democrats, lead by the squad, threatening her position as speaker).
That hard place is the reason they didn't drag it out til closer to the election. That would have been a better strategy, IMO but the squad was insisting on doing something NOW. I doubt that SCOTUS would have compelled Trump to release those records but the Dems could have played that decision in their favor for a month leading up to election day. Instead they are thankful now that a national crisis has drawn attention away from their colossal failure of impeachment.
Discovery is the exchange of legal information and known facts of CASE , between parties. Meaning that charges exist and indictment has occurred. At that point both parties are required to disclose what they have. Discovery is NOT a fishing expedition.
Impeachment is indictment. Article I stated that Trump solicited a foreign government, Ukraine, to interfere in the 2020 elections. Discovery should be limited to evidence of that interference. That evidence was a transcript of a phone call. That's all they had. Bolton testifying would not have made a difference. Even if he had said their was a quid pro quo Trump's attorneys would have torn that, and Bolton, apart. The fact is they knew Bolton wasn't going to provide any additional evidence anyway that's why the House didn't call him in the impeachment phase. They wanted to be able to point the finger at the Senate for blowing the trial because they didn't call Bolton. It wasn't the Senate's job to discover anything. It was to render judgement on what the House presented. Their case was so full of holes their only hope was to make The Senate look more biased that the House was.
It was all a bad political showing.
For instance:
They turned over the transcript of the phone call and that fuckhead Schiff sat there and paraphrased it in front of Congress then said it was a parody when called out on it. No judge in America would have let something like that happen, not even in opening or closing where attorneys have greater latitude.