• Ranvier
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      4 months ago

      Cannon’s ruling is going to be appealed. If it gets appealed all the way to the supreme court, again (and Clarence Thomas has specifically asked for this in one of his prior rulings), and the supreme court holds with them, then any charges brought by a special counsel in any case are gone. Her ruling invalidates special counsels in general. The office that is pressing charges against Hunter Biden will no longer exist.

      The scary part about this is it means that if Trump were to win he would have every excuse and cover from the judiciary to hand pick his own justice department attorney hires to go after people with no semblance of independence. After all, special counsels aren’t even allowed to be used anymore. So you’re of course right, it does fit into a larger fascist plant, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that it doesn’t or this isn’t all for Trump’s benefit.

      I just wanted to point out that the current move would also be able to get Hunter Biden off the hook on the off chance that it gets anyone blindly supporting Trump immunity to stop and think for a second that maybe this isn’t actually a good thing (since a lot of them seem to have some pretty extreme beliefs about Hunter Biden going to jail).

        • Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Cannon’s ruling is going to be appealed. If it gets appealed all the way to the supreme court, again (and Clarence Thomas has specifically asked for this in one of his prior rulings), and the supreme court holds with them, then any charges brought by a special counsel in any case are gone.

          Have you been paying attention? For the last two and a half years, we’ve seen the entire court system bend over backwards to carve out special exemptions that only apply to Trump, or make Trump exempt from certain laws because reasons. Trump has received special accomodations for no reason other than the fact that he’s Donald Trump. They could very easily declare that the Supreme Court will determine which special counsels are valid and which ones aren’t on a case-by-case basis. And in this case, the special counsel is invalid because Trump couldn’t have been investigated for official acts in the first place, per their previous ruling. And since this presidential immunity doesn’t also cover the president’s children, the special counsel in that case is valid and therefore Hunter’s conviction stands.

          If you objectively follow the logic of their previous rulings, this is pretty much where that road leads to. Special counsels investigating Trump are invalid because Trump is covered by Presidential immunity. Special counsels against Hunter biden are valid because that immunity doesn’t cover a president’s son (until Eric, Don, Ivanka, or Jared need it to). Special counsels currently investigating Biden are valid because it’s not the court’s place to interfere in ongoing investigations, and removing the special counsels would be too disruptive. Or something. It makes sense as long as you don’t think about it too hard. Or at all. Or if you’re a brazenly corrupt Supreme Court judge.

          Precedent doesn’t matter any more. The rules now apply when the Supreme Court says they do. And if they say that the rule only applies to Trump because fuck you that’s why, they’re going to say that the rule only applies to Trump because fuck you that’s why.