Acting AG Whitaker is dancing with the House Judiciary commitee.
He has been asked to testify voluntarily and has been given the questions in advance. They relate to his discussions with the President. He has been asked if he will invoke executive privilege.
He has said he will testify as long as it is guaranteed he will not be compelled via subpeona at a future date.
This seems to relate to a couple of things.
If he testifies voluntarily he can not answer questions if he chooses without invoking executive privilege.
If he is subpeonaed he is compelled to answer.
Also probably just playing for time, as he’ll seem less important to the Commitee once Barr is confirmed.
Last I checked Australians don’t pay the US govt at all.
I certainly think it’s a good thing that US money is being spent to investigate US crimes committed by US citizens possibly against the US state. Far better that than the burying, obfuscation and delaying tactics actually working, anyway.
Criminality should be investigated and penalised, and the sadder bit here is that someone most suspected of money laundering for years had to become President to be investigated. Most of the people now in jail would have been perfectly fine if they hadn’t shone the spotlight on themselves by running for (and winning) the highest office in the USA.
Which is an indictment on what the rich can get away with. Unless they’re in the spotlight, it all gets ignored because the rich making money by breaking the law isn’t what Police/Investigators actually investigate.
I personally think that investigations into the behaviour of those who are elected and the government is actually a fundamental requirement of a healthy democracy. Its just a shame that the Republicans decided to pervert its purpose by running half-a-dozen Benghazi! investigations (I was fine with one, doing it over and over again for political reasons was ridiculous).
I’m not sure on the whole pardon element. You may well be right. But this may be an exception. Even if he is pardoned, I think this is a good thing.
I don’t care about this woman either way, but if your grandfather’s grandfather were aboriginal, it’d be weird to say you weren’t of aboriginal descent, wouldn’t it?
Nobody on the Dem side is saying its a problem if she says she’s descended from. But she appears to have been saying she is Native American. At 1/64th, I think that’s pretty close to an outright lie.
I can see this happening without malice or nefarious intent. You are told by your family that you have this heritage. You are proud of the heritage. There’s a question asking your heritage and you put it down.
Maybe the link isn’t strong, maybe there’s advantages to being of that heritage, where do you draw the line and say you aren’t Native American enough to call yourself Native American?
There’s a lot of captain hindsight at work in America right now, good people losing their careers for things in the distant past. Things that the individual would in no way support in the present day. The inability to let people redeem past mistakes is not healthy. And to be clear I don’t think past crimes should be excused, but past social errors that have been learnt from should be put in context.
This is why we have police, FBI, and other bodies: to investigate criminality. It shouldn’t be the focus of the the politicians imo. I don’t mind the occasional investigation (such as the banking royal commission, or the one on sexual abuse) but for them to have many different types of investigations going is not overly healthy, even if Trump deserves it.