“Look, if a former president can be investigated, so too can a current president.”
— The Recount (@therecount) May 9, 2023
— Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) claims there are “potential multiple smoking guns” in the investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. pic.twitter.com/o4YmEgFOU1
When during July, 2019 he testified before Congress
former special counsel Robert Mueller noted that part of his decision to refrain from considering an indictment of President Donald Trump was attributed to a long-standing Justice Department policy: According to the agency’s Office of Legal Counsel, a sitting president cannot be charged with a federal crime.
“We, at the outset, determined that, when it came to the president’s culpability, we needed to go forward only after taking into account the OLC opinion that indicated that a sitting president cannot be indicted,” he said.
The OLC policy itself is relatively straightforward: Most recently reevaluated in 2000, it argues that the executive branch would be incapacitated by a criminal prosecution:
The indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.
That was, and remains, in terms Joe Biden would understand, malarkey. There was no constitutional or statutory impediment to prosecuting a sitting President for a criminal offense. Mueller chose not to state explicitly that President Trump had appeared to have committed a crime because he was a Marine who didn't want to create additional controversy. However, he did state that the President could be charged with obstruction of justice once he left the office.
Moreover, as The Hill reported at the time, "hundreds of former federal prosecutors and DOJ officials have signed on to a letter saying that they believe Trump would have been charged with a crime were it not for the guidance" of a policy memorandum from the Department of Justice." (It shouldn't have stopped prosecution, but it did.)
This is not a hard-and-fast rule. Nevertheless, it was one which a Justice Department in a Democratic Administration followed when it investigated a Republican president. Nonetheless, Nancy Mace wants us to believe that the reason Donald Trump wasn't charged was not because he was a sitting President but because there was little reason to believe he had committed a crime. The Biden Justice Department gave President Trump a break, and now a fairly prominent Republican is trying to gaslight the public in return.
Today, someone who was fine with an American citizen trying to overthrow the federal government is telling the DOJ "to get off their ass.
“The DOG — DOJ — needs to get off its ass … If these allegations — any of these allegations — are proven true, then someone with the last name Biden needs to be charged, prosecuted, and maybe spend a little time in prison.”
— The Recount (@therecount) May 10, 2023
— Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) on Biden family probe pic.twitter.com/s2oDt0eXpr
Representative Mace wants Joe Biden undermined and Donald Trump, the probable 2024 GOP presidential nominee, elected President/ She is never lumped in with bomb-throwing colleagues such as Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, or Paul Gosar. She is among those Republicans considered by the center-left media to be a "moderate" and "normal," demonstrating once again that such an animal is now virtually extinct.
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