No. of Recommendations: 3
But, again, those hurdles are not insurmountable. Congresspeople are indicted and prosecuted and convicted for bribery under these rules.
True. But most Members of Congress don't have the resources a President has to filter and hide information inside of their exempt bubble. A President filters the vast majority of his outside communications through his staff. That makes the connections much harder.
In the two recent cases against Menendez and Cuellar, the DOJ was able to get search warrants for their homes to generate admissible evidence. Good luck getting a search warrant for the White House, never mind the fact that the DOJ won't even begin an investigation until the president suspected of a crime is out of office.
Again, I agree that it all looks nice on paper. We'll have to see how it works out in practice as the NY fraud case wends its way through it's various appeals. I suspect we may get lucky, in that there is so much evidence available that is clearly outside of these protections that it won't matter.
But what about the Jan 6 case? That case depends more heavily on testimony from those inside the White House. Could Hatch Act violations pierce the wall of immunity - turning conversations between President and official staff into conversations between a candidate and his campaign staff?
--Peter
