As long as the prosecutors are all so uniformly corrupted and in line behind an AG who is in the criminals’ pocket – what then?

Special Prosecutor??

Welcome back Ishmael…one of our “other” advisors!

Better still, they could respond to the FOIA reqquests and let people know if they were spied upon.

12 – If Congress is really concerned about bankrupting the phone companies they can place a cap on damages.

Here’s my proposal – give immunity to the telecoms, but not to the telecom directors and officers who made the decisions. Give immunity to anyone for calls where a foreign power (or agent) was on at least one-half of the call.

Granted, the officers and directors of the telecoms directly involved may not have enough money to pay off all claims, but the telecoms aren’t bankrupted (just bad actors and only if they are bad actors ) and no one has to worry about any kind of liability for helping out when al-Qaeda was calling.

I’d go even this much further – immunity for the period of time between 9/11 and the first Patriot Act passage.

So now you are talking about the liability of telecom execs, after the initial panic period (or possibly before ) and only where no foreign power(agent) was involved in the call.

And, in those settings, we already know that there is immunity if there was a warrant or a qualifying AG certification too – so there you go.

22 – Am I just slow to accept that State Secrets trumps everything else?

No and on paper it shouldn’t – but in practice it has been a depressing deference but, IMO, an understandable deference in some ways when the Executive is so corrupt. This Executive Branch and this DOJ has no real squeamishness about telling courts to kiss their ass and asserting, strongly, that the President can do whatever he wants with no legal check. If the courts disagree – what can they do to enforce their orders with this kind of a criminal Executive Branch? It comes down to individual and personal bravery/foolhardiness/pokerskills of an individual judge.

You know, bmaz mentioned case posture and the ACLU case is not in the best posture and is also not the best “on the facts” case for the SUp Ct to hear. I’m not necessarily upset that it didn’t take cert, or wouldn’t be if we were preRoberts and preAlito. Now – I’m not so sure whether there is a decision to both wait for a better case and also wait out the immunity issue and also wait out the election – things a prudent court wanting to protect its power by issuing an opinion during the Presidency of a President who is not as likely to just defy and to issue that opinion on more solid facts and less conjecture might do – is a possibility or if is just more of the seepage of political sewage.

I don’t think there is any question at all that criminal behaviour can not be protected as a “state secret” and yet – how do you ever get the facts to first prove the crime when the facts themselves are hidden as state secrets too? Add on a criminally corrupt or whipped or self-interested DOJ, with an AG who has made it indubitably clear that his function is to protect criminals in the whitehouse from ever having to be responsible for their crimes – and where do you go from there?

As long as the prosecutors are all so uniformly corrupted and in line behind an AG who is in the criminals’ pocket – what then?