@mrmhead Said 
I'll admit, I don't follow all this stuff that closely, and some of these details and definitions (interpretations) escape me.
But there is Wiki!!
In 1994, Paula Jones filed a lawsuit accusing Clinton of sexual harassment when he was governor of Arkansas. Clinton attempted to delay a trial until after he left office, but in May 1997 the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the case to proceed and shortly thereafter the pre-trial discovery process commenced.
.. So had the Paula Jones case proceeded along (more legal mumbo-jumbo), would there not have been an indictment?
... and if the case was stopped by SCOTUS, Clinton wouldn't have committed perjury and obstruction of justice.
There may have been...I didn't really explain it well.
There's nothing in the Constitution that says the President can't be indicted. It's not impossible..it's just incredibly unlikely that anyone would be indicted
while actually serving in office. The president can technically be indicted, it's just that pragmatically, the process of impeachment is in place to keep an acting president in office so that if whomever is serving is going to be indicted, we remove him or her from office and put in place another person to act as president.
All of that is kind of moot though, honestly. Kavanaugh never said the president couldn't be indicted...what he actually said is that the president can be investigated and indicted unless Congress passes a law saying he or she can't. Which is correct. And he said it in 2009 in reference to his own involvement as personal counsel for Ken Starr during the Clinton investigation, long before anyone ever held any notion that Trump would be the president. He held in the 90s during the Starr debacle that a president should be subject to criminal investigation, but then later while working directly for the Busch administration, he said he came to understand the demands of the presidency and that the office required full attention, even suggesting the Starr investigation distracted Clinton from his focus on bin Laden.
So then, in 09, as a newly appointed judge, he proposed that Congress might pass a law to protect the president from criminal indictment while in office, essentially just tightening the policy that's already loosely in place.
It's no small overlooking of fact that this took place during the Obama administration, by the way.
So if a law by Congress is necessary to fix that perceived problem, logically it follows that it's perfectly Constitutional to investigate and charge a sitting president, as with the Starr investigation, which he admitted was a distraction.
Jul 11, 2018 @ 23:32:50
)
Moderator
