Trump Affidavit Contains Broad-Based Probable Cause of Three Federal Crimes; and Nationalizing The Fossil Fuel Industry

Trump Affidavit Contains Broad-Based Probable Cause of Three Federal Crimes

On August 8, FBI agents seized 33 boxes, containers or items of evidence with more than 100 classified records from Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago compound. They included information classified at the highest levels. The Department of Justice had applied for the search warrant after Trump stonewalled them for seven months.

A federal judge found probable cause to believe that agents would find evidence of three federal crimes at Mar-a-Lago. They include a violation of the Espionage Act, which has recently been used to prosecute whistleblowers, publishers and journalists who publicize evidence of government wrongdoing.

Trump claims that the documents are his but in fact they belong to the National Archives. He is seeking the appointment a special master to review the documents for possibly privileged material. Attorney General Merrick Garland will use the seized documents to inform his decision about whether to indict Trump and/or his associates.

Guest – Law and Disorder co-host Marjorie Cohn, A former criminal defense attorney and professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Marjorie does frequent written and broadcast commentary about these and other legal and political issues.

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Nationalizing The Fossil Fuel Industry

Thomas Hanna has been Research Director for the Democracy Collaborative since 2015, after working for five years as a research assistant to Gar Alperovitz, co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative and well-known historian and political economist. The Democracy Collaborative was founded in 2000 as a research center at the University of Maryland, to develop a theoretical and historical framework for building a truly democratic society, based on the principles of democratic economy, community wealth building and the democratization of ownership.

Hannas areas of expertise include public ownership, privatization, local government, democratic ownership and banking. He is the author and editor of a number of books, articles and reports, including Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States which was published by Manchester University Press in 2018.

Hannas recent article, The Supreme Court is Gutting the Regulatory State. Lets Look at our Other Options, published in In These Times, provides a fascinating analysis of the historical evolution of the regulatory system in the United States. Since the New Deal and the end of World War II, the use of regulatory legislation has been used to protect capitalism, based on the notion that the excesses and injustices of capitalism can be ameliorated primarily through state regulation of private enterprise, rather than large-order shifts in the ownerships of these enterprises. In his article, Hanna articulately explains how these historical attempts to regulate capitalist power within the context of capitalism is destined to fail because of its own structural limitations.

In the wake of the existential threat of catastrophic climate change and rising tide of right-wing extremism, we are seeing ” predictably ” the explicit dismantling of that regulatory system. Hanna explores the recent rulings from the new right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court, particularly the case of West Virginia v. EPA, in which the court literally kneecapped the agencys ability reduce the devastating effects of corporate pollution in order to protect private profit and free enterprise. Hanna explores an alternative vision of creating a system of economic and political democracy based on public and collective ownership of important assets, enterprises and services, including the fossil fuel industry.

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