Slickwilly, in his estimable Comment of the Day on the post, “President Trump Reportedly Will Not Cooperate With The House Democrats’ Effort To Keep Investigating Him Until They Can Find Something To Impeach Him With,” explores the related and important ethics issues of over-criminalization, prosecutorial abuse and “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” (Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief. Of course, he said it in Russian…)
I know I’ve written on the topic, and would love to include some links, but for the life of me I can’t figure out the key words that would lead me to any of those posts.
_____________________
Of course Trump broke laws.
So did I. So did Jack. EVERYONE breaks laws every day they draw breath. This is a fishing expedition to find them and prosecute anything at all. There are so many laws from so many jurisdictions that you cannot live outside a rubber room and not actively break one.
“…the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes… If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?”
For instance: It is illegal to lie down and sleep with your shoes on in North Dakota; singing off-key is illegal in North Carolina; unmarried Florida women who parachute face jail time; taking a picture of a rabbit (without a permit) from January to April is verboten; walking a dog without a diaper (on the dog) is forbidden in Mississippi; and California insists you not eat an orange in a bathtub.
Take a picture of a rabbit? This one is easy to prove, too: Metadata in digital pictures can tell the time, date, and location of a photo. Post that little indiscretion online and *poof* you are a criminal.
Those are only some looney state laws. Federal laws include confusing copyright infringement with terrorism; taking a fake sick day is “a scheme or artifice to defraud” your company; and failing to affix a mandatory sticker to your UPS package could send you to prison. (You likely break copyright law any time you forward a meme, email, or text someone else created that violates the law… and those laws have TEETH!)
We all have heard of the ‘lying to a federal agent’ non-crime. We know where it has been abused lately, at the highest levels, even where it seems no false statements were made. How does that apply to you? Say you tell a National Park ranger that you cleaned your campsite. He then finds a paper plate you missed. You just lied to a federal agent.
The Lacey Act states it is illegal to “import, export, sell, acquire or purchase fish, wildlife or plants that are taken, possessed, transported or sold: 1) in violation of U.S. or Indian law, or 2) in interstate or foreign commerce involving any fish, wildlife or plants taken, possessed or sold in violation of State or foreign law.”
Think about this. You go to WalMart and purchase a cool hat, made of natural fibers. As it turns out, the fibers were sourced from Honduras, and were harvested out of season by Honduran statute. You did not harvest the fibers. You did not make the hat. You did not import the hat. But those activities broke foreign law, and you purchasing the fibers in the hat violates The Lacey Act. Don’t think innocent Americans have not been sentenced to prison for similar violations. All it takes is someone to notice and decide to prosecute.
In this way alone, we all are very likely to have verboten products in our home, or or office, or church… you get the picture. A search warrant for, say, drugs, executed on the wrong address (and that finds no drugs) could be used to apply The Lacey Act, just to cover up the government’s error.
I have not scratched the surface at the laws we break. Own your own business and the complexities multiply by a factor of 100.
All it takes is for you to become a target.
Given the way progressives go after those who oppose them, or simply are not ‘woke’ enough, how long until they clamor for such a fishing expedition for someone who uses the wrong pronoun? You deserve to be destroyed for your transgender transgression, and any means necessary are legit for progressives. So an investigation finds that you bought that hat… and the full force of federal law is imposed upon you… even if you are progressive. (May God have mercy on your soul if you are Republican or, worse, conservative.)
Serves you right!
Trump had better not cooperate with these investigations: they are legal traps waiting to be sprung in an effort to thwart a legitimate election.
Ethics Alarms 
Trump should challenge Congress on each request demanding how the inquiry serves to provide their Constitutionally valid oversight role.
Congressional oversight relates to the activities of government of which the Executive branch is empowered to manage. If Congress believes Trump has committed a crime in the process of carrying out the executive duties it can request a special prosecuter but only if they can specify a crime they believe has actually occurred.
I still do not know how Mueller can convene a grand jury when the Mueller investigation was originally a counterintelligence investigation and was not a criminal investigation because no crime was specified. How it legally transitioned into a criminal one which could not justify a special counsel investigation initially is beyond my understanding of the special counsel law.
What about firearms laws? They are draconian. Breaking even the smallest federal firearms law is a felony with 10 year prison terms (worse than manslaughter).
A man’s felony sentence for dropping mail into the mail box in his post office mail box while he had a firearm in the car was upheld by the Supreme Court. There was no sign in the parking lot. It is illegal to bring a firearm onto federal property unless you are blessed by association with the almighty government. If your post office owns the parking lot and it isn’t shared with a private business, you have committed a felony just by entering the parking lot (even to turn around).
Either he had a bad attorney or the Supreme Court justices hate freedom.
I would have put together a slideshow of properties and asked the Justices to guess which ones you can turn around in. The scenario would be that you have a concealed carry permit and have an unloaded firearm in the trunk of your car because you are moving from one state to another. You turn off the highway to get something to eat, turn the wrong way out of the parking lot and need to turn around to get back to the highway. The properties would be:
(a) a bowling alley
(b) another bowling alley
(c) a grocery store
(d) another grocery store
(e) a gas station
(f) another gas station
(g) a post office
(h) a privately-owned, post office affiliate
(i) a house
(j) another house
(k) a third house
(l) a gun store
None of the properties has a sign indicating firearms are not permitted.
The answers: Entering properties a, d, e, h, i, j, and k are felonies. All are on federally-administered land. Post office g may seem like it would be illegal, but it is a parking lot shared with private businesses. The privately owned post office affiliate may seem legal, but it has a gravel parking lot, indicating that it is not part of the state, but tribal land. The gun store may seem obvious, but it is on federally administered tribal land. However, because it is leased to a white man, he retains his Constitutional rights and firearms are permitted. If it were rented to a tribal member, they would not retain their Constitutional rights and firearms would be prohibited.
The kicker is that the restaurant I would put in the slideshow (right off the highway) is on federally administered land and a felony was committed when they entered the parking lot. Technically, if you were in a car accident and you were forced off the road onto any of these properties, you would commit a felony. If a police officer tries to pull you over in the wrong area, you will commit a felony if you pull over. If you don’t pull over and the officer forces you off the road, you commit a felony then as well.
This is what gun owners have to learn to remain law-abiding gun owners. Any of the above infractions results in felon status and forfeiture of your 2nd Amendment rights for life. Getting gas in the wrong gas station carries a longer prison sentence than dealing drugs, burglarizing a house, or manslaughter. As you can see, we don’t have enough gun laws.
Trump holds a New York City concealed carry permit. It is rumored to be impossible to get one without bribing officials in New York City. The gun laws there are draconian.
Former President Obama gave him the model of non-cooperation. Now all he has to do is follow that template.
To the point of your post, Harvey Silvergate and Alan Dershowitz have already described the phenomenon you discuss in their seminal work, Three Felonies a Day
They were the start of my enlightenment years ago. I have since researched deeper and found just how bad things are.
Thank you, Jack, for the honor.