French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

Since a few days, there is an abundance of cover and articles in most major newspaper here with propaganda and repeated lies supporting him. It's hard to imagine but non stop. You have everyday interviews of his family saying that it is an injustice, that he did nothing, that the judgement was rigged, that he was a great men that served France and so should not be treated like everyone else. Article about how sad the poor family is. Number of articles repeating friends of him verbatim s that the judgement was fake.

Almost none speaking about the facts, the grounds for his sentence, the big number of other trials against him that are running. And also the other definitive convictions he got. Like for attempting to bribe a head prosecutor to get insider info about his case. Using a prepaid line opened with a fake name...

But what you see in the end is that 90% of medias in France belongs to a few wealthy families that are friends with him.

I don't disagree with him going to jail: but it's one heck of a corrupt country where they all have their hands in the cookie jar.

Most french politicians who served at the EU, for example, have friends and family as "employees" on their payroll (well, on the EU citizens' payroll). Same at non-EU level: it's called "emplois fictifs" in french ("fictional jobs"). Soooo many stories about politicians at so many local, regional, national and supra-national levels engaging in "emplois fictifs".

So many mayors in France have dirty money on their hands. Where for example they block construction permits then, once joyfully greased with cash, allow the construction permits.

But Sarkozy was right-wing and the EU, and France in particular, is ultra left-wing. So it's good to put a right-wing president in jail.

Once again: I've got nothing against him going to jail. But we're talking about a country were judges are openly leftists. They're not impartial.

It's all rotten and disgusting.

And why do you think all the leftist french mainstream media root for right-wing Sarkozy? Because these media are at the hand of corrupt politicians who think a politician going to jail is a dangerous precedent. They're nearly all corrupt, so they're shitting their pants to see that even a president is sent to jail.

But yup: one politician in jail. Great. Only 9999 more to go. And corrupt judges.

Sorry, why is this such a big deal?

How much of this is driven by contrarian and counter-cyclical reporting?

I’m not familiar with French media, but I see the same pattern in every country where I’ve kept up with the news: Media starts being favorable to a topic when it’s up and coming, switching to being highly critical when that topic becomes mainstream, then reverts again to exploring the positives when the topic falls out of favor.

You see it even with people like Elizabeth Holmes. News stories about her fraud were everywhere until she had to go to jail, but now the news has swung to humanizing her, claiming her sentencing was excessive, focusing on the angle of a mother separated from her children, and confusingly ignoring her fraud at all.

It’s all designed to be counter-narrative and rise waves of controversy. The more controversial, the more shares and views.

By 2024 they were 100% in lock-step with the party line that all cases were fake news lawfare (but wouldn't engage with detailed argument, of course) and in 2025 they are gaslighting me about ever having had those arguments at all. The only thing keeping me sane is the correspondence that I kept proving that our conversations weren't a product of my own fevered imagination.

Clearly, all the right-wing papers that have traditionnaly supported him (Le Figaro, Match) and all the hard-right-wing papers (owned by Bolloré, Arnault, etc..) that have _personnal_ ties to him are playing their "opinion" part.

I don't think public media is defending him at all. Left or Center-left papers are not (obviously.)

The tie breaker would be: "what is TF1 20h saying" (this is, no matter what new media says, still the one thing that most people watch and treat as "the news") - and I don't think they have been "blatantly" defending him.

Which are the "leftist french mainstream media" rooting for Sarkozy ?

The "leftist french mainstream media" I can think of would be Libération, Le Monde, Le Nouvel Obs, France Inter...

Do you have a link to articles where any of those are "defending" Sarkozy, cause quite frankly I missed it.

There is a reason why administrations don't go after obvious, in-your-face crimes committed by previous administrations/politicians. They all hate each other, but they are also terrified that if they prosecute previous administrations (for legitimate crimes), they'll be the target when someone else is in power (even if they themselves didn't commit any crimes).

I suppose it might be easier to prevent misbehavior by highest officials of the land by having stricter scrutiny, laws etc than prosecuting them after the fact, but who watches the watchdogs? Who watches the judiciary? As an ordinary citizen, it is exhausting to just even follow the news.

And if it is this bad in democracies, imagine how it is like in countries like Russia.

Lots of bureaucrats everywhere.

The fact that a new publicist was hired by her before all the sympathetic press started coming out is enough for me to believe that there's a link there and not a natural news swing cycle.

https://www.theverge.com/news/611549/elizabeth-holmes-people...

A nitpick of mine is how Trump having the documents wasn’t the case against him. The case against Trump was an obstruction case because he lied and concealed the documents from authorities, going so far as shuffling them between properties, having his lawyers give false statements, and defying subpoenas.

This differentiates Trumps document case from everyone else’s (ie Bidens); the right loves to use this as an example of DOJ weaponization when they couldn’t be more different.

1. They are the voice of a group of millions of people, and therefore a perception will exist that an attack on the politician is an attack on those people as well 2. Sure seems like a lot of them are compromised in some way, so any time one is targeted it will always seem selective in the moment

I don't know how much that intersects with what you're observing, and I don't really have easy answers.

Enslaving our media to what triggers the cravings of the masses was probably one of the dumbest thing we did. And we owe it, like many other terrible things, to ad industry.

It's a parasite of the economy and cancer of society. Serves no useful purpose beyond what an open access database of all products and services could cheaply fulfill.

Was there ever a time or place where this was not true?

Does that still even exist? The problem I see in politics is that everyone has their hand in the cookie jar to some degree.

You don't get into politics unless you already have your hand in there, or are given the option to prove yourself where moving up the ranks involves helping someone getting their hand in there, with the unspoken assumption that they'll return the favor. And of course once you're in and have your hand in there, why rock the boat and waste all that effort?

> President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes.

This part is especially fascinating because I have heard of, and even had, remarkably similar experiences. The only real thing is the perpetual now. It's not even that they aren't curious or aware of what they said previously, they even emphatically deny their own words.

I don't know if you remember when Ebola was a big news topic because there were two or three cases in the U.S., but I had a family member insisting it was "just the beginning" and was going to get worse. A year later he said there's "probably a lot of stuff happening that's not reported yet". Two years later he forgot he ever said it.

In Hungary and Poland, they are specific, time-bound events with important institutional implications and unique factual circumstances. "It's always been that way" is risky because it can be used to airbrush away specific moral urgency with vagueness and false equivalences, and even functions to apologize for active advancements of authoritarianism as they are happening in real time.

I don't know. I suppose there is behavior that is illegal and behavior that is unethical. I guess there aren't that many politicians that are ethical, but there may be some (hopefully?) who don't do downright illegal things? Maybe, I dunno.

The fact that collectively we all have such low expectations and such low opinions about our politicians/government says a lot about the sorry state of affairs :(

Tribal alignment. If the tribe had moved on from Trump and he had lost the election, your relatives would still be grounded in these conversations and reality.

Trump is still the leader of their party and cultural movement, They have zero incentive to acknowledge the truth if it conflicts with these loyalties. If anything, such an action would be dangerous and risk their standing within their tribe, So the loyalty test then becomes denying what's clear and obvious to prove you are still a loyal member.

It’s also a very dangerous precedent to bring criminal charges against the presumptive (and in hindsight, actual) winner of the at time forthcoming presidential election, even if some of the cases have merit. Regardless of the merit of the cases, it’s impossible for that scenario to not be at least partly politically motivated and to have the effect of trying to disenfranchise half the country.

For example: https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/110123/nic... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/15/france-investi...

Much like a brushless motor controller, if you pull towards the direction the rotors already faces, it's uninteresting. But if you lead the momentum in a different direction...

That these same candidates, when elected, haven’t even attempted such a thing, even when they have an aligned Congress, doesn’t seem to register at all. They hear their lying talking heads say it again the next time, and believe it whole-heartedly. It’s so weird. You’d think at some point they’d start to wonder why it never happened.

No, if Joe Biden had the same facts against him the entire right wing -- including you -- would be eagerly prosecuting them and singing of the high-minded justice in doing so. Have you forgotten "lock her up!"?

"President is above the law" is a far more dangerous precedent to set, and "nominees are above the law" is out-of-this-word nuts.

Not sure how much an impact what you describe is having.

I see non optional and IMO skewed reporting all the time, I'm not sure it is all directed by someone.

You sound like you actually don’t know much about France. For instance your accusations about left wing media rooting for Sarkozy has no foundation. The judges being biased toward left is groundless as well. Many left wing politicians have been condemned by French justice.

The craziest example for me was NYC congestion pricing. When it was about to happen, all the reporting was about all of the downsides of the tolls starting. A week after the New York Governor "indefinitely paused" congestion pricing, the reporting was all about the downsides of the tolls not starting.

It's similar to the people who push against unionization for fear of being retaliated against, only to get capriciously laid off during the next cyclical downturn. Seek your justice now, as delay is a form of denial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_during...

Btw, I've seen chinese tankies and I've seen russian tankies. First time I see a gadaffian tankie.

I am not right wing, have never voted for Trump or chanted "lock her up", and no, I believe in principles and not party loyalty and would have felt the same had it been Biden.

I was also against Clinton's impeachment for the same reason. Stormy Daniels and Monica Lewinsky were both private sexual matters, and to try to use ancillary technical crimes (obstruction; campaign finance) to remove your political opponent is a bad precedent and it's bad when both parties do it.

Your reply itself also proves my point. You say that the right wing would have prosecuted Biden on the same facts, not that the same left wing New York DA would have. Justice shouldn't be left wing and right wing.

But keep thumping yourself on the chest. What do all the deaths and suffering matter ? The bad guy has been beheaded after all and the War stockholders got richer! Mission Accomplished!

The crimes of the Gaddafi regime are one thing, the ensuing chaos is another. We celebrate the end of a brutal regime and we despair at the death and destruction that followed.

At least in France he’ll serve a sentence- in the US we might have elected him again and let him make the charges go away.

Is that like Lockheed Martin owning a major newspaper or GE owning a TV network?

Most of French media, specially newspapers, are money sinks only surviving because they are useful to push the rent-seeking business or ideological agenda of their owners (Dassault, Bouygues, Lagardere, Arnault, Bettencourt, Saade, Pinault, Niel).

Also, just for context, Martin Bouygues, Bernard Arnault and Vincent Bollore, the respective owners of TF1 (main French TV channel), Le Parisien (major newspaper) and CNews/Europe1 (major TV channel & radio) are personal friends of Sarkozy (a la "witness at your wedding, god father of your son or let's celebrate your election on my yacht" kind of way).

The Figaro (main right-wing newspaper in France) and its owners, the Dassault family, are also not far away.

Seeing the Figaro website was actually quite funny. Because the evidences are so damming, their main page was textbook "how to propagate fake news with plausible deniability". It was mainly pro-Sarkozy Editorials/Tribunes from non-journalists people, articles titled with quotes from Sarkozy's supporters and the few articles actually on the case were about the side stories.

French press ownership map:

https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/PPA#&gid=1&pid=1

There are only two truly independent major media left in France: Mediaparte (the ones we have to thanks for Sarkozy's well deserved condemnations) and Le Canard Enchaine (a bunch of scandals, but lately, the "Affaire Fillion").

The rest is either owned by billionaires, state run, or is far smaller and doesn't have the aura, size & credibility to reveal such scandals.

The incredible successes of Trumps second term so far will encourage and empower populists everywhere.

Faith based society is not just the domain of the religious. 1984 been the norm since well before Orwell wrote the book.

The only way the current wave of right-wing media ends if by finding a new way to fund media & making it impossible to concentrate in the ends of a few rich folks.

And good luck with that, folks don't want to pay for media.

Big head political pundits literally go on Fox News and blame a Democrat President for Epstein's death, and you have to tell them "Uh, no, Trump was president then, and it was his administration in control" and they have this insane double take look like they can't possibly remember that.

Blaming Obama for the Hurricane Katrina response wasn't a fluke.

My father is a general contractor and viscerally experienced Trump's first term stupidity tripling his material costs. He still voted for him again, as "good for the economy", or "the democrats have gone too far". He blames democrats for the regional grocery chain hiring gay people as managers, which is funny, because they hire those people because they are the right kind of MBA types. He literally can't recognize the problem when it's in his very face.

My father has never been outwardly sexist and always demonstrated respect for strong women and their ability to participate in normal society. He still was convinced by right wing media that he should be afraid of women in the cockpit.

The soybean farmers were fucked by Trump's first term, and he gave them over $10 billion dollars. They all voted for him again, and it happened the exact same way.

Like, at this point, how do you convince people who change their memory of reality to fit their ideology?

That isn't a problem if the electorate aren't easily influenced.

Or maybe it's a simple change of strategy; the goal is now "rehabilitate image" rather than "prevent conviction" - and with the new strategy, a new team.

The best way to notice this in yourself (I think) is if there are arguments for the other side of an issue that you simply avoid discussion of altogether. When they are brought up, you attack the source, personally attack the person repeating them, or refuse the discussion on some other terms. This is reflexively doing propaganda, on a small scale, but as a reaction to being cornered.

If you find yourself in this situation, resorting to repeating slogans you've heard rather than treating the argument exactly as you would treat an argument in an uncontroversial context, it's better to shut up, listen, and reflect.

The only moral position is to be a collection of any valid argument you can find, always trying to clarify their degree of soundness. Whenever you deviate from that, you're defying reason, and weakening civil society (which relies on secular protocols.)

If you consume propaganda with that mindset, you notice because it has very little useful content at all. It's astounding how long media can go on about a subject without saying anything, or making any coherent claim, and scary when you see people who seem to get something out of that avalanche and they can't quite explain how they got there. It's how Saddam did 9/11.

Ever watched any NBC IP in the 2000s and early 2010s?

I do not want to be all about doom and gloom but I do not think that there is any media on this planet that delivers factual information without lying (either directly or by omission) to shape the opinion. And no, having a narrative is not lying as long as all the facts are presented, which allows the reader to make their own judgement whether they are buying into the narrative or not. Unfortunately, today journalists/editors believe that they have to report in a specific way as otherwise the “fight” would be lost.

To be fair, le Figaro was The French conservative newspaper long before the Dassault's ownership (like +100 years prior), so it's more a case of "Le Figaro has a more comfortable budget to push its views".

The closest I can think of in the US context is Bezos owning the Washington Post to both push his personal views and Amazon's interests.

Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy for his son).

No, there's not. The incentives are hopelessly misaligned.

If the biggest, most profitable story is the destruction of civilization itself, then the news media -- which like so many other institutions in our society is owned by people too old or too wealthy to suffer the eventual consequences -- will cheer it on.

For example reddit is consistently an echo chamber in the reverse direction. Another example is any clips selected by cable news are doubted by republicans for intentional malicious framing. Which is fair enough since I’ve seen plenty of intentionally obtuse takes of things said which are already unacceptable.

Why would I not believe candidates who have spent their political life advocating the banning of the most popular rifle in America? When someone shows you what they are, believe them.

If Democrats want people to stop reacting that way, they need to commit to leaving law-abiding gun owners alone, not say "well it'll be fine, believe us" yet continue to campaign for bans and pass idiotic restrictions that do little to control crime.

A politician who is no longer able to exert influence going to prison isn't a big loss to them, in fact it's arguably a good outcome. They get to have had favors while Sarkozy was in office and an angry France now that's he's out.

What I meant is that general media (either social or legacy) has often strong biases and narratives and at certain times it gets too much to the point of propaganda.

But, if you're not very intimate in some topic, or have not been part of the events it's not that obvious.

Few examples.

1. Almost a million people protested the war in Gaza few weeks ago here in Italy, in many cities, but if you turned on the tv (any channel really) or read the news this was skipped and instead the entirety of the focus was on few limited clashes with the entire narrative being built about how if you protest for Gaza you're automatically violent and antisemitic. Nonsense.

1.5 At an anti-Covid protest in Piazza San Giovanni, a place that comfortably holds half a million people, the place was ultra full, as packed as during concerts...But ask the police and the official numbers were below 10k. Ridiculous, it was at least 15 times as much. I wasn't part of the protests but lived nearby so I had a full account.

2. Around 15 years ago our main airline (Alitalia) was in terrible shape and Air France-KLM wanted to buy it out, pay the debts and retain most of the workforce. Non stop bombarding on every outlet about how we could not sell our main company, and that taxpayers would foot the bill. The bombarding went on with plenty of interviews of how Alitalia staff was in favor of this operation, but I had several friends working for the company and actually the opposite was true: most of them supported the merger rather than the bailout, but the propaganda did its best to silence these voices.

Again, how would you know about those things if you were not intimately knowledgeable about the topics?

I really don't have time to get knowledgeable and fact check or be part of every world, national and local event. Thus I'm not equipped with distinguishing a genuine fact based narrative from a biased one.

Lots of things to criticize Sarkozy for but his support for the intervention is not one of them.

Your choices betray your priorities and they are not what you claim.

Not only is it a category error, it is undesireable. Let them fight it out in the special realm of politics and leave our legal systems alone so we can enjoy their benefits.

Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for providing a link to a website and infographic shining light on the lack of independence in US media. That's HN for you.

The vast majority of people don't look at news media (much less pay for it) unless there's a massive controversy.

You have editorial like "Sarkozy stays honorable and magnificent despite an illegal non proof based sentence" "His wife so sad that this hero of the nation that did so much, proud father, beloved by his friends, will have to live this hard experience" All days long.

A few examples just to give one newspaper: https://x.com/Le_Figaro/status/1980589938941874341

Or "Sarkozy in jail, the fault of the justice!" https://x.com/Le_Figaro/status/1980567283157139926

And we now all know well what book "he will bring" to show how honorable is this man: "The count of Monte Cristo", "life of Jesus Christ", ...

I also think there's a kind of fascinating meta question about how the nature of conspiracy theorizing itself response to challenges. I think fact checking is a perfectly legitimate institutional response to it and in a healthy culture it would be appreciated and valued and utilized and would play a role. But the conspiracy ecosystem writ large has had to think of a systematic response to the phenomenon of fact checking and like evolve its way out of vulnerability to it.

One is to dismiss correction for any number of reasons, another is to kind of cultivate a mindset and attitude of frenzied emotional subject shifting that kind of exists and sustains itself in a way that's detached from the habit of factual investigation. But I also think there are such things as like experimenting with principled philosophical stances like relativism or disputing baseline concepts like burden of proof or especially fascinating in the flat Earth corner of the internet are philosophical positions about the relativity of knowledge and extreme subjective and skeptical orientations towards the world and the possibility of data and knowledge.

So even though I actually personally believe in the importance and significance of isolating out and emphasizing specific clear and short criticisms such as conspiracy theorists can't remember the past. I do think they have processes to metabolize and respond to those criticisms and I'm fascinated to learn to what extent they might try to articulate a principle in defense of not remembering the past. Because surely some will give it the college try.

If it were just a toy for his son these things wouldn't have happened - Stephen Colbert canned - Bari Weiss hired to head the news division - $32 million settlement for an easily winnable lawsuit

I've probably missed some. Ellison is a huge Trump supporter and is clearly reshaping CBS to at least go easy on Trump, if not to make it yet another right wing propaganda outlet.

En: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/about-us/article/2023/09/24/two-ma...

Fr: https://www.lemonde.fr/actualite-medias/article/2023/09/24/d...

This was the result of journalist demands, covered here: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/le_monde_daniel_kretinsk...

This structure is also used by Mediapart, owned by Fonds pour une presse libre, and Libération, owned by Fonds de dotation pour une presse indépendante, with Mediapart being inspired to emulate The Manchester Guardian (which has been operated by a trust since 1936): https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/medias/le-monde-appartie...

Successes? He's succeeded at consolidating power because his own party and his partisans on the Supreme Court allow it. Also, destroying stuff is easy. What are these successes of which you speak?

I mean he's going to jail. If anything that's better than most countries. In India, a chief minister who instigated racial riots never even had to go to court for it and he even became the current de facto autocrate

Yes, because removing Gaddafi from power after he yielded to international pressure to give up his nuclear-weapons ambitions makes it less likely that leaders will agree to give up nuclear ambitions in the future.

All leaders of countries know that no one would do to the leader of North Korea what France, Britain and the US did to Gaddafi -- because North Korea has nukes.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde_diplomatique offers a few first insights. Note how the page quickly emphasizes the redaction's independence.

Yet, it might be reasonably true: as stated in the Wikipedia page, Le Monde Diplomatique is read mostly by educated people, who probably are 1/ less susceptible to/more aware of coarse manipulation 2/ much less numerous.

That's to say, influencing (too much) the redaction might have too low of a costs/benefits ratio.

Personal anecdote: I've read it a few times about a decade ago. At that time, I perceived some of the articles to be more emotionally grounded than rationally, and the prose to be at time needlessly heavy, "sophisticated".

Those are the main reasons why I didn't kept reading it more often.

This is untrue anywhere that has the rule of law. (One can run a system where the law is secondary to politics. But it doesn't have the benefits of rule of law.)

> To preserve the law for the common stock, we can't use law against political figures without debasing the currency of law

The entire history of the rule of law runs in the opposite direction. Prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens the rule of law. What it weakens, temporarily, is stability. You need strong institutions to take on and survive prosecuting a former politican, particularly a former head of state.

> If the will of the people can be overruled by the shrewd use of legal challenges then you have a juristocracy, not a democracy

You have a republic. Pure democracy doesn't work.

> legal system can and will be abused when it is used politically

Which is exactly what shielding politicians from prosecution causes.

The Roman Republic had this flaw. One of the perks of magistracy was immunity from prosecution. This not only encouraged corruption, it incentivised lawbreaking during office for politcal advantage and ultimately led to the downfall of the Republic when expiring politicians chose violence over losing immunity.

Unlike someone else who is engaging in extreme corruption and is trampling the constitution of his country completely in the open and will likely never face any repercussions.

Maybe... if someone did prosecute him this whole thing could have been avoided?

Well yes. That's certainly the case when the system is deeply corrupt and only superficially democratic. They shouldn't be above the law nor their opponents should have the power to abuse it.

Given that the precedent is that the president can arbitrarily decide that the country is in a permanent state of national emergency and suspend the constitution indefinitely (which is literally what happened with the tariffs) that seems quite reasonable.

it should be repeated ad-nauseam that he is a crook, a shame for the country and its values and that the whole discourse about the injustice of the sentencing has heavy anti-liberal vibes

But Le Monde Diplomatique's redaction has been able to remain independent thanks to it's 49% shares and veto right.

It's also fairly small (~10 permanent journalists + independent contributors, ~150k monthly readers).

It's not really the kind of journal able to sustain a long investigation, it's more "social commentaries with a left-leaning/alter-mundialist point of view".

Hilary Clinton funded the creation of the Steele dossier-- which was later shown to be generally false and unsupported-- but paid for it through one of her law firms and misclassified it as legal expenses in an effort to conceal its origins.

Trump was criminally charged with falsification of business records because he paid Stormy Daniels hush money (to get her to deny her earlier claim that they had an affair) via his lawyer, and classified it as legal expenses. A visible hush money payment would have made it ineffective, just at the Steele dossier being known to be a campaigned paid hit piece would have made it ineffective.

There are plenty of things to ding Trump on, but I think if you're trying to persuade someone that the legal system wasn't weaponized unfairly against him this is a particularly poor example.

Even an argument that the facts make him worse here (e.g. maybe you say concealing an accusation of an affair says more about his integrity than paying for a false report says about hers)-- wouldn't change that this is just not a good example.

Particularly because there was nothing unlawful about the hush money payment itself-- the crime was an obscure accounting violation resulting from it... and in any other circumstance nothing would happen at all or at most, as seen with Clinton, a nominal fine would result. Sure, it's true that random details (like what state the acts in) will often decide if an act is technically illegal or not, but that's hardly an argument for the fairness of the justice system or that it was fairly applied to him.

I don't even hope to convince you of this-- but only to convince you that your example is unlikely to convince others, and is easily exploited to wrongfully convince people opposite your intentions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Techno...

It is 100% false that prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens law when we're talking above a certain low threshold of corruption. In those cases, it's up to the ruling class to police its own by using the legal code against low-level political figures and officials. The Chinese Communist Party operates this way more overtly but same principle. The incentive to do so is to strengthen the legitimacy of that ruling class, not because the law says you must.

According to the Law, you and I are committing "Three Felonies a Day". If the law were en vigueur then you and I and everyone else would be prosecutable 1984-style. It's at the whim of The Prosecutor to decide whether or not to pursue. Sound good to you? Me neither. The only thing stopping that is politics. When the political will is on the side of prosecution, then there will be prosecutions. We saw this with some heavy-handedness during the early days of the GWOT, 2020, Covid, hate speech legislation, many such cases.

The point being, interpretation of laws is a point of political conflict, often very sharp-elbowed. Even in the cases where laws are unambiguously stated (rare), there's still interpretation of the evidence, which doesn't happen in a political vacuum. Who would disagree?

You don't have to look far in history to see the abuse of the legal system in politics. Watergate is a prime example. Uninformed people think Nixon committed crimes and had to go. Anyone who spends just a little time looking at the details of that episode understands it as a political coup executed using lawfare. Whatever you think of Nixon's politics, the facts support that he was taken down by the anti-communist hawks in the defense establishment, largely in consequence of his opening up China. (The reasons were anti-USSR but given that China subsequently went from an agrarian backwater to a global competitor, one could debate whether they were right for the wrong reasons.)

Impeachment as a check/balance was just recently burned in Congress as a political tool to remove a sitting president. Extremely shortsighted. Or perhaps it just exposed it as a paper tiger. I thought it was burned when it was used against Clinton but it was only singed. Now it's completely discredited and no one will take it seriously ever again. That's the effect of abusing the law for political purposes.

What happened to the Roman Republic was overdetermined, but the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon". If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.

If you're talking about Orange Man Bad then he was, in fact, prosecuted, and it was a political own-goal by the Dems. Complete and total waste of time and resources for short-term political gains that never actually materialized. And it discredited the institution of impeachment forever. Well done.

Upon hearing these words, pqtyw was enlightened.

Say someone is legally elected president of France. They serve their 5 years term, doing their job. They get out of Elysée Palace, draw a gun and shoot a passer by. Do they get a free pass? Wouldn't that victim deserve justice?

That person, not a divine being, a mere mortal like the rest of us, has been convicted of serious offences. He is now serving his sentence as any other person would (well, not exactly, for instance he gets a clean solo room and 24/7 security detail).

If your point is "an elected head of state should not be prosecuted by a standard court of justice" (a point I still disagree with btw), the french judicial system got that covered with "cour de justice de la république".

For offenses committed while doing their jobs. Use your elected position as president to steal money? Cour de justice de la république it is. Not a walk in the park, judges & a "jury" of members of the Parliament. Aggravating circumstances (committing an offense while in an official capacity) means theoritically harsher sentences.

What he's been convicted for was as a private citizen. Standard judicial system. As should be, nothing naïve about this.

(Huge simplification of the french judicial system, the actual nature of his current legal status, etc as this case is utterly complex. Judge's ruling is over 400 pages long, and he's appealing, and he'll mostly spend a month in the lam and the rest under house arrest)

Assuming he's losing the appeal on this particular case, he will have been sentenced for scheming with a convicted murderer (Lockerbie amongst other things).

If convicted, that person will be guilty of criminal actions together with a foreign dictator and his terrorist in chief.

Not exactly stealing gums.

The case is of particular seriousness and he's a convicted person, repeat offender.

Would something as serious be put under the rug in other democracies? I'm not so sure. If Justin Trudeau is found accepting money from a bunch of Taliban involved in weapons trafficking, would the RCMP turn a blind eye?

(Why do I say "if convicted"? He appealed, so he is innocent until proven guilty. Why is he in jail? In large parts because his political party lobbied for this type of sentences. Leopards did eat his face)

Everything we’re discussing is made up. That’s what social constructs like law, politics and language are.

> up to the ruling class to police its own by using the legal code against low-level political figures and officials. The Chinese Communist Party operates this way

You’re inspired by Legalism. It rejects the rule of law. It stands in conflict to the institutions of a republic, specifically, of voting.

(Also, the Chinese would execute someone for doing what Sarkozy or Trump did. Eliciting foreign interference in a domestic political contest and challenging the outcome of one with open violence. Former Presidents have been treated roughly for worse.)

> the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon"

The Senate didn’t threaten Caesar with prosecution until after he crossed. Cato, personally, was threatening him.

> a political coup executed using lawfare

Impeachment and conviction is lawfare according to you?

> Now it's completely discredited and no one will take it seriously ever again. That's the effect of abusing the law for political purposes

It’s been “discredited” before. The teeth are in removal from office, not impeachment per se. (That’s just American civic ineptitude.)

To the extent that we’re abusing the law, you’re correct. I’ve seen serious brainstorming on how a D President can use Trump’s precedents to act swiftly ahead of Congress and the courts, for example, to accomplish policy goals that are popular but have been difficult to do precisely legally. If the President is above the law, he doesn’t need to worry about that constraint anymore.

> If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.

It did. Caesar didn’t end the Republic. That was his son, Octavius.

The point is when the Republic’s laws stopped applying to Caesar, it was effectively dead. There is no point calling for votes in that context.

We have a large number of authoritarian fascists in America. (There are also authoritarian leftists. They have not been politically empowered like the right has been.) The historic solutions to those were through law and then violence. If the law doesn’t apply, that leaves only violence. That’s civil war.

We’re not there yet. But we do need to make a concerted effort to ensure these folks are politically incapacitated while a basic civic education campaign can be completed, since basic concepts like “rule of law” isn’t taught outside the elites.

You’re citing history, ancient and modern, inaccurately to push an edgy narrative. I don’t know if you’re trolling or have been unwittingly trolled.

RCMP turned a blind eye to multiple corruption scandals involving bribery, fraud, embezzlement of public funds, etc. under Trudeau and his government, and helped cover them up. That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corruption within the RCMP - there is a long list of nefarious and straight up illegal shit they have done over the years.

I don't want to digress into Ancient Roman history but it's specious to argue that Caeser was only threatened after he broke the law. That's just not a plausible reading of history. It's well-established that crossing the Rubicon was the culmination of political conflict with the Senate, not the inception. Octavian would not have been in a position to end the republic if not for his uncle.

Impeachment is lawfare, of course. It is almost by definition a political act of parties in Congress. What could be more lawfare than that? Use the courts to attack your political enemies. Removal from office in a western democracy is "mostly peaceful" but I agree that removal from office is the solution with teeth. The parent post is about prosecuting former heads of state. That's 3rd world shit. At least in the 3rd world you would do that to remove a rival. Here it just seems to be vindictive. At best a shot across the bow of Sarkozy's patrons. If that's the motivation it's at least understandable. My objection is when people are propagandized to the point of being traumatized by political fights that have zero impact on their lives.

I don't believe terms like "fascists" have any meaning in the current political discourse and immediately suspect people who use that term casually. If half the country is fascist then we've really lost the plot. Nor do I think narratives about civil war are creditable at this time. The sectarian ingredients are not present in this country. Bringing it up is an appeal to extremes to discredit the vast middle ground.

What is the curriculum of that "basic civic education" campaign you propose should be completed? Sounds ominous.

Could you explain this a bit more?

Many people over 60 (i.e. the people who vote) watch nothing but.

This lack of overwhelming political firepower and clear focus on guns and guns alone is why they haven't acted, not any kind of goodwill or sudden appreciation for the Constitution. They haven't banned common firearms yet because they can't, not because they don't want to.

It was a straight-up bribe.