Sometimes ya just gotta wonder...

Are trump and his peeps ignorant? Or are they playing semantics games?

Years ago, I attended a hearing for professional engineer license infractions. There was an older gentleman who was accused of "rubber stamping" documents that a junior person had reviewed and sent to him.

A little context: engineers assume some liability when working for the public trust. They create plans and designs for things, and are legally and ethically bound to review them themselves before affixing their stamp to them.

It's okay to have someone help do prep work and create some of the documents, but it's incumbent on the person whose seal appears on those documents to review everything.

So the guy is accused of not reviewing the junior persons work, and simply affixing his seal on that work. As he is questioned, it becomes less clear whether he understands what he has done. And whether he is essentially incompetent, or whether he is playing a bit of a semantics game.

He trusts the younger guy to do the work, and only marginally reviews the documents. But he doesn't own a physical rubber stamp, so it's impossible for him to rubber stamp them. And so it goes for a while.

The infraction committee has several lawyers on it, and it's clear that no matter how it came to pass, they have him cornered. He is in violation of the rules and will surely face a suspension of his license - or perhaps worse.

At one point he stops and says "I think I will say no more until I consult with my attorney," to which the chair says to him "that's the first reasonable thing you've said, and we will accept that."

The proceeding stops, and they set a new date to continue.

I later heard that his license was revoked (I think it was voluntary meaning he agreed to give it up) due to his negligence.

It's a smaller scale lesson that ignorance to the law is no excuse; whether you play semantics or whether you don't understand, you're guilty just the same of the crime.

So we look at the jackass in the Oval Office. He tells us there was no collusion with Russia. Could be that he doesn't own a literal stamp - or it could be that he doesn't know what collusion means.

We'll see where this leads.

But there's also a piece about money laundering that's been largely overlooked for 18 months or so. Until now. Money, property, and services were exchanged in violation of the law. It's messy, and is still being untangled. There's always the chance that trump will pardon himself and those he's closest to, in order to avoid punishment....

...and enter the state of New York. Apparently, they are running a similar parallel investigation that's at least loosely coordinated with the federal investigation. Because trump was living and working in New York while committing these (alleged) crimes, they have jurisdiction. And he can not pardon himself or others for state crimes.

He (and his idiot cronies) haven't commented on the money laundering, probably because they are using the old magicians trick of showing you the collusion thing in one hand while scrambling like mad to hide the laundering in the other hand behind the back.

But at some point, they will surely tell us they don't own a rubber stamp here either.