show me where they were obligated legally to tell anyone they were delaying it.
You are really not getting it. I am laying out the mens rea argument. IE, the evidence that they knew what they were doing was wrong. The actus reus is a different point. Them hiding what they were doing wasn't, in and of itself, a crime. The hiding of the evidence shows that they were cognizant that they had, and were continuing to commit, a crime. And they therefore took steps to prevent people from finding out.
so couldn't the devil's advocate say that once they were informed it was wrong they corrected it, thus it wasn't an intentional crime but rather a mistake?
But they didn't. The aid was blocked for months while multiple people lodged objections. The funding was blocked on July 3rd. The call with Zelenksy was July 25th. Multiple people reported they had issues with the call and the aid being blocked. The formal whistle blower complaint was august 12th. It hit the news august 28th. The official investigation began on September 9th. The aid was released on september 11th.
So they blocked the aid for 2 months while receiving multiple complaints. They only released it after a news article came out and an official investigation began. If it was a mistake, it would never have gotten to a whistle blower complaint. The reason it did was because they were continuing to block it after being told repeatedly it was wrong.
the same reason there as hundreds of videos which instruct you to plead the 5th and never talk to police w/o a lawyer, nothing good can come of it
that is when you are talking to police. They lied and hid info from their own staff. Their own diplomats and members of government had no idea the aid money was being blocked. And when they found out, the white house wouldn't tell them the reason. The only reason that this situation is similar is that example is that trump was blocking the aid to commit a crime. If it was normal diplomatic procedure, the state department would have known why it was being blocked.
irrelevant, in the U.S. you are innocent until PROVEN guilty, thinking, inferring, assuming etc is not proof.
We already have the proof. This is just to establish that they knew they were committing the crime.
1) asking a foreign national for a thing of value to help you in a campaign is a crime. so when trump asked for dirt on biden, by name, on that call he committed a crime. We have known this since the transcript was released.
2) using the power of your public office for personal gain. Trump used the power of the presidency, by withholding aid and dangling a state visit, in order to personally profit himself by getting dirt on a political rival. We already know he blocked the aid and dangled the state visit. We know the ukranians planned to give him the dirt he wanted. We already know he committed this crime as well.
3) trump has committed obstruction of justice and witness tampering during the impeachment. By ordering witnesses not to testify, refusing to provide documents and threatening witnesses he has committed some new crimes during his attempted cover up. so we already know he has committed these too.
