[ExI] etymology of just a piece of paper

[Adrian Tymes]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2026 at 5:16 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
> >…Your buddy King Donald The First invoked the Fifth Amendment 440 times during a 2022 deposition in the New York Attorney General's investigation into Donald's unethical and probably illegal business practices….
>
> He didn’t have a blanket pardon, as Dr. Fauci does.  Dr. Fauci cannot be incriminated if he cannot be prosecuted.

A sitting US President can not be prosecuted so long as he is in
office.  Even just running for office gave him enough protection to,
in practice, forestall any attempt to prosecute him during his 4 years
out of office.

On the other hand, the hearing Dr. Fauci was attending was explicitly
intended to find anything that Dr. Fauci could be prosecuted on -
anything outside the confines of his pardon (which was rather more
limited than the term "blanket" implies).  That's a textbook case of
where the Fifth Amendment applies.