"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
This past weekend, the Republican National Committee caved to white supremacist and other hate groups by adopting a resolution titled Refuting the Legitimacy of the Southern Poverty Law Center to Identify Hate Groups.
The focus of the resolution is that “the SPLC is a radical organization” that harms conservative organizations and voices through our hate group designations.
This attack on our work is an attempt to excuse the Trump administration’s pattern and practice of working with individuals and organizations that malign entire groups of people — immigrants, Muslims and the LGBTQ community — while promoting policies that undermine their very existence. It comes from the same vein as Trump’s claim that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Simply put, it’s an audacious attempt by Trump and the GOP to paper over the bigotry and racism that has been allowed to infect their policies.
This resolution comes at a moment when Trump will argue at the Republican National Convention that he will combat hate and bigotry, despite welcoming the support of QAnon. It also comes days after the indictment of Stephen Bannon, reminding us that Bannon was once the White House chief strategist and senior counselor and CEO of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. And it comes just after our special investigation shined a light on One America News Network’s Jack Posobiec, a reporter at Trump’s favorite network who is aligned with white supremacy and has used his platform to further hate speech and propaganda.
Trump should sever these ties to hate groups and extremists instead of doubling down through this RNC resolution.
The Trump administration has filled its ranks and consulted with alumni and allies from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigrant hate group that has ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists. They include Julie Kirchner, Kris Kobach, Jeff Sessions and, most notably, Stephen Miller.
The Trump administration has worked with hate groups like the Family Research Council (FRC) to roll back LGBTQ rights. FRC was designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group for decades of demonizing LGBTQ people and spreading harmful pseudoscience about them. Over the years, the organization has published books, reports and brochures that have linked being LGBTQ to pedophilia, claimed that LGBTQ people are dangerous to children and claimed that LGBTQ people are promiscuous and violent.
Anti-Muslim groups have also been welcomed into the administration, including the Center for Security Policy (CSP). Fred Fleitz, a longtime staffer, was appointed the executive secretary and chief of staff of the National Security Council. For decades, CSP has peddled absurd accusations that shadowy Muslim Brotherhood operatives have infiltrated all levels of government.
These extremists are seeking a license to continue spreading their bigotry and will do anything to undermine those — like the SPLC, which tracks and monitors hate groups — who expose their extremist views and oppose their attacks on communities. With this resolution, Trump and members of the GOP have shown the extent to which they will carry their water.
This past weekend, the RNC also released a resolution titled Resolution to Conserve History and Combat Prejudice – Christopher Columbus. It’s a remarkably transparent statement that hate and bigotry stem from Black Lives Matter protesters. The RNC and Trump did not denounce organizations that promote antisemitism, Islamophobia, neo-Nazis, anti-LGBTQ sentiment or racism. It only criticized the SPLC for challenging those groups.
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Pretty much says it all about today’s GOP and the Trump Administration.
· No platform
· No values
· No truth
· No humanity
· No decency
· No America
· No inclusion
· The party of “Dred Scottification,” Jim Crow, and White Supremacy
Sure “Sounds Like Hate” to me!
This November, vote like your life and the future of our world depend on it! Because they do!
Valenzuela Gallardo v. Barr, 9th Cir., 08-06-20, published
SYNOPSIS BY COURT STAFF:
Immigration
The panel granted Agustin Valenzuela Gallardo’s petition for review of a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals and vacated his order of removal, holding that 8 U.S.C. §1101(a)(43)(S), which describes an aggravated felony “offense relating to obstruction of justice,” requires a nexus to an ongoing or pending proceeding or investigation and that, therefore, the BIA’s contrary construction of the statute was inconsistent with the statute’s unambiguous meaning.
In a prior published opinion, the BIA found Valenzuela Gallardo removable on the ground that his conviction for being an accessory to a felony, in violation of California Penal Code § 32, was an obstruction of justice aggravated felony under 8 U.S.C. §1101(a)(43)(S). Switching directions from its precedent, the BIA concluded that the existence of an ongoing proceeding was not an essential element of an offense relating to obstruction of justice. However, a prior panel of this court vacated the BIA’s redefinition because it raised serious questions about whether the statute is unconstitutionally vague. On remand, the BIA issued a published decision concluding that obstruction of justice offenses included not only offenses that interfered with ongoing or pending investigations or proceedings, but also those that interfered with investigations or proceedings that were reasonably
** This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.
VALENZUELA GALLARDO V. BARR 3
foreseeable by the defendant. Valenzuela Gallardo again petitioned for review.
The panel began at Chevron Step Zero, where the court determines whether the Chevron framework applies at all. The panel noted amici’s argument that the BIA’s interpretation of the term “aggravated felony,” which includes offenses related to obstruction of justice, is ineligible for Chevron deference because the term has dual application in both civil proceedings, including removal proceedings, and criminal proceedings, including increased maximum prison terms for illegal reentry. The panel explained that deferring to the BIA’s construction of statutes with criminal applications raises serious constitutional concerns because only Congress has the power to write new federal criminal laws. However, the panel concluded that it was bound by the law of the case doctrine because the panel that decided Valenzuela Gallardo’s prior petition for review had applied the Chevron framework, and no exceptions to the doctrine applied.
At Chevron Step One, the panel concluded that 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(43)(S) is unambiguous in requiring a nexus to an ongoing or pending proceeding or investigation. The panel rejected the Government’s assertion that the court had already held that the statute is ambiguous in this regard. Next, the panel explained that the ordinary meaning of the term “obstruction of justice” when the statute was enacted in 1996 required a nexus to an extant investigation or proceeding. Looking to the term’s relevant statutory context – which the panel concluded to be Chapter 73 of Title 18, entitled “Obstruction of Justice” – the panel further explained that almost all of the substantive provisions in Chapter 73 that existed in 1996 required a nexus to an ongoing or pending proceeding or investigation.
4 VALENZUELA GALLARDO V. BARR
Because the panel concluded that § 1101(a)(43)(S) was unambiguous, it did not proceed to Chevron Step Two. The panel also noted that it would reach the same conclusion even if it were not to apply the Chevron framework.
Finally, the panel concluded that the statute under which Valenzuela Gallardo was convicted, California Penal Code § 32, is not a categorical match with obstruction of justice under § 1101(a)(43)(S) because the text of § 32 and its practical application demonstrate that it encompasses interference with proceedings or investigations that are not pending or ongoing. Accordingly, the panel vacated Valenzuela Gallardo’s removal order.
COUNSEL:
Frank Sprouls (argued) and John E. Ricci, Law Office of Ricci & Sprouls, San Francisco, California, for Petitioner.
Rebecca Hoffberg Phillips (argued), Trial Attorney; John S. Hogan, Assistant Director; Joseph H. Hunt, Assistant Attorney General; Office of Immigration Litigation, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.; for Respondent.
Amalia Wille and Judah Lakin, Van Der Hout Brigagliano & Nightingale LLP, San Francisco, California, for Amici Curiae American Immigration Lawyers Association, U.C. Davis School of Law Immigration Law Clinic, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice—Asian Law Caucus.
PANEL: Eugene E. Siler,* Kim McLane Wardlaw, and Milan D. Smith, Jr., Circuit Judges.
The Honorable Eugene E. Siler, United States Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, sitting by designation.
OPINION BY:Judge Wardlaw
KEY QUOTE:
Nonetheless, both a de novo interpretation of the obstruction of justice provision utilizing traditional tools of statutory interpretation and a Chevron Step One analysis of the precise question before us—whether the BIA’s new “reasonably foreseeable” definition is at odds with the plain meaning of the statute, which was not before the prior panel—lead us to the same conclusion: the statute is unambiguous in requiring an ongoing or pending criminal proceeding, and the Board’s most recent interpretation is at odds with that unambiguous meaning.
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So, let’s put this in perspective. Today’s EOIR has been “weaponized” by the Trump regime as a deportation assembly line. Immigration Judges and the BIA are pushed to cut corners and avoid careful legal analysis in a rush to deport.
Beyond that, the regime has, with the connivance of the Supremes, found ways to deport asylum seekers and others without any meaningful hearing whatsoever. Notwithstanding all these gimmicks, moronic “production quotas,” coercive detention, biased anti-immigrant “precedents,” and the appointment of mostly prosecutors to function as “judges,” the EOIR backlog continues to mushroom out of control because of the regime’s gross mismanagement.
Yet, in the middle of all this mess, the BIA finds time to spend a decade, including three trips to the Court of Appeals, trying to manipulate the law and disregard and misinterpret prior precedent in a misguided effort to wrongfully deport this particular individual. What if we had judges who just got it correct in the first place? No wonder this system is totally out of control.
Do we need a maliciously incompetent and misdirected system like this? Of course not!
With the same amount of resources, a group of independent, qualified expert judges committed to the rule of law and due process could drastically improve the functioning of the Immigration Courts by rendering fair decisions, granting more relief where possible, and working with all “stakeholders” toprioritize cases, find alternate dispositions for “non-priority cases,” and to move the cases that actually need to be tried through the system in a fair, reasonable, professional, and predictable manner. Such a system would produce more consistency and would avoid much of the wasteful litigation and constant intervention of the Courts of Appeals to correct mistakes that is now a staple of this system. It would be a “win” for everyone involved, including the DHS’s legitimate enforcement functions.
Of course, the particular problem with this case began when the “Post-Ashcroft-Purge” BIA started fabricating ways to deviate from one of the old “Schmidt Board” precedents, Matter of Espinoza-Gonzalez, 22 I. & N. Dec. 889, 892–94 (BIA 1999) (en banc). That case had actually found in favor of the (unrepresented) respondent, an unheard of result in today’s “bend and distort the law to deport” climate fostered by “Billy the Bigot” Barr and his predecessor “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions! You basically can trace EOIR’s continuous downward “death spiral” from “The Purge.”
Laura Coates is a CNN legal analyst. She is a former assistant US attorney for the District of Columbia and trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. She is the host of the daily “Laura Coates Show” on SiriusXM. Follow her @thelauracoates. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
(CNN)Attorney General Bill Barr’s written opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee was replete with mischaracterizations, fallacies and unnerving stereotypes that run afoul of the principle of equal justice — and which, taken together, show how he has transformed the Department of Justice that enforces the law to a department that undermines the rule of law.
These are but a few lines that should evoke a visceral reaction to the views of a man who sits at the helm of the most powerful prosecutorial office in the country.
1. “Ever since I made it clear that I was going to do everything I could to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal, many of the Democrats on this Committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the President’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions.”
No, Attorney General Barr, you are not being accused of being a factotum, colloquially defined as a handyman. You stand accused of being a henchman who acts not only under the President’s instructions but, perhaps more nefariously, exclusively in the President’s interests. And what conveys this impression is not a deceptive narrative crafted by the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee, but rather your own conduct.
Case in point: undermining career prosecutors in what appears to clearly be the interests of President Donald Trump. Not once can I recall an attorney general weighing in on a career prosecutor’s sentencing recommendations for a defendant convicted of multiple felonies by a jury. Yet, this appears to be an increasingly frequent endeavor by this Attorney General on behalf of Trump associates, including, most recently former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and the President’s long-time friend Roger Stone.
The disturbing trend is underscored by the fact that the one convicted felon who has fallen out of the President’s favor, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, felt the knife twisted rather than removed when the Justice Department recently, albeit briefly, sent him back to prison under questionable
And Barr’s misuse of terms continues with the use of the term “Russiagate.” The use of the suffix “gate” insinuates that it is conspiratorial, farcical and worthy of derision. And yet, the Attorney General has confirmed, as recently as today’s colloquy with Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond, that Russia did interfere with the past presidential election and will presumably continue to interfere with our upcoming presidential election. Perhaps the nod to conspiracy theorists was inadvertent in light of overwhelming evidence he fails to dispute.
2. “Like his predecessors, President Trump and his National Security Council have appropriately weighed in on law-enforcement decisions that directly implicate national security or foreign policy, because those decisions necessarily involve considerations that transcend typical prosecutorial factors.”
No one doubts the propriety of the President of the United States and members of his National Security Council to get involved in cases that directly implicate the national security of this nation or those matters that directly relate to our foreign policy interests. What is in doubt is whether Barr’s defense of deploying federal agents to US cities is anything more than a pretextual reason to infringe upon the constitutional rights of Americans, namely their First Amendment rights to assemble and to protest their grievances with the government. A bald assertion of a national security interest does not absolve the executive branch from having to provide an appropriate and lawful justification when constitutional rights are implicated. And yet Barr has offered no compelling reason.
3. “I had nothing to prove and had no desire to return to government. … When asked to consider returning, I did so because I revere the Department and believed my independence would allow me to help steer her back to her core mission of applying one standard of justice for everyone and enforcing the law even-handedly, without partisan considerations.”
This is just laughable. He had no desire to return to the government? I have a June 2018 memo that says otherwise. It was entirely unsolicited, offered Barr’s insight on special counsel Robert Mueller’s handling of an investigation into Russia’s interference in our presidential election and read like a solicitation for a job. And lo and behold, he got his wish. Now, Barr has launched an investigation into the origins of what he calls “Russiagate” that seems to track the very outline he presented when he, ahem, had no desire to put skin in the game.
Barr’s suggestion that he was compelled to return to the helm out of a sincere interest to restore the objectivity and credibility of the Department of Justice is belied by his decision-making. His sentencing decisions that seem to show political favor, his failure to justify the use of force against peaceful protestors and his involvement in the removal of Geoffrey Berman, the former Attorney General for the Southern District of New York, comprise just a handful of the many instances where his conduct has undermined — not restored — the credibility of the Justice Department.
. . . .
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Read the rest of Laura’s seven points at the link.
It’s a familiar pattern. After “stonewalling” Congressional oversight, Administration Kakistocrat finally shows up and arrogantly spews lies, misrepresentations, and false narratives under oath. Dems spend their time lecturing and pontificating, but don’t create the factual record for a subsequent perjury prosecution. (Ask yourself: What if Laura Coates were doing the questioning?)
GOP toadies in Congress “circle the wagons” and double down on the lies showing their complete contempt for truth, human decency, and good governance.
We already knew Barr was a shady character and that the GOP is unfit for any office in any branch. So, this hearing didn’t really accomplish much.
But it does demonstrate the absolute necessity for the majority of us who want to save our nation to get out the vote to remove Trump and the GOP at every level 🧹 in November.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does! Another four years of Trump’s racist malicious incompetence and the GOP kakistocracy could kill us all (including the truth-impervious Trumpsters and GOP toadies willing to seek the end of our democracy)! Victory for the “good guys” isn’t inevitable —it will take lots of energy and continuing hard work to save our nation!👍🏼🗽🇺🇸
President Trump granting clemency to his crony Roger Stone, who served as the go-between for the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, on practically the eve of Stone’s incarceration for multiple crimes attendant to his coverup on behalf of the president, is grotesquely corrupt but unsurprising. Stone virtually confessed to a quid pro quo, telling Howard Fineman, “He [Trump] knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” Silence for clemency. A separate system of justice for the president’s henchmen. This is the very definition of corruption.
“By this action, President Trump abused the powers of his office in an apparent effort to reward Roger Stone for his refusal to cooperate with investigators examining the President’s own conduct,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in a written statement released Friday. “No other president has exercised the clemency power for such a patently personal and self-serving purpose.”
Stone’s clemency should remind all Americans of the necessity of removing Trump at the ballot box and seeking a full accounting of Attorney General William P. Barr’s role in running interference for the president (e.g., spinning the Mueller report, turning a blind eye toward criminality in the Ukraine scandal, intervening to block Stone’s and Michael Flynn’s punishments). It should remind voters that if not for the spinelessness of every Republican senator save Utah’s Mitt Romney, Trump would not have survived impeachment to seek vengeance on witnesses (e.g., Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman), corruptly protect his friends and incompetently manage a pandemic, leading to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands. With the pardon of Stone, we can affirm that Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s assertion that he learned his lesson from impeachment was delusional.
In 2019, The Post’s editorial board argued the president tried to manipulate the justice system, wrongdoing that Congress must not let go. (The Washington Post)
However, we will need far more than an electoral shellacking of Republicans to address the damage Trump has done to the Justice Department and the rule of law. Ten simple measures would begin to repair our justice system:
1. A thorough redo of the special counsel/independent counsel law is necessary. The counsel’s final report should be issued to Congress and/or the courts, depriving a potentially corrupt attorney general or president the opportunity to pre-edit or spin it. Additional legislation should clarify that a special counsel is empowered to make specific findings of illegality. The DOJ guidelines preventing prosecution of the president while still in office should be revisited.
2. Congress must reassert the power of the purse. The executive branch must report all holds/impounds on congressionally appropriated funds. “Emergency” powers should be reexamined, tightened and clarified to prevent the sort of unilateral misappropriation of funds we saw regarding the wall.
3. Severe criminal penalties should be exacted for revealing the identity of whistleblowers or threatening and/or punishing federal employees for providing truthful testimony.
4. A new, speedy enforcement mechanism is required for contempt of Congress citations, allowing lawmakers to get a swift and definitive resolution of its conflicts with the executive branch.
5. We need a barrier between the White House and Justice Department to prevent political interference in specific cases, targets of investigation and prosecutorial recommendations. Any such communications must be logged and made available to the inspector general and/or Congress.
. . . .
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Get the rest of the article with five more good ideas at the above link.
An essential that should have been #1 on the list: An independent Article I Immigration Court with an open, merit-based judicial selection process involving public input!
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
Discerning a hierarchy of depravity among Trump’s provocations is not easy. His increasingly strident racism is complicating America’s reckoning with current injustices and grave historical crimes. His politically motivated sabotage of essential public health measures has likely cost thousands of lives. But there is something uniquely debased about a commander in chief who receives the salutes of soldiers while his administration does nothing about credible information on a plot to kill them.
And that is what the Trump administration seems to have done. If, as reported by multiple news sources, the White House was informed in March that Russian intelligence units were placing bounties on the heads of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, then the administration’s silence and inaction have been a form of permission.
The president’s claim of ignorance is not credible. This act of aggression would be a major escalation by a strategic rival. If the United States received intelligence about the bounties, and if response options were considered at a high level within the White House, there is simply no way the president and his senior staff would have been kept in the dark. It is information directly pursuant to Trump’s function as commander in chief.
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Read the rest of Michael’s article at the link.
Sadly, Michael, the answer to the question I posed above is “the modern GOP.”
You really appear to be a decent human being and a courageous writer. How did you ever fall in with such a disreputable gang as the GOP?
Anyway, glad you finally have seen the light. My parents were Republicans. But, to state the obvious, this isn’t your parents’ (or at least my parents’) GOP. Apparently, not yours either. Which is a good thing — at least a start.
Judge John “Maximum John” Sirica 1904-1992 US District Court, D.C. 1957-1992Hon. Emmet G. Sullivan US District Judge DC
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Will Judge Emmet Sullivan Become The Judge John Sirica of “Trumpgate?” — “No Nincompoops!”
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
Courtside Exclusive
May 17, 2020.Nearly five decades ago, a tough-mindedU.S. District Judge in Washington, D.C., refused to “go along to get along.” Judge “Maximum John” Sirica saw through the corrupt B.S. being put forth by defendants (“The Plumbers”) who pleaded guilty in attempting to “cover up” the badly bungled Watergate burglary of DNC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. So, Sirica did some digging on his own.
One of his most famous quotes — the “No Nincompoops Rule”was set forth in his New York Times obit:
None other than former Attorney General John Mitchell had been involved in orchestrating the Watergate caper, and the “cover-up” trail eventually led all the way to the Oval Office and President Nixon. Nixon eventually resigned with impeachment, conviction, and removal staring him in the face.
The scandal involved some truly bizarre moments such as the “kidnapping” of Mitchell’s eccentric, talkative, estranged wife Martha and White House Counsel John Dean being told to “deep six” potentially incriminating documents by throwing them off the 14th Street Bridge on the way home to his Alexandria townhouse. It added to our vocabulary colorful terms like “stonewalling,” “twisting slowly in the wind,” “Deep Throat,” and more, in addition, of course, to “deep six.” John “The Con” Mitchell was convicted of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice (although never charged with Martha’s kidnapping) and served time in a Federal Penitentiary. Judge Sirica was named Time’s “Man of the Year.”
Watergate also resulted in changes in ethical rules and an effort to insulate the DOJ investigative and prosecution functions from political influence, particularly interference from the White House. With AG Billy Barr’s assistance, Trump has basically blown away all ethical safeguards and politicized and “weaponized” government institutions to a degree that probably exceeds Watergate.
Now, Billy Barr is trying to further Trump’s agenda by making the Flynn prosecution go away. That’s after Flynn actually pleaded guilty to the charges before Judge Emmet G. Sullivan. At least initially, Judge Sullivan appears skeptical about the sudden change of course by DOJ prosecutors. It’s a move that led to the withdrawal of the career prosecutors involved in the case and a demand from a bipartisan group of more than 2,000 former DOJ officials (including me and many colleagues from the Round Table of Retired Judges) that Barr resign.
Judge Sullivan has a reputation for independence and not suffering fools lightly. He has appointed private counsel to argue against dismissal of the charges. We’ll have to see what, if anything, comes of it all.
It’s also unclear whether a lone Federal Judge of courage and integrity still can “make a difference” in today’s rapidly deteriorating legal and political environment. During Watergate, a unanimous Supremes (with Chief Justice Rehnquist recused) stood up to Nixon and rejected his bogus executive privilege claim on incriminating tapes. GOP Congressional leaders eventually joined those voices urging Nixon to resign.
So far, by contrast, the Roberts-led Supremes’ majority hasn’t shown an inclination to stand up to Trump on any major issue of Executive overreach. And, GOP legislators have shown themselves to be so scared of Trump and so far inside his pocket that they can’t see the light of day. Indeed, they appear to have lost ambition to do anything other than help Trump and cover up his corruption and “malicious incompetence.”
Even if Sullivan does uncover something shady, it’s likely that Roberts and the GOP will leap to help Trump and Barr suppress and cover up any evidence of wrongdoing by blocking or obstructing any further investigation by House Democrats. Times have changed. And, right now, that doesn’t appear to be for the better for our justice system or our nation.
When Donald Trump chose Bill Barr to serve as attorney general in December 2018, even some moderates and liberals greeted the choice with optimism. One exuberant Democrat described him as “an excellent choice,” who could be counted on to “stand up for the department’s institutional prerogatives and … push back on any improper attempt to inject politics into its work.”
At the end of his first year of service, Barr’s conduct has shown that such expectations were misplaced. Beginning in March with his public whitewashing of Robert Mueller’s report, which included powerful evidence of repeated obstruction of justice by the president, Barr has appeared to function much more as the president’s personal advocate than as an attorney general serving the people and government of the United States. Among the most widely reported and disturbing events have been Barr’s statements that a judicially authorized FBI investigation amounted to “spying” on the Trump campaign, and his public rejection in December of the inspector general’s considered conclusion that the Russia probe was properly initiated and overseen in an unbiased manner. Also quite unsettling was Trump’s explicit mention of Barr and Rudy Giuliani in the same breath in his July 25 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, as individuals the Ukrainian president should speak with regarding the phony investigation that Ukraine was expected to publicly announce.
Still more troubling has been Barr’s intrusion, apparently for political reasons, into the area of Justice Department action that most demands scrupulous integrity and strict separation from politics and other bias—invocation of the criminal sanction. When Barr initiated a second, largely redundant investigation of the FBI Russia probe in May, denominated it criminal, and made clear that he is personally involved in carrying it out, many eyebrows were raised.
But worst of all have been the events of the past week. The evenhanded conduct of the prosecutions of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn by experienced Department of Justice attorneys have been disrupted at the 11th hour by the attorney general’s efforts to soften the consequences for the president’s associates. More generally, it appears that Barr has recently identified a group of lawyers whom he trusts and put them in place to oversee and second-guess the work of the department’s career attorneys on a broader range of cases. And there is no comfort from any of this in Barr’s recent protests about the president’s tweeting. He in no way suggested he was changing course, only that it is hard to appear independent when the president is publicly calling for him to follow the path he is on.
Bad as they are, these examples are more symptoms than causes of Barr’s unfitness for office. The fundamental problem is that he does not believe in the central tenet of our system of government—that no person is above the law. In chilling terms, Barr’s own words make clear his long-held belief in the need for a virtually autocratic executive who is not constrained by countervailing powers within our government under the constitutional system of checks and balances.
Indeed, given our national faith and trust in a rule of law no one can subvert, it is not too strong to say that Bill Barr is un-American. And now, from his perch as attorney general, he is in the midst of a root-and-branch attack on the core principles that have guided our justice system, and especially our Department of Justice, since the 1970s.
. . . .
The benefit of the doubt that many were ready to extend to Barr a year ago—as among the best of a bad lot of nominees who had previously served in high office without disgrace—has now run out. He has told us in great detail who he is, what he believes, and where he would like to take us. For whatever twisted reasons, he believes that the president should be above the law, and he has as his foil in pursuit of that goal a president who, uniquely in our history, actually aspires to that status. And Barr has acted repeatedly on those beliefs in ways that are more damaging at every turn. Presently he is moving forward with active misuse of the criminal sanction, as one more tool of the president’s personal interests.
Bill Barr’s America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go. It is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that, we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately, or failing that, be impeached.
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Read Don’s full article at the link.
I always liked and respected Don Ayer. We worked together on a few projects at the DOJ and were partners together at Jones Day in the 1990s.
I’m sure that, like others, I was a guilty of giving Billy Barr “the benefit of the doubt,” as I did with his totally unfit predecessor Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. I actually hoped they would function as they claimed under oath they would during their Senate confirmations. Obviously, both these dudes gave blatantly false testimony. But, it’s hardly surprising considering the litany of lies about migrants, lawyers, political opponents, and the law, not to mention loyal DOJ employees, that have come out of their mouths since they were confirmed.
The legal profession is basically back to the “bad place” we were at the time of Watergate. This time it’s probably even worse because of the lack of integrity among GOP legislators and too many Article III Judges who seem to have bought into Trump’s “I could shoot somebody in Times Square at noon and my toadies and enablers would still support me” rationale. After all, it was the loss of support among the Senate GOP that eventually led Nixon to resign.
Obviously, for today’s “Trump owned and operated” GOP rank and file, no crime Trump could commit would ever rise to the level of an impeachable offense. And beyond a mild “slap on the wrist” to Wilbur Ross for giving intentionally false testimony, J.R. and his “Gang of 5” at the Supremes have been perfectly happy to dehumanize migrants and asylum seekers, many of them Hispanic or Muslims, in ways that would never be acceptable if applied to others in society. In other words, “Dred Scottification” of the “other” is OK, just so long as only the desperate, vulnerable, or people of color are at risk.
What Trump has done to refugees, asylum, seekers, other migrants, and their families is actually far worse than the “Stone fiasco” in human and legal terms. Billy Barr actually unconstitutionally acts as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner in their Immigration “Court” cases — that is, if they are even fortunate to get to any type of hearing at all.
This is completely and outrageously unfair and unconstitutional. Yet judges and others who haven’t taken the time to figure out what’s really happening or who have just abandoned their humanity routinely overlook these grotesque miscarriages of justice, clear violations of basic judicial ethics prohibiting conflicts of interest, and blatant disregard for Constitutional guarantees for fair and impartial adjudication, particularly in matters affecting life and/or freedom.
Someday, I think that history will accurately characterize the immigration and refuge policies of the Trump regime as “crimes against humanity” and will detail the culpability of all of those, be they government employees, judges, legislators, or voters, who assisted and enabled Trump’s cruel,illegal, immoral, and abhorrent conduct.
Until then, many will suffer unnecessarily and unconstitutionally. And, no, despite all of Don’s cogent arguments, Billy Barr isn’t going anywhere unless and until “His Don” finds him no longer useful in corrupting justice in America.
There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus.
Under Attorney General Bill Barr’s management, it appears no corner of the Justice Department can escape perversion — even the annual grants the Justice Department gives to nonprofits and local governments to help victims of human trafficking.
In a new grant award, senior Justice officials rejected the recommendations of career officials and decided to deny grants to highly rated Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Instead, Reuters reported, they gave more than $1 million combined to lower-rated groups called the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus.
Why? Well, it turns out the head of the Catholic Charities affiliate had been active with Democrats and the Phoenix group had opposed President Trump’s immigration policies. By contrast, Hookers for Jesus is run by a Christian conservative and the Lincoln Tubman group was launched by a relative of a Trump delegate to the 2016 convention.
That Catholic Charities has been replaced by Hookers for Jesus says much about Barr’s Justice Department. Friends of Trump are rewarded. Opponents of Trump are punished. And the nation’s law enforcement apparatus becomes Trump’s personal plaything.
Federal prosecutors Monday recommended that Trump associate Roger Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, witness tampering and other crimes.
Then Trump tweeted that the proposed sentence was “horrible and very unfair” and “the real crimes were on the other side.” And by midday Tuesday, Barr’s Justice Department announced that it would reduce Stone’s sentence recommendation. All four prosecutors, protesting the politicization, asked to withdraw from the case.
But politicization is now the norm. Last week, Barr assigned himself the sole authority to decide which presidential candidates — Democrats and Republicans — should be investigated by the FBI.
Also last week, the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice Department, announced that New York state residents can no longer enroll in certain Trusted Traveler programs such as Global Entry — apparent punishment for the strongly Democratic state’s policies on illegal immigrants.
On Monday, Barr declared that the Justice Department had created an “intake process” to receive Rudy Giuliani’s dirt from Ukraine on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden — dirt dug in a boondoggle that left two Giuliani associates under indictment and Trump impeached.
The same day, Barr’s agency announced lawsuits against California, New Jersey and King County (Seattle), Washington — politically “blue” jurisdictions all — as part of what he called a “significant escalation” against sanctuary cities.
On Tuesday, to get a better sense of the man who has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s toy, I watched Barr speak to the Major County Sheriffs of America, a friendly audience, at the Willard Hotel in Washington.
Even by Trumpian standards, the jowly Barr, in his large round glasses, pinstripe suit and Trump-red tie, was strikingly sycophantic. “In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,” he read, deadpan.
Trump, he went on, “loves this country,” and “he especially loves you.” The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the “rule of law.”
Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked “rogue DA’s” and “so-called social-justice reformers,” who are responsible for “historic levels of homicide and other violent crime” in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer “to help criminal aliens evade the law.” Barr vowed to fight these foes with “all lawful means” — federal subpoenas to force them to turn over “information about criminal aliens,” dozens of lawsuits to invalidate statutes and attempts to deny them both competitive and automatic grants.
In response to a question, Barr railed against tech companies’ use of encryption: “They’re designing these devices so you can be impervious to any government scrutiny,” he protested.
Maybe people wouldn’t be so sensitive about government scrutiny if the top law enforcement official weren’t using his position to punish political opponents and reward political allies.
Instead, with Barr’s acquiescence, we live in a moment in which: Trump’s Treasury Department immediately releases sensitive financial information about Hunter Biden, while refusing to release similar information about Trump; Trump ousts officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry and even ousts the blameless twin brother of one of the witnesses; and Trump’s FBI decides to monitor violent “people on either side” of the abortion debate — although the FBI couldn’t point to a single instance of violence by abortion-rights supporters.
This week, the Pentagon released a new color scheme for Air Force One, replacing the 60-year-old design with one that looks suspiciously like the old Trump Shuttle.Surprised? Don’t be. Soon the entire administration will be able to apply for a Justice Department grant as a newly formed nonprofit: Hookers for Trump.
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Barr’s inspirational lesson for new lawyers: Once you achieve fame, fortune, and protection from corrupt politicos and complicit judges, it’s virtually impossible to get your law license revoked for unethical performance. As long as you thumb your nose at the law and ethical rules right in public, right in front of judges, you’re essentially immune. The “rules” only apply to those poor suckers at the bottom of the “legal totem pole.”
This is actually a fairly new development under the Trump regime. In the past, even high-profile lawyers who violated their ethical obligations got zapped: John Mitchell, Dick Kleindienst, Bill Clinton(technically, he might have “surrendered his law license” in lieu of disbarment), Webb Hubbell, etc.
But, during the Trump regime, Federal Judges seem content to just “roll their eyes” at lies, false narratives, thinly veiled racist or religiously bigoted rationales for policy, and simply astounding conflicts of interest (how about running a biased and unconstitutional Immigration “Court” right in plain view?) streaming out of an ethics-free zone at the “Department of Hookers for Trump.”
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson was actually a “target” of Roger Stone’s contemptuous and openly threatening behavior. It will be interesting to see how she deals with the sudden reversal and baseless plea for mercy from Barr for this unrepentant and totally unapologetic criminal.
As if to resolve any doubts as to his contempt for America and democratic institutions, the cowardly “Bully-in-Chief” unleashed an unprovoked twitter tirade against Judge Jackson and the career prosecutors in the case. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/12/trump-stone-judge/
Perhaps predictability, this was followed by an impotent call by Senate Democrats for the uber corrupt Billy Barr to resign and for the equally corrupt and spineless Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to stop slithering around the Capitol and schedule an “investigative hearing” into improper political influence at the “Department of Hookers for Trump.”https://apple.news/Az2hAo6yqT8uKJSuAX26F1Q Don’t hold your breath, folks!
This is not “normal.” This is not “right.” It’s time for those of us who still believe in American democracy to take a stand in November to remove Trump and the sociopathic element that he represents in our society from power. Otherwise, the “race to the bottom” will continue, unabated. And more innocent people will be hurt by or die because of this unprincipled, totally immoral lunatic.
An impeachment trial with no witnesses or evidence is very American
Opinion by David Love
Updated 9:53 AM ET, Tue February 4, 2020
Senator: This is a tragedy in every possible way 02:05
David A. Love is a writer, commentator and journalism and media studies professor based in Philadelphia. He contributes to a variety of outlets, including Atlanta Black Star, ecoWURD and Al Jazeera. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidALove. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN)The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump is a relative rarity in American political history, and yet aspects of it have the haunting familiarity of a sham trial in the Jim Crow South, where black people were routinely criminalized and murdered in the name of “justice.” Yes, there are certainly obvious differences between this political trial and the ones that many black Americans have faced, but the common thread remains: going through a trial that has already been decided before it even began.
David A. Love
There is little precedent for how to conduct only the third presidential impeachment trial ever to take place. However, with the Senate vote by the Republican majority to exclude witnesses — likely including former national security adviser John Bolton and indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas — the impeachment trial became nothing more than a kangaroo court with a predetermined outcome, a very American ritual of injustice masquerading as due process.
Comparing impeachment to Jim Crow jurisprudence, Rev. William J. Barber II of Repairers of the Breach and the Poor People’s Campaign summed it up when he tweeted: “In the old Jim Crow South, when racists harmed Black folks, the prosecutor & judge would conspire to have a fake trial & ensure the racists didn’t get convicted. We are seeing these same tactics play out in the impeachment trial under McConnell & it’s shameful.”
There is ample evidence the fix was in, that GOP senators had no intention of acting as impartial jurors. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said there was no chance the President would be removed from office, pledged to work closely and in “total coordination” with the White House on impeachment.
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham said, “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.” And as some senators reportedly fell asleep and played with fidget spinners during the trial, Trump threatened to invoke executive privilege to block the testimony of former national security adviser John Bolton.
Boasting about hiding the impeachment evidence, Trump said “We have all the material. They don’t have the material.”
In a perfect example of jury nullification, Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexanderacknowledged Trump’s wrongdoing as “inappropriate,” yet supported acquittal and voted against witnesses. And Florida Sen. Marco Rubio wrote in a Medium post, “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.”
Preventing first-hand witnesses from testifying and new documents from being entered into evidence is very typical of how trials were conducted in the Jim Crow South, when gerrymandering, voter suppression and violence maintained white political rule, and all-white juries quickly convicted black defendants and exonerated white defendants without the need for evidence or deliberation.
For example, in 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam — two white men — went on trial in Mississippi for the brutal kidnapping, murder and mutilation of Emmett Till — a black 14-year old boy from Chicago.
It was obvious then, as now, that the trial was for show, almost more a justification for what had happened to Till. A white woman, the wife of one of the defendants, alleged Till had whistled at her (decades later she admitted to lying).
A number of witnesses were called, including two black men, one of whom identified the killers, and both of whom were threatened with death for testifying. However, the sheriff reportedly placed other black witnesses in jail to prevent them from testifying. An all-white-male jury — black people were effectively not allowed to vote or serve on juries — deliberated for only 67 minutes to deliver a not guilty verdict. Even the jurors knew they were participating in theater; “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,” one juror said.
Similarly, in 1931, nine black teens known as the Scottsboro boys were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. While the boys were awaiting trial, a white mob threatened to lynch them. With the exception of the 13-year-old, they were swiftly sentenced to death by an all-white-male jury. Although none were executed, they collectively served 100 years in prison. Some of the boys were retried and reconvicted, and the Supreme Court twice overturned the guilty verdicts.
Echoes of Jim Crow jurisprudence continue to the present day, and even with attempts to reform the criminal justice system, injustices plague the poor and people of color, who are disproportionately incarcerated. When black and Latino teens, known as the Central Park Five, were falsely arrested, interrogated and coerced in the brutal rape and beating a white woman in New York, Trump placed a full-page ad in four newspapers calling for the death penalty. Even after the accused were exonerated by DNA evidence linking another person to the crime, as recently as last year, Trump has declined to apologize for his actions.
It is not surprising that Trump’s GOP would work overtime to conduct a fake impeachment trial with their own narrative and set of facts and no witnesses to avoid accountability. This, despite a CNN poll showing that 69% of Americans want to hear new witness testimony, and a Quinnipiac Poll in which 75% say witnesses should be allowed to testify. A recent Pew poll found a slight majority of Americans supporting Trump’s removal from office, with 63% saying he has definitely or probably broke the law, and 70% concluding he has done unethical things.
However, if the Senate does not reflect the will of most Americans, it is because the Senate is a fundamentally undemocratic institution that exercises minority rule. For example, on a strictly 53-47 party line vote, the Senate voted to reject a series of amendments to subpoena documents and witnesses (for the vote that decided whether to allow witnesses, two Republicans voted with Democrats in a vote that failed 49-51 to allow witnesses at Trump’s impeachment trial).
Those 53 Republican senators in the first vote, as author and reporter Ari Berman noted, represent 153 million Americans, as opposed to the 168 million people the Democratic senators represent. Minority rule is subverting democracy and the rule of law and undermining the popular will, resulting in unjust policies and decisions. This, as Republicans who control the Senate with a minority of popular support block the impeachment of a President who was elected with nearly 2.9 million fewer votes than his opponent. Jim Crow segregationists employed voter suppression, violence and coups to maintain power. Similarly, today’s GOP must rely on anti-democratic methods to cling to power in a changing America, and prop up a President who will most certainly stay in office through malfeasance, playing to xenophobic fear and threats of violence.
Meanwhile, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who has assumed the role of a potted plant throughout most the proceeding, helped create this mess by playing an active role in the erosion of democracy and the legitimacy of the political system. Under Roberts’ leadership, the high court has sanctioned gerrymandering, eviscerated voting rights, and allowed for unlimited money in our elections, including potentially from foreign sources.
If the Republicans hope for an end run around democracy with a kangaroo court, this is nothing new. Following in the footsteps of those who played a part in sham trials in the Jim Crow South, the Trump party cares little about justice, and everything about breaking the rules to maintain power in perpetuity. Unfortunately, sham trials are as American as apple pie.
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By aligning himself with the totally corrupt, lawless, and immoral Trump and his various scofflaw schemes, Roberts seems intent on following in the footsteps of the now reviled Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision.
Obviously, given a chance at a Second Term, a Senate of toadies, and a complicit, willfully tone-deaf Supremes, Trump has every intention of “Dred Scottifying” immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ community, political opponents, and other large segments of America.
“Corruption, impunity,” those are words that those of us who actually decided immigration cases saw often in country background information on third word dictatorships and autocracies. Now, thanks to Trump, his Senate toadies, and Article IIIs “go alongs,” those are also words that can be used to describe the American justice system.
President Trump’s progress in corrupting the Department of Justice — and, to some extent, the entire federal government — into a weapon of his autocratic aspirations relies on the acquiescence of figures like Rod Rosenstein. It is the Rosensteins who translate the president’s lizard-brain impulses into practical directives and create a patina of normalcy around them. (Or, in some increasingly rare cases, refuse to do so.) And so Rosenstein’s spate of valedictory remarks attempting to cleanse and justify his service to Trump give us real insight into the worldview of the compliant bureaucratic functionary.
In a speech last night, Rosenstein delivered a sharp attack on former FBI Director James Comey. Rosenstein, of course, supplied Trump with a letter justifying Comey’s removal. Rosenstein justified his cooperation by claiming ignorance of any obstruction of justice motive. “Nobody said that the removal was intended to influence the course of my Russia investigation.”
It is perhaps remotely possible that Rosenstein actually did not realize what was going on with Trump, Comey, and the Russia investigation. It is not possible that Rosenstein believed, as he wrote, that Donald “Lock her up!” Trump fired Comey for treating Hillary Clinton unfairly, which is the reason Rosenstein elucidated in his letter.
Rosenstein also gushed about the rule of law, assuring his audience that it is safe, and implictly crediting Trump with upholding it. “We use the term ‘rule of law’ to describe our obligation to follow neutral principles,” he lectured. “As President Trump pointed out, ‘we govern ourselves in accordance with the rule of law rather [than] … the whims of an elite few or the dictates of collective will.’”
More revealingly, Rosenstein lashed out at Comey, who has made some cutting remarks about Rosenstein’s character, as a “partisan pundit.” Rosenstein’s conceit here is that Comey, a lifelong Republican, has become “partisan” by attacking Trump’s character. Meanwhile, Rosenstein, also a Republican, has maintained his neutrality and therefore his credibility.
But Rosenstein’s idea of nonpartisan neutrality does not require abstaining from political commentary. It merely requires abstaining from criticism of his boss. In another recent speech, Rosenstein attacked the Obama administration for failing “to publicize the full story about Russian computer hackers and social media trolls, and how they relate to a broader strategy to undermine America.” (Blaming Obama for doing too little to stop the Russian operation, when Trump was abetting it and Republican leader Mitch McConnell threatened to publicly attack any administration statement against it, is one of Trump’s Orwellian talking points.)
It might seem hypocritical for Rosenstein to parrot Trump’s talking points and then lash out as Comey as a partisan pundit. But from Rosenstein’s standpoint, it probably feels perfectly consistent. Opinions that extol and burnish the powers that be are qualitatively different than opinions tearing them down. Rosenstein’s opinions are not opinions at all. They are merely the lubricant in the proper functioning of the machinery of government.
And so Rosenstein joined with William Barr to spin the Mueller report — in a fashion so misleading that Mueller himself memorialized his objections in a memo — and declare all of Trump’s efforts to obstruct the probe to be non-crimes. Barr is meanwhile authorizing the fourth counter-investigation of the Russia probe. This will probably fail to yield any charges, but will succeed in making anybody in the Department of Justice think very carefully before looking into any crimes by Trump or his friends, with the full understanding that Republicans will harass them for years if they try.
Trump continues to mock even the pretense that his attorney general should make investigative decisions independent of politics. “I’m proud of our attorney general that he is looking into it,” he told reporters today. Somehow, Rosenstein is able to look upon the situation he has left with pride. Mueller was never fired. More importantly, neither was Rosenstein himself. It is easy for the inside man to confuse a system that is intact with a system that is working.
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Here is my assessment of Rosenstein’s legacy from a recent post:
Rosenstein is on his way out the door at the DOJ. He’ll leave behind a mixed legacy. He’ll deserve great credit for protecting the Mueller investigation from Trump’s various attempts to interfere and compromise it. On the other hand, he drafted the infamous “pretext memo” which was part of the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to cover up Trump’s real real reason for firing FBI Director Jim Comey.
His failure to stand up for judicial independence, fairness, and due process for vulnerable individuals coming before our U.S. Immigration Courts and his continuing defense of the Administration’s indefensible and harmful White Nationalist immigration agenda will go down as one of his lesser moments.
America needs an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court where judges act fairly and impartially and owe allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, not the Attorney General or any other political official.
Rosenstein is a good illustration of why 1) we need an independent U.S. Immigration Court, and 2) the U.S. Department of Justice is a failed organization whose mission and functions need thoughtful reexamination once Trump and his GOP toadies have been removed from power.
Interestingly, Rosenstein once was considered a “straight up guy” — a public servant who had served honorably in Administrations of both parties. Whatever else one might say about Trump, he does have a talent for bringing out and exploiting the underlying sliminess and weakness in folks once thought to be decent human beings and good public servants: John Kelly, Lindsay Graham, Kirstjen Nielsen, Rosenstein, Nikki Haley, Bill Barr, Rachel Brand, etc.
Somewhere out there are pockets of the “anti-Rosensteins” — civil servants who continue to uphold their oaths of office, do the right thing, and put Due Process, human lives, and the public welfare above job security or sucking up to power. Hopefully, we will reach a point in time where their stories can be told and where “sell-outs” like Rosenstein are held accountable for aiding and abetting the abuse of power.
Fitz Brundage is the William B. Umstead professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill and the author of “Civilizing Torture,” which was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History.
May 3
Does it violate human rights to hold children in fenced enclosures in grim facilities that are bone-chillingly cold for weeks on end? Is separating children from their parents a form of cruel and unusual punishment? When does a crisis justify the kind of treatment normally seen as inhumane?
The furious debate over migrant detention along the nation’s southwest border with Mexico has put these questions front and center in American politics. But they’re not new. The treatment of people on the margins of American life — criminals, immigrants, civilians in overseas war zones — has always proven a challenge to our democratic ideals.
Yet beginning in the 1920s, activists waged a half-century-long struggle to persuade the Supreme Court to stop abusive practices by authorities. After World War II, the United States also committed itself to the promotion of international human rights. These two signal developments have been seriously eroded, first by the excesses of the war on terrorism and now by the Trump administration’s targeting of the unwelcome and powerless, whether they are undocumented immigrants in the United States or asylum seekers. We have returned to a pattern of willful ignorance, one that allows us to avoid grappling with deeply immoral policies.
Threats to our safety, perceived or real, have long justified the kind of “tougher policies” that President Trump has demanded for the southern border. He may not be well versed in history, but the president is joining a long line of elected officials who found that rights and basic norms are easily jettisoned when they collide with demands for greater security. Across our history, from the Indian wars to the war on terrorism, officials were quick to call for “tougher policies” and slow to fill in the details. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered military commanders in the Philippines to adopt “the most stern measures” to punish Filipino guerrillas; in a subsequent campaign the Marines followed orders and left a trail of devastation and death across the island of Samar. But such methods were justified as a “military necessity.”
Roosevelt rationalized the brutal treatment of alleged guerrillas by citing the need to stanch the threat to security. This kind of evasive language has repeatedly prevented us from coming to terms with acts of cruelty carried out in the name of national security. We’re seeing that pattern again.
What precisely did Trump officials mean when they announced “a tougher direction” for immigration? They certainly imply more than just the proposals for new fees and regulations reducing the numbers of asylum seekers. Are the American people ready to confront the reality of harsh security measures? Or will we retreat into euphemisms such as a “hardened” border and “zero tolerance” for migrants that covers up the reality of what is actually happening on the border?
We are deciding day by day whether to extend the basic protections of law and civilization to the people arriving on our border. For much of the nation’s history, the prohibition on cruelty and torture in American law rested on the premise that the fundamental decency of Americans, especially empathy for fellow citizens, would make such violations unthinkable.
But our capacity to empathize begins to fray at the margins, and we grow less certain about who, exactly, deserves protection. Those deemed undeserving, unwelcome or powerless — Native Americans, the enslaved, prison inmates and criminal suspects — have commonly suffered forms of violence and abuse that violated our national principles. Some people are inside the protection of the law, and some are cast out from it.
We’re seeing a replay of that ugly history unfold along our southern border. If the Trump administration codifies its get-tough rhetoric into harsher policies, we will see far more allegations of human rights abuses against the men and women charged with securing our border. And we probably will rationalize it by claiming that those responsible are just a few bad apples rather than reckoning with the ways cruelty has been embedded in the policy itself. Like the euphemistic language of security, this choice allows us to avoid uncomfortable questions about our moral values.
In fact, we’ve already seen this pattern. Accusations of cruelty and torture by ICE and CBP agents have been circulating for years, and they follow this well-worn pattern. Official denials are followed by investigations that almost always find limited violations by “a few bad apples,” not the kind of systemic abuse that would call our broader policies into question.
This pattern has long historical roots: When investigations of police brutality in Washington during the 1930s revealed widespread use of abusive interrogation methods, the police superintendent, whose predecessors had dismissed similar allegations for decades, only grudgingly conceded that a few officers may have gone too far in their resolve to protect the public.
By seeing violations of human rights as rare exceptions, unfortunate lapses that don’t challenge our fundamental sense of decency, Americans can avoid any real reckoning with the policies we’ve approved — which often violate our purported values. Very few of the officers and soldiers responsible for the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam in 1968 and none of the architects of the George W. Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” policies have faced legal consequences. Even Jon Burge, a notorious ringleader of lawless police in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s, was convicted of perjury for lying to police investigators rather than torturing countless suspects.
Focusing on bad apples has long allowed us to excuse morally bankrupt policies. We need to realize that human rights abuses on the southern border aren’t spurred by immoral actors in ICE or CBP, but rather because of a political leadership that can’t or won’t come up with humane immigration policies.
Congress needs to do its job and exercise scrupulous oversight of Trump’s immigration policies. But the real solution to our border crisis is to demand that all elected officials, from local sheriffs to senators, responsibly address immigration and human rights. Trump declared that he wants immigration to be a key campaign issue in 2020. His opponents should accept that challenge. We must shine a spotlight on cruel and illegal policies that undermine our national ideals and find the wisdom and the courage to do better.
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Join the New Due Process Army today and fight for human rights, the rule of law, accountability for Government scofflaws, and a return to basic human decency! Fight for a better future for ALL Americans!
Photo By: Kimberly April Photography www.kimberlyapril.com
Litman writes:
It took Attorney General William Barr only one week from the release of the Mueller report to bring obstruction of justice charges against two governmental officials for interfering in a federal investigation. But the charges have nothing to do with the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the election or the possible obstruction of that investigation.
Although the obstruction charges DOJ filed are not related to the Mueller report, they underscore just how far the attorney general bent over backward to spin the report in the president’s favor and how partisan the Department of Justice has become. The disparities between the two cases highlight how the Department of Justice, under Barr’s leadership, has become nothing more than a political arm of the Trump administration, particularly in its handling of possible obstruction charges stemming from the Mueller report.
The indictment against Judge Shelley Richmond Joseph, a Massachusetts district court judge, and Officer Wesley MacGregor, a Massachusetts trial court officer, alleges that the officers interfered with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement proceeding by preventing ICE from arresting an individual who was arrested on state charges and attended an arraignment hearing in state court. During the state court proceeding, Joseph asked an ICE officer to wait outside the courtroom while the court conducted the arraignment hearing. Earlier in the day, the judge had requested more information about one of the state charges in the case (a fugitive charge) after the prosecutor said the state would not seek to detain the defendant on the other charge (a drug charge).
Barr’s response to the obstruction issues raised by the Mueller report was partisan andunprincipled.
After recalling the case, the judge observed that ICE was in the courthouse. The prosecutor then informed the court that the state did not believe the defendant was the fugitive from Pennsylvania for whom there was an arrest warrant and therefore believed that the fugitive charge was an error, which would mean that the defendant would be free to leave. The defense attorney, however, noted that ICE was convinced otherwise and suggested they would likely take the client into custody. The defense attorney then suggested that “the best thing for us to do is to … release him … and hope that he can avoid ICE.”
At that point, the judge noted the other alternative was to recall the proceedings again the next day and asked “ICE is gonna get him?” before directing the clerk to go off the record. The recording was turned off for 52 seconds, and when it resumed, the prosecutor renewed the claim that the defendant was not the person with a Pennsylvania warrant out for his arrest and moved to dismiss the fugitive charge against him. Because the state had already stated it would not seek to detain the defendant on the drug charges, the defendant was released, and the trial court officer escorted him through the back door.
This evidence provided the basis for Barr’s Department of Justice to indict the state judge and state officer for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Yet all of the reasons Barr has previously cited for opposing an obstruction investigation against the president suggest the Department of Justice should not have brought obstruction charges against Joseph and MacGregor either.
For example, in June, Barr wrote a memo as a private citizen arguing that obstruction laws should not “reach facially-lawful actions taken by the President in exercising the discretion vested in him by the Constitution.” Yet that is exactly what the obstruction-of-justice charges against Joseph and MacGregor cover. State judges do not persist with criminal charges that the district attorney has dropped, and state law does not require judges to detain individuals on the drug charges that remained. It was therefore “facially legitimate” and within the “discretion” of the judge not to detain the individual based on the drug charge. The judge also has total control of her courtroom and can decide through which doors to instruct people to come and go. And the state judge’s motive shouldn’t matter to the analysis because under Barr’s theory of obstruction, government officials can’t be charged with obstruction “based solely on his subjective state of mind” for “simply exercising his discretion in a facially lawful way.”
Or take Barr’s statement—given at a bizarre press conference just prior to the release of the Mueller report last week—that the president did not corruptly intend to obstruct the investigation because the president “was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.” A similar exculpatory argument could be made on behalf of Joseph and MacGregor. They, too, may have been “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that” ICE’s investigations and presence in state courthouses undermined the integrity of state court proceedings. Or perhaps they were frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that ICE’s enforcement efforts were the result of the president’s apparent bias and animosity toward the Latino community.
Ultimately, the Justice Department’s indictment of Joseph and MacGregor is a reminder about how aggressively the federal government often reads the federal obstruction statute. For example, the indictment confirms that obstruction does not have to be particularly sophisticated or successful in order to constitute a crime—the trial court officer merely let the defendant out the back door, and the defendant was subsequently apprehended and now faces deportation.
It also demonstrates a contrast in the kind of evidence that often suffices to establish an obstruction-of-justice charge. In the case of Joseph and MacGregor, DOJ has some snippets of a courtroom conversation that indicated the judge wanted to do something she did not want publicly recorded and less than a minute without a recording. In the case of President Donald Trump and his associates, special counsel Robert Mueller compiled dozens of witnesses, contemporaneous notes, 10 separate incidents, 182 pages of a report, multiple instances of officials lying to investigators or not being forthcoming with them, and several damning instances of the president lying in an apparent effort to cover his tracks. All of this led Barr to his four-page summary conclusion that Trump had not committed a crime—a conclusion that flew in the face of Mueller’s findings.
The stark difference between the attorney general’s treatment of the obstruction case against Joseph and MacGregor and the obstruction cases at the heart of the Mueller report serves as a pointed reminder that Barr’s response to the obstruction issues raised by the Mueller report was partisan and unprincipled.
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Golly gee, who woulda thought that a guy who “auditioned” for his job by promising to turn the DOJ into “Trump’s personal law firm” to be used against the United States of America and its people while being paid by same USA would turn out to be exactly the type of unethical hack that he promised to be? I mean we expect Trump sycophants to lie about everything. But, Barr only lies about the law when it suits Trump’s purposes — he’s made good on his promise to help Trump degrade and destroy American democracy.
BILL BARR – Unqualified For Office – Unfit To Act In A Quasi-Judicial Capacity
There have been many articles pointing out that Bill Barr unethically has acted as Trump’s defense counsel rather than fulfilled his oath to uphold the Constitution and be the Attorney General of all of the American people. There have also been some absurdist “apologias” for Barr some written by once-respected lawyers who should know better, and others written by the normal Trump hacks.
Here are my choices for four of the best articles explaining why Barr should not be the Attorney General. It goes without saying that he shouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be running the Immigration Court system. His intervention into individual cases in a quasi-judicial capacity is a clear violation of judicial ethics requiring avoidance of even the “appearance” of a conflict of interest. There is no “appearance” here. Barr has a clear conflict in any matter dealing with immigration.
Attorney General William Barr. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
House Democrats are going to face a difficult decision about launching an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Balanced against the president’s impressive array of misconduct is the fact that several more criminal investigations that may add to the indictment are already underway, and that impeaching the president might jeopardize the reelection of red-state Democratic members. But in the meantime, Attorney General William Barr presents them with a much easier decision. Barr has so thoroughly betrayed the values of his office that voting to impeach and remove him is almost obvious.
On March 24, Barr released a short letter summarizing the main findings of the Mueller investigation, as he saw them. News accounts treated Barr’s interpretation as definitive, and the media — even outlets that had spent two years uncovering a wide swath of suspicious and compromising links between the Trump campaign and Russia — dutifully engaged in self-flagellation for having had the temerity to raise questions about the whole affair.
Barr had done very little to that point to earn such a broad benefit of the doubt. In the same role in 1992, he had supported mass pardons of senior officials that enabled a cover-up of the Iran–Contra scandal. Less famously, in 1989 he issued a redacted version of a highly controversial administration legal opinion that, as Ryan Goodman explained, “omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion” for “no justifiable reason.”
And while many members of the old Republican political Establishment had recoiled against Trump’s contempt for the rule of law, Barr has shown no signs of having joined them. He met with Trump to discuss serving as his defense lawyer, publicly attacked the Mueller investigation (which risked “taking on the look of an entirely political operation to overthrow the president”), called for more investigations of Hillary Clinton, and circulated a lengthy memo strongly defending Trump against obstruction charges.
The events since Barr’s letter have incinerated whatever remains of his credibility. The famously tight-lipped Mueller team told several news outlets the letter had minimized Trump’s culpability; Barr gave congressional testimony hyping up Trump’s charges of “spying,” even prejudging the outcome of an investigation (“I think there was a failure among a group of leaders [at the FBI] at the upper echelon”); evaded questions as to whether he had shared the Mueller report with the White House; and, it turns out, he’s “had numerous conversations with White House lawyers which aided the president’s legal team,” the New York Times reports. Then he broke precedent by scheduling a press conference to spin the report in advance of its redacted publication.
It is not much of a mystery to determine which officials have offered their full loyalty to the president. Trump has reportedly “praised Barr privately for his handling of the report and compared him favorably to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions” —whose sole offense in Trump’s eyes was following Department of Justice ethical protocol. Trump urged his Twitter followers to tune in to Barr’s conference, promotional treatment he normally reserves for his Fox News sycophants.
The press conference was the final disqualifying performance. Barr acted like Trump’s defense lawyer, the job he had initially sought, rather than as an attorney general. His aggressive spin seemed designed to work in the maximal number of repetitions of the “no collusion” mantra, in accordance with his boss’s talking points, at the expense of any faithful transmission of the special counsel’s report.
Barr’s letter had made it sound as though Trump’s campaign spurned Russia’s offers of help: “The Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign,” he wrote. In fact, Mueller’s report concluded, “In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer,” but that the cooperation fell short of criminal conduct.
Where Mueller intended to leave the job of judging Trump’s obstructive conduct to Congress, Barr interposed his own judgment. Barr offered this incredible statement for why Trump’s behavior was excusable: “[T]here is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” Barr said. “Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation,” and credited him further with taking “no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.”
Sincere? How can Barr use that word to describe the mentality of a man whose own staffers routinely describe him in the media as a pathological liar? Trump repeatedly lied about Russia’s involvement in the campaign, and his own dealings with Russia. And he also, contra Barr, repeatedly denied the special counsel access to witnesses by dangling pardons to persuade them to withhold cooperation.
It is true that many of Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice failed. As Mueller wrote, the president’s “efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
This is a rather different gloss on the facts than the happy story Barr offered the press. What’s more, it is a pressing argument for Barr’s own removal. Next to the president himself, the attorney general is the most crucial actor in the safeguarding of the rule of law. The Justice Department is an awesome force that holds the power to enable the ruling party to commit crimes with impunity, or to intimidate and smear the opposing party with the taint of criminality.
There is no other department in government in which mere norms, not laws, are all that stand between democracy as we know it and a banana republic. Barr has revealed his complete unfitness for this awesome task. Nearly two more years of this Trumpian henchman wielding power over federal law enforcement is more weight than the rickety Constitution can bear.
In the years after Watergate, Justice Department officials — from both parties — worked hard to banish partisan cronyism from the department. Their goal was to make it the least political, most independent part of the executive branch.
“Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general, said at the time. Griffin Bell, later appointed to the same job by Jimmy Carter, described the department as “a neutral zone in the government, because the law has to be neutral.”
Attorney General William Barr clearly rejects this principle. He’s repeatedly put a higher priority on protecting his boss, President Trump, than on upholding the law in a neutral way. He did so in his letter last month summarizing Robert Mueller’s investigation and then again in a bizarre prebuttal news conference yesterday. As The Times editorial board wrote, Barr yesterday “behaved more like the president’s defense attorney than the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.”
Throughout his tenure, Barr has downplayed or ignored the voluminous evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing — his lies to the American people, his willingness to work with a hostile foreign country during a presidenial campaign, his tolerance of extensive criminal behavior among his staff and his repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation. Barr even claimed that Trump “fully cooperated” with that investigation, which Vox’s Ezra Klein notes is “an outright lie.”
Since he took office, Trump has made clear that he wants an attorney general who acts as first an enforcer of raw power and only second as an enforcer of federal law. In Barr, Trump has found his man. Together, they have cast aside more than four decades worth of Justice Department ideals and instead adopted the approach of Richard Nixon.
President Donald Trump has long wished for an attorney general who would act as his own private lawyer, protecting him from any potential legal damage. He finally found his man in William Barr.
Barr could have released special counsel Robert Mueller’s report from the beginning. Instead, the attorney general chose to twice present his own interpretation of the special counsel’s findings on foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. election ― before allowing members of the public to see the report and decide for themselves whether Trump and his associates did anything improper.
The first time the public received a glimpse of what was in the Mueller report was on March 24, when Barr sent a four-page letter to congressional leaders summarizing his conclusions from the report the special counsel team had submitted to Barr two days earlier.
The second time the public heard about the report’s content was in a Thursday morning press conference when Barr went out of his way to echo Trump talking points, attacking the media and the president’s “political opponents.”
To the Justice Department’s credit, the redactions in the Mueller report were relatively light ― allowing the public to see a substantial amount of the content.
But still, in his public comments, Barr made sure to paint as positive a picture of Trump before the report became widely available.
Here’s how the attorney general misled the public:
He left out the Trump campaign’s expectation of benefiting from hacked material.
In his letter to Congress on March 24, Barr wrote:
The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: ”[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election inference activities.”
While it’s true that the Mueller report did reach that conclusion, that quote is incomplete. Barr left out the first part, which was less complimentary to the Trump campaign.
Below is the full quote from the Mueller report, with the part Barr omitted in bold:
Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
He said it was up to him to make a decision on obstruction of justice.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Attorney General William Barr went to bat for Trump in a Thursday morning press conference.
In his March 24 letter, Barr said Mueller’s team did not come to a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice in the course of the investigation. Therefore, Barr claimed, it was now up to him to make that determination.
“The Special Counsel’s decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime,” he wrote.
Barr said he concluded that the evidence “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”
But Barr never had to make that legal conclusion, as Matt Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department under President Barack Obama, pointed out. And Mueller never asked Barr to so.
Indeed, the report said the special counsel’s team couldn’t come to such a conclusion:
[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.
The report also said that ultimately, the obstruction call wasn’t for Mueller to make. The special counsel decided not to make a decision on whether to prosecute Trump because the Justice Department’s position, according to an Office of Legal Counsel memo, is that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
“Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations … this Office accepted OLC’s legal conclusion for the purpose of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction,” the report states.
Furthermore, it seems clear that Mueller and his team expected that ultimately, Congress would make the decision on obstruction of justice.
NBC News reported earlier that some in Mueller’s office had said “their intent was to leave the legal question open for Congress and the public to examine the evidence.”
“[W]e concluded that Congress can validly regulate the President’s exercise of official duties to prohibit actions motivated by a corrupt intent to obstruct justice,” the report says.
In other words, Congress can impeach the president if it wants to do so.
He gave an incomplete picture of Trump’s actions that could be construed as obstruction of justice.
“In cataloguing the President’s actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct,” Barr wrote in his March 24 letter.
The report doesn’t let Trump off the hook quite so easily. It says Trump tried to obstruct justice ― but he didn’t succeed because his staff refused to follow his orders.
“The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” the report reads.
The report detailed 10 acts by Trump that could amount to obstruction of justice.
He said Mueller found “no collusion.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been called to testify before Congress about his report.
One of Trump’s favorite phrases is that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 elections. He has tweeted it 84 times.
Barr used the phrase four times in his 18-minute remarks in Thursday’s press conference:
“Put another way, the special counsel found no ‘collusion’ by any Americans in the IRA’s illegal activity.”
“But again, the special counsel’s report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its hacking operations. In other words, there was no evidence of Trump campaign ‘collusion’ with the Russian government’s hacking.”
“After finding no underlying collusion with Russia, the special counsel’s report goes on to consider whether certain actions of the president could amount to obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation.”
“At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the president’s personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was, in fact, no collusion.”
But the Mueller report never actually said the investigation found no collusion. In fact, the report explains specifically why it doesn’t use the term “collusion.” The word only appears in the report as part of this explanation or in quoting someone else.
MUELLER REPORT
The Mueller report avoided using the term “collusion,” and explains why here.
Therefore, Barr repeatedly saying Mueller found “no collusion” was simply the attorney general adopting a Trump talking point.
He said Trump fully cooperated with the investigation.
Barr was extremely sympathetic to Trump in Thursday’s press conference. He tried to paint a picture of a president under extreme ― and unfair ― pressure, telling reporters, “As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates.”
He said Trump was “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” so it’s not surprising if he may have lashed out a bit. And, he added, Trump deserved credit for “fully cooperat[ing]” with the special counsel at all:
Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.
Trump, however, didn’t fully cooperate. He refused repeated requests to give an interview to Mueller and his team. The report said the special counsel’s team considered issuing a subpoena for Trump to testify but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it:
MUELLER REPORT
The Mueller report says Trump refused to be interviewed by the special counsel and his team.
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Finally, this editorial form the SF Chronicle really “hammers home” Barr’s patent unfitness to continue serving.
Editorial: Attorney General Barr’s misplaced loyalties
Chronicle Editorial Board
Updated
Photo: Tom Brenner / New York Times
Attorney General William Barr has been acting as if he is Presisdent Trump’s personal attorney.
President Trump has never made any secret of his desire to have an attorney general whose first loyalty was to him. Regrettably for the nation and the honest administration of justice, Trump unquestionably now has one in William Barr.
The attorney general has lost all credibility with his disgraceful handling of the rollout of the Mueller report into Russian interference into the 2016 election. Barr left the American people for more than a month with a seriously skewed characterization of the “principal conclusions” from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings from the two-year investigation.
His four-page summary of those conclusions amounted to “nothing much to see here, folks.” While he was correct that the Mueller team could not make a case that anyone in Trump’s campaign broke the law by conspiring with Russians, the Barr summary was downright deceptive in its portrayal of the special counsel’s findings on possible obstruction of justice by the president.
Barr’s summary suggested that “difficult questions of law and fact” left it difficult for Mueller to determine whether Trump had obstructed the probe. Barr and his deputy took it upon themselves to conclude that “the evidence developed by the special counsel is not sufficient” to establish obstruction.
Americans who have now read the Mueller’s team’s own words in the 448-page report discovered that Barr’s account was highly misleading. In fact, Mueller’s hesitation was not based on an inability to decide; it was guided in part by a Department of Justice policy that a sitting president could not be indicted. Given that, Mueller suggested it would be unfair to accuse Trump of a crime when the president could not have a chance to defend himself in a “speedy and public trial” with the constitutional protections.
Barr also suggested that Trump could not have obstructed justice into an investigation of a crime he did not commit.
Mueller’s report clearly stated otherwise.
“The injury to the integrity of the justice system is the same regardless of whether a person committed an underlying wrong,” it stated. Mueller’s investigation detailed “multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations.”
Rather than punting the obstruction decision to Barr, Mueller very clearly noted that a decision on what to do with the substantial evidence of wrongdoing he collected should be made by Congress, which has the power of impeachment.
Barr never bothered to correct Trump’s exhortation of “complete and total exoneration.” Barr might as well have been on a Trump spokesman, rather than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, at a bizarre Thursday news conference (before the report’s release) in which he offered a sympathetic explanation for Trump’s repeated efforts to stymie the investigation. Barr chalked it up to Trump’s anger and frustration.
Justice has been frustrated. Americans are justifiably angry. Barr has proved himself unfit for the high office he holds.
This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
Undoubtedly, Trump is unfit for office as many of us have been saying for some time now. The Mueller report confirmed what most thinking people already knew: the guy is dishonest, immoral, pathological, and a not very bright “con man.” (He’s also a racist and a White Nationalist would be authoritarian, although those admittedly were not points of emphasis in the Mueller report which focused on other aspects of his totally disgraceful conduct.)
But, I’ll concede that Trump’s removal is unlikely to happen except at the ballot box. Even that is uncertain with about 40% of American voters apparently wedded to a “beggar thy neighbor, who cares about the majority, country be damned” worldview. Trump is already focused on a “race-baiting” strategy of leveraging the most problematic aspects of our electoral college system while treating the interests of majority of Americans with mockery and disdain.
It remains to be seen whether any Democratic candidate can unite the diverse majority of Americans for at least long enough to save our country by removing Trump and, hopefully, his GOP enablers along with him. It also remains to be seen whether any country where 40% of the voters are so out of touch with reality and the common interests of the rest of us can actually be governed, once majority rule is restored.
But, Barr is a different matter. He’s not elected, he’s not President, and we don’t have to enable his continued unethical misuse of authority at the DOJ, at least not in the the all important area of the U.S. Immigraton Court.
If Congress won’t do the job by creating an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court, it’s time for the Article III courts to invalidate precedents produced by Barr’s and Sessions’s unethical participation in individual quasi-judicial decision-making and to start invalidating removal orders entered by “courts” controlled by political enforcement officials, in clear contradiction to the Due Process requirement that individuals facing the life or death authority of the Federal Government are entitled to have fair and impartial decision makers and reasoned decisions. That can’t happen in a system controlled and directed by biased political “enforcement only” officials like Barr (and Sessions before him). Barr has made it crystal clear that he always will put the selfish interests of Trump above truthfulness, the law, due process, fundamental fairness, and the common good.
Letting this farce of a “judicial system” continue unfairly endangering individual lives and deferring to officials who are neither subject matter experts nor fair and impartial quasi-judicial decision makers is unconstitutional. By letting it continue, life-tenured Federal Judges both tarnish their reputations and fail to fulfill their oaths of office.
As a young attorney in the Department of Justice during the Watergate Era, I, along with many others, were indelibly impressed and inspired when then Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his Deputy William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s illegal order to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor (a/k/a/ “The Saturday Night Massacre”). Obviously, Barr has dragged the Department and its reputation down to new depths — back to the days of Nixon and disgraced (and convicted) Attorney General “John the Con” Mitchell, who actually planned criminal conspiracies in his fifth floor office at the DOJ.
Obviously, there are systemic problems that have allowed unqualified individuals like Barr and Sessions to serve in and co-opt the system of justice, and denigrate the Department of Justice. (I spoke to some recently retired DOJ officials who characterized the morale among career professionals at the DOJ as “below the floor”). Some of those can be traced to the lack of backbone and integrity in the “Trump GOP” which controls the Senate and refuses to enforce even minimal standards of professionalism, meaningful oversight, and independent decision making in Trump appointees. That’s what a “kakistocracy” is. It’s up to the rest of us to do what is necessary under the law to replace the kakistocracy with a functioning democracy.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Ted Cruz defended President Donald Trump Sunday amid reports that are raising new questions about the president’s relationship with Russia, insisting that Trump’s record shows he has been “tougher” on the U.S. adversary than past presidents.
When asked about The New York Times report that broke Friday — which says Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey triggered a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president was wittingly or unwittingly working to benefit Russia — the Texas Republican said the focus on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is a Washington-centric fascination.
“When you get outside the Beltway, I don’t see anyone concerned about this at all,” he said.
“If you compare objectively, President Trump’s policies to Russia compared to President Obama’s policies to Russia — by any measure, President Obama was much easier, was much more gentler on Russia,” Cruz said.
News outlets reported in 2017 that Mueller was interested in the Comey firing as a possible example of obstruction of justice by the president. And Trump himself connected the firing of Comey to his frustration with the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian election interference during a 2017 interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt.
But the new Times report connects that event to the larger investigation into Russian interference in American politics and elections, asking if the president was acting effectively as a Russian agent, regardless of his intentions.
“Our collective understanding was much narrower — it was just on obstruction: Did the president break the law there?” New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, who broke the story, said on “Meet the Press” to explain the significance of the revelation.
“Now we know it was much broader, it has national security concerns. The FBI was afraid that the firing of Comey was a way to help the Russians stop the FBI from figuring out what they did in the election.”
Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who spent much of the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign criticizing Trump’s posture toward Russia, called the report proof that Congress must protect Mueller’s investigation from any meddling from the administration.
“They had to have a very deep level of concern about this president to take this step,” Kaine, the 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee, said of the FBI’s decision to open the investigation.
“And that’s again why we need to protect the Mueller investigation,” he added.
Trump criticized the New York Times story in a Saturday morning tweet, and called the accusation he might be working to advance Russian interests “insulting” during a Saturday night interview on the Fox News show hosted by ally Jeanine Pirro.
The president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, also dismissed the report in a phone call with NBC News, where he argued “they obviously found nothing or else they would have reported it.”
The Times story wasn’t the only potential bombshell report to come out over the weekend about Trump and Russia.
On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that Trump personally intervened to hide readouts of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The White House also panned that report, pointing to new sanctions on Russia as proof the administration is being tough on the adversary.
Now that Democrats control the House, it’s possible that committees may look into the details of either story. Cruz, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he’d “consider any allegations” as part of his roles on the committee.
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Yeah, Teddy, who cares if our President is a dupe of Vladimir Putin! And, the lies about the Obama Administration just keep flowing. Clearly, Putin was so worried about Hillary Clinton becoming President that he went to great lengths to divide America and hand the Presidency to Trump. The only real debate is whether his efforts actually had a determinative effect on the elections. And, there were never any allegations of connections between Obama and Putin. Trump is sleazy, incompetent, and carrying out a program that has to delight Vladimir Putin. Obama was none of these things. And, it’s certainly worth getting to the bottom of the relationship among Trump, his organization, his family, his associates, and Vladimir Putin.
President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.
Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. officials learned of Trump’s actions when a White House adviser and a senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.
The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.
As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is thought to be in the final stages of an investigation that has focused largely on whether Trump or his associates conspired with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. The new details about Trump’s continued secrecy underscore the extent to which little is known about his communications with Putin since becoming president.
After this story was published online, Trump said in an interview late Saturday with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that he did not take particular steps to conceal his private meetings with Putin and attacked The Washington Post and its owner Jeffery P. Bezos.
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Read the complete article at the above link.
The shutdown/Southern Border Fake Crisis appears to be a distraction from the real national security threat: Donald Trump!
He’s dividing and destroying America, just like Putin wants him to do. Why is the GOP “going along to get along” with a blatantly dishonest and clearly unqualified President who is undermining America?
