"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
IS MATTHEW G. WHITAKER the legitimate acting attorney general? From approximately the second President Trump ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions and tapped Mr. Whitaker to temporarily exercise the office’s vast authority, legal experts have sparred over whether Mr. Trump can unilaterally elevate someone from a role that does not require Senate confirmation to one that does. But regardless of whether the promotion is legal, it is very clear that it is unwise. Mr. Whitaker is unfit for the job.
Several prominent legal scholars point out that the Constitution demands that “principal officers” of the United States must undergo Senate confirmation. A 19th-century Supreme Court case suggeststhere may be limited room for temporary fill-ins, but Mr. Whitaker’s appointment is hardly so temporary; he could serve for most of the rest of Mr. Trump’s first term. Even if Mr. Whitaker’s promotion is constitutional, Congress passed a law governing Justice Department succession that also seems to prohibit Mr. Whitaker’s ascent. The department has a capable, Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general in Rod J. Rosenstein; he should be running the department in the absence of a permanent replacement.
The Senate above all should be offended by the president’s end run around its authority. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) should demand hearings and consider filing a lawsuit. Instead, he is helping to establish a troubling precedent, saying only that he expects Mr. Whitaker to be a “very interim AG.” Yet no random official should be endowed with all the powers of an office as powerful as attorney general, meant for a Senate-vetted individual, even for a relatively short time.
And Mr. Whitaker is worse than random. It took less than 24 hours for material to emerge suggesting he could not survive even a rudimentary vetting.
First, there are Mr. Whitaker’s statements criticizing the Russia probe of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. At the least, they require him to consult Justice Department ethics counsel about whether he can oversee the inquiry with a plausible appearance of evenhandedness. He will do immediate and lasting harm to the Justice Department’s reputation, and to the nation, if he assumes the role of president’s personal henchman and impedes the Mueller probe.
Then there is Mr. Whitaker’s connection to a defunct patent promotion company the Federal Trade Commission called “an invention-promotion scam that has bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars.” Mr. Whitaker served on its board and once threatened a complaining customer, lending the weight of his former position as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa to the company’s scheme.
Finally, and fundamentally most damning, is Mr. Whitaker’s expressed hostility to Marbury v. Madison, a central case — thecentral case — in the American constitutional system. It established an indispensable principle: The courts decide what is and is not constitutional. Without Marbury, there would be no effective judicial check on the political branches, no matter how egregious their actions.
If the Senate were consulted, it is impossible to imagine Mr. Whitaker getting close to the attorney general’s office. He should not be there now.
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There’s no doubt whatsoever that Whitaker is spectacularly unqualified for the job. But so was Sessions. And so were Pruitt and Price. And, so are Carson, DeVos, Nielsen, Zinke, and a host of Senate-confirmed underlings like L. Francis Cissna at USCIS.
Sadly, the point is that the GOP Senate lacks the integrity, backbone, and decency to perform their “advise and consent” function in a credible manner. So, I think the Post might be unduly optimistic in assuming that the GOP-controlled Senate would reject Whitaker merely because he is totally unqualified. Doesn’t seem to have bothered them before; no reason to believe that it will in the future. That’s one reason why our nation is “on the rocks.”
Katyal (former Acting Solicitor General) and Conway (Husband of Kelleyanne Conway) write in the NY Times:
What now seems an eternity ago, the conservative law professor Steven Calabresi published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in May arguing that Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. His article got a lot of attention, and it wasn’t long before President Trump picked up the argument, tweeting that “the Appointment of the Special Counsel is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!”
Professor Calabresi’s article was based on the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 2. Under that provision, so-called principal officers of the United States must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate under its “Advice and Consent” powers.
He argued that Mr. Mueller was a principal officer because he is exercising significant law enforcement authority and that since he has not been confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was unconstitutional. As one of us argued at the time, he was wrong. What makes an officer a principal officer is that he or she reports only to the president. No one else in government is that person’s boss. But Mr. Mueller reports to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. So, Mr. Mueller is what is known as an inferior officer, not a principal one, and his appointment without Senate approval was valid.
But Professor Calabresi and Mr. Trump were right about the core principle. A principal officer must be confirmed by the Senate. And that has a very significant consequence today.
It means that Mr. Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.
Much of the commentary about Mr. Whitaker’s appointment has focused on all sorts of technical points about the Vacancies Reform Act and Justice Department succession statutes. But the flaw in the appointment of Mr. Whitaker, who was Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff at the Justice Department, runs much deeper. It defies one of the explicit checks and balances set out in the Constitution, a provision designed to protect us all against the centralization of government power.
If you don’t believe us, then take it from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Mr. Trump once called his “favorite” sitting justice. Last year, the Supreme Court examined the question of whether the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board had been lawfully appointed to his job without Senate confirmation. The Supreme Court held the appointment invalid on a statutory ground.
Justice Thomas agreed with the judgment, but wrote separately to emphasize that even if the statute had allowed the appointment, the Constitution’s Appointments Clause would not have. The officer in question was a principal officer, he concluded. And the public interest protected by the Appointments Clause was a critical one: The Constitution’s drafters, Justice Thomas argued, “recognized the serious risk for abuse and corruption posed by permitting one person to fill every office in the government.” Which is why, he pointed out, the framers provided for advice and consent of the Senate.
What goes for a mere lawyer at the N.L.R.B. goes in spades for the attorney general of the United States, the head of the Justice Department and one of the most important people in the federal government. It is one thing to appoint an acting underling, like an acting solicitor general, a post one of us held. But those officials are always supervised by higher-ups; in the case of the solicitor general, by the attorney general and deputy attorney general, both confirmed by the Senate.
Mr. Whitaker has not been named to some junior post one or two levels below the Justice Department’s top job. He has now been vested with the law enforcement authority of the entire United States government, including the power to supervise Senate-confirmed officials like the deputy attorney general, the solicitor general and all United States attorneys.
We cannot tolerate such an evasion of the Constitution’s very explicit, textually precise design. Senate confirmation exists for a simple, and good, reason. Constitutionally, Matthew Whitaker is a nobody. His job as Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff did not require Senate confirmation. (Yes, he was confirmed as a federal prosecutor in Iowa, in 2004, but Mr. Trump can’t cut and paste that old, lapsed confirmation to today.) For the president to install Mr. Whitaker as our chief law enforcement officer is to betray the entire structure of our charter document.
Related
Another view on the legality of Whitaker’s appointment
Opinion | Stephen I. Vladeck
Whitaker May Be a Bad Choice, but He’s a Legal One
In times of crisis, interim appointments need to be made. Cabinet officials die, and wars and other tragic events occur. It is very difficult to see how the current situation comports with those situations. And even if it did, there are officials readily at hand, including the deputy attorney general and the solicitor general, who were nominated by Mr. Trump and confirmed by the Senate. Either could step in as acting attorney general, both constitutionally and statutorily.
Because Mr. Whitaker has not undergone the process of Senate confirmation, there has been no mechanism for scrutinizing whether he has the character and ability to evenhandedly enforce the law in a position of such grave responsibility. The public is entitled to that assurance, especially since Mr. Whitaker’s only supervisor is Mr. Trump himself, and the president is hopelessly compromised by the Mueller investigation. That is why adherence to the requirements of the Appointments Clause is so important here, and always.
As we wrote last week, the Constitution is a bipartisan document, written for the ages to guard against wrongdoing by officials of any party. Mr. Whitaker’s installation makes a mockery of our Constitution and our founders’ ideals. As Justice Thomas’s opinion in the N.L.R.B. case reminds us, the Constitution’s framers “had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked.” He added “they knew that liberty could be preserved only by ensuring that the powers of government would never be consolidated in one body.”
We must heed those words today.
Neal K. Katyal (@neal_katyal) was an acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama and is a lawyer at Hogan Lovells in Washington. George T. Conway III(@gtconway3d) is a litigator at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York.
Of course, not everyone agrees with Conway and Katyal. But, no matter how you slice it, the appointment of the obviously unqualified political hack Whitaker and his acceptance of the job notwithstanding his ethical conflicts and lack of qualifications is just another step in the total destruction of the US Department of Justice and the “Clowning of America!”
For that, both Trump and Whitaker get the coveted “Courtside Five Clown Award” (Trump winning for the second time this week!)
First, he trashed the 1stAmendment by attacking, insulting, demeaning, and revoking the White Press credentials of CNN Correspondent Jim Acosta while fabricating an alleged “incident” involving Acosta that both national TV recordings and dozens of eye-witnesses testify never happened;
Second, he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions (no tears, please, for this corrupt public official and immoral person) and appointed sycophantic Acting Attorney General (and former right-wing commentator and established Trump suck-up) Matt Whitaker, a sleazy maneuver which now gives Trump control over the Mueller investigation through Whittaker (indeed, some legal experts say this maneuver in and of itself could easily be construed as an obstruction of justice);
Third, while half-heartedly saying he would be willing to work with House Democrats, he then threatened them with retaliation if they had the audacity to exercise their Constitutional authority to investigate him and his corrupt Administration;
And, remember folks, this is just “Day One of Phase II” of America’s Continuous National Clown Show! Stay tuned for more daily clown performances and hilarious degradations of America, our laws, human rights, and our values from under the Big Top! Today’s Trump performance get Courtside’s coveted “Five Clown” rating!
The new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives can’t force President Donald Trump to abandon his efforts to crack down on asylum-seekers, migrant families and immigrants already living in the U.S. But it can make it harder for him to enact his agenda.
Whether through oversight, withholding funds or passing pro-immigrant bills and daring the Republican-controlled Senate and the president to shoot them down, Democrats now have leverage on immigration.
Republicans, of course, will still control the Senate after Tuesday’s midterms, and Trump will still be in the White House, where he has already cracked down on undocumented immigrants without congressional help.
Still, there were glimmers of hope around the country. Oregon voters rejected a ballot measure that would have ended the state’s “sanctuary” policies. Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach, a Republican who has spent years pushing hard-line immigration policies around the country, lost. So did Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate Lou Barletta, who enacted an anti-immigrant policy years before as a mayor and recently defended separating families at the border. Several other Republicans who campaigned on immigration crackdowns lost too, which immigrant rights advocates held up as proof that Trump’s fear-based campaigning wasn’t the guaranteed winner he seemed to think it was.
And now that Democrats have taken control of the House, they can serve as a check on Trump’s immigration efforts.
Democrats are expected to launch investigations and conduct oversight on a number of Trump actions and policies ― something Republicans have so far declined to do. And immigrant rights groups will be pressing them to do so.
Tyler Moran, managing director of progressive group The Immigration Hub and a former Senate and White House staffer, pointed out several areas ripe for oversight. Those include the Trump administration’s family separations at the border, its deportation tactics, and its decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for young undocumented immigrants and temporary protected status for certain nationalities of immigrants whose home countries suffered natural disasters or violence.
Many of Trump’s immigration policies also require significant funding increases ― something a Democratic House is likely to fight. The Democrats have already vowed not to fund Trump’s wall along the southern border. Trump is expected to push for wall funding during the lame duck session while Republicans maintain control of both chambers, and has suggested a government shutdown in December if he doesn’t get what he wants.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told The Wall Street Journal ahead of the election that if Democrats should win a majority on Tuesday, they’d have more leverage to block wall spending even before they officially take over.
“Why would we compromise on the wall now?” she said.
BLOOMBERG
Current House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has pushed for more protections for undocumented immigrants.
Mass detention of families and asylum-seekers, which Trump is pushing for through a proposed rule change and a potential executive order, would also have a hefty price tag. Most Democrats oppose such policies.
Democrats are also likely to push legislation that protects undocumented immigrants, particularly young immigrants, which could increase public pressure for Senate Republicans and Trump to back it.
Trump ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, last year, but so far has been forced to keep it running by court orders that he is continuing to fight. Although Republicans opposed DACA, some have voiced support for some type of legislative measure that would keep its recipients ― so-called Dreamers who have lived in the U.S. since childhood ― from being deported.
But so far, Republicans haven’t actually supported measures that would do so, at least without simultaneously aiming to restrict legal immigration and ramp up deportation efforts.
Immigrant rights groups want a “clean” bill for Dreamers, called the Dream Act, that doesn’t include other measures. Democrats are expected to push for it, but past stalemates are likely to continue. More likely, Democrats could make a deal to protect Dreamers while also giving Trump something he wants, but not the whole spate of anti-immigrant measures Republicans tried, and failed, to pass earlier this year.
While Democrats gaining the majority was a good thing for supporters of immigrant rights, it required knocking out some moderate Republicans who could previously be claimed as allies on bipartisan legislation. Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who unsuccessfully pushed for protections for undocumented young people, lost to a Democrat. So did Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), another Republican who called for legal status for Dreamers, although he spoke in more hawkish terms at an August fundraiser.
The defeat of bipartisan backers may be more of a symbolic loss than a substantive one. The Democrats who will take their place are likely to be even more reliable supporters of immigration reform.
Leading immigrant rights advocates, including Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, cheered Coffman’s defeat.
Even with the departure of the truly terrible Jeff Sessions, the situation is likely to remain grim. Trump’s dreams of legislation slashing legal immigration and eliminating the right to apply for asylum are DOA. Also, he’s not likely to get funding for expanding the New American Gulag, “the wall,” harassing Dreamers, or expanding already bloated, ineffective, and inhumane ICE civil enforcement. Oversight might even result in some accountability for human rights abusers like Nielsen.
But, as he has already shown, there is plenty of damage that Trump can do to the Constitution, human rights, the legal system, and our national values in the area of immigration “administratively.” It’s likely that he’ll look for a total sycophant in the Mike Pence mold for Attorney General. With the Senate firmly in GOP hands, there will be nobody to stop even more unqualified appointments. However, House oversight and budget control might be able to slow the pace of the abuses or at least make a public record for history and future action.
Dan De Luce and Julia Edwards Ainsley report for NBC News:
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has consistently sought to exaggerate the potential security threat posed by refugees and dismissed an intelligence assessment last year that showed refugeesdid not present a significant threat to the U.S., three former senior officials told NBC News.
Hard-liners in the administration then issued their own report this year that several former officials and rights groups say misstates the evidence and inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S.
At a meeting in September 2017 with senior officials discussing refugee admissions, a representative from the National Counterterrorism Center came ready to present a report that analyzed the possible risks presented by refugees entering the country.
But before he could discuss the report, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand dismissed the report, saying her boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would not be guided by its findings.
“We read that. The attorney general doesn’t agree with the conclusions of that report,” she said, according to two officials familiar with the meeting, including one who was in the room at the time.
Brand’s blunt veto of the intelligence assessment shocked career civil servants at the interagency meeting, which seemed to expose a bid to supplant facts and expertise with an ideological agenda. Her response also amounted to a rejection of her own department’s view, as the FBI, part of the Justice Department, had contributed to the assessment.
“She just dismissed them,” said the former official who attended the meeting.
The intelligence assessment was “inappropriately discredited as a result of that exchange,” said the ex-official. The episode made clear that “you weren’t able to have an honest conversation about the risk.”
A current DHS official defended the administration’s response to the intelligence assessment, saying immigration policy in the Trump administration does not rely solely on “historical data about terrorism trends,” but rather “is an all-of-the-above approach that looks at every single pathway that we think it is possible for a terrorist to come into the United States.”
A spokeswoman for DHS said, “If we only look at what terrorists have done in the past, we will never be able to prevent future attacks … We cannot let dangerous individuals slip through the cracks and exploit our refugee program, which is why we have implemented security enhancements that would prevent such violent individuals from reaching our shores, while still upholding our humanitarian ideals.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Following the dismissal of the assessment, anti-immigration hard-liners in the administration clashed with civil servants about how to portray the possible threat from refugees in documents drafted for inter-agency discussions, former officials said. In the end, the president’s decision last year to lower the ceiling for refugee admissions to 45,000 did not refer to security threats, but cited staffing shortages at DHS as the rationale. But once the decision was issued, the White House released a public statement that suggested the president’s decision was driven mainly by security concerns and said “some refugees” admitted into the country had posed a threat to public safety.
An Afghan refugee sleeps on the ground while another looks out a window in an abandoned warehouse where they and other migrants took refuge in Belgrade, Serbia, on Feb. 1, 2017.Muhammed Muheisen / AP file
“President Donald J. Trump is taking the responsible approach to promote the safety of the American people,” said the Sept. 29 statement.
Political appointees in the Trump administration then wrote a new report a few months later that seemed to contradict the view of the country’s spy agencies.
In a press release at the time, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the report showed the need for tougher screening of travelers entering the country and served as “a clear reminder of why we cannot continue to rely on immigration policy based on pre-9/11 thinking that leaves us woefully vulnerable to foreign-born terrorists.”
But the report is being challenged in court by several former officials and rights groups who say it inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S. Two lawsuits filed in Massachusetts and California allege the report improperly excludes incidents committed by domestic terrorists, like white supremacists, and wrongfully includes a significant number of naturalized U.S. citizens and foreigners who committed crimes overseas and were brought to the United States for the purpose of standing trial.
Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand speaks during the opening of the summit on Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking at Department of Justice in Washington, on Feb. 2, 2018.Jose Luis Magana / AP file
Mary McCord, former assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, which prosecutes terrorism charges, said the January 2018 report is “unfortunately both over-inclusive and under-inclusive.”
“The result is a report that presents an inaccurate picture of the threat of terrorism in the United States,” McCord said.
When the report was released in January 2018, Trump tweeted that it showed the need to move away from “random chain migration and lottery system, to one that is merit based” because it showed that “the nearly 3 in 4 individuals convicted of terrorism-related charges are foreign-born.”
But the report only focuses on international terrorism, which is defined as a crime committed on behalf of a foreign terrorist organization. The document excludes domestic terrorism committed by groups such as white supremacists or anti-government militias, which are more likely to be supported by those born in the U.S.
Because of the way the terrorism statute is written, those who support domestic organizations like anti-government or white supremacists groups cannot be charged with terrorism, even if the groups they support have committed crimes. Only supporters of foreign terrorist organizations designated by the State Department can be charged with “material support” of terrorism.
Still, Trump has repeatedly stated that the overwhelming majority of terrorists in the United States came from overseas, even before the 2018 report.
In his first speech to Congress in February 2017, Trump said that the “vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our own country.”
Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, MSNBC legal analyst and editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, took issue with that statement and sued the Justice Department to provide documents that backed up the president’s claim. But the Department was unable to locate any records.
“There are a lot of domestic terrorism cases, and they are generally not committed by people born abroad. To the extent that those cases were excluded — white supremacist violence, anti-abortion terrorism and militia violence — the inquiry is grossly biased,” Wittes wrote on Lawfare.
Wittes said that almost 100, or about a quarter, of the 402 individuals listed as foreign-born terrorists committed their crimes overseas and were brought to the U.S. to face trial.
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller at roundtable discussion on California immigration policy at the White House on May 16.Evan Vucci / AP file
During her time in government as the chief of the Refugee Affairs Division at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Barbara Strack said her staff worked diligently to thoroughly vet refugees for any possible terrorist links. But she said there was no information she came across that indicated refugees posed a significant security threat.
“I did not see evidence that refugees presented an elevated national security risk compared to other categories of travelers to the United States,” she told NBC News.
The administration must decide by the end of the month how many refugees to allow in the country in the next fiscal year. Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, known for his hawkish stance on immigration, has been pushing for a drastic reduction in the ceiling.
The cap was set at 45,000 last year, but the number of refugees allowed in the country has fallen far below that ceiling, with only about 20,000 resettled in the United States since October 2017. Rights advocates and former officials accuse the White House of intentionally slowing down the bureaucratic process to keep the numbers down, overloading the FBI and other government agencies with duplicative procedures.
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This level of total intellectual dishonesty, overt racism, and policy driven solely by a White Nationalist philosophy and political agenda by an Attorney General is unprecedented in my experience at the DOJ.
If you remember, Brand escaped to a “soft landing” in the private sector earlier this year. One of my theories is that she was trying to protect herself and her reputation for a future Federal Judgeship. If and when that happens, I hope that those serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee will remember her completely sleazy role in carrying Sessions’s racist-polluted water on this one. Someone with no respect for facts, the law, humanity, or professional expertise definitely does not deserve to be on the Federal Bench!
And for Pete’s sake don’t credit Sessions with any integrity whatsoever in not resigning under pressure from our “Mussolini Wannabe.” He’s not “protecting” the Mueller investigation or anything else worthy in the DOJ. In fact, he has wholly politicized the DOJ and taken it down into the gutter. The reason he “hangs on” is not because he respects the Constitution or rule of law. Clearly, he doesn’t! No, it’s because he wants to do as much damage to civil rights and people of color as he can during his toxic tenure.
Make no mistake, that damage he has done, as has been reported elsewhere, is very substantial. It has set the goals that Dr. Martin Luther King and others fought for and even gave their lives for back by decades. Despicable!
Sessions’s White-Nationalist driven lies and false narratives about refugees are described above. For the truth about refugees and immigrants and all of the great things they have done and continue to do for our country, see my recent post at https://wp.me/p8eeJm-313.
By now, I assume everyone has read the explosive “Anonymous NY Times Op-Ed” (linked above) that confirmed 1) what everyone already knew about Trump’s total incompetence for office, and 2) the widely rumored but heretofore not previously confirmed existence of an organized “resistance” to Trump within his own senior staff. While many will take heart from the latter, count me out.
What a bad dream! So, now, as a result of the gutless GOP and their supporters, we have the unelected, self-proclaimed “real conservatives” unilaterally deciding which Trump programs are “worthy” — like tax breaks for the rich or eliminating environmental protections — and which are “unworthy” — like, presumably starting a gratuitous nuclear war or handing the country over to Putin.
Is this really an acceptable solution to this GOP/White Nationalist created problem?
What about taking our country back at the ballot box from the anti-American Trump base? What about “outing” these self-proclaimed “saviors” and confronting the GOP with the need to initiate some “removal proceedings” against Trump?
What these “internal resisters” really are doing is putting their own egos over the good of the country. They need to resign, tell what they know, and demand action to remove Trump immediately.
Time to vote every Republican out of office.
Yes, Trump’s removal would result in the ascension of
“Mike the Terrible” Pence to the office of President. Under normal circumstances that would be an unparalleled national disaster in its own right. But, obviously, these aren’t normal times.
Some actually are speculating that “Mikie” is the “Deep Bloat” here. Seems unlikely given his record of sycophancy; on the other hand, he’s the one guy Trump can’t fire. And, stranger things have happened — like Trump being inflicted on us in the first place.
In the meantime, join the New Due Process Army and fight Trumpist White Nationalism in all of its insidious forms.
Just hours after Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, pled guilty to violating campaign-finance law on behalf of an unnamed political candidate in 2016, and Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, was convicted of eight counts of financial fraud, Trump was firmly ensconced in the safe space of a political rally in West Virginia, greeted by comforting chants of “Lock her up!” For the next few hours, the president studiously avoided mentioning the two men who may very well have thrown his political future into jeopardy, freewheeling instead about “no collusion” before a crowd that would accept—and even repeat—virtually anything he said. Yet even as the president pontificated, his right-wing allies found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being forced to fill his silence. Blindsided by not one, but twodamning convictions, they did the only thing they could: everything. “There are a lot of lines of defense that are being wheeled out right now,” Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt observed to me. “It feels very much like throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
On cue, the right’s public-facing side pulled out every single pro-Trump defense it had concocted over the past two years. Within an hour of the verdicts breaking, The Five’s Greg Gutfeld was aggressively dismissing Cohen and Manafort as “two men who most Americans don’t know their names.” Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromowent after Hillary Clinton, saying Tuesday morning that Robert Mueller’s probe had no legitimacy unless the former Democratic presidential candidate was likewise investigated for the infamous Steele dossier. A shrewder group of Republicans converged on the seeming lack of Russia-related convictions in the Manafort trial, putting their disavowals on hold: “Thus far, there have yet to be any charges or convictions for colluding with the Russian government by any member of the Trump campaign,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in a statement, in one of the more measured defenses coming out of the Republican Party. The line made its way into the official G.O.P. defense, according to notes that a surrogate texted to reporter Josh Dawsey.
A less artful group of Trump supporters deployed a different line of logic: if the Manafort convictions carried no mention of Russia, then the media’s Russia-meddling narrative was, ipso facto, false, and Trump was therefore innocent (never mind the fact that a second Manafort trial, centering around the former G.O.P. operative’s extensive work in Russia and the Ukraine, is set to begin in D.C. in less than a month). “So all this legal activity strange I see no ‘Russian collusion’ in any breaking news,” tweetedMatt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union and the husband of White House communications director Mercedes Schlapp. “Odd.” Still others, said Holt, went further off the deep end, asserting that the Justice Department was being “run as part of a conspiracy theory,” and the trial wasn’t proof of the “Russian hacking narrative’s” veracity.
Almost simultaneously, a large segment of Trump’s diehard, MAGA-oriented allies began pushing the story of Mollie Tibbetts, a college student who was allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant. The lead story on Fox News’s home page was dedicated exclusively to the case, as was Breitbart’s, while MAGA wunderkinds Charlie Kirk,Candace Owens, and Tomi Lahren all tweeted that Tibbetts’s story ought to be top-line news, and lamented the “liberal media’s” preoccupation with Manafort and Cohen.
Fox and Friends simply ignored the convictions altogether in favor of discussing Tibbetts, along with kneeling N.F.L. protesters, and Andrew Cuomo’s recent gaffes. Though the outpouring could be read as spontaneous, it could not have come at a more convenient time—as former speaker Newt Gingrichput it to Axios, “If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble. If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then G.O.P. could lose [the House] badly.”
Behind the scenes, Republicans reportedly wrung their hands, increasingly concerned that the two cases, and Cohen’s in particular, could herald the president’s doom. “The verdict in the Manafort trial isn’t nearly as worrisome to me as the Cohen agreement and the Cohen statement,” former Trump adviser Michael Caputotold Politico. “It’s probably the worst thing so far in this whole investigation stage of the presidency.” “There was political momentum building to wrap up the Mueller probe soon,” a former administration official fretted to the outlet. “At the very least, in the short term, these two developments will pretty significantly bolster the office of the special counsel and people’s perceptions of it.” The perception, it seems, is widespread:
Nearly a dozen people close to the president, including current and former White House aides, acknowledged that Tuesday was one of the darkest days of Trump’s year and a half in office. And they worried that the revelations—even if they are unrelated to allegations of collusion with Russia—could lend new credence to the Mueller probe, even after the president’s allies spent months undercutting public faith in the investigation.
A close Trump friend confessed to Axios that they are “a bit concern[ed] about what he would do fully backed into a corner.” And a “usually buoyant outside West Wing adviser” read the tea leaves, noting, “Booming economy, robust bull market, troops in harm’s way but not in a large-scale war. And yet the president is enmeshed in a series of scandals and controversies . . . and that is before the Dems in the House start with the investigations.”
But by Wednesday morning, the G.O.P.’s fearless leader had returned from West Virginia and thrown himself back into the fray, making it clear what he wanted his followers to do: hail Manafort as a “brave man” who escaped 10 counts but fell victim to the Russia “witch hunt;” and jeer Cohen, the bad lawyer who pled guilty to things that were “not a crime.” “Whenever Trump tweets out what could be perceived as the official response, that tends to take over,” Holt said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see if that becomes the primary line of defense.”
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There’s only going to be one “right side of history” on this one. And, Trump and his supporters won’t be on it.
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Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.CreditLeft, Jeenah Moon for The New York Times; right, Zach Gibson/Bloomberg, via Getty Images
From the start of the Russia investigation, President Trump has been working to discredit the work and the integrity of the special counsel, Robert Mueller; praising men who are blatant grifters, cons and crooks; insisting that he’s personally done nothing wrong; and reminding us that he hires only the best people.
On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishingsplit-screen moment involving two of those people, as Mr. Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes “at the direction of” Mr. Trump himself.
Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony.
Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a “hoax” or “scam” or “rigged witch hunt.”
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The conviction of Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for three months in 2016, was a win for prosecutors even though jurors were unable to reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 counts against him. On the other eight, which included bank fraud, tax fraud and a failure to report a foreign bank account, the jury agreed unanimously that Mr. Manafort was guilty. He is scheduled to go on trial in a separate case next month in Washington, D.C., on charges including money laundering, witness tampering, lying to authorities and failing to register as a foreign agent. Mr. Manafort faces many decades behind bars, although he will probably serve less than that under federal sentencing guidelines.
A few hundred miles to the north, in New York City, Michael “I’m going to mess your life up” Cohen stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to multiple counts of bank and tax fraud as well as federal campaign-finance violations involving hush-money payments he made to women who said they’d had sex with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen, who spent years as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and “fix-it guy” (his own words), was under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, to whom Mr. Mueller referred his case. In April, F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office, home and hotel room looking for evidence of criminality on a number of fronts. Apparently they found it.
Mr. Cohen didn’t agree at Tuesday’s hearing to cooperate with prosecutors, but if he eventually chooses to, that could spell even bigger trouble for Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen has been involved in many of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia, including his aborted effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and could shed light on connections between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials involved in the 2016 election interference.
But back to Tuesday’s news. Mr. Manafort was not an original target of the inquiry by Mr. Mueller, who was appointed in May of last year to look into possible ties between the Trump campaign and efforts by Russian government officials to interfere in the election. But Mr. Mueller’s mandate authorized him to investigate any other crimes that arose in the course of his work. It didn’t take long. As soon as he and his lawyers started sniffing around, the stench of Mr. Manafort’s illegality was overpowering.
As a longtime lobbyist and political consultant who worked for multiple Republican candidates and presidents, Mr. Manafort had a habit of lying to banks to get multimillion-dollar loans and hiding his cash in offshore accounts when tax time rolled round. In at least one case, he falsely characterized $1.5 million as a loan to avoid paying taxes on it, then later told banks that the loan had been “forgiven” so he could get another loan.
He also enriched himself by working for some of the world’s most notorious thugs and autocrats, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jonas Savimbi in Angola and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He helped elect the pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine, a job that earned him millions until Mr. Yanukovych was ousted from power in 2014.
Despite this mercenary history — or perhaps, more disturbingly, because of it — Donald Trump, while running on promises to clean up Washington, hired Mr. Manafort to run his presidential campaign, a job he may well have kept but for news reports that he was receiving and hiding millions of dollars from his work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych.
What does it tell you about Mr. Trump that he would choose to lead his campaign someone like Mr. Manafort, whom even on Tuesday he called a “good man”? It tells you that Mr. Trump is consistent, and consistently contemptuous of honesty and ethics, because he has surrounded himself with people of weak, if not criminal, character throughout his career.
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While the president has so far dodged questions about whether he will pardon Mr. Manafort, he’s already shown a willingness to make a mockery of the justice system with his pardons of unrepentant lawbreakers like Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza. Last year, the president’s lawyer dangled the prospect of a pardon to lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. If Mr. Trump were to follow through and grant clemency to Mr. Manafort, it would make his pardon of Mr. Arpaio look like the signing of the Civil Rights Act.
You’re forgiven if you’ve lost track of all the criminality, either charged or admitted, that has burst forth from Mr. Trump’s circles in the last couple years even as Mr. Trump has continued to claim that the investigation is a hoax, a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars. So here’s a brief refresher:
In addition to the prosecution of Mr. Manafort, the special counsel’s office has secured guilty pleas from multiple people, including Mr. Flynn and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser on the Trump campaign, both of whom lied to federal investigators about their communications with Russian officials.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller has charged more than a dozen Russian individuals and companies for their roles in a coordinated and deceptive social-media campaign aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and helping Mr. Trump’s. Some Trump campaign officials were unwittingly in contact with some of these defendants.
Mr. Mueller has also charged a dozen Russian military officials with hacking and helping to release emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The hackers first tried to break into Mrs. Clinton’s personal servers on July 27, 2016 — the same day that Mr. Trump publicly called on Russians to do exactly that.
And he has charged Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian associate of Mr. Manafort and a suspected spy, with obstructing justice.
As Mr. Trump rages on about the unfairness of the investigation, remember that Mr. Mueller has been on the job for just 15 months. For comparison, the Watergate investigation ran for more than two years before it brought down a president and sent dozens of people to prison. The Iran contra investigation dragged on for about seven years, as did the Whitewater investigation, which resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
Also remember we still don’t know anything about the ultimate fate of several other Trump associates who have been under Mr. Mueller’s microscope, including Roger Stone, Carter Page and Donald Trump Jr. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”).
For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: All the President’s Crooks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Unfortunately, the Trump Circus is just picking up steam. We’re sure to be subjected to a “carpet bombing” of lies, tweets, insults, and threats as the Emperor’s clothes come off piece by piece while the emasculated GOP Congress merely sits and watches. And, of course, there will be the “normal” Trump strategy of attempting to shift blame to the victims and away from himself and the other corrupt individuals associated with him. Seems Trumpie owes Stormy (and Melania) an apology
President Donald Trump meets with President Vladimir Putin of Russia at the G-20 Summit, in Hamburg, Germany, in July 2017. CreditEvan Vucci/Associated Press
Put aside whatever suspicions you may have about whether Donald Trump will be directly implicated in the Russia investigation.
Trump is right now, before our eyes and those of the world, committing an unbelievable and unforgivable crime against this country. It is his failure to defend.
The intelligence community long ago concluded that Russia attacked our election in 2016 with the express intention of damaging Hillary Clinton and assisting Trump.
“In 2016, cyber actors affiliated with the Russian Government conducted an unprecedented, coordinated cyber campaign against state election infrastructure. Russian actors scanned databases for vulnerabilities, attempted intrusions, and in a small number of cases successfully penetrated a voter registration database. This activity was part of a larger campaign to prepare to undermine confidence in the voting process.”
And this is not simply a thing that happened once. This is a thing that is still happening and will continue to happen. As Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the committee in February, “Persistent and disruptive cyberoperations will continue against the United States and our European allies using elections as opportunities to undermine democracy.” As he put it, “Frankly, the United States is under attack.”
The Robert Mueller investigation is looking into this, trying to figure out what exactly happened in 2016, who all was involved, which laws were broken and who will be charged and tried.
“Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has either indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 32 people and three companies — that we know of. That group is composed of four former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Five of these people (including three former Trump aides) have already pleaded guilty.”
Twelve of those indictments came last week with a disturbingly detailed account of what the Russians did. As The New York Times put it:
“From phishing attacks to gain access to Democratic operatives, to money laundering, to attempts to break into state elections boards, the indictment details a vigorous and complex effort by Russia’s top military intelligence service to sabotage the campaign of Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.”
Whether or not Trump himself or anyone in his orbit personally colluded or conspired with the Russians about their interference is something Mueller will no doubt disclose at some point, but there remains one incontrovertible truth: In 2016, Russia, a hostile foreign adversary, attacked the United States of America.
We know that they did it. We have proof. The F.B.I. is trying to hold people accountable for it.
And yet Trump, the president whom the Constitution establishes as the commander in chief, has repeatedly waffled on whether Russia conducted the attack and has refused to forcefully rebuke them for it, let alone punish them for it.
In March, the White House, under pressure from Congress, seemed to somewhat reluctantly impose some sanctions on Russia for its crimes. As CNN reported that month, Congress almost unanimously passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act last summer, “hoping to pressure Trump into punishing Russia for its election interference.” But as the network pointed out:
“Trump signed the bill reluctantly in August, claiming it impinged upon his executive powers and could dampen his attempts to improve ties with Moscow.”
Instead, Trump has repeatedly attacked the investigation as a witch hunt.
Just last week at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump said:
“I think I would have a very good relationship with Putin if we spend time together. After watching the rigged witch-hunt yesterday, I think it really hurts our country and our relationship with Russia. I hope we can have a good relationship with Russia.”
Now Trump is set to pursue just such a relationship as he meets one-on-one with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Monday in Finland. As Trump said earlier this month at a rally:
“Will he be prepared? Will he be prepared? And I might even end up having a good relationship, but they’re going, ‘Will President Trump be prepared? You know, President Putin is K.G.B. and this and that.’ You know what? Putin’s fine. He’s fine. We’re all fine. We’re people.”
Actually, none of this is fine. None of it! Trump should be directing all resources at his disposal to punish Russia for the attacks and prevent future ones. But he is not.
America’s commander wants to be chummy with the enemy who committed the crime. Trump is more concerned with protecting his presidency and validating his election than he is in protecting this country.
This is an incredible, unprecedented moment. America is being betrayed by its own president. America is under attack and its president absolutely refuses to defend it.
Simply put, Trump is a traitor and may well be treasonous.
Charles M. Blow has been an Op-Ed columnist since 2008. His column appears every Monday and Thursday. He joined The Times in 1994 and was previously the graphics director. He also wrote the book “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” @CharlesMBlow•Facebook
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Yup! Bogusly claiming that desperate refugees are a threat to our national security, failing to protect us, and in fact enabling and furthering the actual existential threats to our security from Putin. That’s Trump and his “fellow traveler” supporters!
Remember all oft he nonsense about the “Kobach Commission” and their bogus search for almost nonexistent “undocumented voters?” Compare all the pontificating about the “integrity of our election process” with the Administration’s “shrug off” of hard evidence that a foreign power actually did attempt to interfere in our elections with the purpose of sowing discord and electing Trump?
Trump makes enemies out of our friends, creates non-existent enemies, and treats our country’s enemies as if they were our friends!
One of the great under-reported stories of the Trump era is the extent to which the toxicity of the current administration has made high-level government appointments—once among the nation’s most prestigious vocations, and a stepping stone to more lucrative careers—virtually radioactive. John Kelly is said to be hard-pressed to fill out the ranks; State Department departures amount to “a hit on personnel that lasts a decade,” per one former official; and in policy areas from international trade to negotiations with North Korea, Donald Trump’sWhite House has failed to attract much-needed expertise. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than at the Justice Department, where 500 days into Trump’s term, his administration is still struggling to fill top spots. According to a Wall Street Journalreport published Tuesday, the White House has failed to persuade at least three people to accept the traditionally plum position of associate attorney general, the No. 3 job at the D.O.J., prompting an official pause to the search.
Given the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the perilous position of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whoever fills the spot could realistically find themselves overseeing Robert Mueller’s probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The possibility has already (reportedly) scared away one associate A.G.: Rachel Brand, who left the role in February for an executive position at Walmart, told officials the job was too good to pass up. But sources close to Brand told NBC News that she was “frustrated by vacancies at the department and feared she would be asked to oversee the Russia investigation.” (A Justice Department spokeswoman pushed back on the report, calling it “false and frankly ridiculous.”) Two other candidates, attorneys Helgi Walker and Kate Todd— both veterans of the George W. Bush administration and Clarence Thomas clerkships—turned down the job, sources told the Journal, though their motivations for doing so are unclear. Nor is the No. 3 spot the only D.O.J. position the White House has failed to fill: according to the Journal, at least five high-profile units at the Justice Department still don’t have permanent, politically appointed leaders, including the criminal, civil, and tax divisions.
In a few cases, the Trump administration’s picks have been stalled in the confirmation process—the heads of both the criminal and civil units were named a year ago, for instance, but still haven’t been scheduled for a Senate vote. Per the Journal, the Russia probe is at play here, too: Democrats are “pressing nominees about how they would handle the probe should they become involved in it,” and Republicans, too, have been slow to push for a vote.
The pall of the Russia probe hangs equally heavy over current D.O.J. officials, who are constantly dodging attacks from the president over their own roles. Trump has repeatedly and publicly admonished Sessions over his recusal; in his latest attack, Trump blamed the top lawyer for the probe’s indefinite timeline. “The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself . . . I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined,” Trump tweeted, adding, “Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!” The Trump-Sessions relationship has reportedly deteriorated to the point that Trump refuses to say the former Alabama senator’s name out loud, a practice his stop aides have also picked up:
Trump’s fury with Sessions is so ever-present it has taken to darkening his moods even during otherwise happy moments. On Thursday, Trump was on Air Force One returning from a trip to Texas, reveling in both a successful day of fundraising and the heads-up he had received from economic adviser Larry Kudlow that the next day’s jobs report would be positive.
But when an aide mentioned Sessions, Trump abruptly ended the conversation and unmuted the television in his office broadcasting Fox News, dismissing the staffer to resume watching cable, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Rosenstein, too, has been a frequent presidential punching bag. While Trump has targeted Sessions for his “original sin” of recusal, the deputy attorney general is the one responsible for appointing Mueller in the first place, not to mention for signing off on the F.B.I. raid of Michael Cohen. He’s battled with Trump allies over D.O.J. document requests and has come under scrutiny for the role he played in James Comey’s firing: on Tuesday, Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters that Rosenstein should be a key witness in the obstruction of justice aspect of the investigation, considering he penned a letter recommending Comey’s dismissal on the grounds that the former F.B.I. director mishandled the probe into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Graham also sent the D.A.G. a letter questioning Rosenstein’s oversight of the investigation late last month.
The White House’s struggle to fill out the ranks would result in an unusual situation should Rosenstein recuse himself, resign, or be fired—all possible outcomes. With Jesse Panuccio serving in an acting capacity as the associate attorney general, the responsibility of overseeing the Russia probe would likely fall to Solicitor General Noel Francisco. Typically, Francisco’s job is to argue on the government’s behalf in cases that go before the Supreme Court. And while it’s unclear how Francisco would treat the role, what’s much less ambiguous is how Trump would want him to treat it. “When you look at the I.R.S. scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, aah, real problems they had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems,” Trump toldThe New York Times. “When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”
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Gee, I remember how totally excited I was the day I got my job offer to serve as a GS-11 Attorney Adviser at the BIA under the DOJ Honors Program in 1973. Short of family events, it was one of the most exciting and satisfying events of my life. Who would have thought that 45 years later the once-proud DOJ would be run by a Jim Crow wannabe working for a White Nationalist regime?
Most of the “vibes” that I get are that everyone eligible or nearly eligible for retirement at the DOJ is getting those retirement estimates updated. Better hurry, though, before Trump & the GOP Know Nothings put the finishing touches on their plan to destroy the retirement system, the merit Civil Service, and return to the “good old days” of the spoils system where jobs could be handed out to political cronies and sycophants who could be hired and fired at will. And, of course, anyone with the integrity to stand up to these political hacks could be unceremoniously fired on the spot to make way for the kakistocracy.
Just like destroying the Constitution disingenuously is called “restoring the rule of law” in the Trump Administration, replacing the merit-based career Civil Service with a sycophantic kakistocracy is what disingenuously is termed “promoting accountability.”
Thinking about what he’s done, or not.By Mike Segar/Reuters.
When Lexington Avenue lothario Rudy Giuliani declared last month that he would be joining Donald Trump’s august legal team, he said that he would only be taking a “leave of absence” from his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, because it’d take just a week, two weeks tops, to resolve the Mueller investigation. On Thursday, though, the law firm announced that the leave of absence has, sadly, become permanent, with Giuliani tendering a “resignation” letter on Wednesday. “After recognizing that this work is all consuming and is lasting longer than initially anticipated, Rudy has determined it is best for him to resign,” the firm’s chairman, Richard A. Rosenbaum, said in a statement. So that’s the party line. More likely, as others have speculated, “America’s Mayor” was told he had 24 hours to cough up a letter announcing his departure, or the firm would cough it up for him.
Greenberg Traurig might have seen this one coming. For starters, any lawyer worth their salt could have told Giuliani that defending the president of the United States in an investigation into possible collusion with a foreign power couldn’t be a side hustle. Second, no one outside of Giuliani actually thought that the Mueller case was going to wrap up in two weeks, or even a month. Perhaps Giuliani’s former bosses would even have granted him a sabbatical, and then allowed him back, if the words coming out of his mouth since joining Team Trump hadn’t become so thoroughly mortifying by association. While Giuliani has said a number of cringe-worthy things since joining Trump’s legal team—that he fantasizes about riding to Ivanka Trump’srescue; that it would have been really bad if the Stormy Daniels story got out a month before the election, etc.—perhaps the most embarrassing was his appearance on Sean Hannity, wherein he implied any lawyer worth his salt has pulled a Michael Cohen.
At his law firm, the sentient denture suggested, such payments porn-star payouts were standard practice. “That was money that was paid by his lawyer, the way I would do, out of his law firm funds,” Giuliani said. Cohen, he added, “would take care of things like this like I take care of this with my clients.” You can see how Greenberg Traurig might have come to the conclusion that Giuliani was not the ideal advertisement for the firm.
Indeed, according to The New York Times, they were not pleased at all. “Firm partners . . . chafed over Mr. Giuliani’s public comments about [the] payments,” write reporters Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman. They were particularly displeased by the implication, which Giuliani spake as gospel, that it’s perfectly normal for a lawyer to secretly take the initiative to silence the porn stars who say they banged their clients. At least not without informing their client first. “We cannot speak for Mr. Giuliani with respect to what was intended by his remarks,” Jill Perry, a spokesperson for the firm, told the paper. “Speaking for ourselves, we would not condone payments of the nature alleged to have been made or otherwise without the knowledge and direction of a client.”
Also likely playing into Greenberg Traurig’s decision to happily part ways with ole Rudy? The fact that in his short time representing Trump, he’s made a name for himself as one of the worst lawyers of all time, so comically bad that even Donald Trump, Mr. Incompetent, can’t believe what a terrible job he’s doing. Those sorts of reviews are typically seen as a negative for companies advertising their legal services.
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Pharma giant: In retrospect, we probably should not have agreed to pay the president’s “fixer” $1.2 million for dubious consulting work
Novartis AG “made a mistake” in striking a deal with Michael Cohen through his shell company, Essential Consultants, for guidance “as to how the Trump administration might approach certain U.S. healthcare-policy matters,” the firm’s C.E.O. toldemployees an e-mail today. “As a consequence, [we] are being criticized by a world that expects more from us.” Vasant Narasimhan did not say if the mistake specifically was agreeing to pay someone $1.2 million before holding a single meeting with him, or if the whole thing in general was one giant mistake, but presumably it’s the latter.
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You heard it months ago at “Courtside.” I said that Stormy D was smarter, more credible, more decent, and probably a better overall self-promoter than “Don the Con” and predicted that her lawyers would run circles around the 21st Century version of “The Three Stooges” hired by him.
To date, nothing to show I was wrong. Actually, I think I underestimated the incompetence of the Trump Legal Team. But, when everything the client says is a lie, and he can’t keep them straight, it’s hard for those around him to figure out which lies are part of the “party line” and which are . . . well, just plain old lies.
Edward Levi and Griffin Bell were very different men. One was the son and grandson of rabbis, a legal scholar whose life revolved around the University of Chicago. The other was a country lawyer who became a master operator in the Atlanta legal world. One was appointed to high office by a Republican president, the other by a Democrat.
Yet for all their differences, Levi and Bell came to share a mission. Together, they created the modern Department of Justice and, more important, the modern American idea of the rule of law.
They were the first two attorneys general appointed after Watergate — Levi by Gerald Ford and Bell by his fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter. And they both set out to refashion the Justice Department into the least political, most independent part of the executive branch. “Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” Levi said. It cannot become “anyone’s weapon.” Bell described the department as “a neutral zone in the government, because the law has to be neutral.”
They understood Richard Nixon’s deepest sins: He saw the law as an instrument not of justice but power. Yet Levi and Bell also knew that Nixon hadn’t been the only problem. Other administrations had also misused the law — investigating enemies and rivals, like civil-rights leaders. So Levi and Bell made sure that the crisis of Watergate didn’t go to waste.
They changed the rules for F.B.I. investigations. They put in place strict protocols for communication between the White House and Justice Department. They made clear — with support from Ford and Carter — that the president must have a unique relationship with the Justice Department.
“It’s perfectly natural and fine for the president and others at the White House to have interactions with the Justice Department on broad policy issues,” Sally Yates, the former deputy attorney general, told me last week. “What’s not O.K. is for the White House, and especially the president, to have any involvement with criminal prosecutions. That really turns the rule of law on its head.”
No administration has been perfect in the pursuit of neutral justice, but every one from Ford’s through Barack Obama’s stayed true to the post-Watergate overhaul. They allowed uncomfortable investigations to proceed unimpeded. They did not treat the law as a weapon.
Then came President Trump.
The story of Levi and Bell highlights how fragile the rule of law is. Much of it does not depend on the Constitution or legislation. It depends on political culture and habits. And that culture and those habits can change. In the sweep of history, the reforms of Levi and Bell are still quite young.
The most obvious ways that Trump is undermining the law involve the Russia investigation. Like Nixon, Trump is enraged that anyone in his administration would investigate anyone else in it. But Russia is only one part of the problem: Trump really does view the law as a weapon, to protect his allies and strike his enemies.
The incomplete list includes: He suggested an end to the prosecution of someone he likes (Joe Arpaio) and the start of prosecutions of people he hates (Hillary Clinton, James Comey). Trump defended his personal lawyer by claiming that the government regularly fabricates evidence. Trump has dragged federal prosecutors into politics, bringing one of them — John Huber, Utah’s top federal prosecutor — to the White House to give a speech lobbying for new immigration laws.
Other presidents did none of this. It undermines the idea of equal justice. It tells Americans that our legal system is merely another instrument of partisan battle, that our prosecutors and law-enforcement officers are political hacks in disguise.
The Trump attacks on the justice system demand a stronger response. The media can’t become numb. His aides and appointees need to stand up to him more often — rather than, for example, assenting to a baseless new inquiry into Clinton, overseen by none other than Huber.
And other Republicans, in Congress and private life, should summon more courage. “We don’t see senior Republican officials, either current or past, defending the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.,” John Bellinger III, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, said last week at a Georgetown University conference on democratic norms. “It’s just inexplicable.”
Where are the Republican defenders of law and order? Where are you, John Ashcroft? What about C. Boyden Gray, Larry Thompson, Paul Clement, Ted Olson, Susan Collins and Ben Sasse? At least a few of them should be willing to take a little heat in defense of the American system of justice.
In retrospect, Levi almost seemed to be pleading with them in his 1977 goodbye speech as attorney general: “We have shown that the administration of justice can be fair, can be effective, can be nonpartisan. These are goals which can never be won for all time. They must always be won anew.”
Yup! And, in some cases, the disguise is pretty transparent — perhaps the only “transparency” in today’s DOJ.
This time period comes close to spanning my career in the DOJ. I worked for both Attorney General Ed Levi and Attorney General Griffin Bell (“known on the “5th Floor” of the DOJ as “Judge Bell”).
I don’t have a recollection of personally meeting Attorney General Levi. However, I did have a strong impression of his integrity because he disqualified himself from a key BIA disbarment case being then being written by my office mate Lauri Steven Filppu who later served with me as an Appellate Judge at the BIA.
The case was Matter of Koden, 15 I&N Dec. 739 (BIA 1974; A.G., BIA 1976), aff’d , 564 F.2d 228 (7th Cir. 1977). The conflict apparently involved the fact that Levi’s wife served on the board of a charitable organization in Chicago where Koden had worked as an attorney.
Compare that with Jeff Sessions who continues to interfere in BIA cases by certification notwithstanding the obvious conflict of interest and ethically required disqualification stemming from his many pejorative (often untrue and/or distorted) statements about migrants exercising their legal rights, particularly asylum seekers.
I knew Judge Bell better. As INS Deputy General Counsel I accompanied my then boss General Counsel (now Judge) David Crosland to a number of meetings in Bell’s office. I believe that our response to the Iranian Hostage situation was the main topic. I remember him as having a very pronounced Southern accent and being just what I expected of a former judge — concerned with the fair enforcement of the law.
Those days are long gone. The DOJ now appears to have reverted to what it was in the Nixon Administration, when Attorney General John Mitchell actually plotted Federal Crimes from his office.
Over the past month, Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and mother Russia has kicked into high gear. Also over the past month, Donald Trump’s legal team, which wasn’t comprised of the country’s most brilliant legal minds to begin with, has completely fallen apart. John Dowd, the president’s personal lawyer, decided he’d had enough and quit. Ty Cobb, who famously claimed the Russia probe would be over by Thanksgiving 2017, is basically persona non grata. Joseph diGenova, who peddled a conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. and D.O.J. were in cahoots to frame Trump, decided at the last minute he didn’t want to be associated with such an epic s–t show. As former Obama general counsel Bob Bauer told my colleague Abigail Tracy, “Like so much else around Trump, [the shake-up] is marked by confusion, a lack of consistency, and an apparent reflection of the president’s uncontrolled impulses.”
At one point, it looked like the ex-Miss Universe owner was going to have to represent himself. But on Thursday, blessing of blessings, the president’s fairy godmother intervened:
Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a combative former prosecutor and longtime ally of President Trump, told The Washington Post on Thursday that he has joined the president’s legal team dealing with the ongoing special counsel probe.
Giuliani, like Trump, is Central Park Five truther, told the Post, “I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller.” The president, naturally, is thrilled by the turn of events, which reunites him with this favorite cross-dressing enthusiast. “Rudy is great,” Trump said a statement issued by counsel Jay Sekulow. “He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country.”
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Get this and much more lively political commentary from Bess in the “Levin Report” here:
Naturally, Andy Borowitz at The New Yorker couldn’t allow Rudy’s resuscitation to go unnoticed:
WARNING: THIS IS “FAKE NEWS” BUT COMES WITH MY ABSOLUTE, UNCONDITIONAL, MONEY BACK GUARANTEE THAT IT CONTAINS MORE TRUTH THAN THE AVERAGE TRUMP TWEET OR SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS NEWS BRIEFING, AND ALSO MORE FACTUAL ACCURACY THAN ANY REPORT PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF “AGENT DEVON!”
SATIRE FROM THE BOROWITZ REPORT
TRUMP HIRES ONLY LAWYER IN U.S. WITH FEWER CLIENTS THAN MICHAEL COHEN
By Andy BorowitzApril 20, 2018
Photograph by Ralph Freso / Getty
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House announced on Thursday that Donald Trump had successfully secured the services of Rudolph Giuliani, after an exhaustive search for an attorney with fewer clients than Michael D. Cohen.
“President Trump had become concerned in recent days that Mr. Cohen might be too distracted to pay full attention to his case, what with him having two other clients and all,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said. “So the search was on for a lawyer with zero clients, and with the hiring of Mayor Giuliani, the President believes he has hit the jackpot.”
Speaking to reporters, Giuliani agreed that, by virtue of having three fewer clients than Cohen, he was uniquely qualified to give Trump his full attention. “There is absolutely no chance of my ever putting him on hold,” Giuliani said.
While the former New York mayor’s hiring got high marks from Trump’s inner circle, it drew a bitter reaction from Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who angrily pointed out that he had not been considered for the job despite having as few clients as Giuliani. “Not only do I have absolutely no clients, I have even less going on, career-wise, than Rudy Giuliani,” Christie said. “Once again, I’ve been screwed.”
Mueller Says That Until Yesterday He Had Almost Forgotten to Investigate Giuliani
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The independent counsel, Robert Mueller, told reporters that, prior to news reports on Thursday, he had “almost forgotten” to investigate the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
“Like most Americans, I had totally forgotten about Rudy Giuliani’s existence,” he said. “But then when he popped up on the news I was, like, ‘Hold on—shouldn’t we be investigating him?’ ”
Mueller was at a loss to explain why he had failed to investigate Giuliani earlier. “I have no idea how it could have slipped my mind,” he said. “His role in Trump’s campaign was as fishy as all get-out.”
He said that other members of his team were “poking fun” at him for not deciding to investigate Giuliani before Thursday. “I mean, think about it: how do you do a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign and leave Rudy out of it?” he said. “I’ve got to say, I’m pretty darn embarrassed about the whole thing.”
When asked for an estimate of when the Russia inquiry might wrap up, Mueller responded, “I honestly can’t say. I was hoping to bring it to a close in the next month or two, but now that we’re also investigating Rudy Giuliani, God only knows how long it’ll take.”
I’m betting that when the time comes that our poor nation finally is relieved of Gonzo’s “services” as AG, unlike the late Janet Reno he won’t be showing up for any live appearances on SNL. Perhaps, he’ll be out on bond awaiting trial. At least he’s smart enough to hire “Chuckie” Cooper as his mouthpiece rather than “The Fixer!”
I thought of those earlier experiences this week as I began to feel a familiar clarity about what will unfold next in the Trump Presidency. There are lots of details and surprises to come, but the endgame of this Presidency seems as clear now as those of Iraq and the financial crisis did months before they unfolded. Last week, federal investigators raided the offices of Michael Cohen, the man who has been closer than anybody to Trump’s most problematic business and personal relationships. This week, we learned that Cohen has been under criminal investigation for months—his e-mails have been read, presumably his phones have been tapped, and his meetings have been monitored. Trump has long declared a red line: Robert Mueller must not investigate his businesses, and must only look at any possible collusion with Russia. That red line is now crossed and, for Trump, in the most troubling of ways. Even if he were to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and then had Mueller and his investigation put on ice, and even if—as is disturbingly possible—Congress did nothing, the Cohen prosecution would continue. Even if Trump pardons Cohen, the information the Feds have on him can become the basis for charges against others in the Trump Organization.
This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth. I know dozens of reporters and other investigators who have studied Donald Trump and his business and political ties. Some have been skeptical of the idea that President Trump himself knowingly colluded with Russian officials. It seems not at all Trumpian to participate in a complex plan with a long-term, uncertain payoff. Collusion is an imprecise word, but it does seem close to certain that his son Donald, Jr., and several people who worked for him colluded with people close to the Kremlin; it is up to prosecutors and then the courts to figure out if this was illegal or merely deceitful. We may have a hard time finding out what President Trump himself knew and approved.
However, I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations.
Listing all the financial misconduct can be overwhelming and tedious. I have limited myself to some of the deals over the past decade, thus ignoring Trump’s long history of links to New York Mafia figures and other financial irregularities. It has become commonplace to say that enough was known about Trump’s shady business before he was elected; his followers voted for him precisely because they liked that he was someone willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, and they also believe that all rich businesspeople have to do shady things from time to time. In this way of thinking, any new information about his corrupt past has no political salience. Those who hate Trump already think he’s a crook; those who love him don’t care.
I believe this assessment is wrong. Sure, many people have a vague sense of Trump’s shadiness, but once the full details are better known and digested, a fundamentally different narrative about Trump will become commonplace. Remember: we knew a lot about problems in Iraq in May, 2003. Americans saw TV footage of looting and heard reports of U.S. forces struggling to gain control of the entire country. We had plenty of reporting, throughout 2007, about various minor financial problems. Somehow, though, these specific details failed to impress upon most Americans the over-all picture. It took a long time for the nation to accept that these were not minor aberrations but, rather, signs of fundamental crisis. Sadly, things had to get much worse before Americans came to see that our occupation of Iraq was disastrous and, a few years later, that our financial system was in tatters.
The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations.
Cohen, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka monetized their willingness to sign contracts with people rejected by all sensible partners. Even in this, the Trump Organization left money on the table, taking a million dollars here, five million there, even though the service they provided—giving branding legitimacy to blatantly sketchy projects—was worth far more. It was not a company that built value over decades, accumulating assets and leveraging wealth. It burned through whatever good will and brand value it established as quickly as possible, then moved on to the next scheme.
There are important legal questions that remain. How much did Donald Trump and his children know about the criminality of their partners? How explicit were they in agreeing to put a shiny gold brand on top of corrupt deals? The answers to these questions will play a role in determining whether they go to jail and, if so, for how long.
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Read Davidson’s complete article at the link.
i certainly have no trouble believing that Trump is a sleazy second-rate criminal. However, he’s a sleazy second-rate criminal who has escaped truth and accountability for his entire life. Tough for me to see him being held accountable now. In my view, accountability will require at least some GOP help. No sign of any spine in a party that’s become no better, and in some ways even worse, than Trump and his “core thugocracy.”
