"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.
There are a good number of lawyers who don’t love their jobs. Sure, the pay is often good. But the hours can be long and the work narrow, leaving many people without much sense of a mission.
The lawyers who work for the Department of Justice, however, tend to feel quite differently about their work.
I’ve known and interviewed many over the years, and they have some of the highest job satisfaction of any group of people I can think of. “You get to do good for a living, and in the name of your country,” as James Comey said in a 2005 speech to Justice Department employees (the same speech I highlighted in my column earlier this week). “If that doesn’t motivate you to work hard, nothing will.”
To many Justice Department lawyers, doing good means pursuing equality under the law. They see themselves as representing some of the highest American ideals: Every citizen deserves the protection of the law, and no citizen is above the law.
Donald Trump does not share the view that the United States has a fundamental set of rules that apply alike to rich and poor, powerful and powerless. “Trump isn’t someone who played close to the line a time or two, or once did a shady deal. He may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America,” The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman wrote yesterday. Waldman then listed Trump’s scams: Trump University, bankrupt casinos, illegal labor, stiffed vendors and on and on and on.
He has often figured out how to stop shy of outright illegality or, in other cases, to violate the law in ways that bring only minor sanctions. He has rarely faced big consequences for his misbehavior. But Trump now finds himself in a very different situation.
The scale of the misbehavior by him and his associates appears to be large. It occurred on perhaps the biggest national stage of all, in a presidential campaign. And dozens of talented, committed Justice Department officials have the assignment of figuring out what he actually did. Thank goodness for them and for the work they are doing.
“Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks,” The Times editorial board writes. “He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado.”
But, as the headline of that piece bluntly puts it: “The law is coming, Mr. Trump.”
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It’s certainly ironic that Trump and Sessions no longer get along. They are both totally corrupt and dishonest in their own unique ways. Each is a fraud in his own right. And their shared dedication to intellectual dishonesty, bullying, racism, White Nationalism, xenophobia, divisiveness, skewed justice, and every horrible aspect of America’s past certainly should be a uniting factor.
It would be nice to think that the justice system and Justice Department that they abuse every day in office will get the last laugh and eventually sack them up. But, it’s by no means certain that justice will be done here. On the other hand, it’s highly unlikely that Trump, Sessions, or today’s GOP will escape the judgement of history for their misdeeds and the damage they are intentionally inflicting upon our country every day that they are allowed to remain in the offices for which they are so supremely unqualified.
White House seeks to rekindle immigration debate on Hill
By Tal Kopan, CNN
The White House is quietly feeling the waters on trying for another push on immigration legislation as President Donald Trump continues to up the rhetoric on the issue.
Trump focused on border security and immigration last week, tweeting repeatedly about the need for congressional action and ordering the deployment of the National Guard to the border.
But sources say the there’s more than just tweets, that the White House has been quietly reaching out to allies on the Hill to explore what might be doable. Still, that outreach has to date not included any Democrats and has been unfocused, leaving it unlikely the effort could muster the votes it would need to pass.
“I think there is a real attempt to figure something out — I don’t think they actually know what they want — but there’s a legitimate want to do something on this,” said one senior GOP aide of the White House’s outreach efforts.
The aide characterized the outreach more as floating ideas than coming up with a game plan, and noted that the White House doesn’t seem to be building a coalition to pass the bill yet. Another GOP source agreed any talks are more exploratory than organized.
“It is frustrating that things are so unclear and it would be better to have a coalition that the White House is part of in these conversations, to be a little bit more specific,” the aide said.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican who has worked on unsuccessful bipartisan efforts to save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy Trump ended, said on Fox News on Monday that there could be another opportunity.
“The President wants to do a DACA deal — border wall money plus other border security measures are very much on the table,” Graham said. “Our southern border is porous. It needs to be rebuilt strongly and the DACA kids need to have certainty their lives. I hope this President can find Democrats to work with him.”
Dems directly appeal to House Speaker Paul Ryan on election hacking
By Tal Kopan, CNN
The top Democrats on six of the House’s key committees are appealing directly to Speaker Paul Ryan to help them obtain documents from the Trump administration related to election hacking during the 2016 contest.
In a letter sent to the speaker Tuesday morning, the highest-ranking Democrats on the House Oversight, Judiciary, Homeland Security, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and House Administration committees implored Ryan to intervene in their ongoing efforts to get the Department of Homeland Security to turn over documents related to the targeting of state election-related systems by Russian hackers.
The Democrats asked the department in October to provide copies of the notifications it sent to the 21 states it identified as the target of Russian government-linked attempts to hack voting-related systems and other related documents.
The Democrats wrote when they did not get adequate responses on an ensuing back-and-forth, they asked House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy to issue a subpoena, but he did not respond.
The Speaker’s office did not immediately respond to CNN request for comment.
Calling the administration’s response “woefully inadequate,” the group said they’ve “exhausted” the options at the committee level and asked Ryan to “personally intervene to protect the integrity and authorities of the House of Representatives.”
Who knows what will happen. But, for “my $.02,” I doubt that either of these has “legs.” First, Trump has “less than zero credibility” on DACA. Second, the House GOP appears to have no desire whatsoever to get to the bottom of the Russia interference, probably correctly fearing that the fingerprints of Trump, his family, and/or his cronies will be all over the place. They might even find the connection to Putin’s personal lobbyist, “Agent Devon.”
No, I don’t have any “hard evidence.” In the end, it’s possible that Mueller will largely exonerate Trump. I know that many believe that 1) Trump isn’t subtile enough to have done anything “under the table,” and 2) if he had actually manipulated the election, he would have proudly tweeted credit for it by now.
But, the great rush to “close out” the Russia investigation and turn the attention elsewhere, along with clear Russia ties to some associated with the campaign who tried to hide those ties, and clear evidence of Russian meddling to elect Trump certainly is enough “smoke” to suggest that we might eventually find “fire.”
President Trump’s legal team reversed course Sunday, announcing that a lawyer slated to join the attorneys handling the response to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation will not come on board after all, the latest sign of disarray for Trump’s legal strategy.
The development came three days after John Dowd, who had been Trump’s top attorney handling the Russia inquiry, resigned amid strategy disputes with the president.
Trump is now left, at least temporarily, without a traditional criminal defense attorney as Mueller’s team appears to be entering a critical phase in its investigation into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election and whether the president’s campaign cooperated with Russia in this effort.
Joseph diGenova, the lawyer Trump wanted to replace Dowd, has often stridently defended the president on Fox News Channel and cast the Mueller probe as a conspiracy against him. Trump enjoyed the TV appearances and wanted diGenova on his team even though he did not know him, officials say.
But in a statement on Sunday, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team said both diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, who is also a lawyer, would not be working on the Russia probe because clients they are representing in connection with the investigation posed conflicts of interest.
One of President Trump’s personal attorneys, John Dowd, resigned on March 22, amid a shake-up of the president’s legal team for the Russia investigation.(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
“The President is disappointed that conflicts prevent Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing from joining his Special Counsel legal team,” Jay Sekulow, counsel to Trump, said in the statement. “However, those conflicts do not prevent them from assisting the President in other legal matters. The President looks forward to working with them.”
The unraveling of the president’s legal team has left his advisers concerned. People familiar with the situation said the president has been counseled by friends that he needs to find a new lawyer to quarterback his team, and efforts are underway by people close to Trump to hire a new lawyer.
Before his resignation Thursday, Dowd had been Trump’s main point of contact with Mueller’s office and had been helping to negotiate the terms for an interview between the president and the special counsel’s team as it examines whether Trump obstructed justice by allegedly seeking to shut down the investigation, which was being conducted by the FBI until Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey in May. Mueller was then appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
Trump’s legal effort is now led by Sekulow, a conservative attorney and radio host who has concentrated on constitutional issues, and assisted by Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer paid by taxpayers to represent the institution of the presidency rather than Trump personally. Cobb, too, has occasionally drawn the president’s ire, people familiar with the team have said.
A number of white-collar attorneys in Washington said the president has been unable to attract top-flight talent as he looks to overhaul his legal team, with major firms fearful that an affiliation with Trump and the Russia case could impact their ability to attract other clients and hire new lawyers.
Trump has recently been relying on Marc E. Kasowitz, who led his legal team until this summer and has represented Trump in several cases over the years. Kasowitz and Trump clashed over a number of issues, including Kasowitz’s belief that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a top White House aide, needed to leave the administration because of the potential legal problems he faced due to the probe and the potential problems they could cause Trump. After Dowd’s hiring, Kasowitz took a diminished role in handling the case.
Ultimately, said one person close to Trump’s legal team, “He’s his own lawyer. Always has been and always will be.”
The person added: “You know what they say about a ‘lawyer’ who has himself as a client.”
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Read the entire article at the link.
“A lawyer who represents him or herself has a fool for a client.”
Adam Goldman, Katie Benner, Matt Apuzzo report for the NYT:
WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. investigated Attorney General Jeff Sessions for possible perjury last year over congressional testimony in which he said he had no contacts with Russians, according to three people familiar with the case.
In fact, Mr. Sessions later acknowledged, he had personally met the Russian ambassador to the United States during the campaign and was aware that George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser, had developed Russian ties, too. F.B.I. agents were aware of both inaccuracies in real time. And last March, when Congress asked the F.B.I. to investigate the attorney general, agents began doing so, two of the people said.
Andrew G. McCabe, the F.B.I.’s deputy director at the time, authorized the investigation, the two people said. Mr. McCabe himself was recently fired for showing “lack of candor” in an internal investigation. Mr. Sessions rejected Mr. McCabe’s appeal and fired him hours before his retirement was to take effect, jeopardizing his pension.
The investigation into Mr. Sessions began before Robert S. Mueller III was appointed special counsel to investigate Russia-related matters. Mr. Sessions’s lawyer, Chuck Cooper, said no investigation is being conducted now.
“The special counsel’s office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress,” Mr. Cooper said in a statement.
The investigation was first reported by ABC News.
Perjury investigations based on congressional referrals are common, and the F.B.I. frequently investigates but seldom charges. But the fact that the attorney general himself was a focus of the Russia investigation, even if only peripherally and temporarily, shows how entangled the Trump administration has become in the case. Mr. Sessions is recused from any aspect of the investigation.
The investigation also adds a new layer to Mr. McCabe’s firing. Mr. McCabe’s lawyers have said that he did not lie and acted quickly to fix any inaccuracies or misunderstandings. Mr. Sessions has offered a similar defense, saying he never intended to mislead Congress.
. . . .
Mr. McCabe’s allies have pointed in recent days to these clarifications and asked why Mr. McCabe did not receive the same benefit of the doubt as the attorney general. But it is impossible to compare the cases because the Justice Department’s inspector general has not released his report explaining his concerns about Mr. McCabe’s candor.
. . . .
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Go to the above link to read the complete article in the NYT.
Double standards are the norm in the Trump Administration and the DOJ. Ethics laws, civil rights laws, environmental laws, asylum laws, conflict of interest laws, civil service protections all are applied selectively to favor “friends of the Administration” and punish “enemies.” Just like in any good Banana Republic like the “B.A.R.!”
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to fire former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe appears to directly violate the promise Sessions made, under oath, to recuse himself from such matters.
Some might contend that Sessions’ recusal covered only the Clinton and Trump campaigns, and that McCabe’s firing involved the Clinton Foundation investigation as a separate matter. But Sessions unequivocally assured senators of his intentions during his January 2017 confirmation hearings in response to a clear and specific question from the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley. Sen. Grassley asked a follow-up question that went right to the point. In response, Sessions very clearly said his recusal would cover any matters involving the Clinton Foundation.
Here is the full exchange:
Grassley: During the course of the presidential campaign, you made a number of statements about the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, relating to her handling of sensitive emails and regarding certain actions of the Clinton Foundation. You weren’t alone in that criticism. I was certainly critical in the same way as were millions of Americans on those matters, but now, you’ve been nominated to serve as attorney general. In light of those comments that you made, some have expressed concerns about whether you can approach the Clinton matter impartially in both fact and appearance. How do you plan to address those concerns?
Sessions: Mr. Chairman, it was a highly contentious campaign. I, like a lot of people, made comments about the issues in that campaign. With regard to Secretary Clinton and some of the comments I made, I do believe that that could place my objectivity in question. I’ve given that thought.
I believe the proper thing for me to do, would be to recuse myself from any questions involving those kind of investigations that involve Secretary Clinton and that were raised during the campaign or to be otherwise connected to it.
Grassley: OK. I think, that’s—let me emphasize then with a follow-up question. To be very clear, you intend to recuse yourself from both the Clinton email investigation and any matters involving the Clinton Foundation, if there are any?
Sessions: Yes.
This exchange has two implications for how one understands the scope of Sessions’ recusal. First, it goes to defining the scope of the recusal that Sessions made on March 2, 2017. If it is a close call whether the Clinton Foundation matter is sufficiently connected to the Clinton campaign for the purpose of understanding Sessions’ recusal, it should be deemed to be sufficiently connected. After all, that’s essentially what Sessions told Sen. Grassley. Second, if the Clinton Foundation matter is deemed outside the scope of the recusal statement that Sessions made back in March last year, then his decision to fire McCabe shows that he failed to honor the promise for a broader recusal which he clearly made to the Senate in its decision to confirm him as attorney general. The same goes for Hillary Clinton’s emails. Sen. Grassley’s questions and Sessions’ answers specifically covered any matters involving that investigation as well.”
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Meanwhile, over at Reuters, Karen Freifeld, Sarah N. Lynch, Mark Hosenball have uncovered some evidence that contradicts Gonzo’s “revised account” of his meeting at which George Papadopoulos’s proposed “Russia contacts” were discussed with Trump campaign officials including Gonzo. It now appears that Gonzo’s story that he immediately and strongly denounced them could be a fabrication. Or just another “memory lapse.”
“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ testimony that he opposed a proposal for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team to meet with Russians has been contradicted by three people who told Reuters they have spoken about the matter to investigators with Special Counsel Robert Mueller or congressional committees.
Sessions testified before Congress in November 2017 that he “pushed back” against the proposal made by former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos at a March 31, 2016 campaign meeting. Then a senator from Alabama, Sessions chaired the meeting as head of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team.
“Yes, I pushed back,” Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 14, when asked whether he shut down Papadopoulos’ proposed outreach to Russia.
Sessions has since also been interviewed by Mueller.
Three people who attended the March campaign meeting told Reuters they gave their version of events to FBI agents or congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the accounts they provided to Reuters differed in certain respects, all three, who declined to be identified, said Sessions had expressed no objections to Papadopoulos’ idea.
One person said Sessions was courteous to Papadopoulos and said something to the effect of “okay, interesting.”
The other two recalled a similar response.
“It was almost like, ‘Well, thank you and let’s move on to the next person,’” one said.
However, another meeting attendee, J.D. Gordon, who was the Trump campaign’s director of national security, told media outlets including Reuters in November that Sessions strongly opposed Papadopoulos’ proposal and said no one should speak of it again. In response to a request for comment, Gordon said on Saturday that he stood by his statement.
Sessions, through Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores, declined to comment beyond his prior testimony. The special counsel’s office also declined to comment. Spokeswomen for the Democrats and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee did not comment.
Reuters was unable to determine whether Mueller is probing discrepancies in accounts of the March 2016 meeting.
The three accounts, which have not been reported, raise new questions about Sessions’ testimony regarding contacts with Russia during the campaign.
Sessions previously failed to disclose to Congress meetings he had with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and testified in October that he was not aware of any campaign representatives communicating with Russians.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Justice Department on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., November 14, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
Some Democrats have seized on discrepancies in Sessions’ testimony to suggest the attorney general may have committed perjury. A criminal charge would require showing Sessions intended to deceive. Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee that he had always told the truth and testified to the best of his recollection.
Legal experts expressed mixed views about the significance of the contradictions cited by the three sources.
Sessions could argue he misremembered events or perceived his response in a different way, making any contradictions unintentional, some experts said.
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, said Sessions’ words might be too vague to form the basis of a perjury case because there could be different interpretations of what he meant.
United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions visits families of opioid overdose victims at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky, U.S. March 15, 2018. REUTERS/John Sommers II
“If you’re talking about false statements, prosecutors look for something that is concrete and clear,” he said.
Other legal experts said, however, that repeated misstatements by Sessions could enable prosecutors to build a perjury case against him.
“Proving there was intent to lie is a heavy burden for the prosecution. But now you have multiple places where Sessions has arguably made false statements,” said Bennett Gershman, a Pace University law professor.
The March 2016 campaign meeting in Washington was memorialized in a photo Trump posted on Instagram of roughly a dozen men sitting around a table, including Trump, Sessions and Papadopoulos.
Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty in October to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his Russia contacts, is now cooperating with Mueller.
According to court documents released after his guilty plea, Papadopoulos said at the campaign meeting that he had connections who could help arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Papadopoulos continued to pursue Russian contacts after the March 2016 meeting and communicated with some campaign officials about his efforts, according to the court documents.
Trump has said that he does not remember much of what happened at the “very unimportant” campaign meeting. Trump has said he did not meet Putin before becoming president.
Moscow has denied meddling in the election and Trump has denied his campaign colluded with Russia.
Reporting by Karen Freifeld, Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball; Additional reporting by Jonathan Landay in Washington and Jan Wolfe in New York; Editing by Anthony Lin, Noeleen Walder and Jeffrey Benkoe”
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Like Trump, Gonzo is a congenital liar who has been pushing his “White Nationalist alternate world view” for so long that he wouldn’t recognize truth if it hit him in the face. I don’t know if he will ever be held accountable for all of his biased disingenuous deeds. But, at some future point, someone will “unpack” all of Gonzo’s disastrous abuses — immigration, civil rights, criminal justice, prisons — of justice at the Department of Justice and preserve them for history.
“MORE THAN the details of the case, President Trump’s tweet early Saturday celebrating the firing of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe is what stands out: a marquee of bullying and unseemly behavior by a president. Mr. Trump acts like a nasty, small-minded despot, not the leader of a democracy more than two centuries old in which rule of law is a sturdy pillar. If there is doubt that the timing of Mr. McCabe’s dismissal was driven by political vengeance, Mr. Trump does everything he can to prove the worst with his own sordid words.
This is the language of a banana republic. In nations without a strong democratic foundation, tyrants cling to power by belittling perceived enemies and insulting and coopting other institutions, such as a free press, law enforcement and the military, coercing them into subservience. Just look around the world at practices today in Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Turkey, to name a few. The banana republic playbook has no place in the United States, not in a town hall, not in a statehouse, least of all in the Oval Office.
Mr. McCabe is a 21-year-veteran of the FBI and served as deputy director under James B. Comey, whom Mr. Trump fired earlier. A Justice Department inspector general’s report, not yet public, reportedly found that he authorized the disclosure of sensitive information to the media about an investigation involving Hillary Clinton and then misled investigators. He disputes the allegations, noting that he had authority to share the information and corrected what he told investigators. He previously stepped down from the deputy director’s job and was preparing to retire from the FBI on Sunday, which would have assured him of a full federal pension. The rushed timing of the firing on Friday night by Attorney General Jeff Sessions — whose own job security is perpetually threatened by Mr. Trump — robs Mr. McCabe of that full pension.
As Mr. Trump knows, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has been reported to be looking into possible obstruction of justice in the firing of Mr. Comey. Mr. McCabe could be a vital witness in such a prosecution. Now the president has attempted to discredit, and lauded the punishment of, a potential witness against him, an affront to the integrity and independence of law enforcement.
Mr. McCabe’s actions as deputy FBI director are hard to evaluate without release of the inspector general’s report, due out this spring. There will be time to judge him then. What is clear today is that the president jumped on Mr. McCabe with unseemly ferocity, tweeting: “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI — A great day for Democracy.”
In fact, the hardworking men and women of the FBI, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and elsewhere in government come to work every day to uphold the values of a democratic system based on rule of law — a system that is distinguished by the simple principle that everyone is judged fairly, not by grudge or whim, and that no one is above the law, not even the president.”
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Lest there were any doubt about it, by canning McCabe less than 48 hours before his retirement, Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions cemented his position as a person just as small in heart, soul, character, and integrity as he is in stature.
The irony here is rich: What about Gonzo’s own frequent intentional and rather incredibly claimed “lapses” in candor, whether under oath or not?
Max Boot reports from The Swamp for the Washington Post:
“One of the great non-mysteries of the Trump administration is why Cabinet members think they can behave like aristocrats at the court of the Sun King. The Department of Housing and Urban Development spent $31,000 for a dining set for Secretary Ben Carson’s office while programs for the poor were being slashed. The Environmental Protection Agency has been paying for Administrator Scott Pruitt to fly first class and be protected by a squadron of bodyguards so he doesn’t have to mix with the great unwashed in economy class. The Department of Veterans Affairs spent $122,334 for Secretary David Shulkin and his wife to take what looks like a pleasure trip to Europe last summer; Shulkin’s chief of staff is accused of doctoring emails and lying about what happened. The Department of Health and Human Services paid more than $400,000 for then-Secretary Tom Price to charter private aircraft — a scandal that forced his resignation.
Why would Cabinet members act any differently when they are serving in the least ethical administration in our history? The “our” is important, because there have been more crooked regimes — but only in banana republics. The corruption and malfeasance of the Trump administration is unprecedented in U.S. history. The only points of comparison are the Gilded Age scandals of the Grant administration, Teapot Dome under the Harding administration, and Watergate and the bribe-taking of Vice President Spiro Agnew during the Nixon administration. But this administration is already in an unethical league of its own. The misconduct revealed during just one day this week — Wednesday — was worse than what presidents normally experience during an entire term.
The day began with a typically deranged tweet from President Trump: “Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse. . . . Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!” Translation: Trump is exercised that the Justice Department is following its normal procedures. Sessions fired back: “As long as I am the Attorney General, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor.” Translation: The president is asking him to act without “integrity and honor.”
This is part of a long pattern of the president pressuring the “beleaguered” Sessions — a.k.a. “Mr. Magoo” — to misuse his authority to shut down the special counsel investigation of Trump and to launch investigations of Trump’s political foes. Because Sessions won’t do that, Trump has tried to force him from office. The president does not recognize that he is doing anything improper. He thinks the attorney general should be his private lawyer. The poor man has no idea of what the “rule of law” even means, as he showed at a White House meeting Wednesday on gun control, during which he said: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” This from a supposed supporter of the Second Amendment.
But wait. Wednesday’s disgraceful news was only beginning. Later in the day the New York Times reported that Jared Kushner’s family company had received hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from companies whose executives met with him in his capacity as a senior White House aide. The previous day, The Post had reported that officials in the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico had discussed how they could manipulate the president’s son-in-law “by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience.” Oh, and don’t forget that during the transition in 2016, while Kushner was trying to refinance a family-owned office building, he met with a Russian bankerclose to the Kremlin and with executives of a Chinese insurance company that has since been taken over by the Chinese government.
President Trump’s nepotism has compromised U.S. standing in the world, says Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.(The Washington Post)
Little wonder that the previous week Kushner lost his top-secret security clearance. The wonder is that a senior aide with such dodgy business dealings was allowed access for a full year to the government’s most sensitive secrets — and that he still works in the White House. This is the kind of nepotism that plagues dictatorships and is a defining characteristic of Trump’s kleptocratic rule.
Of course, we are still only scratching the surface of administration scandals. This is a president, after all, whose communications director quit on Wednesday after admitting to lying (but insists her resignation was unrelated); whose senior staff included an alleged wife-beater; whose former national security adviser and deputy campaign manager have pleaded guilty to felonies; whose onetime campaign chairman faces 27 criminal charges, including conspiracy against the United States; whose attorney paid off a porn star; and whose son mixed family and government business on a trip to India. Given the ethical direction set by this president, it’s a wonder that his Cabinet officers aren’t stealing spoons from their official dining rooms. Come to think of it, maybe someone should look into that.”
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The total ugliness, dishonesty, corruption, and lack of accountability of the Trumpsters is hard to contemplate. Everybody mentioned in this article probably belongs in jail. Other than that, though, they’re a great bunch of guys. Check those pockets and briefcases for the spoons! Draining The Swamp indeed!
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that the problem “is far worse than I imagined,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday urged First Lady Melania Trump to intensify her campaign against cyberbullying.
Speaking to reporters from his office at the Justice Department, Sessions said that, whatever Mrs. Trump had done to eliminate the scourge of cyberbullying, “It clearly has not been enough.”
“From my perspective, cyberbullying is very much a growing problem,” he said. “And with every passing day it gets worse and worse.”
Sessions said that, while he understands that Mrs. Trump has many other responsibilities as First Lady, “anything you can do to get cyberbullying to stop will be very much personally appreciated by me.”
“Please help,” he said, his voice quavering.
In an official statement released later in the day, the First Lady said that she had “kind of forgotten” about her campaign to stop cyberbullying but that she would “get right on it.”
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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!”
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“Mister Magoo” nothing! He’s not a “bumbler” when it comes to implementing Trump’s White Nationalist immigration policies and bashing Latinos and other minorities.
Nope! He’ll always be “Gonzo Apocalypto” to me! Captures the full crazy, wild-eyed, disingenuous, ignorant, malicious meanness of the man!
“The most difficult decision a lawyer has to make is whether to allow his client to speak to the prosecutor—or in this case, the special counsel,” Robert Bennett told me, referring to the unfolding chess match between Donald Trump and Robert Mueller. Bennett, the Brooklyn-born Washington superlawyer, would know, having represented President Bill Clinton in the Kenneth Starr investigation. For a fabulist like Trump, however, the danger is tenfold: Mueller has already charged four former members of the Trump campaign with making false or misleading statements to the F.B.I. “I think there are tremendous risks in this case, because the easiest case for the government to prove would be a false statement given to the F.B.I. or the independent counsel,” Bennett added. “That’s a very easy one to prove.”
While the president initially said he is “100 percent” willing to meet with Mueller under oath, his legal team has cautioned that any interview could be a perjury trap. “He’ll be guided by the advice of his personal counsel,” Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer on the Russia inquiry, told The New York Times. For months, Trump’s lawyers have been engaged in discussions with Mueller’s team, weighing options that could mitigate the president’s legal risk. Though the format of the potential interview remains an open question, Mueller, wielding the power of subpoena, has the upper hand in shaping the negotiations. “What matters is how much leverage you have on either side,” said Renato Mariotti, a former Chicago prosecutor. “Mueller has most of the leverage . . . in the end, Mueller is going to get most, if not the vast majority, of what he wants.”
The challenge for Trump’s legal team, led by Cobb and John Dowd, is to protect the president from himself under conditions acceptable to Mueller. “It’s a very bad sign for the president that his own lawyers are so worried about whether he’s going to tell the truth that they’re trying to negotiate all of these conditions ahead of time,” Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama, told me. “Ordinarily, when you’re representing a high-ranking government official, you’re not worried about your client being forthcoming because that goes with the nature of government service. But here, I think the lawyers are wise to worry, just given Donald Trump’s track record of him confabulating in any number of ways.”
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Read the rest of Tracy’s article at the above link.
I don’t have much doubt that Trump will perjure himself. I don’t think he could tell the truth if his life depended on it. And, it’s likely that Mueller will be able to build a convincing case for obstruction against the Liar-In-Chief.
But, Trump relies heavily on the complicity of the sleazy GOP he has come to dominate and the indifference of his voters to moral values or honest government. Trump is used to at least figuratively “getting away with murder” (remember his all too true boast that he could shoot someone in broad daylight in Times Square and his voters wouldn’t care). So, the chances of Trump being held accountable are probably minimal until 2024.
“Even among some of Donald Trump’s allies, there is a sense of astonishment at the White House’s handling of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “It’s like no one took down the Gambino family,” Steve BannontoldChris Whipple in a book adaptation the Hive published this week. “Mueller’s doing a roll-up just like he did with the Gambinos. [Paul] Manafort’s the caporegime, right? And [Rick] Gates is a made man!” Indeed, Mueller, who led the F.B.I. takedown of the infamous crime family in the early 1990s, famously cutting a deal with Sammy the Bull to flip on mob boss John Gotti, appears to be executing what some have called a “Gambino-style roll-up.” First, he flippedformer Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos; then, he turnedousted national security adviser Michael Flynn. Now, CNN reports, Mueller appears to be in the final stages of a plea deal with Gates, Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman and a longtime business associate of Manafort, who was indicted alongside him last fall.
The White House reportedly views Gates’s testimony as a threat to Manafort, and not to the president. “There’d be no anxiety here,” a White House official told CNN when asked about the possibility that Gates will cut a deal. The charges against the two, after all, had nothing do with Russian collusion; the 12 counts included failure to register as a foreign agent, false and misleading statements related to that registration, and seven counts of improper foreign financial reporting—all as part of a broader conspiracy to launder millions of dollars from their consulting work in Ukraine into the United States. Manafort has pleaded not guilty, and is fighting the charges. But Gates, who has also pleaded not guilty, has been grappling with financial troubles and difficulties with his legal team. According to CNN, he has been in plea negotiations with Mueller’s team of F.B.I. investigators for about a month, and has already given an interview in which he would have revealed any knowledge he might have of criminal activity that could be traded for leniency or immunity in sentencing.
What this means for the White House isn’t exactly clear. While Manafort’s reign as campaign chairman and Gates’s role as his deputy were short-lived, the duo oversaw a series of events and interactions that have come under intense scrutiny in the ongoing Justice Department probe. Manafort and Gates ran the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, during which Donald Trump Jr. held his infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer. They were also on board during the Republican National Convention, where a number of Trump campaign officials and surrogates met with Russian officials and campaign officials altered the language of the official G.O.P. platform on Ukraine to be more sympathetic to Russian interests. While Manafort was replaced by Bannon after The New York Times alleged that handwritten ledgers showed millions in undisclosed cash payments designated for Manafort in Ukraine—a claim Manafort denies—Gates continued to work with the Trump campaign through the transition, and served as a senior official on Trump’s inaugural committee.”
For now, the most significant facts in the case remain under lock. Adam Schiff, the top ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that the panel has discovered evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians during the 2016 campaign, as well as evidence of subsequent obstruction. “There is certainly an abundance of non-public information that we’ve gathered in the investigation,” Schiff toldreporters. Whether that information is actionable remains to be seen. According to the White House’s own budget request, the administration expects Mueller’s investigation to continue well into next year, despite repeated assurances from the president’s legal team that it was approaching a conclusion. If Gates has the goods, perhaps it will end sooner.
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No, the “Don of Con” isn’t “in the clear” as he incredibly asserts. In fact, it appears that the noose is slowly tightening. Exactly the kind of “dangling in the wind” to which The Don likes to subject those subordinates whom he suspects of disloyalty.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” And, there’s so much smoke surrounding The Don, his family, and his current and former associates right now that it’s a miracle nobody in the White House has succumbed to smoke inhalation.
When Donald Trump was running for president, absent any actual relevant experience, he claimed he was qualified for the job thanks to his superior deal-making skills—an argument that many ended up buying, despite vast stores of evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately for the U.S., what Trump didn’t explain—though laid out pretty clearly in his book The Art of the Deal—was that as a businessman, making “a deal” to him meant the other side loses, rather than both parties walking away with a happy compromise. “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition,” he wrote, because yes, he’s just that much of an asshole. But whereas his business-world competition could simply get up from the negotiating table and leave, sadly for America, that asshole is our president. And this week, we all got a taste of his singular deal-making style. Only instead of jockeying over some crappy Atlantic City casino or Versailles-inspired condo, this deal had to do with the fate of hundreds of thousands of people who might be sent back to a country they’ve never known because the president is a fraud.
Despite claiming over and over that he has a “big heart” where DACA recipients are concerned, that he wants to come up with a solution before the March 5 deadline he set, and that if lawmakers came to him with an agreement, “I will be signing it,” Trump this week chose to torpedo Congress’s best stab at a bipartisan deal. With four proposed Senate bills to protect the Dreamers from deportation, the White House chose to “work vigorously to oppose” a centrist bill that had the best chances of passing, with the Department of Homeland Security claiming it amounted to “mass amnesty for over 10 million illegal aliens.” While the Common Sense Coalition measure, sponsored by eight Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent, would have provided $25 billion for border security, including Trump‘s precious wall, it would have done so over a period of 10 years and not immediately, as the man-child in the Oval Office has demanded. “I don’t think the president helped very much,” Senator Lindsey Graham, told The New York Times, adding, “As long as the president allows Steve Miller and others to run the show down there, we’re never going to get anywhere.” Thanks to Congress’s paralysis, experts estimate that more than 100 DACA recipients are losing their status daily. And Trump’s the business world is pissed.
“I’ve been very worried for quite a while that I was watching a train wreck in slow motion, and yesterday we had that train wreck,” Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an alliance of small businesses, told the Financial Times. Echoing the sentiment was Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, who noted: “We have people who are working here contributing to our society. Many of them are in the manufacturing sector. We don’t want to lose those folks. And frankly our country shouldn’t want to lose those folks—especially in manufacturing where we have 364,000 open jobs.” Earlier in the week, Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein said in interview, “I couldn’t bear the idea of sending outside the country someone who grew up here his or her entire life,” adding that “over time, immigrants add to the economy because they bring in skills,” a data point the administration would rather not hear. To that end, the Cato Institute estimates that if the employers lost all of their DACA employees, it would set businesses back $6.3 billion in worker-turnover costs.
You might think a guy who just delivered a billion-dollar tax break to corporations would remain invested in keeping those corporations happy. But of course, Trump doesn’t deal in facts, so such negotiating points are lost on him. Art of the Deal, indeed.
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“Putin’s Idiot” Donald Trump specializes in taking potential “win-win” situations and turning them into “lose-lose.” That’s certainly what he has done with the Dreamers. And, we all share in their loss.
Nevertheless, if our country survives, the Dreamers will end up better than Trump and his apologists. The Dreamers aren’t going anywhere, for the most part. But, I’m betting that we will see a number of the super slimy folks who served Trump in the White House or his campaign headed for jail (or at least a few years of “supervised release.”).
FRIDAY’S FEDERAL grand jury indictment of 13 Russians for conspiracy to interfere illegally in the 2016 presidential election presents powerful evidence that Moscow staged an attack on the United States’ democratic political process. The facts, doggedly accumulated by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III despite much hostility from President Trump, show that the Russians’ goal was to foment “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general,” as the indictment puts it. And the chosen means was “information warfare,” reportedly waged via provocations on social media and the occasional in-person grass-roots activity. It began in 2014 and involved Russians engaging in political activities under false, sometimes stolen, identities; no Americans wittingly cooperated with this particular plot, though some did so unwittingly, according to the indictment.
The indictment thus undercuts any lingering suggestion that Russian interference is a myth or a hoax, and Mr. Trump, who has often suggested as much, should have acknowledged the new evidence Friday. Instead, his first reaction was to claim vindication on Twitter. “The Trump campaign did nothing wrong,” he wrote, adding, “no collusion!” This was inappropriate on two levels.
First, though the indictment did say that there was no knowing American collusion with the Russian social media campaign, and though it did not say that it affected the results, it also showed that the vast majority of Russian propaganda supported Mr. Trump’s campaign and attacked that of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. You would think Mr. Trump would take a moment to repudiate that support, even in hindsight, and to declare that no foreign power has a right to campaign secretly against an American candidate.
Second, Mr. Mueller has not finished his investigation and has not ruled out the possibility of collusion. We don’t yet know whether Donald Trump Jr.’s eagerness to meet with Russians offering “dirt” on Ms. Clinton’s campaign was an isolated incident. Nor has the special counsel yet weighed in on the question of possible obstruction of his investigation by President Trump.
Meanwhile, the evidence of a Russian assault on the U.S. election is a serious development in and of itself that any responsible president would respond to in a serious way. Such an attempt to delegitimize the American system could only have gone forward with the knowledge and approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It reflected the Kremlin’s all-too-accurate judgment that a divided and polarized U.S. electorate would be vulnerable to the same sort of dirty tricks Russia has pulled in Europe. In a statement, Mr. Trump declared that “we cannot allow those seeking to sow confusion, discord, and rancor to be successful,” though he strangely blamed not Russia, but rather “outlandish partisan attacks” by his opponents, which, he said, “further the agendas of bad actors, like Russia.” The only message he should be sending now, both to the American people and to Moscow, is that Mr. Putin is responsible and that the U.S. government will respond to his covert attacks with appropriate retaliation.
President Trump continues to insist the Democrats are responsible for any story relating to Russian interference in the 2016 election.(Video: Meg Kelly/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The grand jury’s indictment shows how far Russia is willing to go to manipulate and discredit our democracy. Mr. Trump’s own intelligence chiefs warned this week that the 2018 election is under threat. Given the baffling and inexcusable absence of presidential leadership, Congress must step up to defend the nation.”
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An “inexcusable absence of presidential leadership.” Sorry, I don’t find that “baffling” or surprising at all. In fact, it’s a depressingly accurate and succinct description of Trump’s entire “Joke Presidency.”
Trump’s own intelligence officials, including National Security Advisor Gen. McMaster are all warning of the seriousness of the threat Russia poses to our electoral integrity and national security. Trump is, as normal, focused entirely on trying (totally unsuccessfully) to cover his own behind. This is a guy who up until now has been calling Russian interference with the 2016 Election “a hoax” and “fake news.”
And, there is zero chance that the spineless and complicit GOP-controlled Congress will step into the breach. They are too busy looting our country before Armageddon comes!
There is, however, one way available to all of us to save our country! Throw the GOP scoundrels, enablers, and “Fellow Travelers” out of office. A Democratic Congress is the best hope for the people to take back control and save America from Putin, Trump, and the “New American Oligarchs” and “Kleptocrats” who are enabling both of them!
Otherwise, we all ought to start studying Russian. Because we’re all going to need it to communicate with our “future real rulers” in Moscow!
Sessions runs around the country trashing Dreamers, asylum seekers, lawyers, empowering MS-13, and promoting his White Nationalist agenda while not lifting a finger to prevent Russian meddling in our elections;
DHS is headed by a lightweight sycophant who is more concerned about deporting gardeners and maids and “kissing up” to Trump’s racist agenda than about protecting our country from the active threat by Russia;
We’re standing by and letting Russia run all over us on the world stage;
Vladi is just delighted with the performance of his “Puppet President,” “Agent Devon,” and a host of GOP “Fellow Travelers;”
Trump and his cohorts are out to destroy the career civil service because career civil servants owe allegiance to our Constitution rather than to Trump and his corrupt minions.
Wake up, folks, and vote the GOP out of office, on all levels, before it’s too late for America!
“WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s No. 3 attorney had been unhappy with her job for months before the department announced her departure on Friday, according to multiple sources close to Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.
Brand grew frustrated by vacancies at the department and feared she would be asked to oversee the Russia investigation, the sources said.
She will be leaving the Justice Department in the coming weeks to take a position with Walmart as the company’s executive vice president of global governance and corporate secretary, a job change that had been in the works for some time, the sources said.
Sources: Brand left DOJ over fear of overseeing Russia probe 3:40
As far back as last fall, Brand had expressed to friends that she felt overwhelmed and unsupported in her job, especially as many key positions under her jurisdiction had still not been filled with permanent, Senate-confirmed officials.
Four of the 13 divisions overseen by the associate attorney general remain unfilled, including the civil rights division and the civil division, over one year into the Trump administration.
While Brand has largely stayed out of the spotlight, public criticism of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein by President Donald Trump worried Brand that Rosenstein’s job could be in danger.
Should Rosenstein be fired, Brand would be next in line to oversee Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, thrusting her into a political spotlight that Brand told friends she did not want to enter.
The Justice Department pushed back on NBC’s report.
“It is clear these anonymous sources have never met Rachel Brand let alone know her thinking. All of this is false and frankly ridiculous,” said Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Flores.
Brand has had a long legal career that has spanned several administrations, including under Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican George W. Bush.
In announcing her departure, Attorney General Jeff Sessions described Brand as “a lawyer’s lawyer,” noting that she graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court.
In the same statement, Brand said, “I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish over my time here.”
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Undoubtedly, the DOJ under Trump and Sessions has made some great strides in attacking the rule of law, undermining social justice, mal-administering the Immigration Courts, eroding the credibility of DOJ attorneys in court, and generally diminishing the quality and fairness of the justice system in the United States.
While those might give Rachel “bragging rights” over at Wal-Mart or in right-wing legal circles, I don’t see that they are anything to “write home about.” Hopefully, at some point in the future, having served as a politico in the Trump/Sessions DOJ will become a “career killer” for any future Government appointments.
But, in today’s topsy-turvy legal-political climate, it’s still a shrewd “self-preservation” move on Brand’s part. And, she’s somewhat less likely to be stomping on anyone’s civil rights over at Wal-Mart (although you never know when an opportunity to dump on the civil rights of the LGBTQ community, African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, women, the poor, or to promote religious intelerance might present itself in a corporate setting).
Looking forward to more DOJ reporting from the super-talented Julia! I’ve missed her on the “immigration beat!”
“President Donald Trump, a man notorious for throwing around patently false accusations, has suddenly appealed for “due process” as top White House aides have been cast out over domestic violence allegations.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that people’s lives “are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation.”
“Some are true and some are false,” he tweeted. “Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused.”
The president was likely referring to the recent departure of White House staff secretary Rob Porter, who resigned earlier this week after allegations from his two ex-wives surfaced, detailing that he was abusive to them. Colbie Holderness, Porter’s first wife, alleged that he punched her in 2005 and provided photos of bruises she says he inflicted on her.
And on Friday, White House speechwriter David Sorensen resigned after his ex-wife accused him of physically abusing her.
Trump himself, a man who once bragged about being able to grab women “by the pussy,” has been accused by more than 20 women of sexual misconduct and abuse. It might not come as a surprise, then, that Trump would be eager to protect those accused of sexual abuse rather than those who say they’ve been victimized by it.
“Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” the president asked in a tweet. It’s a fair question, for sure. It’s also something Trump has previously not seemed to care about. Here are just a few times that “due process” didn’t matter to Trump.
The Central Park Five
In 1989, a group of black and Hispanic men were convicted but later exonerated in the rape of a female jogger in New York City’s Central Park.
As police coercion and false allegations ruined these men’s lives, Trump spent $85,000to place ads in four daily New York City newspapers to demand the innocent men be killed.
“Muggers and murderers should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump wrote in the ad at the time.
Despite their names eventually being cleared, Trump still wouldn’t stop saying they were guilty.
“The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty,” Trump told CNN in 2016. “The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”
President Barack Obama
For years, Trump has also promoted the conspiracy that former President Barack Obama is a Muslim who was actually born in Kenya and is lying about his identity. None of that is true.
Trump later retracted his false statement during his bid to become president. But the damage was done.
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“I say nothing,” Trump said during a 2016 debate with candidate Hillary Clinton regarding Obama’s long-form birth certificate. “I say nothing because I was able to get him to produce it.”
Last year, Trump falsely accused Obama of having ”wires tapped” in Trump Tower. The Department of Justice flatly denied the claim.
Hillary Clinton
Even after winning the election, Trump has been unable to stop focusing on Clinton. Trump has repeatedly said Clinton lied to the FBI regarding her private email server. Meanwhile, former Trump administration official Flynn pleaded guilty last December to misleading the FBI about talks he had with Russian officials.
Former head of the FBI James Comey, who Trump eventually fired, told Congress in a July 2017 testimony there was “no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.”
‘Treasonous’ Democrats
Just this month, Trump made the bold and outrageous accusation that Democrats who did not clap and praise the president during his recent State of the Union address are “treasonous.”
“Can we call that treason?” Trump said of Democrats last week during a campaign-style rally in Cincinnati. “Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”
Committing treason is a deeply serious accusation for a president to make. U.S. law states that whoever “owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason.”
To be clear: Not clapping for the president does not qualify as treason.
‘Mexican’ Judge
In June of 2016, Trump accused U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel of not being able to make a fair ruling regarding lawsuits against Trump University. The president alleged that because he has made it clear he wants to build a wall to separate Mexico and the U.S., the judge’s heritage would be a “conflict.”
Curiel had “an absolute conflict” because of his “Mexican heritage,” Trump claimed.
He then doubled down on the claim in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper that same month.
That same judge will now preside over a case to determine whether or not Trump will get his border wall.
For all his Saturday chest pounding about making false, unverified accusations, Trump has made clear that same logic has never applied to his perceived enemies.”
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I’ve noted before the deep irony in the attitude of our disingenuous Attorney General Jeff “Gonzo Apocalyoto” Sessions toward due process. Sessions smears hard-working, often pro bono, immigration lawyers, promotes actions that inhibit the ability of individuals to obtain counsel, intentionally makes practice before the U.S. Immigration Courts “user unfriendly,” and constantly promotes totally bogus changes in the law to deprive hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of migrants of even the rudiments of a due process hearing before an Immigration Judge.
On the other hand, Gonzo was among the first Trump Cabinet members to “lawyer up” for himself. He hired hotshot DC attorney and former Assistant AG Charles “Chuckie” Cooper to help him “beat the rap” for his disingenuous and inaccurate sworn testimony before Congress.
In the world of Trump and Sessions, “White Guys” are entitled to due process. Everyone else can just “Go pound sand!”
