"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.
BILL BARR – Unqualified For Office – Unfit To Act In A Quasi-Judicial Capacity
There have been many articles pointing out that Bill Barr unethically has acted as Trump’s defense counsel rather than fulfilled his oath to uphold the Constitution and be the Attorney General of all of the American people. There have also been some absurdist “apologias” for Barr some written by once-respected lawyers who should know better, and others written by the normal Trump hacks.
Here are my choices for four of the best articles explaining why Barr should not be the Attorney General. It goes without saying that he shouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be running the Immigration Court system. His intervention into individual cases in a quasi-judicial capacity is a clear violation of judicial ethics requiring avoidance of even the “appearance” of a conflict of interest. There is no “appearance” here. Barr has a clear conflict in any matter dealing with immigration.
Attorney General William Barr. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
House Democrats are going to face a difficult decision about launching an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Balanced against the president’s impressive array of misconduct is the fact that several more criminal investigations that may add to the indictment are already underway, and that impeaching the president might jeopardize the reelection of red-state Democratic members. But in the meantime, Attorney General William Barr presents them with a much easier decision. Barr has so thoroughly betrayed the values of his office that voting to impeach and remove him is almost obvious.
On March 24, Barr released a short letter summarizing the main findings of the Mueller investigation, as he saw them. News accounts treated Barr’s interpretation as definitive, and the media — even outlets that had spent two years uncovering a wide swath of suspicious and compromising links between the Trump campaign and Russia — dutifully engaged in self-flagellation for having had the temerity to raise questions about the whole affair.
Barr had done very little to that point to earn such a broad benefit of the doubt. In the same role in 1992, he had supported mass pardons of senior officials that enabled a cover-up of the Iran–Contra scandal. Less famously, in 1989 he issued a redacted version of a highly controversial administration legal opinion that, as Ryan Goodman explained, “omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion” for “no justifiable reason.”
And while many members of the old Republican political Establishment had recoiled against Trump’s contempt for the rule of law, Barr has shown no signs of having joined them. He met with Trump to discuss serving as his defense lawyer, publicly attacked the Mueller investigation (which risked “taking on the look of an entirely political operation to overthrow the president”), called for more investigations of Hillary Clinton, and circulated a lengthy memo strongly defending Trump against obstruction charges.
The events since Barr’s letter have incinerated whatever remains of his credibility. The famously tight-lipped Mueller team told several news outlets the letter had minimized Trump’s culpability; Barr gave congressional testimony hyping up Trump’s charges of “spying,” even prejudging the outcome of an investigation (“I think there was a failure among a group of leaders [at the FBI] at the upper echelon”); evaded questions as to whether he had shared the Mueller report with the White House; and, it turns out, he’s “had numerous conversations with White House lawyers which aided the president’s legal team,” the New York Times reports. Then he broke precedent by scheduling a press conference to spin the report in advance of its redacted publication.
It is not much of a mystery to determine which officials have offered their full loyalty to the president. Trump has reportedly “praised Barr privately for his handling of the report and compared him favorably to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions” —whose sole offense in Trump’s eyes was following Department of Justice ethical protocol. Trump urged his Twitter followers to tune in to Barr’s conference, promotional treatment he normally reserves for his Fox News sycophants.
The press conference was the final disqualifying performance. Barr acted like Trump’s defense lawyer, the job he had initially sought, rather than as an attorney general. His aggressive spin seemed designed to work in the maximal number of repetitions of the “no collusion” mantra, in accordance with his boss’s talking points, at the expense of any faithful transmission of the special counsel’s report.
Barr’s letter had made it sound as though Trump’s campaign spurned Russia’s offers of help: “The Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign,” he wrote. In fact, Mueller’s report concluded, “In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer,” but that the cooperation fell short of criminal conduct.
Where Mueller intended to leave the job of judging Trump’s obstructive conduct to Congress, Barr interposed his own judgment. Barr offered this incredible statement for why Trump’s behavior was excusable: “[T]here is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” Barr said. “Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation,” and credited him further with taking “no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.”
Sincere? How can Barr use that word to describe the mentality of a man whose own staffers routinely describe him in the media as a pathological liar? Trump repeatedly lied about Russia’s involvement in the campaign, and his own dealings with Russia. And he also, contra Barr, repeatedly denied the special counsel access to witnesses by dangling pardons to persuade them to withhold cooperation.
It is true that many of Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice failed. As Mueller wrote, the president’s “efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
This is a rather different gloss on the facts than the happy story Barr offered the press. What’s more, it is a pressing argument for Barr’s own removal. Next to the president himself, the attorney general is the most crucial actor in the safeguarding of the rule of law. The Justice Department is an awesome force that holds the power to enable the ruling party to commit crimes with impunity, or to intimidate and smear the opposing party with the taint of criminality.
There is no other department in government in which mere norms, not laws, are all that stand between democracy as we know it and a banana republic. Barr has revealed his complete unfitness for this awesome task. Nearly two more years of this Trumpian henchman wielding power over federal law enforcement is more weight than the rickety Constitution can bear.
In the years after Watergate, Justice Department officials — from both parties — worked hard to banish partisan cronyism from the department. Their goal was to make it the least political, most independent part of the executive branch.
“Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general, said at the time. Griffin Bell, later appointed to the same job by Jimmy Carter, described the department as “a neutral zone in the government, because the law has to be neutral.”
Attorney General William Barr clearly rejects this principle. He’s repeatedly put a higher priority on protecting his boss, President Trump, than on upholding the law in a neutral way. He did so in his letter last month summarizing Robert Mueller’s investigation and then again in a bizarre prebuttal news conference yesterday. As The Times editorial board wrote, Barr yesterday “behaved more like the president’s defense attorney than the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.”
Throughout his tenure, Barr has downplayed or ignored the voluminous evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing — his lies to the American people, his willingness to work with a hostile foreign country during a presidenial campaign, his tolerance of extensive criminal behavior among his staff and his repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation. Barr even claimed that Trump “fully cooperated” with that investigation, which Vox’s Ezra Klein notes is “an outright lie.”
Since he took office, Trump has made clear that he wants an attorney general who acts as first an enforcer of raw power and only second as an enforcer of federal law. In Barr, Trump has found his man. Together, they have cast aside more than four decades worth of Justice Department ideals and instead adopted the approach of Richard Nixon.
President Donald Trump has long wished for an attorney general who would act as his own private lawyer, protecting him from any potential legal damage. He finally found his man in William Barr.
Barr could have released special counsel Robert Mueller’s report from the beginning. Instead, the attorney general chose to twice present his own interpretation of the special counsel’s findings on foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. election ― before allowing members of the public to see the report and decide for themselves whether Trump and his associates did anything improper.
The first time the public received a glimpse of what was in the Mueller report was on March 24, when Barr sent a four-page letter to congressional leaders summarizing his conclusions from the report the special counsel team had submitted to Barr two days earlier.
The second time the public heard about the report’s content was in a Thursday morning press conference when Barr went out of his way to echo Trump talking points, attacking the media and the president’s “political opponents.”
To the Justice Department’s credit, the redactions in the Mueller report were relatively light ― allowing the public to see a substantial amount of the content.
But still, in his public comments, Barr made sure to paint as positive a picture of Trump before the report became widely available.
Here’s how the attorney general misled the public:
He left out the Trump campaign’s expectation of benefiting from hacked material.
In his letter to Congress on March 24, Barr wrote:
The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: ”[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election inference activities.”
While it’s true that the Mueller report did reach that conclusion, that quote is incomplete. Barr left out the first part, which was less complimentary to the Trump campaign.
Below is the full quote from the Mueller report, with the part Barr omitted in bold:
Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
He said it was up to him to make a decision on obstruction of justice.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Attorney General William Barr went to bat for Trump in a Thursday morning press conference.
In his March 24 letter, Barr said Mueller’s team did not come to a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice in the course of the investigation. Therefore, Barr claimed, it was now up to him to make that determination.
“The Special Counsel’s decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime,” he wrote.
Barr said he concluded that the evidence “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”
But Barr never had to make that legal conclusion, as Matt Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department under President Barack Obama, pointed out. And Mueller never asked Barr to so.
Indeed, the report said the special counsel’s team couldn’t come to such a conclusion:
[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.
The report also said that ultimately, the obstruction call wasn’t for Mueller to make. The special counsel decided not to make a decision on whether to prosecute Trump because the Justice Department’s position, according to an Office of Legal Counsel memo, is that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
“Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations … this Office accepted OLC’s legal conclusion for the purpose of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction,” the report states.
Furthermore, it seems clear that Mueller and his team expected that ultimately, Congress would make the decision on obstruction of justice.
NBC News reported earlier that some in Mueller’s office had said “their intent was to leave the legal question open for Congress and the public to examine the evidence.”
“[W]e concluded that Congress can validly regulate the President’s exercise of official duties to prohibit actions motivated by a corrupt intent to obstruct justice,” the report says.
In other words, Congress can impeach the president if it wants to do so.
He gave an incomplete picture of Trump’s actions that could be construed as obstruction of justice.
“In cataloguing the President’s actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct,” Barr wrote in his March 24 letter.
The report doesn’t let Trump off the hook quite so easily. It says Trump tried to obstruct justice ― but he didn’t succeed because his staff refused to follow his orders.
“The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” the report reads.
The report detailed 10 acts by Trump that could amount to obstruction of justice.
He said Mueller found “no collusion.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been called to testify before Congress about his report.
One of Trump’s favorite phrases is that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 elections. He has tweeted it 84 times.
Barr used the phrase four times in his 18-minute remarks in Thursday’s press conference:
“Put another way, the special counsel found no ‘collusion’ by any Americans in the IRA’s illegal activity.”
“But again, the special counsel’s report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its hacking operations. In other words, there was no evidence of Trump campaign ‘collusion’ with the Russian government’s hacking.”
“After finding no underlying collusion with Russia, the special counsel’s report goes on to consider whether certain actions of the president could amount to obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation.”
“At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the president’s personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was, in fact, no collusion.”
But the Mueller report never actually said the investigation found no collusion. In fact, the report explains specifically why it doesn’t use the term “collusion.” The word only appears in the report as part of this explanation or in quoting someone else.
MUELLER REPORT
The Mueller report avoided using the term “collusion,” and explains why here.
Therefore, Barr repeatedly saying Mueller found “no collusion” was simply the attorney general adopting a Trump talking point.
He said Trump fully cooperated with the investigation.
Barr was extremely sympathetic to Trump in Thursday’s press conference. He tried to paint a picture of a president under extreme ― and unfair ― pressure, telling reporters, “As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates.”
He said Trump was “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” so it’s not surprising if he may have lashed out a bit. And, he added, Trump deserved credit for “fully cooperat[ing]” with the special counsel at all:
Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.
Trump, however, didn’t fully cooperate. He refused repeated requests to give an interview to Mueller and his team. The report said the special counsel’s team considered issuing a subpoena for Trump to testify but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it:
MUELLER REPORT
The Mueller report says Trump refused to be interviewed by the special counsel and his team.
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Finally, this editorial form the SF Chronicle really “hammers home” Barr’s patent unfitness to continue serving.
Editorial: Attorney General Barr’s misplaced loyalties
Chronicle Editorial Board
Updated
Photo: Tom Brenner / New York Times
Attorney General William Barr has been acting as if he is Presisdent Trump’s personal attorney.
President Trump has never made any secret of his desire to have an attorney general whose first loyalty was to him. Regrettably for the nation and the honest administration of justice, Trump unquestionably now has one in William Barr.
The attorney general has lost all credibility with his disgraceful handling of the rollout of the Mueller report into Russian interference into the 2016 election. Barr left the American people for more than a month with a seriously skewed characterization of the “principal conclusions” from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings from the two-year investigation.
His four-page summary of those conclusions amounted to “nothing much to see here, folks.” While he was correct that the Mueller team could not make a case that anyone in Trump’s campaign broke the law by conspiring with Russians, the Barr summary was downright deceptive in its portrayal of the special counsel’s findings on possible obstruction of justice by the president.
Barr’s summary suggested that “difficult questions of law and fact” left it difficult for Mueller to determine whether Trump had obstructed the probe. Barr and his deputy took it upon themselves to conclude that “the evidence developed by the special counsel is not sufficient” to establish obstruction.
Americans who have now read the Mueller’s team’s own words in the 448-page report discovered that Barr’s account was highly misleading. In fact, Mueller’s hesitation was not based on an inability to decide; it was guided in part by a Department of Justice policy that a sitting president could not be indicted. Given that, Mueller suggested it would be unfair to accuse Trump of a crime when the president could not have a chance to defend himself in a “speedy and public trial” with the constitutional protections.
Barr also suggested that Trump could not have obstructed justice into an investigation of a crime he did not commit.
Mueller’s report clearly stated otherwise.
“The injury to the integrity of the justice system is the same regardless of whether a person committed an underlying wrong,” it stated. Mueller’s investigation detailed “multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations.”
Rather than punting the obstruction decision to Barr, Mueller very clearly noted that a decision on what to do with the substantial evidence of wrongdoing he collected should be made by Congress, which has the power of impeachment.
Barr never bothered to correct Trump’s exhortation of “complete and total exoneration.” Barr might as well have been on a Trump spokesman, rather than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, at a bizarre Thursday news conference (before the report’s release) in which he offered a sympathetic explanation for Trump’s repeated efforts to stymie the investigation. Barr chalked it up to Trump’s anger and frustration.
Justice has been frustrated. Americans are justifiably angry. Barr has proved himself unfit for the high office he holds.
This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
Undoubtedly, Trump is unfit for office as many of us have been saying for some time now. The Mueller report confirmed what most thinking people already knew: the guy is dishonest, immoral, pathological, and a not very bright “con man.” (He’s also a racist and a White Nationalist would be authoritarian, although those admittedly were not points of emphasis in the Mueller report which focused on other aspects of his totally disgraceful conduct.)
But, I’ll concede that Trump’s removal is unlikely to happen except at the ballot box. Even that is uncertain with about 40% of American voters apparently wedded to a “beggar thy neighbor, who cares about the majority, country be damned” worldview. Trump is already focused on a “race-baiting” strategy of leveraging the most problematic aspects of our electoral college system while treating the interests of majority of Americans with mockery and disdain.
It remains to be seen whether any Democratic candidate can unite the diverse majority of Americans for at least long enough to save our country by removing Trump and, hopefully, his GOP enablers along with him. It also remains to be seen whether any country where 40% of the voters are so out of touch with reality and the common interests of the rest of us can actually be governed, once majority rule is restored.
But, Barr is a different matter. He’s not elected, he’s not President, and we don’t have to enable his continued unethical misuse of authority at the DOJ, at least not in the the all important area of the U.S. Immigraton Court.
If Congress won’t do the job by creating an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court, it’s time for the Article III courts to invalidate precedents produced by Barr’s and Sessions’s unethical participation in individual quasi-judicial decision-making and to start invalidating removal orders entered by “courts” controlled by political enforcement officials, in clear contradiction to the Due Process requirement that individuals facing the life or death authority of the Federal Government are entitled to have fair and impartial decision makers and reasoned decisions. That can’t happen in a system controlled and directed by biased political “enforcement only” officials like Barr (and Sessions before him). Barr has made it crystal clear that he always will put the selfish interests of Trump above truthfulness, the law, due process, fundamental fairness, and the common good.
Letting this farce of a “judicial system” continue unfairly endangering individual lives and deferring to officials who are neither subject matter experts nor fair and impartial quasi-judicial decision makers is unconstitutional. By letting it continue, life-tenured Federal Judges both tarnish their reputations and fail to fulfill their oaths of office.
As a young attorney in the Department of Justice during the Watergate Era, I, along with many others, were indelibly impressed and inspired when then Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his Deputy William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s illegal order to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor (a/k/a/ “The Saturday Night Massacre”). Obviously, Barr has dragged the Department and its reputation down to new depths — back to the days of Nixon and disgraced (and convicted) Attorney General “John the Con” Mitchell, who actually planned criminal conspiracies in his fifth floor office at the DOJ.
Obviously, there are systemic problems that have allowed unqualified individuals like Barr and Sessions to serve in and co-opt the system of justice, and denigrate the Department of Justice. (I spoke to some recently retired DOJ officials who characterized the morale among career professionals at the DOJ as “below the floor”). Some of those can be traced to the lack of backbone and integrity in the “Trump GOP” which controls the Senate and refuses to enforce even minimal standards of professionalism, meaningful oversight, and independent decision making in Trump appointees. That’s what a “kakistocracy” is. It’s up to the rest of us to do what is necessary under the law to replace the kakistocracy with a functioning democracy.
Wendy Fry reports in the LA Times/San Diego Times-Union:
SAN DIEGO — Three months into the Department of Homeland Security’s program that requires asylum-seeking migrants to wait in Mexico until their U.S. immigration hearings, observers said Friday that the policy may actually be encouraging illegal border crossings.
Last week, migrants rushed the border at least four times at Playas de Tijuana, many of them saying they were motivated by not wanting to wait in Mexico.
A Customs and Border Protection official said migrants who cross the border illegally are not being returned to Mexico while they seek asylum. Instead, they are taken into custody, where they eventually get to wait in the United States, sometimes up to three or four years until their asylum hearings before an American immigration judge.
“Why would I spend three years here in Tijuana when I could be in the United States?” asked Jeydi Fuentes Lopez Montes, a 29-year-old mother from Honduras traveling with a 1-year-old child. “I know there is work here in Tijuana, but isn’t the work better over there?”
Fuentes said she went to Tijuana planning to wait in line to ask for asylum, but she said that when she learned the list to get an initial appointment with U.S. officials could take several months, she decided to try to find another way into the U.S.
Legal experts say a judge is not allowed to deny a person’s asylum request based solely on whether he or she entered the country legally or illegally.
Samuel Rodriguez Guzman, from El Salvador, arrived in Tijuana this month. He said he went to the beach Thursday after hearing about more people successfully entering the U.S. illegally, and seeing on the news people getting through the border infrastructure at Playas.
“I’m trying whatever way I can to immigrate to the United States,” Rodriguez said. “I had problems with the gangs in my country and my father did, too. They want to kill us. When we get there to the United States, they have to respect our human rights to ask for asylum, right?”
Alan Bersin, the former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said there is no coordinated system between the Mexican government and the U.S. to accept large numbers of migrants returned to Tijuana.
So far, fewer than 300 people have been returned to Mexico under the program.
“It’s an incompetent program,” said Bersin, adding that people who cross illegally should be returned to Mexico in the same numbers as those who wait for months in line for their turn to cross legally.
“This policy has a chance of succeeding as a deterrent,” he said. “But [Mexican President Andres Manuel] Lopez Obrador is trying to avoid a fight with Trump so he says yes to everything but does nothing.”
This month, migrants have been climbing through holes in border fencing at Playas or climbing over the 15-foot-high fence.
On March 13, some people slipped through a hole in the border fencing near the beach. One of the men, who was seen in a video running down the beach carrying a small child while a border agent chased him, provided updates via WhatsApp to several people in his group and some witnesses. He said he was not apprehended and made it to Los Angeles.
A group of about 60 people who crossed on March 14 included men, women and children, most of whom said they were from Honduras. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Ralph DeSio said 52 people from that group were arrested.
Border officials also arrested 23 people from Honduras and one from Guatemala on Tuesday after they scaled the fence near the beach.
Then Thursday, activity at the border intensified as border agents and migrants clashed.
Two migrants and several witnesses said agents shot pepper spray across the fence and into their eyes. During the incident, one man climbed the fence and dropped into the U.S. before he was detained by border agents.
DeSio said Customs and Border Protection is averaging 167 arrests a day in the San Diego County area of responsibility, which stretches east to past Jacumba.
“Every arrest in San Diego Sector is investigated. Every breach in San Diego County is a concern whether it’s near Imperial Beach or in Jacumba,” DeSio said in a written statement. “Compromises in our fence are common due to our aging infrastructure. Efforts are made to repair breaches or compromises in a timely manner.”
On Friday, another hole big enough for people to climb through was visible at the base of the border fence at Playas.
“Really, we’re tired of fighting because we just want to cross and ask for asylum…. We’re not rude. We are allowed to come here and ask for asylum,” said Jose Reinera, a Honduran migrant who climbed up on top of the fence at Las Playas on Thursday.
Reinera said he turned back and climbed back down on the Mexican side of the border when he realized his wife and children would not be able to make the climb.
Fry writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
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Up until now, the Administration has been fortunate that their cruel, sometimes illegal, and always incompetent policies haven’t made things even worse.
Fact is, most individuals applying for asylum still turn themselves in either at legal ports of entry or shortly after crossing the border to apply for asylum. They can be logged in, fingerprinted, screened for criminal records and credible fear. Those who can’t demonstrate credible fear can be expeditiously returned.
Those who pass, become part of the legal system. If given an opportunity to understand the asylum system, obtain legal a representation (we know that represented asylum applicants succeed at a rate of 4X to 17X those who are forced to proceed without representation) and fairly present their cases, most will show up in Immigration Court. Many of those who are represented and treated fairly will qualify for asylum, withholding of removal, or relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), even in today’s administrative system which has been intentionally and unfairly skewed against them and their claims.
Those who don’t qualify will be subject to removal, although many will nevertheless face very real and legitimate harm (not fitting within our legalistic and often arcane asylum system) that a more prudent and humane Administration might use to fashion some type of temporary or long-term respite from removal.
But, if the Administration succeeds in it’s mindless plan to destroy the legal asylum and Immigration Court systems, forced migrants, who come of necessity not choice, will simply stop using it. With the help of smugglers, and paying higher prices and taking more deadly risks, many will simply be smuggled into the interior of our country. There, they will lose themselves in our huge country with a diverse population and an insatiable need for labor at all levels.
No screening, no registration, no taxes, etc. — some will undoubtedly be caught and removed. But the vast majority will remain “in the underground” until 1) we legalize them; 2) they decide that conditions have changed so it is their best interests to return to their native lands, or 3) they eventually get old and die. Not to mention that by forcing them into the “immigration black market” we deprive them of their human dignity and a chance to contribute their full potential to our country, while we lose the many benefits of having them do so.
Sounds like a bad system. But, it’s the type of mindless, White Nationalist, “lose, lose, lose” restrictionism that this Administration loves to feed to its “political base.” A bigger “immigration underground” means more folks to hate, loathe, blame, and run against.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book, which details his frustrations with President’s Trump administration, has made it clear that his “disdain for Trump is rivaled only by his contempt for [Jeff] Sessions,” according to an assessment from Washington Post reporter Greg Miller.
According to Miller’s review of the book, McCabe saw then–Attorney General Sessions as a Trump-like idiot and racist who had “trouble focusing, particularly when topics of conversation strayed from a small number of issues,” failed to read intelligence reports, and jumbled classified material with publicly reported news.
The strangest detail from the book, though, had to do with Sessions’ thoughts on the FBI’s hiring practices. According to the Post:
The FBI was better off when “you all only hired Irishmen,” Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau’s workforce. “They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos — who knows what they’re doing?”
According to a Wall Street Journal review of the book, McCabe wrote in his book that Sessions was only interested in immigration issues. He obsessed over the connection between crime and immigration, and he believed that Islam was an inherently violent religion, according to the Post. When presented with a counterterrorism case, he would first ask where the suspect was born or where the suspect’s parents were from. “He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness,” Miller concluded from McCabe’s book.
McCabe’s assessment is surprising in only that it comes so bluntly from a man who once was acting head of the FBI but now seems intent on speaking out against the men who made his professional and personal life so difficult for 10 months (before he was fired just hours before his planned retirement, blocking him from receiving his full pension benefits). Sessions has a long, long history of making racist and anti-immigrant comments, while also implementing racist and anti-immigrant policies. A non-exhaustive list includes: allegedly warning a black lawyer to “be careful how you talk to white folks”; calling the NAACP “un-American”; reportedly joking that he used to think the KKK was “OK” until he discovered some smoked marijuana; praising an 1924 immigration act promoted by Nazi-style eugenics; denigrating a judge in Hawaii as “sitting on an island in the Pacific”; fondly remembered George Wallace, America’s most famous segregationist politician, as “one of the most formidable third-party candidates in this century; and lauding “the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.”
As for actions, in Alabama, Sessions punished black activists, defended voter suppression tactics, and kept black judges off the federal bench. He opposed sentencing reform over the crack-cocaine disparity. He has opposed hate crime protections and defended the official display of the Confederate flag. He has regularly attended events hosted by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups, which he maintains a close relationship with. He touted falsehoods about DACA and immigrants in general. And of course, he pushed, relentlessly, for deportations and prosecutions of undocumented immigrants and even refugees fleeing domestic and gang violence.
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Sessions is a living example of how someone can spend a lifetime “on the dole” as a so-called “public servant” without providing any meaningful positive service or contributions to the public good.
Compare this “life not so well lived” with the “real world” contributions of the many decent, hard-working, honest, and dedicated civil servants who were screwed over by Trump’s shutdown. Or, compare Sessions’s squandered, anti-social life with the significant “real life” contributions of many of the immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who came before me in Immigration Court over 13 years.
I’m not sure even the worst of the aggravated felons that I ordered deported did as much lasting damage to our nation and its future as did Sessions! He was a child abuser on a grand scale, and someone who used knowingly false narratives to send deserving refugees, particularly abused women, back to torture or even death in the countries from which they had fled. He was the architect of both family separation and the unbridled expansion of the “New American Gulag.”
He promoted hate, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, bias, and intolerance of all kinds, and was an avowed enemy of kindness and human compassion. He even had the absolute audacity to cite the Christian Bible, the compassionate, merciful, inclusive, and forgiving teachings of one of the world’s greatest “outcasts,” in support of his own perverted, bias-driven, and totally un-Christian world view.
Oh yeah, and he had no management qualifications going into the job and proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag. Seldom in modern times has there been a more demoralized, mission-less, and dysfunctional mess than today’s Department of Justice. Even Watergate didn’t do as much institutional damage.
Sessions’s only real contribution to justice, due process, and the public good was the day he walked out of the U.S. Department of Justice for the last time. But, it will take years, if not generations, to repair the damage he has inflicted on the rule of law, our Constitution, honest government, and humane values.
Truly, Liz was right! This was one supremely unqualified dude!
If there were any lingering doubt that Donald Trump’s latest plan to curb asylum is flatly unlawful, Judge Jay Bybee quashed it on Friday.
In a meticulous 65-page opinion, Bybee—a conservative George W. Bush appointee—explained that the president cannot rewrite a federal statute to deny asylum to immigrants who enter the country without authorization. His decision for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a twofold rebuke to Trump, halting the president’s legal assault on asylum-seekers and undermining his claim that any judge who blocked the order is a Democratic hack. The reality is that anyone who understands the English language should recognize that Trump’s new rule is illegal. Like so many of Trump’s attention-grabbing proposals, this doomed policy should never have been treated as legitimate in the first place.
Friday’s ruling involves a proclamation that Trump signed on Nov. 9, ostensibly to address the “continuing and threatened mass migration of aliens with no basis for admission into the United States through our southern border.” The order alluded darkly to the caravan of asylum-seekers then approaching the border, which Trump tried and failed to exploit as a campaign issue. To remedy this “crisis” and protect “the integrity of our borders,” he directed the federal government to deny asylum to any immigrant who enters the United States unlawfully.
Ten days later, U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar halted the new rule, holding that it likely exceeded the president’s authority. Trump responded by dismissing Tigar, a Barack Obama appointee, as an “Obama judge.” The comment led to a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who told the AP: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
As Trump escalated his feud with Roberts, his Department of Justice appealed Tigar’s ruling to the 9th Circuit. It faced a seemingly propitious panel: Bybee, Judge Edward Leavy, and Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz. Bybee is a very conservative jurist who authored the original “torture memo,” justifying the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation of detainees. Leavy is a staunchly conservative Reagan appointee; only Hurwitz, an Obama appointee, leans to the left. Under Trump’s partisan vision of the judiciary, the DOJ would seem to have a good shot at reviving the asylum rule.
But Bybee didn’t bite. In a crisp and rigorous opinion for the court, he wrote that Tigar was correct to conclude that the policy almost certainly violates the law. The problem, Bybee explained, is that Congress expressly provided asylum-seekers with the right that Trump now seeks to revoke: an ability to apply for asylum regardless of how they came into the country. The Immigration and Nationality Act states that “[a]ny alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival …), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section.” This provision implements the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which the United States has ratified. It directs signatories not to “impose penalties [on refugees] on account of their illegal entry or presence.”
The plain text of the law couldn’t be clearer: Immigrants in the U.S. are eligible for asylum whether they arrived legally (through a “designated port of arrival”) or illegally. If the president wants to change that fact, he’ll have to convince Congress to break its treaty obligations and alter the law.
Obviously, the Trump administration has not persuaded Congress to overhaul asylum law. So it tried to work around the existing statute by allowing unauthorized immigrants to request asylum—then directing the government to deny their application. Bybee easily disposed of this semantical workaround. “It is the hollowest of rights,” he wrote, “that an alien must be allowed to apply for asylum regardless of whether she arrived through a port of entry if another rule makes her categorically ineligible for asylum based on precisely that fact. … The technical differences between applying for and eligibility for asylum are of no consequence to a refugee when the bottom line—no possibility of asylum—is the same.”
In light of the proclamation’s fundamental illegality, Bybee, joined by Hurwitz, affirmed Tigar’s nationwide restraining order. Leavy dissented in a curious five-page opinion insisting that the INA grants the executive branch power “to bring safety and fairness to the conditions at the southern border.” His anemic analysis is no match for Bybee’s thorough demolition of the DOJ’s illogical position. It seems quite likely that a lopsided majority of the Supreme Court will eventually agree with Bybee’s majority opinion.
It is satisfying to see a “Bush judge” (in Trumpian parlance) hand the president such a stinging legal defeat. Roberts overstated the case in totally dismissing the role of partisanship in the judiciary; of course some judges are political. But for now, a majority of the federal judiciary remains willing to stand up to the president, at least when he issues blatantly illegal orders. Judges like Roberts and Bybee may let Trump manipulate ambiguous laws to do some very bad things to immigrants. But they are not willing to let the president ignore a clear and constitutional directive from Congress.
The next time Trump floats a flagrantly lawless idea, then, it’s worth remembering that nativist bluster cannot transmogrify an illegitimate command into a permissible executive order. Just because the president considers ending citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants, for instance, does not mean he can actually get away with it. Like the INA, the Constitution grants certain rights that the president cannot unilaterally rescind—including birthright citizenship. Bybee felt no compunction to pretend that Trump’s illicit scheme has any legitimacy. Neither should the rest of us.
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Stern points out that contrary to Trump’s belief that he can bully, co-opt, and control the judicial system, in the way that other authoritarian fascists have done in the past, even so-called “conservative” judges have lines beyond which they won’t be pushed. And, lifetime tenure protects them from retaliation by Trump and his corrupt White Nationalist cronies.
Few things can be more important than having judges across the board, regardless of judicial philosophy, stand up to Trump and his lawless abuses of Executive Power as well as “pushing back” on a Department of Justice that has, with a few exceptions, lost its professionalism, moral compass, and courage, along with any semblance of independence.
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!
Justice Dept. Rank-and-File Tell of Discontent Over Sessions’s Approach
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Justice Department lawyers have raised concerns about Attorney General Jeff Sessions pursuing legally indefensible cases and a lack of support when they tried to warn him.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — During his 20 months in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has swept in perhaps the most dramatic political shift in memory at the Justice Department, from the civil rights-centered agenda of the Obama era to one that favors his hard-line conservative views on immigration, civil rights and social issues.
Now, discontent and infighting have taken hold at the Justice Department, in part because Mr. Sessions was so determined to carry out that transformation that he ignored dissent, at times putting the Trump administration on track to lose in court and prompting high-level departures, according to interviews over several months with two dozen current and former career department lawyers who worked under Mr. Sessions. Most asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
The people interviewed — many yearslong department veterans, and a third of whom worked under both the Bush and Obama administrations — said that their concerns extended beyond any political differences they might have had with Mr. Sessions, who is widely expected to leave his post after November’s midterm elections.
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“Since I’ve been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can’t recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official during the Clinton administration.
A department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, said that Mr. Sessions and other senior law enforcement officials were committed to the department’s mission of upholding the rule of law, and that they had heard no complaints about that.
“We know of no department employee who is opposed to policies that uphold the rule of law and protect the American people — which are precisely the policies that this department has implemented and embraced,” Ms. Flores said in a statement.
Driven by Ideology
Mr. Sessions’s shift in the department’s priorities reflected Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to be tough on crime and crack down on illegal immigration, much as former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took office in 2009 with a mandate to realize President Barack Obama’s vision on civil rights.
Ms. Flores called Mr. Sessions’s changes “vital to reducing violent crime,” combating the opioid epidemic and securing borders.
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The Justice Department’s effort to crack down on sanctuary cities through the courts has been met with protests, here in Sacramento in June.CreditRich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
But Trump appointees ignored the legal advice of career lawyers in implementing their agenda, four current Justice Department employees said.
In one instance, Mr. Sessions directly questioned a career lawyer, Stephen Buckingham, who was asked to find ways to file a lawsuit to crack down on sanctuary laws protecting undocumented immigrants. Mr. Buckingham, who had worked at the Justice Department for about a decade, wrote in a brief that he could find no legal grounds for such a case.
Reminding Mr. Buckingham of the attorney general’s bona fides as an immigration hard-liner, Mr. Sessions asked him to come to a different conclusion, according to three people who worked alongside Mr. Buckingham in the federal programs division and were briefed on the exchange.
To Mr. Buckingham’s colleagues, the episode was an example of Mr. Sessions stifling dissent and opening the department to losses in court.
Mr. Buckingham resigned a few months later, and Mr. Sessions got his lawsuit. A federal judge dismissed most of the case, and the department has appealed. Both Mr. Buckingham and Ms. Flores declined to comment on the episode.
In stripping protections last year for transgender people under the Civil Rights Act, department leaders failed to consult Diana Flynn, the head of the civil rights appellate division who led the effort to add the protections in 2014, and many of her career staff.
The process left little room for debate. “Edicts came down, and it was up to us to try to implement them,” said Ms. Flynn, who has left the Justice Department for Lambda Legal, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal aid organization.
Similarly, a flare-up over the Affordable Care Act this summer occurred after the department’s political leaders urged a judge to find unconstitutional two of the law’s key elements, a reversal of the government’s longstanding position.
“This is a rare case where the proper course is to forgo defense” of existing law, Mr. Sessions said at the time, adding that Mr. Trump had approved the step. Three career lawyers withdrew from the case, including Joel McElvain, a 27-year department veteran, who made headlines by resigning in protest.
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To some career Justice Department lawyers, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, represents a measure of independence because his office oversees the investigations into the president and his associates.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock
The episode prompted an all-hands meeting in June to address lingering rancor, according to two people who attended and two others briefed on the gathering.
During the standing-room-only meeting, attendees pressed the head of the departmental branch. What were the brief’s legal flaws, they asked. Had political considerations edged out a sound legal opinion? Did department leaders consider them part of the bureaucratic “deep state” that Mr. Trump has accused of conspiring against him?
After more than an hour, the officials running the meeting said they understood the employees’ concerns and simply encouraged them to continue doing good work.
Attorneys general have long confronted resistance when they implement ideological initiatives that career lawyers view as outside the Justice Department’s mission.
During the Bush administration under Alberto R. Gonzales, the department formed a task force to crack down on pornography; investigators focused on only a small swath of the most egregious examples.
When political appointees under Mr. Holder wanted to abandon the government’s defense of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Jody Hunt, a well-regarded career attorney, argued successfully that the department had a legal duty to defend it.
Mr. Sessions is not bound to follow the advice of career Justice Department lawyers, “and, if he doesn’t like recommendations, to ignore them,” Mr. Litt said. “But it would be inappropriate to ask people to tailor legal judgments to policy preferences.”
Mr. Trump has stoked much of the unease at the Justice Department. He assailed the prosecutors who won a conviction of his former campaign chairman, and he attacked the plea agreement struck with his longtime personal lawyer. He castigated Mr. Sessions for not investigating perceived White House enemies — drawing a rare rebuke from the attorney general — and for daring to pursue cases against Republican lawmakers.
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President Trump stokes much of the unease at the Justice Department.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times
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The president has also frequently targeted Rod J. Rosenstein, who as deputy attorney general oversees the day-to-day operations at the department as well as the special counsel investigation. In a turnabout this month, Mr. Trump declared his relationship with Mr. Rosenstein good, to the relief of some federal prosecutors. To them, Mr. Rosenstein’s office symbolizes the department’s independence because he oversees its inquiries into the president and his inner circle.
More unnerving, employees said, was the president’s threat to remove the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a civil servant who worked to combat Russian mobs and oligarchs. The message, said one lawyer in the criminal division: Doing your job can make you vulnerable to a career-ending attack.
Two former attorneys said that they stepped away from Russia-related work as a result.
“The underlying message from Trump is that department employees are either enemies of the White House or vassals doing its bidding,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel for ethics and government reform under Mr. Obama. Mr. Eisen is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Mr. Trump of violating the Constitution by maintaining a stake in his hotel in Washington.
As a target of Mr. Trump’s high-profile rebukes, Mr. Sessions has gained cautious support even from some rank-and-file lawyers who find his culture wars zeal distasteful. They cited instances where he pushed back on Mr. Trump’s broadsides and his simply enduring months of presidential invective.
Empty Spots
Internal events intended to boost morale have also proved tense. Guy Benson, a Fox News commentator, was chosen to speak at a gay pride event over the objections of the department’s L.G.B.T. affinity group, DOJ Pride, Justice Department lawyers said.
DOJ Pride members held a separate event, where one employee spoke about how progress for L.G.B.T. Americans had regressed under Mr. Trump. Department officials would not comment on the episode.
Some of the lawyers interviewed also said that departures of respected leaders and longtime career lawyers has weakened morale. Besides Ms. Flynn, Mr. McElvain and Mr. Buckingham, others who left included Doug Letter, the head of the civil appellate branch, and David Laufman, the chief of the counterintelligence section.
“Any given person wants to spend more time with his family,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and critic of Mr. Trump’s attacks on law enforcement who has heard complaints from department lawyers. “But the sudden decision by large numbers of people to spend more time with their families is a creation of the atmosphere.”
Days after the health law brief was filed, a long-planned happy hour for former and current federal programs lawyers took on the feeling of a support group, according to people who attended. Gathered at an Irish pub near the Justice Department, colleagues told Mr. McElvain they were sorry that he was leaving but that they admired his decision.
Some maligned the Trump administration or poked fun at Mr. Sessions. But when political appointees joined the conversation, the career lawyers, worried about being pegged as dissenters, shifted the discussion to more neutral topics.
Correction:
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated who Justice Department leaders consulted in stripping protections for transgender people. They spoke to departmental experts, though not to the head of the civil rights appellate division and her team.
Sharon LaFraniere and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
I’ve commented numerous times on Sessions’s stunningly “law free approach” to his job as the nation’s top legal official. His positions never appear to be the product of any type of legitimate deliberation and reflection. Rather they essentially are lifted, sometimes almost verbatim, from “position papers” and screeds written by far-right groups, most of them driven by a White Nationalist, racially motivated, religiously intolerant views that have little appeal to the majority of Americans — even among “true conservatives” (as opposed to racists masquerading as “pseudo conservatives.”)
Low morale has often been a significant issue among the much maligned corps of U.S. Immigration Judges. But, I’ve heard the same things reflected in this article — that morale is by far the worst that it has ever been among U.S Immigration Judges who feel that their expertise and abilities have been disrespected, discretion virtually eliminated, and their positions reduced to basically “robed representatives of DHS Enforcement” under Sessions’s White Nationalist, openly xenophobic regime.
Sessions undoubtedly is the most glaringly unqualified Attorney General since the disgraced “John the Con” Mitchell under Nixon. But, in terms of long term damage to the entire system, Sessions probably has surpassed even “the Con.”
Considerable mythology has arisen about Watergate, and these myths are confusing the current discussion around why and how Nixon was driven from office—which in turn has muddled the conversation around the possible fate of Donald Trump, whom Democrats might move to impeach if they take control of the House in November. In any event, it’s worth separating myth from reality when it comes to Watergate and the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon.
One of the greatest misconceptions around Watergate is that it was the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the subsequent cover-up, that led to Nixon being forced to surrender the presidency. But, in fact, when Nixon returned to Washington from his vacation home in Key Biscayne, Florida, three days after the break-in had been discovered, he and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman had another matter on their minds. The two men were worried that if the burglars—a group of “plumbers,” established ostensibly to ferret out the source of leaks that upset the Nixon White House led by E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. operative who’d participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former F.B.I. G-man—talked to federal investigators, their other activities on behalf of the White House might come to light. The real role of the plumbers was to “destroy” (Nixon talked that way) Nixon’s real and perceived “enemies,” meaning that, as Haldeman put it to the president when they met three days after the discovered break-in, “the problem is that there are all kinds of other involvements.” (This conversation was recorded on the tape of which 18 and a half minutes was later discovered to have been erased—a revelation that set off one of a number of explosions in the Watergate story. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s head of domestic policy, wrote in his memoir that Nixon had done the erasing at Camp David.)
The “other involvement” that Nixon and Haldeman were most worried about being discovered was a break-in on September 3, 1971, more than nine months before the famous Watergate intrusion. This earlier break-in occurred at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who, in June 1971, leaked the Pentagon Papers, a Johnson-era analysis of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times,The Washington Post,and The Boston Globe. Although the report had nothing to do with the Nixon administration directly, it did raise serious questions about the rationale for the war. Nixon, egged on by national-security adviser Henry Kissinger, was enraged at the study’s leak, and wanted Ellsberg “crushed” and any further unwonted leaks stopped. And so the Office of Special Investigations—the plumbers unit—was established, and Nixon’s obliging top aides drew up “Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. 1,” the goal of which was to recover damaging intel on Ellsberg.
Once it was revealed, the break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding was considered by observers—as it had been by Nixon himself—to be far more serious than the Watergate break-in. Even conservative members of Congress were shocked. During hearings by a special Senate committee in the summer of 1973, Georgia’s conservative Democratic Senator Herman Talmadge (southern Democrats hadn’t yet gone red) asked Ehrlichman if he recalled the English principle in which “no matter how humble a man’s cottage is, even the king of England cannot enter without his consent.” Ehrlichman replied chillingly, “I am afraid that that has been considerably eroded over the years.”
As it happens, the burglars found no medical papers about Ellsberg in Dr. Fielding’s files. Nevertheless, that particular raid had far-reaching consequences. It remained secret until Ellsberg’s 1973 trial, when the Justice Department was obliged to disclose it. Citing this stunning news, the presiding judge dismissed the case against Ellsberg, saying that the administration’s behavior “offend[s] a sense of justice.” The Fielding break-in was incorporated into the articles of impeachment against Nixon.
Another oft-repeated Watergate myth, which arose from those Senate hearings, is that the committee vice-chair, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker, asked Nixon administration witnesses a particularly penetrating question: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” This question was considered so clever that it’s been applied to determine whether Trump played a direct role in collaborating with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election. In fact, Baker was working with the Nixon White House, and the point of the question was to narrow the grounds for holding Nixon to blame for the Watergate break-in; unless a witness could pinpoint precisely that Nixon knew, for example, about the Watergate break-in ahead of time, he was blameless and couldn’t be held accountable for the acts of his aides and hired thugs.
The question of whether to hold a president accountable for the acts of his aides was a critical question facing the House Judiciary Committee in the summer of 1974, as it considered articles of impeachment. The most important of the three that it adopted, which it approved on July 30, was Article II, which accused Nixon of various abuses of power—wiretapping, using government agencies against his “enemies”—and also suggested that the president could be held responsible for a given “pattern or practice” on the part of his aides, meaning that simply winking and nodding would not insulate him from their untoward acts. The president determines the climate of the White House, and his aides can often ascertain what he wants done without receiving specific instructions. In effect, it didn’t matter whether Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in beforehand—according to Article II, he was implicated in it regardless.
A third widely misunderstood and highly important event that occurred shortly before the end of the Nixon presidency was the discovery of an excerpt from three tapes that Nixon, under pressure from his staff and the public, released belatedly on August 5. The tapes captured conversations between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, three days after their initial meeting following the discovery of the Watergate burglars. The president admitted that he had withheld the recordings from even his own lawyers and staff, though in a seeming contradiction, he added that he hadn’t realized the “implications” of their contents. An unusually contrite Nixon admitted that it is “clear that portions of the tapes of these June 23 conversations are at variance with certain of my previous statements.” In a key passage, Nixon could be heard instructing Haldeman to tell the C.I.A. to tell the F.B.I. to halt its investigation into the Watergate case, for the sake of protecting matters pertaining to national security—a well-worn excuse for all sorts of misuses of power.
Here was indisputable evidence that the president was obstructing justice. And this, the myth goes, is why Nixon was forced to resign. In fact, by the time the missing piece of tape was released, the House Judiciary Committee had already approved, on a bipartisan basis, its three articles of impeachment (one was about obstruction of justice), and Nixon’s political position was so weakened by now that it was widely assumed he would be impeached and convicted. The scrap of tape only hastened his departure.
Nixon, photographed departing in his helicopter after resigning as U.S. president in 1974.
By Bill Pierce/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.
As it turns out, Trump isn’t the only president whose aides occasionally saved him from himself by disregarding his orders. Nixon was often drunk at night (a condition exacerbated by Dilantin, an anti-convulsant that he’d been erroneously advised would help with depression), and he’d telephone aides at all hours to bark out instructions, once ordering the firing of an entire floor of State Department officials the next day. Those who received the calls were forced to use their (questionable) judgment to determine which orders to carry out, and which to ignore. One of the most infamous examples of this phenomenon was when Nixon instructed the plumbers to firebomb the Brookings Institution, where two former Johnson administration officials who’d worked on the Pentagon Papers were believed to be keeping unreleased portions of the report. In the confusion that was to be caused by the fire, the plumbers were instructed to break into said files and retrieve the unpublished papers. But someone on Nixon’s staff headed off this harebrained scheme. As it happened, neither man’s office contained even a file cabinet.
The events involving the break-ins and Nixon’s attempts to avoid prosecution—milquetoast in contrast to Trump’s—were more than a series of simple criminal acts. They were, in essence, a constitutional crisis. For some time, the question was whether the president could be held accountable to the Congress or the courts, as intended by the Constitution. But the situation was still more alarming than that: the Watergate break-in, as well as other activities perpetrated by Nixon’s goon squad, were parts of an effort by a sitting president to affect—if not determine—his Democratic opponent in the next election. Faced with a slate of possible opponents, including Ted Kennedy and Edmund Muskie, Nixon and his aides concluded that these potentially formidable candidates should be knocked out of the race, and that by contrast, Nixon believed, George McGovern, an anti-Vietnam War liberal (though he was a World War II hero), would be easy pickings in the general election. Ultimately, McGovern was chosen as the Democratic nominee, thanks in part to the machinations of the current governing party—an effort that veered dangerously close to fascism.
What may ultimately have saved the country was the fact that the plumbers botched every operation they undertook. In an act of carelessness that came to define their leadership, Hunt and Liddy had their picture taken in front of Dr. Fielding’s office door using a C.I.A.-supplied camera. (They then asked the C.I.A. to develop the pictures when they returned to Washington, which meant the agency had a copy of the two men at the site of their first and most serious misdeed.) The famous Watergate break-in was actually the plumbers’ fourth attempt at, in Nixon’s terms, “getting the goods” on D.N.C. chairman Lawrence O’Brien, whose office was in the Watergate complex. During their first attempt, they staged a dinner in the building as a pretext for a raid, but somehow ended up locked in a closet overnight. On their second try, they reached the D.N.C. offices, but discovered that they lacked the right equipment for breaking the lock. After one of the burglars returned to Miami to acquire said tool, they managed to break into the D.N.C.’s Watergate offices on their third attempt, over Memorial Day weekend of 1972. There, they bugged phones and photographed certain documents. But the tap on O’Brien’s phone didn’t work, and John Mitchell, formerly Nixon’s attorney general and now the chairman of his re-election committee, was said to have denounced the fuzzy pictures as “junk.” (Though it’s doubtful that that’s the exact word he used.) He instructed the plumbers to return.
Finally, the details around why a group of Republican leaders urged Nixon to resign have been misrepresented. The widely held belief, then and now, has been that the G.O.P. eminences from Capitol Hill, who told Nixon that his support among their colleagues had evaporated, acted courageously, out of patriotism. In truth, Nixon still had pockets of support around the country. These supposed courageous statesmen were hoping to avoid an inconvenient vote against the president. Nixon, anxious to keep his pension and to be granted the staff accorded presidents after they leave office voluntarily, agreed. He needed to pay off his sizable legal bills, and he wanted a staff to help write his memoirs and plot a return to public life—a scheme in which he succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. And so, on August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in our lifetime to resign from office. Before long, we may find out whether he will be the last.
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“Summer of ’73” — the Senate Watergate Hearings — when my wife Cathy and I arrived in Washington, D.C. and settled down across the river in Alexandria, VA. Alexandria was then home to the notorious Presidential Counsel John Dean who once testified that Nixon’s Chief Domestic Affairs Adviser, the equally notorious John Ehrlichman, suggested that he could use his short commute across the Potomac to “deep six” potentially incriminating evidence by throwing it in the river!
That led my cousin’s husband to (jokingly, of course) suggest that my job prospects in the Nixon Justice Department would be greatly improved by my Alexandria address!
Gotta give Trumpie credit for making “slimeballs of the past” like Ehrlichman & Dean “relevant” again.
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
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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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Can Michael Cohen Bring Down Trump?
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
The president of the United States had just lobbed another racially charged insult — this time calling his former top African American adviser a “dog” — but Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) had no interest in talking about it.
“I’ve got more important things on my mind, so I really don’t have a comment on that,” said the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, chuckling at the question.
Has President Trump ever said anything on race that made Cornyn uncomfortable? “I think the most important thing is to pay attention to what the president does, which I think has been good for the country,” the senator demurred.
What about his constituents back home — are they concerned? “I know you have to ask these questions but I’m not going to talk about that,” Cornyn said, politely ending the brief interview in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. “I just think that’s an endless little wild goose chase and I’m not going there.”
And so it went last week among Republicans: As Trump immersed the nation in a new wave of fraught battles over race, most GOP lawmakers tried to ignore the topic altogether. The studied avoidance is a reflection of the enduring reluctance of Republicans to confront Trump’s often divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, in part because the president remains deeply popular within a party dominated by older white voters.
The Washington Post reached out to all 51 Republican senators and six House Republican leaders asking them to participate in a brief interview about Trump and race. Only three senators agreed to participate: Jeff Flake of Arizona, David Perdue of Georgia and Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate.
Trump has a history of mocking his black critics’ intelligence
President Trump insulted NBA player LeBron James’s intelligence in a tweet Aug. 3. It’s not the first time Trump has taken this approach.(Elyse Samuels /The Washington Post)
Flake, a frequent Trump critic who is retiring, rattled off examples when asked if there were times he felt Trump had been racially insensitive.
“It started long before his campaign, the whole Barack Obama, the birtherism . . . that was abhorrent, I thought,” Flake said in a phone interview. “And then you know, the Mexican rapists . . . on his first official day as a campaign. And then you know, Judge Curiel, the statement that he couldn’t judge because of his heritage. Failure to, you know, condemn in Charlottesville. Just the willingness to go there, all the time. Muslim ban. This kind of divide-and-conquer strategy. It’s just — it’s been one thing after another.”
Six other lawmakers granted impromptu interviews when approached in the Capitol, although most declined to be specific about whether they were uncomfortable with any of Trump’s statements on race. One exception was Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, another Trump critic who is leaving Congress in January.
“It’s a formula that I think they think works for them, as it relates to winning,” Corker said, referring to the use of divisive racial issues by Trump and his advisers. “I think that’s their kind of governing. I think that’s how they think they stay in power, is to divide.”
Several other lawmakers said they did not like some of Trump’s language, especially on race, but did not consider Trump to be racist.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said Trump’s description of former black adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman as a “dog” was “not appropriate, ever.” But he stopped short of pointing to a time when he felt the president had crossed a racial boundary.
“I just think that’s the way he reacts and the way he interacts with people who attack him,” Thune said. “I don’t condone it. But I think it’s probably part built into his — it’s just going to be in his DNA.”
The month of August — which included the first anniversary of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville — has seen Trump unleash a steady tide of racially charged invective, including questioning the intelligence of basketball star LeBron James, attacking Chinese college students and reviving his attacks on anthem protests by black NFL players. At one point last week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she could not guarantee that no audio recording exists of Trump using the n-word, as Manigault Newman alleges in her book.
Republicans have struggled over issues of race since the Civil Rights era, with periodic efforts to appeal to blacks, Latinos and other minorities. Trump’s critics within the party fear that, in an increasingly diverse nation, the president is reopening wounds many Republicans had sought to heal.
Trump and his allies frequently counter by offering economic data that they say is favorable to minorities, seeking to separate Trump’s harsh rhetoric from his policy agenda.
But some longtime party stalwarts worry about the long-term consequences of the party’s near-silence on race.
Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant and vocal Trump critic, bemoaned “the larger moral cowardice that has overtaken the party.”
“Trump’s shtick is that he’s the grievance candidate,” Murphy said. “He’s focused on the economically squeezed Caucasian voter. . . . He is speaking to that rage. Mexican rapists, clever Chinese traders, African American people as dogs. That’s Trump’s DNA.”
. . . .
Perdue said in an interview that he believes Trump is results-focused and “trying to be all-inclusive,” and that Democrats are the ones using race as a political issue.
“Well, I hope they will,” Perdue said. “I have many friends in the African American community and they’re tired of being treated as pawns.”
But Republicans who believe that Trump has galloped past norms of civil society on race and other issues worry about the costs the party may ultimately pay, both politically and morally.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Not surprising to see modern-day Jim Crows like Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) out there carrying water for the Trump/Sessions brand of 21st Century racism. After all, in the face of the overwhelming evidence that America needs more legal immigration and that family-based immigration is good for America, Perdue is one of the chief sponsors of the CIS-inspired bogus merit-based immigration bill that actually reduces legal immigration in a losing attempt to bar immigrants of color and “Keep America White As Long As Possible.” Donald Trump trying to be “all-inclusive?” How’s that David, by dissing African-Americans, calling them “dogs,” dehumanizing immigrants, slurring Hispanics, taking protections away from transgender kids, taking away security clearances of critics, attacking the free press, attacking the Justice Department, the FBI and the intelligence community, promoting a false narrative about voter fraud, or telling thousands of lies since assuming office? Which one of these is “all inclusive?” The only “inclusive” thing about Donald Trump is that the majority of Americans who aren’t in his overwhelmingly White Guy “core.” are all included in his insults, lies, and disrespect!
I also thought that the final comment about the late George Wallace was telling. Yup, Wallace accomplished some things in Alabama including getting more textbooks. (Remember that Adolf Hitler built great Autobahns too!) But, the screaming crowds of White Folks who supported Wallace on the national stage weren’t excited about textbooks or better roads — they loved the message of racism and White Supremacy. And, that’s exactly how history will remember Wallace and his supporters — not for the textbooks, but for the public defense and advocacy of racism (just like Hitler isn’t remembered for his Autobahns). Which is how Trump, his “base,” and his many enablers (whether enthusiastic, merely willing, or downright cowardly) will also be remembered!
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
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I encourage you to read Coates’s entire totally cogent expose of the Supreme ugliness of Trump, his “team,” and his core supporters. No, you can’t really separate Donald Trump’s policies from his racism.
That’s why America needs regime change at the ballot box. NOW!
The Department of Justice, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is drafting a plan that would totally overhaul asylum policy in the United States.
Under the plan, people would be barred from getting asylum if they came into the US between ports of entry and were prosecuted for illegal entry. It would also add presumptions that would make it extremely difficult for Central Americans to qualify for asylum, and codify — in an even more restrictive form — an opinion written by Sessions in June that attempted to restrict asylum for victims of domestic and gang violence.
Vox has confirmed that the regulation is in the process of being evaluated, and has seen a copy of a draft of the regulation.
When the regulation is ready, it will be published in the Federal Register as a notice of proposed rulemaking, with 90 days for the public to comment before it’s enacted as a final regulation.
The version Vox saw may change before it’s finalized, or even before the proposal is published in the Federal Register. (The Department of Justice declined to comment.)
But as it exists now, the proposal is a sweeping and thorough revamp of asylum — tightening the screws throughout the asylum process.
One source familiar with the asylum process but not authorized to speak on the record described the proposed changes as “the most severe restrictions on asylum since at least 1965” — when the law that created the current legal immigration system was passed — and “possibly even further back.”
The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the attorney general, along with the Department of Homeland Security, discretion over asylum standards — saying that the government “may grant asylum” to an applicant who they determine meets the definition of a refugee. But the proposed regulation would make it nearly impossible for Central Americans, including families, to earn the government’s approval.
It would eliminate the path that thousands of Central Americans, including families, take every month to seek asylum in the US: entering between ports of entry and presenting themselves to Border Patrol agents. It would make it all but impossible for victims of domestic or gang violence to qualify for asylum — going even further than a June decision from Sessions that sought to limit asylum access for those groups. It would create a presumption against Central Americans who travel through Mexico on their way to the US.
Anyone convicted of entering the US illegally would become ineligible for asylum
What happens under current policy: Under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” initiative, all migrants who cross between ports of entry and are apprehended by Border Patrol are supposed to be criminally prosecuted for illegal entry.
That arrest can delay a person’s claim of asylum, but it doesn’t derail it. An asylum-seeker may not get their initial screening interview, which determines whether they’ll be allowed to file an asylum application and get a hearing, until after they’ve been prosecuted and convicted. And they definitely won’t get approved for asylum before their criminal conviction.
But the conviction for illegal entry doesn’t affect the asylum claim; as Customs and Border Protection puts it, the two are on “parallel tracks.”
What would happen under the new plan: The proposed regulation would bar anyone from getting asylum if they’d been convicted of illegal entry or illegal reentry. That means people who asked for asylum when they were apprehended at the border, but were prosecuted first, would get denied asylum.
In effect, under this new regulation, combined with the zero-tolerance prosecution initiative, no one would be able to come to the US and get asylum unless they presented themselves at a port of entry. Many asylum-seekers simply don’t have that option. Smugglers often prevent asylum-seekers from using official ports of entry, and many of those who do come to ports of entry are being forced to wait days or weeks, after being told there’s no room to process them right now. And asylum-seekers who come to ports of entry are often required to stay in immigration detention without bond until their case is complete.
The administration would almost certainly get sued over this provision if it ended up included in the finalized regulation. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has the power to bar people from getting asylum (or other forms of relief from deportation) if they’ve committed “particularly serious crimes.” While there’s no definition of seriousness in the law, lawyers and immigration advocates would likely challenge the idea that illegal entry, a misdemeanor, is “particularly serious.”
But even if that provision is struck down or eliminated by the courts, another proposal in the draft regulation could have much the same effect. It would instruct immigration judges to consider how the asylum-seeker got into the US, and treat it as a significant factor in whether or not to grant asylum (since asylum-seekers have to show they deserve “favorable discretion” from the judge). So even if people who crossed between ports of entry weren’t officially banned from getting asylum, they would have a very hard time winning their cases in practice.
If adopted, the regulation, combined with the zero tolerance initiative, would allow the administration to set up assembly-line justice for asylum seekers, including families, entering the US. People who entered between official ports would be held by the Department of Homeland Security, prosecuted for illegal entry, convicted, then have their asylum applications denied and get deported.
While the Trump administration is currently trying to win the power to detain families for more than 20 days, if this regulation were enacted, they might not even need to. They could deny most asylum claims and deport the claimants within that time.
Victims of domestic or gang violence would be all but banned from asylum
What happens under current policy: US law limits asylum to people who are persecuted because of their race, religion, political opinions, nationality, or membership in a particular social group.
The government has been wrestling for decades with that last classification — what exactly counts as a “particular social group”? — and with whether someone is “persecuted” if they’re victimized by someone other than the government. These questions are key to the fate of many of the Central Americans (including children and families) who have come to the US to seek asylum in recent years, many of whom are claiming asylum based on domestic violence or gang victimization in their home countries.
In June, with a sweeping ruling overturning a case from the Board of Immigration Appeals, Sessions attempted to narrow the circumstances in which someone fleeing domestic or gang violence could qualify for asylum in the US — saying that, generally, victims of domestic or gang violence wouldn’t be eligible for asylum based on their victimization.
As I reported last week, though, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been cautious in implementing Sessions’s opinion. Most notably, while Sessions decreed that his ruling overturned any precedent that contradicted it, USCIS only told asylum officers to stop using the one precedent decision Sessions explicitly named as moot.
It looks like the DOJ may be trying to use regulation to accomplish the same goal — with even narrower definitions of “persecuted” and “particular social group.”
What would happen under the plan: The proposed regulation would add several restrictions to what could constitute a particular social group: a family, for example, wouldn’t be a social group unless the family had a visible national presence. Interpersonal violence or crime victimization, similarly, wouldn’t be the basis for social group membership unless they were happening on a national scale. Having been recruited by a gang would be explicitly prohibited as grounds for an asylum claim.
To qualify for asylum, an applicant would have to show that the people who persecuted her were also persecuting others on the same basis. Human-rights lawyers worry this could disqualify many legitimate asylum claims. One lawyer raises the example of a gay man in Russia who suffers a violent homophobic attack: Under the proposal, “this would not be persecution on account of sexual orientation unless you could prove that these attackers had previously persecuted other gay men.”
An asylum-seeker would be required to provide an exact definition of her “particular social group” when she was applying for asylum. And she wouldn’t be allowed to appeal a denial, or reopen a claim, on the basis of any group she hadn’t originally named.
It’s extremely difficult for anyone other than a trained immigration lawyer to know exactly what does and doesn’t count as a particular social group eligible for asylum. Under the proposed regulation, however, an asylum-seeker who didn’t know the precise nature of the basis for her persecution would be assumed to not really be a victim of persecution at all.
This standard wouldn’t just apply to final approvals or denials of asylum. The initial step for an asylee is what’s called a “credible fear” screening, during which an asylum officer decides whether the person has a credible fear of going back to their home country. The proposed rule would tighten standards for those, too.
Immigration lawyers and border advocates were already extremely concerned that Sessions’s May ruling would cause asylum officers to radically hike the standards for passing the screening interview (though the USCIS memo posted by Vox suggests that might not be the case just yet). If this regulation were finalized, however, it seems very possible that many people who are currently given the opportunity to apply for asylum would be turned away before they got the chance.
Central Americans would be penalized for not seeking asylum in Mexico
What happens under current policy: Many asylum seekers are Central Americans who come through Mexico to seek asylum in the US. The US is not allowed to simply turn them back and force them to seek asylum in Mexico instead. (The Trump administration is trying to get Mexico to sign a “safe third country” agreement that would allow them to do this, but Mexico appears unenthusiastic.) But the proposed regulation would make it a lot easier to deny their asylum claims based on not having sought asylum in Mexico first.
What would happen under the plan: Under the proposed rule, the government would generally withhold “favorable discretion” (and, therefore, deny the asylum claim) for anyone who had spent more than two weeks in another country en route to the US without seeking asylum there, or who had traveled through more than one country on the way to the US.
Many Central Americans, especially if they take the train through Mexico or travel on foot, take more than two weeks to travel through Mexico. And asylum-seekers from Honduras and El Salvador cross through Guatemala and Mexico to get to the US — meaning that they would almost certainly not earn the “favorable discretion” required to get their asylum claim approved.
Tightening the screws on the entire asylum process
The proposed regulation is extremely broad, with a lot more provisions — all of which would make it much harder for people to seek and get asylum. Some of the remaining ideas in the proposed draft include:
Limiting appeals for asylum-seekers who fail their screening interviews. Under current law, if an asylum-seeker fails her initial “credible fear” interview with an asylum officer, she can appeal for a judge to review her claim with fresh eyes — ignoring the fact that the asylum officer hadn’t found it a credible claim. Under the proposed regulation, judges would only be able to approve a credible-fear claim on appeal if there was clear evidence that the asylum officer had screwed up.
Rejecting incomplete applications first and letting them get completed later. Instead of returning incomplete asylum applications to the applicant and asking her to complete it, the government would reject the application. The applicant would still have 60 days to complete and resubmit the application before it was officially denied, but it’s not clear how applicants would be told about that — or whether they’d read beyond the word “rejected.”
Allowing judges to put evidence into the record on their own. The proposal would allow immigration judges considering asylum cases to unilaterally insert any information from credible sources into the record (as long as both the prosecutor and defense were informed). This provision would make it much easier for judges to insert information claiming that an asylum-seeker’s home country isn’t as dangerous for him as he claims — since asylum cases often hinge on whether there’s anywhere safe in the home country the asylum-seeker could live instead of the US.
Immigrants could be barred from asylum based on traffic offenses… In addition to the new prohibitions on asylum for immigration-specific crimes, the regulation would ban any applicant who’d been convicted of two or three misdemeanors (depending on what they were) from getting asylum.
This would have the biggest impact on unauthorized immigrants living in the US who get arrested and put in deportation proceedings, but ask for asylum to avert their deportation. (Under asylum law, someone can ask for asylum at any point within their first year of living in the US.)
In immigration policy, traffic offenses like driving without a license often don’t count as misdemeanors because in many states unauthorized immigrants aren’t allowed to get licenses. But the draft regulation makes clear that if driving without a license is a misdemeanor in the jurisdiction in question, it counts toward ineligibility.
…and blue states can’t fix eligibility by expunging immigrants’ records. Some Democratic state officials (most notably Gov. Jerry Brown in California) have started to use the pardon power to clear the criminal records of immigrants facing deportation. This regulation would do an end-run around that strategy.
Convictions that had been expunged or otherwise modified after the fact would still count as convictions if there was any evidence that the criminal record had been altered for immigration purposes. In other words, if Brown tried to expunge a record to make someone eligible for asylum, the fact that that’s why he did it would prevent it from stopping their deportation.
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WOW!
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT ADOLF HITLER WOULD LOSE WORLD WAR II, YET HAVE HIS DIRECT IDEOLOGICAL DESCENDANTS IN CONTROL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 73 YEARS LATER?
Seems to me that we’re witnessing the end of the U.S. as a democratic republic and the beginning of a Nazi-style, White Nationalist, racist authoritarian regime that, with the help of a complacent Supreme Court led by a spineless Chief Justice and his group of GOP appointed sycophants, is basically tearing up our Constitution, spitting on it, and dismantling our democratic institutions before our eyes.
I do have to admit, however, that becoming a neo-Nazi, White Nationalist totalitarian state is likely to diminish our attractiveness as a destination for immigrants and anyone else: The “Stalin theory” of immigration control. And, I suppose that once the kids have been disposed of by returning them to death in the Northern Triangle, Trump & Sessions will use the cages to keep the rest of us in.
The New Due Process Army might be the last defender of our Constitution and human values!
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.”
President Trump berated Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in a dispiriting Cabinet meeting on immigration Wednesday, according to three administration officials,but her colleagues denied reports that she has threatened to quit.
Trump lashed out at his Cabinet, and Nielsen in particular, when told that the number of people arrested for illegally crossing the Mexico border topped 50,000 for the second consecutive month. The blowup lasted more than 30 minutes, according to a person with knowledge of what transpired, as Trump’s face reddened and he raised his voice, saying Nielsen needed to “close down” the border.
“Why don’t you have solutions? How is this still happening?” he said, adding later, “We need to shut it down. We’re closed.”
Administration officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide a candid account of the private meeting.
Trump’s tirade went on so long that many present began fidgeting in their seats and flashing grimaces, White House aides said. Eventually, the topic moved on to health care, bringing relief to many in the room.
Trump’s outburst at Nielsen was first reported Thursday by the New York Times.
The president’s eruption was witnessed by Cabinet members plus a number of senior White House officials — including counselor Kellyanne Conway, advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, immigration adviser Stephen Miller and chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow.
Nielsen battled back, one person said, telling Trump that laws limit some of what she could do to block the flow of undocumented immigrants. Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended her, saying the administration was looking for new ways to deter illegal crossings.
Mostly, though, Nielsen struggled to get a word in, said one senior official.
The New York Times and Politico reported that Nielsen, who began the job in December, drafted a resignation letter. In a statement Thursday, a spokesman for the agency said that was false. Two senior White House officials described Nielsen as upset after the meeting, but said they were unaware of such a letter or threats to resign.
One White House official said Nielsen was in the building again Thursday. Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment.
One person close to Nielsen said she is unlikely to resign. “She feels like she’s doing the best she can and doing a good job on immigration, but she also has to follow the law,” this person said. “It’s frustrating to have your boss unhappy about that.”
Trump has never viewed Nielsen favorably, and complains to colleagues that she is “not tough enough,” according to a senior White House official. He reminds staff that she was a “George W. Bush person” because of her previous tenure as a White House Homeland Security adviser.
In recent weeks, Nielsen has announced measures aimed at deterring illegal migration, including criminal prosecutions for parents who cross the border illegally with their children. Families are typically broken up in those circumstances, as federal immigration agents send children to government shelters while their mothers and fathers remain in custody awaiting court dates.
Trump has asked for frequent updates about the number of people attempting to cross the border illegally and has grown increasingly irritated at the recent trends.
A caravan of Central American migrants traveling through Mexico seized the president’s attention this spring, and in the weeks that followed he frequently asked Homeland Security for updates, administration officials said.
Illegal crossings plunged in the early phase of Trump’s presidency, but have since returned to levels consistent with the last several years of the Obama administration. Arrests along the border with Mexico typically rise during springtime, when migrants seeking jobs on U.S. farms and ranches return for the summer growing season.
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Spinelessness usually isn’t the best policy. Ask “Speaker Paul” how it worked out for him. Cabinet Members are only along for the short ride in any event; why not “do the right thing,” speak “truth to power,” and let the chips fall where they may? Just ask the ghost of Elliott Richardson who “Just said no” to Nixon’s lawless demand to fire the Special Prosecutor!
Immigration and border control are well within normal levels — actually the border is under somewhat better control. Instead of just noting that and moving on to more important issues, Trump unwisely claimed “miraculous powers” of deterrence stemming from his bombastic, anti-immigrant, racist statements last year. Most experts said that was stupid. Now that it has, in fact, proved to be stupid, Trump, as usual, needs to blame someone else. And, the lightweight sycophant Nielsen is the perfect “punching bag” for “Don the Con.”
The story of “The Good Samaritan” reimagined with “Don the Con:” He would have head stomped the helpless victim to death and left the body in the middle of the dusty road as a deterrent.
Donald Trump is not subtle. While normal political language functions through implication and indirection, Mr. Trump luxuriates in saying the quiet part loud. But in doing so, Mr. Trump exposes what drives the politics of the movement he commands. That is most evident in the way he talks about crime and punishment.
No president since Richard Nixon has embraced the weaponized rhetoric of “law and order” as avidly as Mr. Trump. “When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country,” he said during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016. “I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job properly done. In this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate.”
Time and again, the president denounces “illegals” and “criminals” and the “American carnage” they wreak on law-abiding Americans. He even advised an audience of police officers to rough up suspects they were arresting.
Yet this tough-guy stance disappears when the accused are in the president’s inner circle. In defending Rob Porter, the White House senior aide accused of abuse by both of his ex-wives, the president wondered whatever happened to due process while praising a man accused of giving his wife a black eye. (Mr. Porter denies the abuse.)
It’s no surprise that Mr. Trump’s critics pounced. Where was this concern for due process, they asked, when the president and his supporters chanted “Lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, who hadn’t even been formally accused of a crime? Where was his devotion to due process when he called for the Central Park Five to be executed, and then, after their exoneration, still maintained that they were guilty?
As tempting as it is to hammer Mr. Trump for his epic hypocrisy, it is a mistake. The president’s boundless benefit of the doubt for the Rob Porters and Roy Moores of the world, combined with off-with-their-heads capriciousness for immigrants accused of even minor crimes, is not a contradiction. It is the expression of a consistent worldview that he campaigned on and has pursued in office.
In this view, crime is not defined by a specific offense. Crime is defined by who commits it. If a young black man grabs a white woman by the crotch, he’s a thug and deserves to be roughed up by police officers. But if Donald Trump grabs a white woman by the crotch in a nightclub (as he’s accused of doing, and denies), it’s locker-room high jinks.
This view is also expressed by many of the president’s staff members, supporters and prominent allies. During the same week that the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, repeatedly vouched for Rob Porter’s integrity, Mr. Kelly also mused that hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants who did not fill out the paperwork for DACA protections had refused to “get off their asses.”
A political movement that rails against “immigrant crime” while defending alleged abusers and child molesters is one that has stopped pretending to have any universalist aspirations.
This is the opposite of what we like to tell ourselves is the traditional American civic creed: one symbolized by a blindfolded Lady Justice who applies the law without fear or favor to whoever may come before her. It is one of Mr. Trump’s most insidious victories that he has given his supporters permission to drop any pretense of insisting that their actions and views should conform to this principle.
If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption.
And this is what “law and order” means: the preservation of a certain social order, not the rule of law. It shouldn’t have taken this long to see what has always been staring us in the face. After all, the last president to focus so intensely on law and order, Richard Nixon, the man who helped usher in mass incarceration, was also the most infamous criminal to occupy the Oval Office. The history of the United States is the story of a struggle between the desire to establish certain universal rights and the countervailing desire to preserve a particular social order.
We are now witnessing a president who wholly embraces the latter. America can have that kind of social order, or it can have justice for all. But it can’t have both.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) is host of “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC and the author of “A Colony in a Nation.”
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Yup. Probably the most lawless Administration in history, certainly in my lifetime, disingenuously throws around the term “Rule of Law” all the time.
“The president’s moral framework springs from an American tradition of cultivating fear and contempt among its white citizens against immigrants, indigenous people and people of color, who are placed on the other side of “the law.” It’s a practice that has taken on new strength at a time when many white people fear they may be outnumbered, outvoted and out of time.”
But, the good news is that those of us who actually believe in the “REAL Rule of Law” can unite and stand up to Trump, Sessions, Miller and the racist, White Nationalist movement. When we succeed, the “REAL Rule of Law” will actually be available to Trump and his followers on an equal basis with everyone else. And, for many of them, the fair application of the law to everyone in America, as required by the Due Process clause of our Constitution, could be bad news! Let the chips fall where they may.
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!
“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.
