"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
It is entirely fitting that Donald Trump — the least law-abiding president in our history — was renominated at a convention that was itself a seeming cavalcade of crime. Every night featured apparent violations of the 1939 Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities “in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties by an individual employed or holding office in the Government of the United States.”
The White House certainly qualifies as such a facility. Yet Trump used it as a convention prop, even going so far as to televise a naturalization ceremony for immigrants — some of whom did not realize they would be shown at the Republican convention — as part of the nightly show. Trump not only flouted the law but also reveled in doing so. During his acceptance speech, he boasted, “We’re here — they’re not,” and the New York Times reported that Trump “relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him.”
While the president is exempt from the civil provisions of the Hatch Act, he could be subject, once he leaves office, to criminal penalties if he should “intimidate, threaten, command, or coerce … any employee of the Federal Government … to engage in … any political activity.” That is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.
This is, of course, barely scratching the surface of an administration that should more accurately be described as an ongoing criminal conspiracy. While many of Trump’s awful acts — e.g., confining children in cages or unleashing riot police on peaceful protesters — are merely violations of democratic norms, there is also plentiful evidence of lawbreaking on his part.
The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York has identified Trump as “Individual-1” in a conspiracy with his attorney Michael Cohen to violate campaign finance laws by secretly paying off two women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs. Cohen went to prison; Trump, who as president claims immunity from prosecution, wasn’t indicted.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III uncovered a great deal more potential illegality. He found 10 instances when Trump might have obstructed justice, and in at least four of those cases he found evidence that Trump’s conduct met all three elements of the obstruction-of-justice statute. Each violation carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. The recent report from the Senate Intelligence Committee suggests that Trump also lied to Mueller when, in written testimony, he claimed not to remember speaking to Roger Stone about WikiLeaks. If he committed perjury, that would subject him to up to five years’ imprisonment.
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Trump could try to short-circuit justice by seeking to pardon himself before he leaves office — or even by resigning a few hours early and having Vice President Pence sworn in to issue a pardon (as President Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon). In that case, the special counsel would be limited to investigating Trump’s accomplices (unless they are also pardoned) and helping state prosecutors. But the special counsel should still issue a comprehensive report on Trump’s lawbreaking. We must expose and root out this ethical rot before it eats away at the foundations of our democracy.
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Read the rest of Boot’s article at the link. Actually, Max understates the case. Trump long ago ate the ethical underpinnings of American democracy for lunch, with the “JR Five” providing “table service.”
Under “normal” circumstances, the scenario outlined by Boot in his final paragraph would be beyond preposterous! But, in the failed state of American democracy under Trump, it’s perfectly plausible. Whose going to stop him from the “final abuse and mockery of our republic?” Feckless Congress? The Supremely and Serenely Complicit ones? No way. Trump will exploit the moral cowardice and spinelessness of the other failed two branches of Government until the end!
It started about the time that Roberts and his colleagues threw Muslims, refugees, and migrants under the bus in their ridiculously wrong and intellectually dishonest “Travel Ban Fiasco.” The “Dred Scottification” of migrants and people of color and open corruption, aided and abetted by Roberts and his gang, have continued largely unabated since then.
Max’s use of the term “rot” brings to mind the refugees from many nations, most people of color, rotting in Mexico, futilely waiting for “asylum hearings” that might never come and where denial without due process has been predetermined. This is what “American Justice” has become under Trump, Billy the Bigot, Wolfman the Illegal, and Roberts the Complicit!
Actually, separating families, misrepresenting the policy to Federal Courts, and long-term “civil” detention of families in life-threatening conditions as a “deterrent” to exercising important, fundamental legal and human rights might well be criminal violations in a functioning justice system. Sadly, America basically lacks the latter these days because of the Supremes’ coddling of the “crimes against humanity” committed by Trump, Miller, Barr, Wolf, Cooch, and their co-conspirators.
As those of us with experience adjudicating asylum cases know, lack of accountability before the courts and failure of the judiciary to exercise independent judgment to control a corrupt and tyrannical executive are hallmarks of failed states and banana republics.
Let’s see! America’s founders created an independent judiciary to insure the right of the “King” to use the Government as his personal servants to violate the Bill of Rights, exploit the nation for his own gain, and create “alternate Kings’ Courts” where the “judges” are his employees, he makes the rules, the results are largely preordained by the King’s personal biases and the interests of his royal cronies, and the penalty can be “death without due process.” Not likely!
But, that’s what happens when judges’ fealty to ideology, party, or personality often exceeds their loyalty to the Constitution and to the human rights and human dignity of their fellow men, women, and children. It happens when we create an elitist, right-leaning judiciary, out of step with and non-representative of the majority of Americans, where actual knowledge and experience defending the human rights of individuals against Government overreach, courage to speak truth to power, and demonstrated unswerving commitment to equal justice under law is far, far undervalued, even intentionally ignored. Where practical problem-solving skills and human empathy, perhaps the two most important qualities for fair and honest judging, are all too often disrespected and even demeaned.
Better Federal Judges for a better, fairer, functional America! One where the humanity of all persons is honored and respected, rather than being mocked by those in positions of power and privilege. One where the highest Court finally stands up for and enforces the hard-fought Constitutional right to vote, regardless of skin color or ethnicity, rather than aiding and abetting the blatant schemes of the GOP to suppress voting and deny deserved political power to Americans of color. One where an honest Court enforces to the maximum degree the Voting Rights Act rather than intentionally and disingenuously gutting it at the demand of some in the White power structure.
These travesties have unfolded right in front of us. Yet, even so called “liberal-progressive” commentators largely shrug them off as somehow “normal” or “just the way the system functions.” That’s BS! It’s “judicial malpractice.” It’s a major reason why two centuries after our founding we have not yet achieved racial justice and why our nation is coming apart at the seams under grotesque misgovernance and judicial complicity.
The current Federal Judiciary has facilitated the takeover of our Government by an ongoing criminal conspiracy, as described by Boot. We need change! Sooner rather than later! And, it can’t and won’t happen with the current cast of characters in the Executive, the Senate majority, and the Article III Judiciary.
Today’s biggest story set the scene for news that continues to develop about the Ukraine scandal.
The big story, in terms of its ability to frame the crazy events coming at us at top speed, happened last night, when Attorney General William Barr gave a speech to the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers who argue for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The conviction of members of the Federalist Society that courts should not do anything that is not listed in the original Constitution makes them great friends to business and to white men, since they focus on the protection of property and deny that laws can regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, or protect minority or women’s rights. The Federalist Society organized in 1982 to push back against what its members felt was an activist court system that tried to reorganize society from the bench. It has been extraordinarily successful in taking over the courts: currently five members of the nine-member Supreme Court are current or past Federalist Society members: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
In his speech, Attorney General William Barr claimed he was going truly to be an originalist, and explained by taking American history back to its roots. In contrast to every single American historian in, well, American history, Barr argued that Americans had rebelled not against King George III in 1776, but rather against Parliament. What the Founders feared, he said, was not a strong executive, but rather a strong Parliament. (You can tell where this is going, right?) Barr was setting up the idea that Congress has grown far too strong lately (in fact, virtually every scholar will tell you that it is the Executive that has grown terribly strong since 1981) and that it is badly hampering the president’s ability to do his job. The president should be able to act on his own initiative, and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight, Barr insisted, in a theory known as that of the “unitary executive.”
Barr did not stop there, though. He went on to blame “The Resistance” for sabotaging the Trump administration, and claimed that its members were “engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.” More, he claimed “the Left” is “engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.” Conservatives, he said, were at a disadvantage against progressive’s “holy war” because they “have more scruple over their political tactics” especially when facing “a hyper-partisan media.” (You might want to reread those last two sentences.)
Richard Painter, who was George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer, called this a “lunatic authoritarian speech.” Attorneys General are supposed to be non-partisan, and Barr lumped all opposition to Trump as the dangerous far left. The “Left,” in America, generally refers to those few people who advocate for communism—a system in which the government owns and controls all industries and businesses– or anarchy, a system in which there is no central authority at all. It’s actually a pretty small group. But Barr, and other recent Republicans, have included in “the Left” everyone who believes that the government has any role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure, all those things the Federalist Society opposes. In fact, most of us, regardless of whether we vote Republican or Democratic, want some basic regulations, social welfare programs, and infrastructure development.
But now the Attorney General, who is charged with overseeing our justice system, has declared that anyone standing in the way of Trump is not just a member of “the Left” but also is waging war against America. Painter is quite right: this is the language that enables a leader to imprison people he considers his enemies.
Barr is not saying all this in a vacuum. More news dropped today about the Ukraine scandal, filling in the lines we already suspected. Congress released transcripts today from Tim Morrison and Jennifer Williams, both of whom were deeply involved in the Ukraine mess and were on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. A long-time career official in the State Department, Morrison replaced Fiona Hill as the Senior Director for Russia and Europe in July 2019. Williams is another long-standing career officer in the State Department. Since April 2019, she has been the Special Adviser for Europe and Russia for Vice President Mike Pence. Morrison said that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland made it clear that aid was being withheld until there was an announcement about an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.
This jibed with the opening statement of David Holmes, the political counselor at the Embassy in Kyiv, who testified for seven hours yesterday behind closed doors. Holmes was an eye-witness to the efforts of Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuiliani, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, to pressure the new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Holmes’s opening statement was explosive. It was not only first hand, but also it tied Trump directly into the efforts, and it made very clear that the administration was demanding the announcement of an investigation before it would release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions. Holmes also said that he had reported what he had heard to John Eisenberg, Legal Advisor to the National Security Council, the same man to whom Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman had reported the July 25 call, and, once again, Eisenberg had done nothing. (Eisenberg is refusing to honor a subpoena to testify.)
Then, CNN dropped the story that at last year’s White House Hanukkah party Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met privately with Trump and Giuiliani. After the meeting, Parnas told two people that the president had given him a secret mission to pressure the Ukraine government to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. The Wall Street Journal reports that in February, Parnas and Fruman met with the Ukraine President at the time, Petro Poroshenko, and his Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, offering to invite Poroshenko to a White House State dinner if he publicly announced an investigation. As I wrote here two days ago, this would have boosted both Poroshenko’s and Trump’s reelection campaigns. In March, Lutsenko smeared U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to an American reporter and Sean Hannity ran with the story on his show, but the scheme fell apart when voters elected Zelensky instead of reelecting the corrupt oligarch Poroshenko. Then they had to scramble to come up with a new plan, and the whole ham fisted Ukraine scandal took off.
The Ukraine scandal is fleshing out, and it is truly astonishing that there is not more evidence that can be read in Trump’s favor. This increasingly just looks like a shakedown that weakened national security to help Trump rig the 2020 election. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, where Turkish and Russian troops moved in when we moved out, the Russians boasted yesterday that they have now occupied a former U.S. air base.
Trump spent several hours today at Walter Reed hospital. The visit was unexpected and unannounced, but the White House said he had decided to have portions of his annual physical done three months early.
Attorney General Bill Barr Is Getting Roasted for His Outrageous Speech Blasting Progressives
As the impeachment hearings continued, Attorney General Bill Barr on Friday trash-talked Democrats for attempting to “drown the executive branch with oversight demands,” saying they were working for political gain without thinking of the consequences.
“In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in shredding norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr told a room of attorneys at the annual gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has been influential in determining President Donald Trump’s nominees for federal judges.
The remarks about Democrats ignoring the rule of law were especially ironic because they came a mere hours after Roger Stone, one of Trump’s previous advisers, was convicted on all counts for lying to Congress during its probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The attorney general’s speech also came on the second day of presidential impeachment hearings examining allegations that Trump attempted to interfere in the 2020 elections by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Barr criticized Democrats for launching a “holy war” and using “any means necessary to gain momentary advantage,” while he said conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means.”
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Barr reportedly received a standing ovation, but outside the halls of the Federalist Society, his remarks sparked outrage and intensified calls from the left to impeach not only the president, but the attorney general himself. Others were quick to roast Barr for his statements. “Bill Barr is the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel, tweeted.
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“Yesterday AG Barr addressed a radical political group and gave one of the most vicious partisan screeds ever uttered by a US cabinet officer,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Saturday morning. “Barr says trump should have king-like powers. Barr is a liar and a fanatic and should be impeached and stripped of his law licenses.”
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Read Samantha’s complete article which includes the full the two of a number of tweets at the link.
Hours after a new witness testified in the House’s latest impeachment hearing on Friday, Attorney General William Barr railed against Democrats for declaring a “war of resistance against this administration.”
In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society, Barr rebuked lawmakers for probing President Donald Trump’s potential power abuses, suggesting their efforts are illegitimate.
“The sheer volume of what we see today ― the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas ― is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch, and indeed is touted as such,” Barr said. “The costs of this constant harassment are real.”
Barr’s portrayal of oversight as harassment echoes Trump’s repeated claims that he is the victim of a partisan “witch hunt” rather than the subject of a justified inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine, which remain at the heart of Democratic-led impeachment proceedings.
“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr added. “This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have had in contesting the political issues of the day.”
President Trump is convinced he has the “absolute right” to do anything from asking other countries to investigate his political opponents to pardoning himself. But he couldn’t possibly tell you why — aside from his innate conviction that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — you can get away with anything. Enter Attorney General William P. Barr to put a pseudo-intellectual gloss on Trump’s authoritarian instincts. In a Friday night speech to the Federalist Society, Barr gave a chilling defense of virtually unlimited executive authority.
Barr’s wrongheaded assumption was that “over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on presidential authority by the other branches of government.” His view faithfully reflects the conservative consensus of the 1970s when he was a CIA analyst and a law student. Few serious analysts share that view today at a time when the president claims the authority to kill suspected terrorists anywhere in the world without any judicial oversight. In fact, conservatives decried President Barack Obama’s tendency to rule by fiat — for example, in protecting “dreamers” from deportation or reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran that wasn’t submitted for Senate ratification.
Trump has now taken rule-by-executive-order to the next level by declaring a “state of emergency” to spend money on his border wall that Congress refused to appropriate. Trump has also misused his authority in myriad other ways, including obstructing justice (as outlined in a special counsel report that Barr deliberately mischaracterized) and soliciting a bribe from Ukraine to release congressionally appropriated military aid.
Yet, to hear Barr tell it, Trump is somehow denied power by the nefarious “Resistance.” Barr decried Trump critics who do not view “themselves as the ‘loyal opposition,’” but rather “see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”
Earth to Barr: Trump does not treat his critics as “the loyal opposition.” He calls them “human scum,” “traitors” and “the enemy of the people,” using the language of dictators. And it is Trump and his toadies — not his opponents — who are “willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage.”
Barr went on to blame the “Resistance” for Trump’s failure to get more nominees confirmed. The real problem is Trump’s incompetence and his preference for “acting” appointees to dodge the constitutional requirement to seek the Senate’s “advice and consent.” (Trump has not nominated anyone for nearly 20 percent of the top federal jobs.) If Barr wants to find a real abuse of the confirmation process, he should talk to Merrick Garland.
As devoid of self-awareness as his master, Barr whines about “the pursuit of scores of parallel ‘investigations’ through an avalanche of subpoenas.” He conveniently forgets that Republicans tried to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about sex and spent years probing the Benghazi, Libya, attack in a failed attempt to blame Hillary Clinton. Trump is stonewalling congressional subpoenas at an unprecedented rate, forcing Congress to seek judicial assistance to enforce legitimate requests for documents and witnesses. But Barr denies that the courts have any right to “resolve … disputes” between the executive and legislative branches — effectively allowing the president to act like a king.
The attorney general went on to rail against judicial review of administration actions such as “the travel ban.” This was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court after the administration rewrote the initial versions, which constituted clear discrimination on religious grounds. Yet Barr is still aggrieved that the courts dared “to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action” — i.e., to look at Trump’s own words about banning Muslims rather than accept the administration’s disingenuous explanations.
Barr blamed the courts and the president’s critics for the fact that so many administration actions have been challenged in court. The truth is Trump has nobody but himself to blame. Many of the lawsuits accuse the administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which the executive branch can comply with simply by showing that its actions are not “arbitrary and capricious.” This is an incredibly low standard, which is why the normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, the Trump administration’s win rate is less than 7 percent.
Trump likes to blame such setbacks on “Obama judges,” but many of the judges ruling against him are Republican appointees. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for example, wrote the 5-to-4 decision in June in which the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.
“In this partisan age,” Barr sanctimoniously concluded, “we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure.” He is right, but not in the way he intended. The real threat to “our Constitutional structure” emanates not from administration critics who struggle to uphold the rule of law but from a lawless president who is aided and abetted in his reckless actions by unscrupulous and unprincipled partisans — including the attorney general of the United States.
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Mary Papenfuss Contributor HuffPost
Finally, let’s hear from Mary Papenfuss, also at HuffPost:
Attorney General William Barr’s latest extreme defense of Donald Trump has triggered a wave of calls for his impeachment — and disbarment.
Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, tweeted that Barr’s remarks Friday before the conservative Federalist Society were “another lunatic authoritarian speech” amid an impeachment investigation into the president. He claimed that Barr — a member of the conservative Catholic society Opus Dei — is “the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases.”
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Read the rest of Mary’s article at the link.
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Somewhat “below the radar screen:” Barr’s repetition of Session’s blatantly unethical performance by acting as a “quasi-judicial decision maker” in Immigration Court cases where he clearly has both an actual and apparent bias in favor of a party, the DHS, and against another party, the individual migrant, particularly any asylum seeker.
Obviously, viewed through Barr’s perverted historical lens, we’ve made some seriously wrong moves.According to Barr’s interpretation, we should have allied ourselves with Hitler during World War II. Now, there’s a guy who understood the concept of the “Unitary Executive.” And, he sure knew how to deal with opposing legislators, “the resistance,” and others who were “enemies of the state” or of “inferior stock.” Why on earth would we have aligned ourselves with, and helped rebuild, the noxious parliamentary democracies of the West?
One of our allies, Stalin, did actually demonstrate the wonderful power of the “Unitary Executive” — talk about a guy who WAS the State and annihilated all opposition, real and imagined! He certainly would have known what to do with subversives who preached “impeachment” under the Constitution!
But, concededly, Stalin’s godless communism doesn’t fit in well with Barr’s Catholic Christian theocracy (minus, of course, the social justice teachings of Christ and the Catholic Church). Hitler’s pure Aryian Christian superiority was a much better fit with Barr’s historical outlook.
Of course, according to the Barr view, the seminal figure in Republicanism, Abe Lincoln, erred by not aligning himself with Jeff Davis and the Confederacy. Davis certainly knew how to operate without much legislative accountability. And the founders of the Confederacy also possessed Barr’s superior understanding of the relationship between the State and the Divine: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”
Sure, easy to believe that God was always a big fan of enslavement, rape, brutality, white privilege, and theft of services from enslaved African Americans, who also happened to be believers in God. Fits right in with Barr’s dehumanization of Hispanic workers, trashing of LGBTQ Americans, denial of rights to asylum seekers, threats to political opponents, and war on Hispanic Americans who have the audacity of wanting to vote and live peacefully in their communities without being terrorized by DHS enforcement.
George Washington, who wrongly refused to install himself as either King or “President for Life” was, according to Barr’s historical perspective, a dangerous wimp who diminished the potential powers of the “Unitary Executive.”
Undoubtedly, our Founders had their flaws. After all, the Constitution not only enshrined the dehumanization of African Americans, who had actually made the success and prosperity of the American Republic possible, but also excluded the majority of inhabitants from political participation.
But, unlike Barr and his fellow “originalists,” our Founders were largely persons of vision and good will who had enough self awareness and humility to see a better and more dynamic future. They would certainly be shocked and dismayed to find out that rather than viewing our Constitution rationally, as a blueprint to be built upon for a better, more inclusive, more tolerant future, two plus centuries later, individuals like Barr holding supposedly responsible positions under our Republic, would be mindlessly and immorally urging us never to escape the limitations and mistakes of our distant past.
Disturbingly unqualified as he is to serve as our Attorney General, Barr does illustrate the moral and legal bankruptcy of the “fake doctrine” of “originalism.” It’s actually an intellectually indefensible excuse for an empowered, largely White, predominantly male, minority to exclude the majority of America’s inhabitants and their hopes and dreams from full participation in our democracy. It’s as ugly and dishonest as Barr’s own tenure as Attorney General.
President Trump has no one but himself to blame for the fact that he is on the verge of being impeached. He recognizes no legal or moral limits on his “absolute right” to do whatever he pleases — including pressuring a foreign country to intervene in U.S. politics on his behalf. But his most senior aides have done him no favors by acting as accelerators rather than brakes on his unconscionable conduct.
Three senior officials, in particular, could have tried to dissuade the president from misusing his office for personal gain, but there is no evidence that they ever attempted to do so. History will record their names along with Trump’s in the annals of ignominy. The president’s principal accomplices in his brazen assault on the rule of law are Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William P. Barr.
Pence has been Trump’s most prominent proxy in his attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cough up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and to absolve Russia of hacking the 2016 election. Trump told Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration in May so as to turn the screws on the Ukrainian president. When they finally met in Warsaw on Sept. 1, Pence again pressured Zelensky to take action on “corruption,” a code word for investigating Biden and the former vice president’s son Hunter.
Pence has adopted the Sergeant Schultz defense: I know nothing! His protestations of innocence are unconvincing, given that the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, publicly proclaimed his desire to get dirt on the Bidens from Ukraine. Moreover, Pence’s national security adviser listened in on the now-infamous July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky that another participant described as “crazy” and “frightening.” Pence himself was given a readout of the call, yet he claims to have seen nothing wrong and is still sticking to the discredited cover story that Trump was pursuing a legitimate investigation of corruption. Pence will be saved from being remembered as the worst vice president in history only because Spiro Agnew had to resign after being charged with tax evasion and bribery.
Pompeo is now officially the worst secretary of state in history — wresting that uncoveted title from his predecessor, Rex Tillerson. As former secretary of state Colin Powell notes, “Our foreign policy is a shambles right now,” and Pompeo bears part of the blame for failing to stand up to Trump. He did not offer his resignation when the president proclaimed himself “in love” with the dictator of North Korea or when he abandoned the United States’ Kurdish allies. Pompeo subordinates the United States’ national interest to his own political interests; he is said to be interested in succeeding Trump.
Pompeo was fully aware of how unlawful Trump was acting — he was also on the July 25 call, though he pretended during interviews that he had no idea what had transpired. There is no evidence he did anything to stop Trump. Instead, he has endorsed the crazy conspiracy theory that it was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who interfered in the 2016 election. Pompeo is now leading Trump’s coverup: He has refused to allow State Department employees to testify to Congress, denouncing Congress’s request as “an attempt to intimidate” and “bully” the career professionals. If anyone is bullying Foreign Service officers, it is Trump; witness the president’s firing of a respected ambassador in Ukraine because she wouldn’t help Giuliani frame Biden. Pompeo stood by as this happened.
No wonder State Department employees are so disgusted and demoralized. “The mood is low and getting lower,” Thomas Pickering, a distinguished former ambassador, told the New York Times.
But wait. If you think that’s bad, Barr says “hold my beer.” The attorney general has already misled the country about the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation by falsely claiming that the president had been absolved of collusion and obstruction of justice. Barr then refused to investigate complaints that a crime had been committed during Trump’s call with Zelensky. Now, he is flying around the world to pressure allies to cooperate with his politically motivated probe designed to show that the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia was actually a “witch hunt” by the so-called deep state — just as Trump claims. Barr’s highly improper requests have stirred a backlash in Italy, Australia and Britain — close allies that have no desire to be thrust into U.S. domestic politics.
By waging war on the dedicated professionals in his own department at the behest of a law-breaking president, Barr is ensuring that he will be remembered as the worst attorney general ever. He has even eclipsed in awfulness his immediate predecessor, acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, a political hack who was previously a hawker of toilets for “well-endowed” men.
Impeaching Pence, Pompeo and Barr would be an unneeded distraction from the necessary impeachment of their boss but, on the merits, all three richly deserve to join Trump in the dock. They have betrayed the country and their oaths of office. They have even failed Trump by not acting to save the worst person ever to occupy the White House from his worst instincts.
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Yup. Public service doesn’t get any worse than this, although “Big Mac” could easily be included (and Stephen Miller, but he’d be part of the “Trump package.”) Unlikely to happen, of course. But, it should!
Thompson claimed that when it comes to border security, the Trump administration is misleading the American people. Maybe, but I watched a video of the hearing and it seemed to me that the Democrats are the ones who are misleading the American people.
According to the testimony of the hearing’s only witness, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the country is facing a very real humanitarian and security crisis. Uncontrolled illegal migration is posing a serious and growing risk to public safety, national security, and the rule of law.
She is not the first DHS Secretary to make that claim. Every DHS Secretarysince the Department’s inception has sounded the alarm about our unsecured border.
Nielsen testified that DHS expects to apprehend more migrants crossing the border illegally in the first half of fiscal 2019 than it did in the entirety of fiscal 2017, and the numbers are rising. This, however, is not the only problem.
There also has been a change in who is making the illegal crossings.
Historically, illegal crossers were predominantly single adult males from Mexico who generally could be removed within 48 hours if they had no legal right to stay. Now, more than 60 percent of them are family units and unaccompanied alien children.
The detention facilities were intended to be short-term processing centers that would hold adult men for 72 hours or less. They are not suitable for lengthy detentions of women and children.
The Trump Administration has manipulated both the asylum legal system and asylum statistics in an attempt to prove their false narrative about widespread fraud and abuse. Indeed, it’s notable that even with all these political machinations and roadblocks to fair asylum adjudication, approximately 20% from the Northern Triangle succeed — certainly a significant number. Moreover, many of those who fail actually face danger if returned — they just can’t fit it within our somewhat arcane asylum system. Failing to be granted asylum is not an indication of fraud and has little or nothing to do with our obligation to provide fair and unbiased asylum adjudications consistent with Due Process. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/02/15/heidi-altman-heartland-alliance-how-eoir-other-trump-toadies-lie-distort-statistics-to-support-a-white-nationalist-immigration-agenda/
Something that jumps out: those who are represented succeed at a significantly higher rate, understand the system better, and are highly likely to appear. Therefore, the single most cost efficient and obvious measure to take would be providing funding for universal representation of asylum seekers. It’s much cheaper than cruel, expensive, and unnecessary “civil” detention and walls that will have no effect on the current rule flow of asylum seekers. And, as more cases are granted the less necessary it becomes for DHS to waste court time by contesting every case and the more the “problem of removals” diminishes. Those granted asylum don’t have to be removed or monitored — they can actually go to work and begin contributing to our society.
Addressing the causes of the human rights debacle in the Northern Triangle would also be more helpful, logical, and cost effective in the long run than more gimmicks and futile attempts to solve a refugee situation unilaterally at the “receiving” end by “designed to fail” enforcement efforts, while ignoring or intentionally aggravating the causes of the refugee flow.
“I am sick and tired of this administration. I’m sick and tired of what’s going on. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are, too.”
I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox was eliminated about 40 years ago.)
I’m sick and tired of a president who misuses his office to demagogue on immigration — by unnecessarily sending 5,200 troops to the border and by threatening to rescind by executive order the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
I’m sick and tired of a president who is so self-absorbed that he thinkshe is the real victim of mail-bomb attacks on his political opponents — and who, after visiting Pittsburgh despite being asked by local leaders to stay away, tweeted about how he was treated, not about the victims of the synagogue massacre.
Opinion | Trump owns the Republican Party, and there’s no going back
Donald Trump has irreversibly changed the Republican Party. The upheaval might seem unusual, but political transformations crop up throughout U.S. history.(Adriana Usero, Danielle Kunitz, Robert Gebelhoff/The Washington Post)
I’m sick and tired of a president who cheers a congressman for his physical assault of a reporter, calls the press the “enemy of the people” and won’t stop or apologize even after bombs were sent to CNN in the mail.
I’m sick and tired of a president who employs the language of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish financier George Soros and “globalists,” and won’t apologize or retract even after what is believed to be the worst attack on Jews in U.S. history.
I’m sick and tired of a president who won’t stop engaging in crazed partisanship, denouncing Democrats as “evil,” “un-American” and “treasonous” subversives who are in league with criminals.
I’m sick and tired of a president who cares so little about right-wing terrorism that, on the very day of the synagogue shooting, he proceeded with a campaign rally, telling his supporters, “Let’s have a good time.”
I’m sick and tired of a president who presides over one of the most unethical administrations in U.S. history — with three Cabinet members resigning for reported ethical infractions and the secretary of the interior the subject of at least 18 federal investigations.
I’m sick and tired of a president who flouts norms of accountability by refusing to release his tax returns or place his business holdings in a blind trust.
I’m sick and tired of a president who can’t be bothered to work hardand instead prefers to spend his time watching Fox News and acting like a Twitter troll.
And I’m sick and tired of Republicans who go along with Trump — defending, abetting and imitating his egregious excesses.
I’m sick and tired of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) acting like a caddie for the man he once denounced as a “kook” — just this week, Graham endorsed Trump’s call for rescinding “birthright citizenship,” a kooky idea if ever there was one.
I’m sick and tired of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who got his start in politics as a protege of the “bleeding-heart conservative” Jack Kemp, refusing to call out Trump’s race-baiting.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once complained about the federal debt adding $113 billion to the debt just in fiscal year 2018.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once championed free trade refusing to stop Trump as he launches trade wars with all of our major trade partners.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who not only refuse to investigate Trump’s alleged ethical violations but who also help him to obstruct justice by maligning the FBI, the special counsel and the Justice Department.
Most of all, I’m sick and tired of Republicans who feel that Trump’s blatant bigotry gives them license to do the same — with Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) denouncing his opponent as an “Indo-American carpetbagger,” Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) labeling his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent a “security risk” who is “working to infiltrate Congress,” and Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) accusing his opponent, who is of Indian Tibetan heritage, of “selling out Americans” because he once worked at a law firm that settled terrorism-related cases against Libya.
If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do. Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are. And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection. If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one. That’s the only message they will understand.
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!
