"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.
Judge John “Maximum John” Sirica 1904-1992 US District Court, D.C. 1957-1992Hon. Emmet G. Sullivan US District Judge DC
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Will Judge Emmet Sullivan Become The Judge John Sirica of “Trumpgate?” — “No Nincompoops!”
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
Courtside Exclusive
May 17, 2020.Nearly five decades ago, a tough-mindedU.S. District Judge in Washington, D.C., refused to “go along to get along.” Judge “Maximum John” Sirica saw through the corrupt B.S. being put forth by defendants (“The Plumbers”) who pleaded guilty in attempting to “cover up” the badly bungled Watergate burglary of DNC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. So, Sirica did some digging on his own.
One of his most famous quotes — the “No Nincompoops Rule”was set forth in his New York Times obit:
None other than former Attorney General John Mitchell had been involved in orchestrating the Watergate caper, and the “cover-up” trail eventually led all the way to the Oval Office and President Nixon. Nixon eventually resigned with impeachment, conviction, and removal staring him in the face.
The scandal involved some truly bizarre moments such as the “kidnapping” of Mitchell’s eccentric, talkative, estranged wife Martha and White House Counsel John Dean being told to “deep six” potentially incriminating documents by throwing them off the 14th Street Bridge on the way home to his Alexandria townhouse. It added to our vocabulary colorful terms like “stonewalling,” “twisting slowly in the wind,” “Deep Throat,” and more, in addition, of course, to “deep six.” John “The Con” Mitchell was convicted of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice (although never charged with Martha’s kidnapping) and served time in a Federal Penitentiary. Judge Sirica was named Time’s “Man of the Year.”
Watergate also resulted in changes in ethical rules and an effort to insulate the DOJ investigative and prosecution functions from political influence, particularly interference from the White House. With AG Billy Barr’s assistance, Trump has basically blown away all ethical safeguards and politicized and “weaponized” government institutions to a degree that probably exceeds Watergate.
Now, Billy Barr is trying to further Trump’s agenda by making the Flynn prosecution go away. That’s after Flynn actually pleaded guilty to the charges before Judge Emmet G. Sullivan. At least initially, Judge Sullivan appears skeptical about the sudden change of course by DOJ prosecutors. It’s a move that led to the withdrawal of the career prosecutors involved in the case and a demand from a bipartisan group of more than 2,000 former DOJ officials (including me and many colleagues from the Round Table of Retired Judges) that Barr resign.
Judge Sullivan has a reputation for independence and not suffering fools lightly. He has appointed private counsel to argue against dismissal of the charges. We’ll have to see what, if anything, comes of it all.
It’s also unclear whether a lone Federal Judge of courage and integrity still can “make a difference” in today’s rapidly deteriorating legal and political environment. During Watergate, a unanimous Supremes (with Chief Justice Rehnquist recused) stood up to Nixon and rejected his bogus executive privilege claim on incriminating tapes. GOP Congressional leaders eventually joined those voices urging Nixon to resign.
So far, by contrast, the Roberts-led Supremes’ majority hasn’t shown an inclination to stand up to Trump on any major issue of Executive overreach. And, GOP legislators have shown themselves to be so scared of Trump and so far inside his pocket that they can’t see the light of day. Indeed, they appear to have lost ambition to do anything other than help Trump and cover up his corruption and “malicious incompetence.”
Even if Sullivan does uncover something shady, it’s likely that Roberts and the GOP will leap to help Trump and Barr suppress and cover up any evidence of wrongdoing by blocking or obstructing any further investigation by House Democrats. Times have changed. And, right now, that doesn’t appear to be for the better for our justice system or our nation.
There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus.
Under Attorney General Bill Barr’s management, it appears no corner of the Justice Department can escape perversion — even the annual grants the Justice Department gives to nonprofits and local governments to help victims of human trafficking.
In a new grant award, senior Justice officials rejected the recommendations of career officials and decided to deny grants to highly rated Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Instead, Reuters reported, they gave more than $1 million combined to lower-rated groups called the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus.
Why? Well, it turns out the head of the Catholic Charities affiliate had been active with Democrats and the Phoenix group had opposed President Trump’s immigration policies. By contrast, Hookers for Jesus is run by a Christian conservative and the Lincoln Tubman group was launched by a relative of a Trump delegate to the 2016 convention.
That Catholic Charities has been replaced by Hookers for Jesus says much about Barr’s Justice Department. Friends of Trump are rewarded. Opponents of Trump are punished. And the nation’s law enforcement apparatus becomes Trump’s personal plaything.
Federal prosecutors Monday recommended that Trump associate Roger Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, witness tampering and other crimes.
Then Trump tweeted that the proposed sentence was “horrible and very unfair” and “the real crimes were on the other side.” And by midday Tuesday, Barr’s Justice Department announced that it would reduce Stone’s sentence recommendation. All four prosecutors, protesting the politicization, asked to withdraw from the case.
But politicization is now the norm. Last week, Barr assigned himself the sole authority to decide which presidential candidates — Democrats and Republicans — should be investigated by the FBI.
Also last week, the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice Department, announced that New York state residents can no longer enroll in certain Trusted Traveler programs such as Global Entry — apparent punishment for the strongly Democratic state’s policies on illegal immigrants.
On Monday, Barr declared that the Justice Department had created an “intake process” to receive Rudy Giuliani’s dirt from Ukraine on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden — dirt dug in a boondoggle that left two Giuliani associates under indictment and Trump impeached.
The same day, Barr’s agency announced lawsuits against California, New Jersey and King County (Seattle), Washington — politically “blue” jurisdictions all — as part of what he called a “significant escalation” against sanctuary cities.
On Tuesday, to get a better sense of the man who has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s toy, I watched Barr speak to the Major County Sheriffs of America, a friendly audience, at the Willard Hotel in Washington.
Even by Trumpian standards, the jowly Barr, in his large round glasses, pinstripe suit and Trump-red tie, was strikingly sycophantic. “In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,” he read, deadpan.
Trump, he went on, “loves this country,” and “he especially loves you.” The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the “rule of law.”
Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked “rogue DA’s” and “so-called social-justice reformers,” who are responsible for “historic levels of homicide and other violent crime” in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer “to help criminal aliens evade the law.” Barr vowed to fight these foes with “all lawful means” — federal subpoenas to force them to turn over “information about criminal aliens,” dozens of lawsuits to invalidate statutes and attempts to deny them both competitive and automatic grants.
In response to a question, Barr railed against tech companies’ use of encryption: “They’re designing these devices so you can be impervious to any government scrutiny,” he protested.
Maybe people wouldn’t be so sensitive about government scrutiny if the top law enforcement official weren’t using his position to punish political opponents and reward political allies.
Instead, with Barr’s acquiescence, we live in a moment in which: Trump’s Treasury Department immediately releases sensitive financial information about Hunter Biden, while refusing to release similar information about Trump; Trump ousts officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry and even ousts the blameless twin brother of one of the witnesses; and Trump’s FBI decides to monitor violent “people on either side” of the abortion debate — although the FBI couldn’t point to a single instance of violence by abortion-rights supporters.
This week, the Pentagon released a new color scheme for Air Force One, replacing the 60-year-old design with one that looks suspiciously like the old Trump Shuttle.Surprised? Don’t be. Soon the entire administration will be able to apply for a Justice Department grant as a newly formed nonprofit: Hookers for Trump.
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Barr’s inspirational lesson for new lawyers: Once you achieve fame, fortune, and protection from corrupt politicos and complicit judges, it’s virtually impossible to get your law license revoked for unethical performance. As long as you thumb your nose at the law and ethical rules right in public, right in front of judges, you’re essentially immune. The “rules” only apply to those poor suckers at the bottom of the “legal totem pole.”
This is actually a fairly new development under the Trump regime. In the past, even high-profile lawyers who violated their ethical obligations got zapped: John Mitchell, Dick Kleindienst, Bill Clinton(technically, he might have “surrendered his law license” in lieu of disbarment), Webb Hubbell, etc.
But, during the Trump regime, Federal Judges seem content to just “roll their eyes” at lies, false narratives, thinly veiled racist or religiously bigoted rationales for policy, and simply astounding conflicts of interest (how about running a biased and unconstitutional Immigration “Court” right in plain view?) streaming out of an ethics-free zone at the “Department of Hookers for Trump.”
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson was actually a “target” of Roger Stone’s contemptuous and openly threatening behavior. It will be interesting to see how she deals with the sudden reversal and baseless plea for mercy from Barr for this unrepentant and totally unapologetic criminal.
As if to resolve any doubts as to his contempt for America and democratic institutions, the cowardly “Bully-in-Chief” unleashed an unprovoked twitter tirade against Judge Jackson and the career prosecutors in the case. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/12/trump-stone-judge/
Perhaps predictability, this was followed by an impotent call by Senate Democrats for the uber corrupt Billy Barr to resign and for the equally corrupt and spineless Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to stop slithering around the Capitol and schedule an “investigative hearing” into improper political influence at the “Department of Hookers for Trump.”https://apple.news/Az2hAo6yqT8uKJSuAX26F1Q Don’t hold your breath, folks!
This is not “normal.” This is not “right.” It’s time for those of us who still believe in American democracy to take a stand in November to remove Trump and the sociopathic element that he represents in our society from power. Otherwise, the “race to the bottom” will continue, unabated. And more innocent people will be hurt by or die because of this unprincipled, totally immoral lunatic.
3 Roger Stone prosecutors quit over Justice Department sentencing reversal
February 11, 2020
The Justice Department’s decision to reportedly back off its sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone apparently wasn’t well-received by two of his prosecutors.
Upon learning the Department reversed course and said seven to nine years was “grossly disproportionate” given Stone’s offenses — which include lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstructing a House investigation related to 2016 Russian election interference — prosecutor Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Zelinsky withdrew from Stone’s case. However, it looks like he’ll be sticking with the Justice Department and returning to his old job in Maryland.
Another prosecutor, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Jed, is doing the same. Meanwhile, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kravis, is resigning from the department altogether.
The decisions by the prosecutors appear to be in protest of what they consider interference from Justice Department higher-ups. The sentencing recommendation was reversed after Trump tweeted angrily about it, although there’s no confirmation if the White House was directly driving the change.
This story has been updated to reflect Jed’s decision.
—Tim O’Donnell
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I will be interested in seeing 1) how Judge Amy Berman Jackson handles this; and 2) if Trump just goes ahead and pardons the uber sleazy and unrepentant Stone.The GOP has made it crystal clear that the rule of law in America is “for suckers only.”
UPDATE:
After this story was posted, the fourth prosecutor on the Stone case also withdrew.
President Trump’s progress in corrupting the Department of Justice — and, to some extent, the entire federal government — into a weapon of his autocratic aspirations relies on the acquiescence of figures like Rod Rosenstein. It is the Rosensteins who translate the president’s lizard-brain impulses into practical directives and create a patina of normalcy around them. (Or, in some increasingly rare cases, refuse to do so.) And so Rosenstein’s spate of valedictory remarks attempting to cleanse and justify his service to Trump give us real insight into the worldview of the compliant bureaucratic functionary.
In a speech last night, Rosenstein delivered a sharp attack on former FBI Director James Comey. Rosenstein, of course, supplied Trump with a letter justifying Comey’s removal. Rosenstein justified his cooperation by claiming ignorance of any obstruction of justice motive. “Nobody said that the removal was intended to influence the course of my Russia investigation.”
It is perhaps remotely possible that Rosenstein actually did not realize what was going on with Trump, Comey, and the Russia investigation. It is not possible that Rosenstein believed, as he wrote, that Donald “Lock her up!” Trump fired Comey for treating Hillary Clinton unfairly, which is the reason Rosenstein elucidated in his letter.
Rosenstein also gushed about the rule of law, assuring his audience that it is safe, and implictly crediting Trump with upholding it. “We use the term ‘rule of law’ to describe our obligation to follow neutral principles,” he lectured. “As President Trump pointed out, ‘we govern ourselves in accordance with the rule of law rather [than] … the whims of an elite few or the dictates of collective will.’”
More revealingly, Rosenstein lashed out at Comey, who has made some cutting remarks about Rosenstein’s character, as a “partisan pundit.” Rosenstein’s conceit here is that Comey, a lifelong Republican, has become “partisan” by attacking Trump’s character. Meanwhile, Rosenstein, also a Republican, has maintained his neutrality and therefore his credibility.
But Rosenstein’s idea of nonpartisan neutrality does not require abstaining from political commentary. It merely requires abstaining from criticism of his boss. In another recent speech, Rosenstein attacked the Obama administration for failing “to publicize the full story about Russian computer hackers and social media trolls, and how they relate to a broader strategy to undermine America.” (Blaming Obama for doing too little to stop the Russian operation, when Trump was abetting it and Republican leader Mitch McConnell threatened to publicly attack any administration statement against it, is one of Trump’s Orwellian talking points.)
It might seem hypocritical for Rosenstein to parrot Trump’s talking points and then lash out as Comey as a partisan pundit. But from Rosenstein’s standpoint, it probably feels perfectly consistent. Opinions that extol and burnish the powers that be are qualitatively different than opinions tearing them down. Rosenstein’s opinions are not opinions at all. They are merely the lubricant in the proper functioning of the machinery of government.
And so Rosenstein joined with William Barr to spin the Mueller report — in a fashion so misleading that Mueller himself memorialized his objections in a memo — and declare all of Trump’s efforts to obstruct the probe to be non-crimes. Barr is meanwhile authorizing the fourth counter-investigation of the Russia probe. This will probably fail to yield any charges, but will succeed in making anybody in the Department of Justice think very carefully before looking into any crimes by Trump or his friends, with the full understanding that Republicans will harass them for years if they try.
Trump continues to mock even the pretense that his attorney general should make investigative decisions independent of politics. “I’m proud of our attorney general that he is looking into it,” he told reporters today. Somehow, Rosenstein is able to look upon the situation he has left with pride. Mueller was never fired. More importantly, neither was Rosenstein himself. It is easy for the inside man to confuse a system that is intact with a system that is working.
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Here is my assessment of Rosenstein’s legacy from a recent post:
Rosenstein is on his way out the door at the DOJ. He’ll leave behind a mixed legacy. He’ll deserve great credit for protecting the Mueller investigation from Trump’s various attempts to interfere and compromise it. On the other hand, he drafted the infamous “pretext memo” which was part of the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to cover up Trump’s real real reason for firing FBI Director Jim Comey.
His failure to stand up for judicial independence, fairness, and due process for vulnerable individuals coming before our U.S. Immigration Courts and his continuing defense of the Administration’s indefensible and harmful White Nationalist immigration agenda will go down as one of his lesser moments.
America needs an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court where judges act fairly and impartially and owe allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, not the Attorney General or any other political official.
Rosenstein is a good illustration of why 1) we need an independent U.S. Immigration Court, and 2) the U.S. Department of Justice is a failed organization whose mission and functions need thoughtful reexamination once Trump and his GOP toadies have been removed from power.
Interestingly, Rosenstein once was considered a “straight up guy” — a public servant who had served honorably in Administrations of both parties. Whatever else one might say about Trump, he does have a talent for bringing out and exploiting the underlying sliminess and weakness in folks once thought to be decent human beings and good public servants: John Kelly, Lindsay Graham, Kirstjen Nielsen, Rosenstein, Nikki Haley, Bill Barr, Rachel Brand, etc.
Somewhere out there are pockets of the “anti-Rosensteins” — civil servants who continue to uphold their oaths of office, do the right thing, and put Due Process, human lives, and the public welfare above job security or sucking up to power. Hopefully, we will reach a point in time where their stories can be told and where “sell-outs” like Rosenstein are held accountable for aiding and abetting the abuse of power.
BILL BARR – Unqualified For Office – Unfit To Act In A Quasi-Judicial Capacity
There have been many articles pointing out that Bill Barr unethically has acted as Trump’s defense counsel rather than fulfilled his oath to uphold the Constitution and be the Attorney General of all of the American people. There have also been some absurdist “apologias” for Barr some written by once-respected lawyers who should know better, and others written by the normal Trump hacks.
Here are my choices for four of the best articles explaining why Barr should not be the Attorney General. It goes without saying that he shouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be running the Immigration Court system. His intervention into individual cases in a quasi-judicial capacity is a clear violation of judicial ethics requiring avoidance of even the “appearance” of a conflict of interest. There is no “appearance” here. Barr has a clear conflict in any matter dealing with immigration.
Attorney General William Barr. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
House Democrats are going to face a difficult decision about launching an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Balanced against the president’s impressive array of misconduct is the fact that several more criminal investigations that may add to the indictment are already underway, and that impeaching the president might jeopardize the reelection of red-state Democratic members. But in the meantime, Attorney General William Barr presents them with a much easier decision. Barr has so thoroughly betrayed the values of his office that voting to impeach and remove him is almost obvious.
On March 24, Barr released a short letter summarizing the main findings of the Mueller investigation, as he saw them. News accounts treated Barr’s interpretation as definitive, and the media — even outlets that had spent two years uncovering a wide swath of suspicious and compromising links between the Trump campaign and Russia — dutifully engaged in self-flagellation for having had the temerity to raise questions about the whole affair.
Barr had done very little to that point to earn such a broad benefit of the doubt. In the same role in 1992, he had supported mass pardons of senior officials that enabled a cover-up of the Iran–Contra scandal. Less famously, in 1989 he issued a redacted version of a highly controversial administration legal opinion that, as Ryan Goodman explained, “omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion” for “no justifiable reason.”
And while many members of the old Republican political Establishment had recoiled against Trump’s contempt for the rule of law, Barr has shown no signs of having joined them. He met with Trump to discuss serving as his defense lawyer, publicly attacked the Mueller investigation (which risked “taking on the look of an entirely political operation to overthrow the president”), called for more investigations of Hillary Clinton, and circulated a lengthy memo strongly defending Trump against obstruction charges.
The events since Barr’s letter have incinerated whatever remains of his credibility. The famously tight-lipped Mueller team told several news outlets the letter had minimized Trump’s culpability; Barr gave congressional testimony hyping up Trump’s charges of “spying,” even prejudging the outcome of an investigation (“I think there was a failure among a group of leaders [at the FBI] at the upper echelon”); evaded questions as to whether he had shared the Mueller report with the White House; and, it turns out, he’s “had numerous conversations with White House lawyers which aided the president’s legal team,” the New York Times reports. Then he broke precedent by scheduling a press conference to spin the report in advance of its redacted publication.
It is not much of a mystery to determine which officials have offered their full loyalty to the president. Trump has reportedly “praised Barr privately for his handling of the report and compared him favorably to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions” —whose sole offense in Trump’s eyes was following Department of Justice ethical protocol. Trump urged his Twitter followers to tune in to Barr’s conference, promotional treatment he normally reserves for his Fox News sycophants.
The press conference was the final disqualifying performance. Barr acted like Trump’s defense lawyer, the job he had initially sought, rather than as an attorney general. His aggressive spin seemed designed to work in the maximal number of repetitions of the “no collusion” mantra, in accordance with his boss’s talking points, at the expense of any faithful transmission of the special counsel’s report.
Barr’s letter had made it sound as though Trump’s campaign spurned Russia’s offers of help: “The Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign,” he wrote. In fact, Mueller’s report concluded, “In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer,” but that the cooperation fell short of criminal conduct.
Where Mueller intended to leave the job of judging Trump’s obstructive conduct to Congress, Barr interposed his own judgment. Barr offered this incredible statement for why Trump’s behavior was excusable: “[T]here is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” Barr said. “Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation,” and credited him further with taking “no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.”
Sincere? How can Barr use that word to describe the mentality of a man whose own staffers routinely describe him in the media as a pathological liar? Trump repeatedly lied about Russia’s involvement in the campaign, and his own dealings with Russia. And he also, contra Barr, repeatedly denied the special counsel access to witnesses by dangling pardons to persuade them to withhold cooperation.
It is true that many of Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice failed. As Mueller wrote, the president’s “efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
This is a rather different gloss on the facts than the happy story Barr offered the press. What’s more, it is a pressing argument for Barr’s own removal. Next to the president himself, the attorney general is the most crucial actor in the safeguarding of the rule of law. The Justice Department is an awesome force that holds the power to enable the ruling party to commit crimes with impunity, or to intimidate and smear the opposing party with the taint of criminality.
There is no other department in government in which mere norms, not laws, are all that stand between democracy as we know it and a banana republic. Barr has revealed his complete unfitness for this awesome task. Nearly two more years of this Trumpian henchman wielding power over federal law enforcement is more weight than the rickety Constitution can bear.
In the years after Watergate, Justice Department officials — from both parties — worked hard to banish partisan cronyism from the department. Their goal was to make it the least political, most independent part of the executive branch.
“Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general, said at the time. Griffin Bell, later appointed to the same job by Jimmy Carter, described the department as “a neutral zone in the government, because the law has to be neutral.”
Attorney General William Barr clearly rejects this principle. He’s repeatedly put a higher priority on protecting his boss, President Trump, than on upholding the law in a neutral way. He did so in his letter last month summarizing Robert Mueller’s investigation and then again in a bizarre prebuttal news conference yesterday. As The Times editorial board wrote, Barr yesterday “behaved more like the president’s defense attorney than the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.”
Throughout his tenure, Barr has downplayed or ignored the voluminous evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing — his lies to the American people, his willingness to work with a hostile foreign country during a presidenial campaign, his tolerance of extensive criminal behavior among his staff and his repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation. Barr even claimed that Trump “fully cooperated” with that investigation, which Vox’s Ezra Klein notes is “an outright lie.”
Since he took office, Trump has made clear that he wants an attorney general who acts as first an enforcer of raw power and only second as an enforcer of federal law. In Barr, Trump has found his man. Together, they have cast aside more than four decades worth of Justice Department ideals and instead adopted the approach of Richard Nixon.
President Donald Trump has long wished for an attorney general who would act as his own private lawyer, protecting him from any potential legal damage. He finally found his man in William Barr.
Barr could have released special counsel Robert Mueller’s report from the beginning. Instead, the attorney general chose to twice present his own interpretation of the special counsel’s findings on foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. election ― before allowing members of the public to see the report and decide for themselves whether Trump and his associates did anything improper.
The first time the public received a glimpse of what was in the Mueller report was on March 24, when Barr sent a four-page letter to congressional leaders summarizing his conclusions from the report the special counsel team had submitted to Barr two days earlier.
The second time the public heard about the report’s content was in a Thursday morning press conference when Barr went out of his way to echo Trump talking points, attacking the media and the president’s “political opponents.”
To the Justice Department’s credit, the redactions in the Mueller report were relatively light ― allowing the public to see a substantial amount of the content.
But still, in his public comments, Barr made sure to paint as positive a picture of Trump before the report became widely available.
Here’s how the attorney general misled the public:
He left out the Trump campaign’s expectation of benefiting from hacked material.
In his letter to Congress on March 24, Barr wrote:
The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: ”[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election inference activities.”
While it’s true that the Mueller report did reach that conclusion, that quote is incomplete. Barr left out the first part, which was less complimentary to the Trump campaign.
Below is the full quote from the Mueller report, with the part Barr omitted in bold:
Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
He said it was up to him to make a decision on obstruction of justice.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Attorney General William Barr went to bat for Trump in a Thursday morning press conference.
In his March 24 letter, Barr said Mueller’s team did not come to a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice in the course of the investigation. Therefore, Barr claimed, it was now up to him to make that determination.
“The Special Counsel’s decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime,” he wrote.
Barr said he concluded that the evidence “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”
But Barr never had to make that legal conclusion, as Matt Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department under President Barack Obama, pointed out. And Mueller never asked Barr to so.
Indeed, the report said the special counsel’s team couldn’t come to such a conclusion:
[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.
The report also said that ultimately, the obstruction call wasn’t for Mueller to make. The special counsel decided not to make a decision on whether to prosecute Trump because the Justice Department’s position, according to an Office of Legal Counsel memo, is that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
“Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations … this Office accepted OLC’s legal conclusion for the purpose of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction,” the report states.
Furthermore, it seems clear that Mueller and his team expected that ultimately, Congress would make the decision on obstruction of justice.
NBC News reported earlier that some in Mueller’s office had said “their intent was to leave the legal question open for Congress and the public to examine the evidence.”
“[W]e concluded that Congress can validly regulate the President’s exercise of official duties to prohibit actions motivated by a corrupt intent to obstruct justice,” the report says.
In other words, Congress can impeach the president if it wants to do so.
He gave an incomplete picture of Trump’s actions that could be construed as obstruction of justice.
“In cataloguing the President’s actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct,” Barr wrote in his March 24 letter.
The report doesn’t let Trump off the hook quite so easily. It says Trump tried to obstruct justice ― but he didn’t succeed because his staff refused to follow his orders.
“The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” the report reads.
The report detailed 10 acts by Trump that could amount to obstruction of justice.
He said Mueller found “no collusion.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been called to testify before Congress about his report.
One of Trump’s favorite phrases is that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 elections. He has tweeted it 84 times.
Barr used the phrase four times in his 18-minute remarks in Thursday’s press conference:
“Put another way, the special counsel found no ‘collusion’ by any Americans in the IRA’s illegal activity.”
“But again, the special counsel’s report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its hacking operations. In other words, there was no evidence of Trump campaign ‘collusion’ with the Russian government’s hacking.”
“After finding no underlying collusion with Russia, the special counsel’s report goes on to consider whether certain actions of the president could amount to obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation.”
“At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the president’s personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was, in fact, no collusion.”
But the Mueller report never actually said the investigation found no collusion. In fact, the report explains specifically why it doesn’t use the term “collusion.” The word only appears in the report as part of this explanation or in quoting someone else.
MUELLER REPORT
The Mueller report avoided using the term “collusion,” and explains why here.
Therefore, Barr repeatedly saying Mueller found “no collusion” was simply the attorney general adopting a Trump talking point.
He said Trump fully cooperated with the investigation.
Barr was extremely sympathetic to Trump in Thursday’s press conference. He tried to paint a picture of a president under extreme ― and unfair ― pressure, telling reporters, “As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates.”
He said Trump was “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” so it’s not surprising if he may have lashed out a bit. And, he added, Trump deserved credit for “fully cooperat[ing]” with the special counsel at all:
Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.
Trump, however, didn’t fully cooperate. He refused repeated requests to give an interview to Mueller and his team. The report said the special counsel’s team considered issuing a subpoena for Trump to testify but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it:
MUELLER REPORT
The Mueller report says Trump refused to be interviewed by the special counsel and his team.
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Finally, this editorial form the SF Chronicle really “hammers home” Barr’s patent unfitness to continue serving.
Editorial: Attorney General Barr’s misplaced loyalties
Chronicle Editorial Board
Updated
Photo: Tom Brenner / New York Times
Attorney General William Barr has been acting as if he is Presisdent Trump’s personal attorney.
President Trump has never made any secret of his desire to have an attorney general whose first loyalty was to him. Regrettably for the nation and the honest administration of justice, Trump unquestionably now has one in William Barr.
The attorney general has lost all credibility with his disgraceful handling of the rollout of the Mueller report into Russian interference into the 2016 election. Barr left the American people for more than a month with a seriously skewed characterization of the “principal conclusions” from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings from the two-year investigation.
His four-page summary of those conclusions amounted to “nothing much to see here, folks.” While he was correct that the Mueller team could not make a case that anyone in Trump’s campaign broke the law by conspiring with Russians, the Barr summary was downright deceptive in its portrayal of the special counsel’s findings on possible obstruction of justice by the president.
Barr’s summary suggested that “difficult questions of law and fact” left it difficult for Mueller to determine whether Trump had obstructed the probe. Barr and his deputy took it upon themselves to conclude that “the evidence developed by the special counsel is not sufficient” to establish obstruction.
Americans who have now read the Mueller’s team’s own words in the 448-page report discovered that Barr’s account was highly misleading. In fact, Mueller’s hesitation was not based on an inability to decide; it was guided in part by a Department of Justice policy that a sitting president could not be indicted. Given that, Mueller suggested it would be unfair to accuse Trump of a crime when the president could not have a chance to defend himself in a “speedy and public trial” with the constitutional protections.
Barr also suggested that Trump could not have obstructed justice into an investigation of a crime he did not commit.
Mueller’s report clearly stated otherwise.
“The injury to the integrity of the justice system is the same regardless of whether a person committed an underlying wrong,” it stated. Mueller’s investigation detailed “multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations.”
Rather than punting the obstruction decision to Barr, Mueller very clearly noted that a decision on what to do with the substantial evidence of wrongdoing he collected should be made by Congress, which has the power of impeachment.
Barr never bothered to correct Trump’s exhortation of “complete and total exoneration.” Barr might as well have been on a Trump spokesman, rather than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, at a bizarre Thursday news conference (before the report’s release) in which he offered a sympathetic explanation for Trump’s repeated efforts to stymie the investigation. Barr chalked it up to Trump’s anger and frustration.
Justice has been frustrated. Americans are justifiably angry. Barr has proved himself unfit for the high office he holds.
This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
Undoubtedly, Trump is unfit for office as many of us have been saying for some time now. The Mueller report confirmed what most thinking people already knew: the guy is dishonest, immoral, pathological, and a not very bright “con man.” (He’s also a racist and a White Nationalist would be authoritarian, although those admittedly were not points of emphasis in the Mueller report which focused on other aspects of his totally disgraceful conduct.)
But, I’ll concede that Trump’s removal is unlikely to happen except at the ballot box. Even that is uncertain with about 40% of American voters apparently wedded to a “beggar thy neighbor, who cares about the majority, country be damned” worldview. Trump is already focused on a “race-baiting” strategy of leveraging the most problematic aspects of our electoral college system while treating the interests of majority of Americans with mockery and disdain.
It remains to be seen whether any Democratic candidate can unite the diverse majority of Americans for at least long enough to save our country by removing Trump and, hopefully, his GOP enablers along with him. It also remains to be seen whether any country where 40% of the voters are so out of touch with reality and the common interests of the rest of us can actually be governed, once majority rule is restored.
But, Barr is a different matter. He’s not elected, he’s not President, and we don’t have to enable his continued unethical misuse of authority at the DOJ, at least not in the the all important area of the U.S. Immigraton Court.
If Congress won’t do the job by creating an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court, it’s time for the Article III courts to invalidate precedents produced by Barr’s and Sessions’s unethical participation in individual quasi-judicial decision-making and to start invalidating removal orders entered by “courts” controlled by political enforcement officials, in clear contradiction to the Due Process requirement that individuals facing the life or death authority of the Federal Government are entitled to have fair and impartial decision makers and reasoned decisions. That can’t happen in a system controlled and directed by biased political “enforcement only” officials like Barr (and Sessions before him). Barr has made it crystal clear that he always will put the selfish interests of Trump above truthfulness, the law, due process, fundamental fairness, and the common good.
Letting this farce of a “judicial system” continue unfairly endangering individual lives and deferring to officials who are neither subject matter experts nor fair and impartial quasi-judicial decision makers is unconstitutional. By letting it continue, life-tenured Federal Judges both tarnish their reputations and fail to fulfill their oaths of office.
As a young attorney in the Department of Justice during the Watergate Era, I, along with many others, were indelibly impressed and inspired when then Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his Deputy William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s illegal order to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor (a/k/a/ “The Saturday Night Massacre”). Obviously, Barr has dragged the Department and its reputation down to new depths — back to the days of Nixon and disgraced (and convicted) Attorney General “John the Con” Mitchell, who actually planned criminal conspiracies in his fifth floor office at the DOJ.
Obviously, there are systemic problems that have allowed unqualified individuals like Barr and Sessions to serve in and co-opt the system of justice, and denigrate the Department of Justice. (I spoke to some recently retired DOJ officials who characterized the morale among career professionals at the DOJ as “below the floor”). Some of those can be traced to the lack of backbone and integrity in the “Trump GOP” which controls the Senate and refuses to enforce even minimal standards of professionalism, meaningful oversight, and independent decision making in Trump appointees. That’s what a “kakistocracy” is. It’s up to the rest of us to do what is necessary under the law to replace the kakistocracy with a functioning democracy.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Ted Cruz defended President Donald Trump Sunday amid reports that are raising new questions about the president’s relationship with Russia, insisting that Trump’s record shows he has been “tougher” on the U.S. adversary than past presidents.
When asked about The New York Times report that broke Friday — which says Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey triggered a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president was wittingly or unwittingly working to benefit Russia — the Texas Republican said the focus on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is a Washington-centric fascination.
“When you get outside the Beltway, I don’t see anyone concerned about this at all,” he said.
“If you compare objectively, President Trump’s policies to Russia compared to President Obama’s policies to Russia — by any measure, President Obama was much easier, was much more gentler on Russia,” Cruz said.
News outlets reported in 2017 that Mueller was interested in the Comey firing as a possible example of obstruction of justice by the president. And Trump himself connected the firing of Comey to his frustration with the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian election interference during a 2017 interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt.
But the new Times report connects that event to the larger investigation into Russian interference in American politics and elections, asking if the president was acting effectively as a Russian agent, regardless of his intentions.
“Our collective understanding was much narrower — it was just on obstruction: Did the president break the law there?” New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, who broke the story, said on “Meet the Press” to explain the significance of the revelation.
“Now we know it was much broader, it has national security concerns. The FBI was afraid that the firing of Comey was a way to help the Russians stop the FBI from figuring out what they did in the election.”
Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who spent much of the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign criticizing Trump’s posture toward Russia, called the report proof that Congress must protect Mueller’s investigation from any meddling from the administration.
“They had to have a very deep level of concern about this president to take this step,” Kaine, the 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee, said of the FBI’s decision to open the investigation.
“And that’s again why we need to protect the Mueller investigation,” he added.
Trump criticized the New York Times story in a Saturday morning tweet, and called the accusation he might be working to advance Russian interests “insulting” during a Saturday night interview on the Fox News show hosted by ally Jeanine Pirro.
The president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, also dismissed the report in a phone call with NBC News, where he argued “they obviously found nothing or else they would have reported it.”
The Times story wasn’t the only potential bombshell report to come out over the weekend about Trump and Russia.
On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that Trump personally intervened to hide readouts of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The White House also panned that report, pointing to new sanctions on Russia as proof the administration is being tough on the adversary.
Now that Democrats control the House, it’s possible that committees may look into the details of either story. Cruz, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he’d “consider any allegations” as part of his roles on the committee.
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Yeah, Teddy, who cares if our President is a dupe of Vladimir Putin! And, the lies about the Obama Administration just keep flowing. Clearly, Putin was so worried about Hillary Clinton becoming President that he went to great lengths to divide America and hand the Presidency to Trump. The only real debate is whether his efforts actually had a determinative effect on the elections. And, there were never any allegations of connections between Obama and Putin. Trump is sleazy, incompetent, and carrying out a program that has to delight Vladimir Putin. Obama was none of these things. And, it’s certainly worth getting to the bottom of the relationship among Trump, his organization, his family, his associates, and Vladimir Putin.
President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.
Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. officials learned of Trump’s actions when a White House adviser and a senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.
The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.
As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is thought to be in the final stages of an investigation that has focused largely on whether Trump or his associates conspired with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. The new details about Trump’s continued secrecy underscore the extent to which little is known about his communications with Putin since becoming president.
After this story was published online, Trump said in an interview late Saturday with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that he did not take particular steps to conceal his private meetings with Putin and attacked The Washington Post and its owner Jeffery P. Bezos.
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Read the complete article at the above link.
The shutdown/Southern Border Fake Crisis appears to be a distraction from the real national security threat: Donald Trump!
He’s dividing and destroying America, just like Putin wants him to do. Why is the GOP “going along to get along” with a blatantly dishonest and clearly unqualified President who is undermining America?
It’s been an emotional week for people who love Jeff Sessions, assuming such people exist. On the one hand, Donald Trump fired Sessions the day after the election in favor of an unqualified loyalist who used to sit on the board of a hilariously fraudulent patent marketing company. On the other hand, once Sessions skulks back to Alabama, Kate McKinnon will have no further reason to play him on Saturday Night Live, which will probably be good for his reputation. But there was no way SNL would let a walking caricature like Sessions leave the national stage without a kick in the ass on his way to the wings, so McKinnon glued on her Jeff Sessions ears this week for what might be the very last time:
Sketches like this one, in which one celebrity caricature after another marches in, does his or her thing, then leaves, almost always suffer from a lack of momentum. The payoff here, the surprise appearance of Robert De Niro as Robert Mueller, is no substitute for rising action, not least because De Niro’s performance isn’t exactly worthy of Taxi Driver. Some of the individual jokes are hilarious—see, e.g., Sessions’ mug-within-a-mug—but as a whole, the sketch feels like one damn thing after another, for much, much too long. In that sense, it brilliantly captures the essence of the Trump administration, with or without Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. Best of luck to the cast member who has to squeeze into a bald cap to play Matthew Whitaker next week.
Kids in cages, weeping parents, families separated, refugees turned away, African-Americans brutalized by the police, domestic violence victims sent back to torture by their abusers, minority voters suppressed, prisons overflowing with minor offenders, American youth denied opportunities and threatened with removal, scientific evidence ignored, intentionally clogged courts, open season on the LGBTQ community, vigorous defense of hate speech (but not the right to protest), glorification of bias masquerading as “religion,” judges turned into border agents in robes, judges and lawyers publicly dissed, un-prosecuted corruption in government, rampant gun violence mostly generated by disgruntled White guys, journalists attacked, bogus efforts to keep migrants from knowing their rights, lies to Congress — Man-o-Man, this Dude was just a barrel of laughs and good times! Unless, of course, you were one of the millions of men, women, and children in America who was permanently damaged or traumatized by his racist scofflaw approach to “justice” and his failure to enforce the Constitutional rights due to everyone in America. Not exactly “Janet Reno’s Dance Party!”
Katyal (former Acting Solicitor General) and Conway (Husband of Kelleyanne Conway) write in the NY Times:
What now seems an eternity ago, the conservative law professor Steven Calabresi published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in May arguing that Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. His article got a lot of attention, and it wasn’t long before President Trump picked up the argument, tweeting that “the Appointment of the Special Counsel is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!”
Professor Calabresi’s article was based on the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 2. Under that provision, so-called principal officers of the United States must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate under its “Advice and Consent” powers.
He argued that Mr. Mueller was a principal officer because he is exercising significant law enforcement authority and that since he has not been confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was unconstitutional. As one of us argued at the time, he was wrong. What makes an officer a principal officer is that he or she reports only to the president. No one else in government is that person’s boss. But Mr. Mueller reports to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. So, Mr. Mueller is what is known as an inferior officer, not a principal one, and his appointment without Senate approval was valid.
But Professor Calabresi and Mr. Trump were right about the core principle. A principal officer must be confirmed by the Senate. And that has a very significant consequence today.
It means that Mr. Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.
Much of the commentary about Mr. Whitaker’s appointment has focused on all sorts of technical points about the Vacancies Reform Act and Justice Department succession statutes. But the flaw in the appointment of Mr. Whitaker, who was Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff at the Justice Department, runs much deeper. It defies one of the explicit checks and balances set out in the Constitution, a provision designed to protect us all against the centralization of government power.
If you don’t believe us, then take it from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Mr. Trump once called his “favorite” sitting justice. Last year, the Supreme Court examined the question of whether the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board had been lawfully appointed to his job without Senate confirmation. The Supreme Court held the appointment invalid on a statutory ground.
Justice Thomas agreed with the judgment, but wrote separately to emphasize that even if the statute had allowed the appointment, the Constitution’s Appointments Clause would not have. The officer in question was a principal officer, he concluded. And the public interest protected by the Appointments Clause was a critical one: The Constitution’s drafters, Justice Thomas argued, “recognized the serious risk for abuse and corruption posed by permitting one person to fill every office in the government.” Which is why, he pointed out, the framers provided for advice and consent of the Senate.
What goes for a mere lawyer at the N.L.R.B. goes in spades for the attorney general of the United States, the head of the Justice Department and one of the most important people in the federal government. It is one thing to appoint an acting underling, like an acting solicitor general, a post one of us held. But those officials are always supervised by higher-ups; in the case of the solicitor general, by the attorney general and deputy attorney general, both confirmed by the Senate.
Mr. Whitaker has not been named to some junior post one or two levels below the Justice Department’s top job. He has now been vested with the law enforcement authority of the entire United States government, including the power to supervise Senate-confirmed officials like the deputy attorney general, the solicitor general and all United States attorneys.
We cannot tolerate such an evasion of the Constitution’s very explicit, textually precise design. Senate confirmation exists for a simple, and good, reason. Constitutionally, Matthew Whitaker is a nobody. His job as Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff did not require Senate confirmation. (Yes, he was confirmed as a federal prosecutor in Iowa, in 2004, but Mr. Trump can’t cut and paste that old, lapsed confirmation to today.) For the president to install Mr. Whitaker as our chief law enforcement officer is to betray the entire structure of our charter document.
Related
Another view on the legality of Whitaker’s appointment
Opinion | Stephen I. Vladeck
Whitaker May Be a Bad Choice, but He’s a Legal One
In times of crisis, interim appointments need to be made. Cabinet officials die, and wars and other tragic events occur. It is very difficult to see how the current situation comports with those situations. And even if it did, there are officials readily at hand, including the deputy attorney general and the solicitor general, who were nominated by Mr. Trump and confirmed by the Senate. Either could step in as acting attorney general, both constitutionally and statutorily.
Because Mr. Whitaker has not undergone the process of Senate confirmation, there has been no mechanism for scrutinizing whether he has the character and ability to evenhandedly enforce the law in a position of such grave responsibility. The public is entitled to that assurance, especially since Mr. Whitaker’s only supervisor is Mr. Trump himself, and the president is hopelessly compromised by the Mueller investigation. That is why adherence to the requirements of the Appointments Clause is so important here, and always.
As we wrote last week, the Constitution is a bipartisan document, written for the ages to guard against wrongdoing by officials of any party. Mr. Whitaker’s installation makes a mockery of our Constitution and our founders’ ideals. As Justice Thomas’s opinion in the N.L.R.B. case reminds us, the Constitution’s framers “had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked.” He added “they knew that liberty could be preserved only by ensuring that the powers of government would never be consolidated in one body.”
We must heed those words today.
Neal K. Katyal (@neal_katyal) was an acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama and is a lawyer at Hogan Lovells in Washington. George T. Conway III(@gtconway3d) is a litigator at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York.
Of course, not everyone agrees with Conway and Katyal. But, no matter how you slice it, the appointment of the obviously unqualified political hack Whitaker and his acceptance of the job notwithstanding his ethical conflicts and lack of qualifications is just another step in the total destruction of the US Department of Justice and the “Clowning of America!”
For that, both Trump and Whitaker get the coveted “Courtside Five Clown Award” (Trump winning for the second time this week!)
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.”
Related in Opinion
Opinion | Noah Bookbinder, Barry Berke and Norman L. Eisen
What the Manafort Verdict Means
Opinion | Ken White
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.
RELATED
More on Mr. Cohen and Mr. Manafort
Trump Praises Manafort for Refusing to ‘Break,’ Unlike Cohen, His Former Fixer
Cohen and Manafort Are in Deeper Legal Trouble. Mueller Could Benefit.
Michael Cohen Says He Arranged Payments to Women at Trump’s Direction
Paul Manafort, Trump’s Former Campaign Chairman, Guilty of 8 Counts
A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels
While the president has so far dodged questions about whether he will pardon Mr. Manafort, he’s already shown a willingness to make a mockery of the justice system with his pardons of unrepentant lawbreakers like Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza. Last year, the president’s lawyer dangled the prospect of a pardon to lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. If Mr. Trump were to follow through and grant clemency to Mr. Manafort, it would make his pardon of Mr. Arpaio look like the signing of the Civil Rights Act.
You’re forgiven if you’ve lost track of all the criminality, either charged or admitted, that has burst forth from Mr. Trump’s circles in the last couple years even as Mr. Trump has continued to claim that the investigation is a hoax, a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars. So here’s a brief refresher:
In addition to the prosecution of Mr. Manafort, the special counsel’s office has secured guilty pleas from multiple people, including Mr. Flynn and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser on the Trump campaign, both of whom lied to federal investigators about their communications with Russian officials.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller has charged more than a dozen Russian individuals and companies for their roles in a coordinated and deceptive social-media campaign aimed at hurting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and helping Mr. Trump’s. Some Trump campaign officials were unwittingly in contact with some of these defendants.
Mr. Mueller has also charged a dozen Russian military officials with hacking and helping to release emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The hackers first tried to break into Mrs. Clinton’s personal servers on July 27, 2016 — the same day that Mr. Trump publicly called on Russians to do exactly that.
And he has charged Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian associate of Mr. Manafort and a suspected spy, with obstructing justice.
As Mr. Trump rages on about the unfairness of the investigation, remember that Mr. Mueller has been on the job for just 15 months. For comparison, the Watergate investigation ran for more than two years before it brought down a president and sent dozens of people to prison. The Iran contra investigation dragged on for about seven years, as did the Whitewater investigation, which resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
Also remember we still don’t know anything about the ultimate fate of several other Trump associates who have been under Mr. Mueller’s microscope, including Roger Stone, Carter Page and Donald Trump Jr. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”).
For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: All the President’s Crooks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Unfortunately, the Trump Circus is just picking up steam. We’re sure to be subjected to a “carpet bombing” of lies, tweets, insults, and threats as the Emperor’s clothes come off piece by piece while the emasculated GOP Congress merely sits and watches. And, of course, there will be the “normal” Trump strategy of attempting to shift blame to the victims and away from himself and the other corrupt individuals associated with him. Seems Trumpie owes Stormy (and Melania) an apology
President Donald Trump meets with President Vladimir Putin of Russia at the G-20 Summit, in Hamburg, Germany, in July 2017. CreditEvan Vucci/Associated Press
Put aside whatever suspicions you may have about whether Donald Trump will be directly implicated in the Russia investigation.
Trump is right now, before our eyes and those of the world, committing an unbelievable and unforgivable crime against this country. It is his failure to defend.
The intelligence community long ago concluded that Russia attacked our election in 2016 with the express intention of damaging Hillary Clinton and assisting Trump.
“In 2016, cyber actors affiliated with the Russian Government conducted an unprecedented, coordinated cyber campaign against state election infrastructure. Russian actors scanned databases for vulnerabilities, attempted intrusions, and in a small number of cases successfully penetrated a voter registration database. This activity was part of a larger campaign to prepare to undermine confidence in the voting process.”
And this is not simply a thing that happened once. This is a thing that is still happening and will continue to happen. As Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the committee in February, “Persistent and disruptive cyberoperations will continue against the United States and our European allies using elections as opportunities to undermine democracy.” As he put it, “Frankly, the United States is under attack.”
The Robert Mueller investigation is looking into this, trying to figure out what exactly happened in 2016, who all was involved, which laws were broken and who will be charged and tried.
“Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has either indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 32 people and three companies — that we know of. That group is composed of four former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Five of these people (including three former Trump aides) have already pleaded guilty.”
Twelve of those indictments came last week with a disturbingly detailed account of what the Russians did. As The New York Times put it:
“From phishing attacks to gain access to Democratic operatives, to money laundering, to attempts to break into state elections boards, the indictment details a vigorous and complex effort by Russia’s top military intelligence service to sabotage the campaign of Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.”
Whether or not Trump himself or anyone in his orbit personally colluded or conspired with the Russians about their interference is something Mueller will no doubt disclose at some point, but there remains one incontrovertible truth: In 2016, Russia, a hostile foreign adversary, attacked the United States of America.
We know that they did it. We have proof. The F.B.I. is trying to hold people accountable for it.
And yet Trump, the president whom the Constitution establishes as the commander in chief, has repeatedly waffled on whether Russia conducted the attack and has refused to forcefully rebuke them for it, let alone punish them for it.
In March, the White House, under pressure from Congress, seemed to somewhat reluctantly impose some sanctions on Russia for its crimes. As CNN reported that month, Congress almost unanimously passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act last summer, “hoping to pressure Trump into punishing Russia for its election interference.” But as the network pointed out:
“Trump signed the bill reluctantly in August, claiming it impinged upon his executive powers and could dampen his attempts to improve ties with Moscow.”
Instead, Trump has repeatedly attacked the investigation as a witch hunt.
Just last week at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump said:
“I think I would have a very good relationship with Putin if we spend time together. After watching the rigged witch-hunt yesterday, I think it really hurts our country and our relationship with Russia. I hope we can have a good relationship with Russia.”
Now Trump is set to pursue just such a relationship as he meets one-on-one with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Monday in Finland. As Trump said earlier this month at a rally:
“Will he be prepared? Will he be prepared? And I might even end up having a good relationship, but they’re going, ‘Will President Trump be prepared? You know, President Putin is K.G.B. and this and that.’ You know what? Putin’s fine. He’s fine. We’re all fine. We’re people.”
Actually, none of this is fine. None of it! Trump should be directing all resources at his disposal to punish Russia for the attacks and prevent future ones. But he is not.
America’s commander wants to be chummy with the enemy who committed the crime. Trump is more concerned with protecting his presidency and validating his election than he is in protecting this country.
This is an incredible, unprecedented moment. America is being betrayed by its own president. America is under attack and its president absolutely refuses to defend it.
Simply put, Trump is a traitor and may well be treasonous.
Charles M. Blow has been an Op-Ed columnist since 2008. His column appears every Monday and Thursday. He joined The Times in 1994 and was previously the graphics director. He also wrote the book “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” @CharlesMBlow•Facebook
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Yup! Bogusly claiming that desperate refugees are a threat to our national security, failing to protect us, and in fact enabling and furthering the actual existential threats to our security from Putin. That’s Trump and his “fellow traveler” supporters!
Remember all oft he nonsense about the “Kobach Commission” and their bogus search for almost nonexistent “undocumented voters?” Compare all the pontificating about the “integrity of our election process” with the Administration’s “shrug off” of hard evidence that a foreign power actually did attempt to interfere in our elections with the purpose of sowing discord and electing Trump?
Trump makes enemies out of our friends, creates non-existent enemies, and treats our country’s enemies as if they were our friends!
One of the great under-reported stories of the Trump era is the extent to which the toxicity of the current administration has made high-level government appointments—once among the nation’s most prestigious vocations, and a stepping stone to more lucrative careers—virtually radioactive. John Kelly is said to be hard-pressed to fill out the ranks; State Department departures amount to “a hit on personnel that lasts a decade,” per one former official; and in policy areas from international trade to negotiations with North Korea, Donald Trump’sWhite House has failed to attract much-needed expertise. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than at the Justice Department, where 500 days into Trump’s term, his administration is still struggling to fill top spots. According to a Wall Street Journalreport published Tuesday, the White House has failed to persuade at least three people to accept the traditionally plum position of associate attorney general, the No. 3 job at the D.O.J., prompting an official pause to the search.
Given the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the perilous position of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whoever fills the spot could realistically find themselves overseeing Robert Mueller’s probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The possibility has already (reportedly) scared away one associate A.G.: Rachel Brand, who left the role in February for an executive position at Walmart, told officials the job was too good to pass up. But sources close to Brand told NBC News that she was “frustrated by vacancies at the department and feared she would be asked to oversee the Russia investigation.” (A Justice Department spokeswoman pushed back on the report, calling it “false and frankly ridiculous.”) Two other candidates, attorneys Helgi Walker and Kate Todd— both veterans of the George W. Bush administration and Clarence Thomas clerkships—turned down the job, sources told the Journal, though their motivations for doing so are unclear. Nor is the No. 3 spot the only D.O.J. position the White House has failed to fill: according to the Journal, at least five high-profile units at the Justice Department still don’t have permanent, politically appointed leaders, including the criminal, civil, and tax divisions.
In a few cases, the Trump administration’s picks have been stalled in the confirmation process—the heads of both the criminal and civil units were named a year ago, for instance, but still haven’t been scheduled for a Senate vote. Per the Journal, the Russia probe is at play here, too: Democrats are “pressing nominees about how they would handle the probe should they become involved in it,” and Republicans, too, have been slow to push for a vote.
The pall of the Russia probe hangs equally heavy over current D.O.J. officials, who are constantly dodging attacks from the president over their own roles. Trump has repeatedly and publicly admonished Sessions over his recusal; in his latest attack, Trump blamed the top lawyer for the probe’s indefinite timeline. “The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself . . . I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined,” Trump tweeted, adding, “Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!” The Trump-Sessions relationship has reportedly deteriorated to the point that Trump refuses to say the former Alabama senator’s name out loud, a practice his stop aides have also picked up:
Trump’s fury with Sessions is so ever-present it has taken to darkening his moods even during otherwise happy moments. On Thursday, Trump was on Air Force One returning from a trip to Texas, reveling in both a successful day of fundraising and the heads-up he had received from economic adviser Larry Kudlow that the next day’s jobs report would be positive.
But when an aide mentioned Sessions, Trump abruptly ended the conversation and unmuted the television in his office broadcasting Fox News, dismissing the staffer to resume watching cable, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Rosenstein, too, has been a frequent presidential punching bag. While Trump has targeted Sessions for his “original sin” of recusal, the deputy attorney general is the one responsible for appointing Mueller in the first place, not to mention for signing off on the F.B.I. raid of Michael Cohen. He’s battled with Trump allies over D.O.J. document requests and has come under scrutiny for the role he played in James Comey’s firing: on Tuesday, Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters that Rosenstein should be a key witness in the obstruction of justice aspect of the investigation, considering he penned a letter recommending Comey’s dismissal on the grounds that the former F.B.I. director mishandled the probe into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Graham also sent the D.A.G. a letter questioning Rosenstein’s oversight of the investigation late last month.
The White House’s struggle to fill out the ranks would result in an unusual situation should Rosenstein recuse himself, resign, or be fired—all possible outcomes. With Jesse Panuccio serving in an acting capacity as the associate attorney general, the responsibility of overseeing the Russia probe would likely fall to Solicitor General Noel Francisco. Typically, Francisco’s job is to argue on the government’s behalf in cases that go before the Supreme Court. And while it’s unclear how Francisco would treat the role, what’s much less ambiguous is how Trump would want him to treat it. “When you look at the I.R.S. scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, aah, real problems they had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems,” Trump toldThe New York Times. “When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”
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Gee, I remember how totally excited I was the day I got my job offer to serve as a GS-11 Attorney Adviser at the BIA under the DOJ Honors Program in 1973. Short of family events, it was one of the most exciting and satisfying events of my life. Who would have thought that 45 years later the once-proud DOJ would be run by a Jim Crow wannabe working for a White Nationalist regime?
Most of the “vibes” that I get are that everyone eligible or nearly eligible for retirement at the DOJ is getting those retirement estimates updated. Better hurry, though, before Trump & the GOP Know Nothings put the finishing touches on their plan to destroy the retirement system, the merit Civil Service, and return to the “good old days” of the spoils system where jobs could be handed out to political cronies and sycophants who could be hired and fired at will. And, of course, anyone with the integrity to stand up to these political hacks could be unceremoniously fired on the spot to make way for the kakistocracy.
Just like destroying the Constitution disingenuously is called “restoring the rule of law” in the Trump Administration, replacing the merit-based career Civil Service with a sycophantic kakistocracy is what disingenuously is termed “promoting accountability.”
Edward Levi and Griffin Bell were very different men. One was the son and grandson of rabbis, a legal scholar whose life revolved around the University of Chicago. The other was a country lawyer who became a master operator in the Atlanta legal world. One was appointed to high office by a Republican president, the other by a Democrat.
Yet for all their differences, Levi and Bell came to share a mission. Together, they created the modern Department of Justice and, more important, the modern American idea of the rule of law.
They were the first two attorneys general appointed after Watergate — Levi by Gerald Ford and Bell by his fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter. And they both set out to refashion the Justice Department into the least political, most independent part of the executive branch. “Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” Levi said. It cannot become “anyone’s weapon.” Bell described the department as “a neutral zone in the government, because the law has to be neutral.”
They understood Richard Nixon’s deepest sins: He saw the law as an instrument not of justice but power. Yet Levi and Bell also knew that Nixon hadn’t been the only problem. Other administrations had also misused the law — investigating enemies and rivals, like civil-rights leaders. So Levi and Bell made sure that the crisis of Watergate didn’t go to waste.
They changed the rules for F.B.I. investigations. They put in place strict protocols for communication between the White House and Justice Department. They made clear — with support from Ford and Carter — that the president must have a unique relationship with the Justice Department.
“It’s perfectly natural and fine for the president and others at the White House to have interactions with the Justice Department on broad policy issues,” Sally Yates, the former deputy attorney general, told me last week. “What’s not O.K. is for the White House, and especially the president, to have any involvement with criminal prosecutions. That really turns the rule of law on its head.”
No administration has been perfect in the pursuit of neutral justice, but every one from Ford’s through Barack Obama’s stayed true to the post-Watergate overhaul. They allowed uncomfortable investigations to proceed unimpeded. They did not treat the law as a weapon.
Then came President Trump.
The story of Levi and Bell highlights how fragile the rule of law is. Much of it does not depend on the Constitution or legislation. It depends on political culture and habits. And that culture and those habits can change. In the sweep of history, the reforms of Levi and Bell are still quite young.
The most obvious ways that Trump is undermining the law involve the Russia investigation. Like Nixon, Trump is enraged that anyone in his administration would investigate anyone else in it. But Russia is only one part of the problem: Trump really does view the law as a weapon, to protect his allies and strike his enemies.
The incomplete list includes: He suggested an end to the prosecution of someone he likes (Joe Arpaio) and the start of prosecutions of people he hates (Hillary Clinton, James Comey). Trump defended his personal lawyer by claiming that the government regularly fabricates evidence. Trump has dragged federal prosecutors into politics, bringing one of them — John Huber, Utah’s top federal prosecutor — to the White House to give a speech lobbying for new immigration laws.
Other presidents did none of this. It undermines the idea of equal justice. It tells Americans that our legal system is merely another instrument of partisan battle, that our prosecutors and law-enforcement officers are political hacks in disguise.
The Trump attacks on the justice system demand a stronger response. The media can’t become numb. His aides and appointees need to stand up to him more often — rather than, for example, assenting to a baseless new inquiry into Clinton, overseen by none other than Huber.
And other Republicans, in Congress and private life, should summon more courage. “We don’t see senior Republican officials, either current or past, defending the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.,” John Bellinger III, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, said last week at a Georgetown University conference on democratic norms. “It’s just inexplicable.”
Where are the Republican defenders of law and order? Where are you, John Ashcroft? What about C. Boyden Gray, Larry Thompson, Paul Clement, Ted Olson, Susan Collins and Ben Sasse? At least a few of them should be willing to take a little heat in defense of the American system of justice.
In retrospect, Levi almost seemed to be pleading with them in his 1977 goodbye speech as attorney general: “We have shown that the administration of justice can be fair, can be effective, can be nonpartisan. These are goals which can never be won for all time. They must always be won anew.”
Yup! And, in some cases, the disguise is pretty transparent — perhaps the only “transparency” in today’s DOJ.
This time period comes close to spanning my career in the DOJ. I worked for both Attorney General Ed Levi and Attorney General Griffin Bell (“known on the “5th Floor” of the DOJ as “Judge Bell”).
I don’t have a recollection of personally meeting Attorney General Levi. However, I did have a strong impression of his integrity because he disqualified himself from a key BIA disbarment case being then being written by my office mate Lauri Steven Filppu who later served with me as an Appellate Judge at the BIA.
The case was Matter of Koden, 15 I&N Dec. 739 (BIA 1974; A.G., BIA 1976), aff’d , 564 F.2d 228 (7th Cir. 1977). The conflict apparently involved the fact that Levi’s wife served on the board of a charitable organization in Chicago where Koden had worked as an attorney.
Compare that with Jeff Sessions who continues to interfere in BIA cases by certification notwithstanding the obvious conflict of interest and ethically required disqualification stemming from his many pejorative (often untrue and/or distorted) statements about migrants exercising their legal rights, particularly asylum seekers.
I knew Judge Bell better. As INS Deputy General Counsel I accompanied my then boss General Counsel (now Judge) David Crosland to a number of meetings in Bell’s office. I believe that our response to the Iranian Hostage situation was the main topic. I remember him as having a very pronounced Southern accent and being just what I expected of a former judge — concerned with the fair enforcement of the law.
Those days are long gone. The DOJ now appears to have reverted to what it was in the Nixon Administration, when Attorney General John Mitchell actually plotted Federal Crimes from his office.
There are a good number of lawyers who don’t love their jobs. Sure, the pay is often good. But the hours can be long and the work narrow, leaving many people without much sense of a mission.
The lawyers who work for the Department of Justice, however, tend to feel quite differently about their work.
I’ve known and interviewed many over the years, and they have some of the highest job satisfaction of any group of people I can think of. “You get to do good for a living, and in the name of your country,” as James Comey said in a 2005 speech to Justice Department employees (the same speech I highlighted in my column earlier this week). “If that doesn’t motivate you to work hard, nothing will.”
To many Justice Department lawyers, doing good means pursuing equality under the law. They see themselves as representing some of the highest American ideals: Every citizen deserves the protection of the law, and no citizen is above the law.
Donald Trump does not share the view that the United States has a fundamental set of rules that apply alike to rich and poor, powerful and powerless. “Trump isn’t someone who played close to the line a time or two, or once did a shady deal. He may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America,” The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman wrote yesterday. Waldman then listed Trump’s scams: Trump University, bankrupt casinos, illegal labor, stiffed vendors and on and on and on.
He has often figured out how to stop shy of outright illegality or, in other cases, to violate the law in ways that bring only minor sanctions. He has rarely faced big consequences for his misbehavior. But Trump now finds himself in a very different situation.
The scale of the misbehavior by him and his associates appears to be large. It occurred on perhaps the biggest national stage of all, in a presidential campaign. And dozens of talented, committed Justice Department officials have the assignment of figuring out what he actually did. Thank goodness for them and for the work they are doing.
“Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks,” The Times editorial board writes. “He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado.”
But, as the headline of that piece bluntly puts it: “The law is coming, Mr. Trump.”
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It’s certainly ironic that Trump and Sessions no longer get along. They are both totally corrupt and dishonest in their own unique ways. Each is a fraud in his own right. And their shared dedication to intellectual dishonesty, bullying, racism, White Nationalism, xenophobia, divisiveness, skewed justice, and every horrible aspect of America’s past certainly should be a uniting factor.
It would be nice to think that the justice system and Justice Department that they abuse every day in office will get the last laugh and eventually sack them up. But, it’s by no means certain that justice will be done here. On the other hand, it’s highly unlikely that Trump, Sessions, or today’s GOP will escape the judgement of history for their misdeeds and the damage they are intentionally inflicting upon our country every day that they are allowed to remain in the offices for which they are so supremely unqualified.
“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.
