William Barr - A Study in Corruption

Attorneys - including those in government positions - are supposed to adhere to ethical norms and recuse themselves from cases where they have a conflict of interest.  As Attorney General Attorney Barr has demonstrated over and over again, ethical conduct means nothing to him.  Instead of upholding the law, his sole focus is on serving as Donald Trump's consigliere and protecting crime boss like behavior from bearing legal consequences.  Efforts to obstruct justice and to protect Trump from by hiding evidence of Trump's impeachable acts on Barr's part is breath taking.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Barr's disturbing and likely unlawful behavior.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he whistle-blower’s stark, straightforward account of stupefying treachery deserves to be repeated as often as possible.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistle-blower wrote. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals. The president’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”

Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well. The whistle-blower’s complaint was deemed credible and urgent by Michael Atkinson, Trump’s own intelligence community inspector general, but Bill Barr’s Justice Department suppressed it. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying that the complaint needn’t be turned over to Congress, as the whistle-blower statute instructs. When Atkinson made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, it reportedly didn’t even open an investigation. And all the time, Barr was named in the complaint that his office was covering up.

Under any conceivable ethical standard, Barr should have recused himself. But ethical standards, perhaps needless to say, mean nothing in this administration. In the Ukraine scandal, evidence of comprehensive corruption goes far beyond Trump. Former prosecutors have said that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, may have been part of a criminal conspiracy when he pressed Ukrainian officials to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Vice President Mike Pence is also tied to the shakedown of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, having met with him this month to talk about “corruption” and American financial aid. When this administration complains about Ukrainian “corruption,” it almost inevitably means a failure to corruptly pursue investigations that would bolster conspiracy theories benefiting Trump.

The whistle-blower wrote that White House officials moved a word-for-word transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky from the computer system where such transcripts were typically kept into a separate system for the most highly classified information. “According to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under this administration that a presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information,” the whistle-blower said.

[A]ny lawyers involved in hiding these transcripts might have done something illegal. “The rule is it is both unethical and a crime for a lawyer to participate in altering, destroying or concealing a document, and here the allegation is that the word-for-word transcript was moved from the place where people ordinarily would think to look for it, to a place where it would not likely be found,” said Gillers. “That’s concealing.”

Then there’s Barr’s personal involvement in the Ukraine plot. In the reconstruction of Trump’s call with Zelensky that was released by the White House, Trump repeatedly said that he wanted Ukraine’s government to work with Barr on investigating the Bidens.

[S]aid Representative Jamie Raskin, a former constitutional law professor who now sits on the House Judiciary Committee, “the effort to suppress the existence of the phone conversation itself is an obvious obstruction of justice.”

But Barr’s refusal to recuse creates a sort of legal cul-de-sac. It’s only the Justice Department, ultimately, that can prosecute potential federal crimes arising from this scandal. Barr’s ethical nihilism, his utter indifference to ordinary norms of professional behavior, means that he’s retaining the authority to stop investigations into crimes he may have participated in.

“The administration of justice is cornered because the ultimate executive authority for that government role includes the people whose behavior is suspect,” said Gillers.

That makes the impeachment proceedings in the House, where Barr will likely be called as a witness, the last defense against complete administration lawlessness. “Just as the president is not above the law, the attorney general is not above the law,” said Raskin. “The president’s betrayal of his oath of office and the Constitution is the primary offense here, and we need to stay focused on that, but the attorney general’s prostitution of the Department of Justice for the president’s political agenda has been necessary to the president’s schemes and he will face his own reckoning.”

I hope Raskin is right. But until that day comes, people who care about the rule of law in this country should be screaming for Barr’s recusal, even if he won’t listen. He is now wrapped up in one of the gravest scandals in American political history. Can America’s chief law enforcement officer really be allowed to decide whether to criminally investigate misdeeds he might have helped to commit or to conceal? The answer will tell us just how crooked the justice system under Trump has become.

Barr is despicable and embodies the worse characteristics of an unethical lawyer.

Pelosi: Please Stop Coddling Donald Trump

I like Andrew Sullivan's writing skills and applaud the fact that he finally left the GOP and has come to recognized the toxic force that party has become - he now needs to leave Catholicism, in my view - but in his latest column he seems too hard on Democrats and Nancy Pelosi in particular.  Yes, Pelosi has been cautious and has danced around impeachment out of fear of a reprise in 2020 of what Republicans suffered after their impeachment effort against Bill Clinton.  In the argument in favor of impeachment of Trump, the differences between Bill Clinton's lying about a personal sexual misdeed versus Trump's never ending lies and clear obstruction of justice are in totally different leagues.  Yet, a majority of American voters appear opposed to impeachment - something Pelosi must take into account like it or not and whether or not it is even a rational perspective. Plus, unless and until Democrats take control of the U.S. Senate, impeachment would ultimately go nowhere.  Indeed, Trump could be video taped raping a 13 year old girl (or boy, but that would more likely be the closeted Mike Pence) on the high altar of St. Peter's basilica, and today's Republicans would still not vote to impeach him,  Decency, morality and the rule of law long lost favor in today's GOP which worries only about the satiating the hatreds that motivate the party's racist and religious extremist base.  Of course, Democrats have other options which Sullivan lays out and, in the case of Trump's New York State tax returns, they ought to pursue vigorously. The following are highlights from Sullivan's latest column in New York Magazine:

I suspect many of us voted for the Democrats last fall because we wanted a serious check on President Trump’s intensifying authoritarianism. That includes many of us who don’t support the far left’s takeover of the Democrats, but who saw the urgency of an opposition with teeth, confronted as we are by a deranged, tyrannical bully in the White House. What would happen if the Mueller Report emerged with a Republican House still intact, we worried? How could we begin to investigate Trump’s tax returns, or his cronies’ corruption, or his foul pedophile friends, or his murky real estate money-laundering, if Paul Ryan, the Randian eunuch from Wisconsin, were still in charge?

It turns out, six months later, that on all these topics, the Democratic House majority didn’t matter much at all. Whenever a serious administration abuse of power seems to demand investigation, Speaker Pelosi springs almost instantly into inaction. There is nothing she won’t not do.

When, for example, a highly dubious decision years ago by Labor Secretary Alex Acosta — to give Jeffrey Epstein an incredibly lenient plea deal for the sexual abuse of 40 underage girls — blew back into the headlines, Pelosi instantly ruled out any notion of impeaching Acosta: “It’s up to the president, it’s his Cabinet. We have a great deal of work to do here for the good of the American people and we have to focus on that.”

Really, Madam Speaker, oversight of shady dealings by Cabinet officials is the work of the president now? And holding a corrupt administration to account is not “work … for the good of the American people”? This “distraction” from real “work” meme is, in fact, a Republican talking point.

The most epic moment of Pelosi’s oversight abdication was, of course, her response to the Mueller Report. She was completely out-foxed by Bill Barr’s shameless misdirection at first, and once his sleight of hand became obvious, she seemed to have no strategy to hold Trump to account in any way. She was presented with striking evidence that President Trump repeatedly abused the power of his office to obstruct justice — the charge that brought down Nixon, and one charge that forced even Bill Clinton into a Senate trial - and was all but invited by Mueller to move the ball forward through impeachment: “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Pelosi immediately, reflexively, punted.

Later this month, we will finally get testimony from Mueller. This week, the House Judiciary Committee has issued 12 new subpoenas for Trump officials, including Jared Kushner. This time, they tell us, they’re serious. These subpoenas come after almost all previous ones were rebuffed entirely by an unprecedented blanket assertion by the president that all oversight inquiries are of a partisan nature and should therefore be ignored. But last month the Democrats passed a resolution seeking court enforcement of their subpoena power. How long will this process take? Who knows?

Or take the issue of Trump’s tax returns. Judd Legum is aghast that it took the Democrats four months even to ask for them! When Trump (surprise!) refused to hand them over, Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal filed a lawsuit arguing that the reason he was doing so was not because he wanted to see if Trump had committed fraud or other financial crimes, but that he needed “to decide if legislative action is needed” on “the mandatory presidential audit program.” He believed the claim should be as modest as possible to help guarantee an eventual court victory. But “eventual” is the operative word here.

The goods are there though. So when Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill allowing Trump’s state tax returns to be examined directly by Neal, Neal refused, even though the data would be largely the same as the federal returns. He preferred to wait for the result of his own federal legal case — which could be months or years in coming! . . . It is an effective abandonment of a critical tool for exposing presidential corruption.

I know that aggressive oversight, especially impeachment hearings, is a politically fraught decision, full of risk. I know the polls suggest it splits the country and, by her own expert counting, divides the House Democrats as well. I know her party won the House in 2018 by focusing on health care, rather than Trump. I think that should be their focus next year as well. But fortune favors the brave. If she doesn’t act against a serious threat to the Constitution, voters will infer that the Democrats don’t actually believe there’s a threat. If she lets this president own the narrative, as he keeps doing, Democrats will end up following his story rather than their own.

And there is no essential conflict between holding impeachment hearings and making the case for your policies. It should be possible for a competent and gifted Speaker to do both.

The best gloss I can think of to explain Pelosi’s abdication is that she believes that it’s only a matter of time before Trump loses in 2020, so why risk alienating moderates who get nervous with the I-word now? Why impeach when the Senate will acquit? Why go to war now, when it might imperil electoral victory next year?

Here’s why. There is a strong possibility that Trump is going to win the next election. I know it’s early but the head-to-head polling against most of the Democratic candidates is very close — and that’s before the GOP has gotten to work on oppo research on those Democrats who aren’t well known. Incumbency in a strong economy is usually dispositive.

If Pelosi keeps playing it safe and Trump is reelected, it will set a precedent that a president can obstruct justice and be rewarded for it. He can avoid all serious congressional oversight and get away with it. The Congress will continue its journey as a withered limb in a Constitution that actually gives it pride of place, Article 1. And every time Trump gets away with another crime, or abuse of power, he is emboldened. Vindicated by re-election? God help us.

And what Trump now knows after six months of Democratic control of the House is that he is as free from congressional checks whether it is run by Democrats or Republicans. Pelosi has shown every future president that they can obstruct justice with impunity, refuse every subpoena with impunity, lie with impunity, and violate the separation of powers with impunity.

At some point, Madam Speaker, history may show you had one critical chance to stop this slide toward populist authoritarianism. And you decided you had better things to do.

Former Prosecutors: Were He Not President, Trump Would Have Been Indicted

Over the weekend, I saw a headline of a poll that said 57% of Americans think Trump is a criminal. That view ties in well with the opinion of four hundred and fifty (450) former federal prosecutors who state that but for his occupancy of the White House, Trump would have been indicted for obstruction of justice. Sadly, the view of the Justice Department policy - and it is only a policy - that a sitting president cannot be indicted places the holder of the office of president above the law.   The obvious conclusion is that William Barr is more concerned with protection Trump very wide ass and duping the American public that providing an honest analysis of Trump's wrong doings.  The Washington Post looks at the statement of the prosecutors.  Here are highlights:

More than 450 former federal prosecutors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations have signed on to a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump — if not for the office he holds.

The statement — signed by myriad former career government employees as well as high-profile political appointees — offers a rebuttal to Attorney General William P. Barr’s determination that the evidence Mueller uncovered was “not sufficient” to establish that Trump committed a crime.

“Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice,” the former federal prosecutors wrote.

“We emphasize that these are not matters of close professional judgment,” they added. “Of course, there are potential defenses or arguments that could be raised in response to an indictment of the nature we describe here. . . . But, to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice — the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution — runs counter to logic and our experience.”

The statement is notable for the number of people who signed it — 375 as of early Monday afternoon, growing to 459 in the hours after it published — and the positions and political affiliations of some on the list. Among the high-profile signers are Bill Weld, a former U.S. attorney and Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who is running against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination; Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration; John S. Martin, a former U.S. attorney and federal judge appointed to his posts by Republican presidents; Paul Rosenzweig, who served as senior counsel to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr; and Jeffrey Harris, who worked as the principal assistant to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was at the Justice Department in the Reagan administration.

The list also includes more than 20 former U.S. attorneys and more than 100 people with at least 20 years of service at the Justice Department — most of them former career officials. The signers worked in every presidential administration since that of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former federal prosecutor, joined the letter after news of it broke, and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted his support for its premise .

“We strongly believe that Americans deserve to hear from the men and women who spent their careers weighing evidence and making decisions about whether it was sufficient to justify prosecution, so we agreed to send out a call for signatories,” Vail said. “The response was overwhelming. This effort reflects the voices of former prosecutors who have served at DOJ and signed the statement.” Weld said by the time he reviewed the statement, it already had more than 100 signatures, and he affixed his name because he had concluded the evidence “goes well beyond what is required to support criminal charges of obstruction of justice.”

“I hope the letter will be persuasive evidence that Attorney General Barr’s apparent legal theory is incorrect,” he said.

Many legal analysts have wondered since Mueller’s report was released whether the special counsel believed he had sufficient evidence to charge Trump and was just unwilling to say it out loud. “All of this conduct — trying to control and impede the investigation against the President by leveraging his authority over others — is similar to conduct we have seen charged against other public officials and people in powerful positions,” the former federal prosecutors wrote in their letter. They wrote that prosecuting such cases was “critical because unchecked obstruction — which allows intentional interference with criminal investigations to go unpunished — puts our whole system of justice at risk.”

No one is above the law.  Trump needs to be indicted, tried, and hopefully convicted and removed from office. 

Cracks Are Developing in Trump's Stonewalling

Lies and obstruction are the hallmarks of Trump's occupancy of the White House - I will never afford him the title "president" - with an overall goal of keeping the American public from learning all of the dirty business deals, money laundering, self-enrichment, and violations of U.S. Constitution provisions such as the emoluments clause that define the Trump regime.  Now, as a piece in The Atlantic notes, cracks may be developing in the wall of obstruction and obfuscation that Trump has spun for the last four years. One can only hope that Democrats in the House of Representatives and the courts will hold Trump to account and expose Trump's crime syndicate like business scheme.  Here are article highlights:

To date, the cover-up has worked about as well as President Donald Trump could have hoped.

Almost four years after Trump declared his campaign for the presidency, and more than 30 months since he won that office, he has successfully kept secret almost all the things he wished to keep secret. How much debt does he owe, and to whom? How much of his income derives from people who do business with the U.S. government? How much of his income derives from foreign sources? Who are his business partners, and do any of them present ethical or national-security concerns? These basics of post-Watergate official disclosure have all been suppressed.

If Trump has his way, the secrecy will continue for a lot longer. In the past few days, he’s filed suit to prevent his bankers from complying with a congressional subpoena. His secretary of the Treasury has defied a never-before-questioned law and refused to surrender the president’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee. His attorney general mischaracterized the Mueller report, as Mueller complained in writing, and now has operational control over the ongoing criminal prosecutions bequeathed to the Justice Department by Mueller. Trump’s trouble is that the dike is sprouting more leaks than he has fingers with which to plug the expanding trickles. Two federal judges, one in Maryland and one in the District of Columbia, have approved lawsuits based on the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause demanding information about Trump’s revenues from foreign-government entities. Those lawsuits—one filed by congressional Democrats, the other by attorneys general for the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia—now proceed to two different appellate courts, the Fourth Circuit and the D.C. Circuit. At this rate, an emoluments case could reach the Supreme Court before the 2020 election. The dispute over the president’s tax returns has not yet triggered a judicial process. . . . If the tax-return demand ends up in court, we’ll witness the unusual spectacle of a Republican administration inviting judges to reverse decades of conservative legal theory and to defy the clear letter of the law in favor of nebulous concepts of privacy. The law very much favors Congress in the subpoena of Trump’s bankers. Congressional subpoena power extends to any subject on which Congress can constitutionally legislate, among other realms, as the Supreme Court has affirmed again and again. It’s not necessary that Congress actually have any legislation in mind, so long as it potentially could. . . . To be a valid legislative inquiry there need be no predictable end result.”

Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr has just advanced a likely doomed new legal theory that a president is entitled to shut down any investigation that he feels is unfair to him: “The president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow [a special-counsel investigation] to run its course. . . . . It’s an argument for total impunity based purely on political power—and for that reason will gain no favor from either Congress or courts.

Perhaps the Trump administration hopes that it can run out the clock on the bank subpoenas and the other matters, too. But so many clocks are ticking over so many inquiries into so many areas of potential scandal. Can they all be postponed and postponed past 2020? For a president with many guilty secrets, everything turns on the ability to insert delay after delay before ultimate legal defeat. It’s not a great plan. It’s liable to go wrong, maybe catastrophically wrong. At this point, though, it’s all he’s got.

Mueller Complained that Barr’s Letter Misrepresented Report Findings

For those inside and outside of the halls of Congress who have suspected Attorney General William Barr to be more concerned about protecting Der Trumpenführer than allowing the American people to know the truth, new ammunition to support that view now exists in the form of a letter from Robert Mueller to Barr complaining about Barr's mis-characterization of the Mueller Report's findings. Indeed, one Democrat has already called for Barr's resignation and Barr's appearance before Congress today will likely be stormy.  Like so many other Republicans, Barr has seemed only too willing to destroy his own reputation and how he will be viewed by history in a quest to prostitute himself to Trump.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Mueller's complaint and why anything Barr claims now must be independently established.  Here are excerpts:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

The letter and a subsequent phone call between the two men reveal the degree to which the longtime colleagues and friends disagreed as they handled the legally and politically fraught task of investigating the president. Democrats in Congress are likely to scrutinize Mueller’s complaints to Barr as they contemplate the prospect of opening impeachment proceedings and mull how hard to press for Mueller himself to testify publicly.

Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.
 The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”
 The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and it made initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.
 Barr has testified to Congress previously that Mueller declined the opportunity to review his four-page memo to lawmakers that distilled the essence of the special counsel’s findings.
 Mueller said he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work, according to Justice Department officials. Mueller did not express similar concerns about the public discussion of the investigation of Russia’s election interference, the officials said. Barr has testified previously he did not know whether Mueller supported his conclusion on obstruction.
 Throughout the conversation, Mueller’s main worry was that the public was not getting an accurate understanding of the obstruction investigation, officials said.
 In some team members’ view, the evidence they had gathered — especially on obstruction — was far more alarming and significant than how Barr had described it.
 Democrats have accused Barr of downplaying the seriousness of the evidence against the president.

Mueller’s report described 10 significant episodes of possible obstruction of justice but said that because of long-standing Justice Department policy that says a sitting president cannot be indicted and because of Justice Department practice regarding fairness toward those under investigation, his team did not reach a conclusion about whether the president had committed a crime.

Trump Is More Dangerous Than Ever

Yet a former Republican, Andrew Sullivan, has let loose with a lengthy column in New York Magazine that lays out his revulsion towards Donald Trump and the Mussolini like regime that is being propped up by Republicans who have as little regard for the Constitution as the Vichy French showed for the French Republic as the Nazis invaded France.  Interestingly, Sullivan who formerly threw cold water on talk of impeachment now takes the position that patriotic Americans have a duty to demand the impeachment of Donald Trump. The obstacle, of course, will be the Vichy Republicans in the U.S. Senate who place party and retaining power at any cost above the good of the country, the rule of law, and basic morality. Among the worse offenders are Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell who, were their mothers still living, seemingly would sell them into prostitution simply so as to not upset the foul and toxic base of the GOP as they face reelection in 2020.  In his column, Sullivan looks at the obstruction of justice committed by Trump to date and the even worse acts that can be anticipated now that those who restrained him are gone.  Here are column highlights (it ends with the words "impeach Trump now):

Yes, it was worth waiting for. The merit of the Mueller report is that it gives us the whole narrative again, a chance to review the last three years with new perspective and fresh eyes, to get above the daily drizzle of short-attention-span disinformation and lies. First of all, it lays out a foreign government’s extraordinary attempt to corrupt our democratic system — in very close and damning detail.

The Trump campaign had no problem with foreign interference if it could help them, were eager and hopeful it would occur, publicly encouraged it … but never initiated this or followed through. The scale of Moscow’s operation is as remarkable as the lack of evidence that the Trump campaign was actively in on it.

Why the mutual love between Trump and Russia? The answer is over-determined. Trump is an authoritarian; he reveres thugs and bullies and murderers and mobsters; he believes in an economy based on fossil fuels; he has a thing, believe it or not, for cult-worshipping kleptocracies. From Trump’s point of view, what’s not to like? Trump prefers Kim Jong-un to democratic leaders; and Bolsonaro and Duterte over May or Merkel. Putin has said nice things about him; and the CIA worried Trump might be compromised. Of course Trump prefers Putin to his own intelligence services. The idea that Trump could only be pro-Putin because Putin has some dirt on him is silly.

But to my mind, the conspiracy question is far less important than what Mueller discovered on obstruction of justice. Mueller quite rightly notes that obstruction of justice can easily occur even without an underlying crime. And his report, quite simply, is devastating. To be fair to the conspiracy believers, the lies and obstruction and abuse of power would, in most cases, suggest that the president is guilty of something criminal — and was obviously trying to cover it up.

He [Trump] merely had to believe that the investigation would cloud his presidency and subject him to an authority beyond his control. This is something we now know his psyche cannot tolerate. In a contest between his own diseased ego and the rule of law, there has never been any contest.

So of course he lied when he didn’t have to. And of course he tried to kill an investigation that might have embarrassed him, even if it would not convict him of a crime. Mueller spells it all out in agonizing detail.

Once the investigation began, and Trump realized he could be vulnerable on obstruction of justice, he stepped up the obstruction! Of course he did. He instructed White House counsel Don McGahn to get Mueller fired; he engaged in character assassination of potential witnesses; he “launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to [him], while in private, [he] engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.” Mueller cites ten separate cases of obstruction. In six of them, he establishes an obstructive act; a link with an official proceeding; and a corrupt intent. Which is to say there is no doubt that this is what Trump did six times. In another case, Mueller found substantial evidence of obstruction.

And then there is Trump’s persistent claim that a president is effectively above the rule of law. This is attorney general William Barr’s belief — that a president has total executive control over the administration of justice and can direct it away from himself for any reason with complete impunity.

The only reason he didn’t get rid of Mueller was because a handful of his underlings — Priebus, McGahn, and Sessions among them — resisted him. And so this is not just about past obstruction; it is about the very high likelihood of future obstruction. It’s about recrafting the rule of law into one where one man controls everything and can do anything he pleases.

All of this is an unprecedented series of impeachable offenses. It is a textbook definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It is the story of a president assaulting the rule of law, attempting to manipulate the justice system, dangling pardons to induce perjury, and reflexively putting his own personal interests — or simply ego — before any interest of the country as a whole. Mueller openly states that his own investigation was thwarted by the president to the extent that the “the justice system’s integrity [was] threatened.” When a president openly threatens the integrity of the justice system, and says he has unlimited power to do so in the future, he not only can be impeached, he must be impeached.

I understand the prudential concerns about this. I share them. I worry about pushing Trump into outright insanity. And I worry that the contemporary GOP is all too happy to create a presidency — as long as it’s theirs — beyond the rule of law.

What are the consequences of not impeaching?

They are, it seems to me, real and immediate. Trump now has a Justice Department run by a loyalist who believes in total executive supremacy, and who has just revealed himself as a man willing to lie and deceive and distort to please his master. Every official who might have restrained this president is gone. There are almost no heads of agencies, and no dissent in the Cabinet. The country is effectively being ruled by a monarch and his court.

Foreign policy has been given to family members. The Fed is being rigged to remove professionals and install loyal toadies. The judiciary is being filled with judges who defer to presidential power in every circumstance. We have a president who only last week told his new acting DHS secretary, Kevin McAleenan, to break the law if necessary to stop asylum seekers from entering the country, and that he’d have his back and pardon him if he got into trouble. In any other time, that alone would demand impeachment. We know now, however, that this is just one instance of a clear pattern of lawlessness.

We also know that [Trump] the president will put his personal ego above even an investigation of an assault by a foreign power against our democracy — a threat far graver than lying under oath about an affair or passively covering up a two-bit robbery (the cause of the last two impeachments). It is a declaration that this president will not stop that foreign meddling from happening again, and will be happy if it helps reelect him. This is, quite simply, intolerable.

We have a president who is an instinctual criminal and liar, who threatens the integrity of our justice system and of our democratic elections, who is incapable of understanding the rule of law, backed by an attorney general who just outright distorted the findings of the special counsel.

What more do we need to know? To refuse to use the one weapon the Founders gave us to remove such a character from office is more than cowardice. It is complicity.

This disgusting man is not just a cancer in the presidency. His presidency is a cancer in our Constitution and way of life. How long do we let this metastasize even further? How long before we take a stand? Mueller has given us the road map. He has done his duty. Now it’s our turn to do ours: “to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

There is no qualification in that oath of citizenship. Impeach Trump now.

Mueller Report is No Vindication for Trump

Donald Trump continues to make claims that the newly released Mueller Report is a vindication of him and completely exonerates him. The claims - let's call them lies since that is what they are just like most of what Trump says or tweets - simply are not supported by the report which, while not recommending indictments, paint a very ugly picture of Trump and his total corruption.  Meanwhile, seemingly a majority of Republicans want to "move on" and ignore the cesspool that is the Trump White House.  Ditto for evangelical Christians the majority of whom continue to support a man who is the living embodiment of the seven deadly sins and what one would never want one's children to be when adults.  Some former Republicans, thankfully are speaking out and condemning Trump and indirectly those who continue to support his toxic regime.  One is Michael Gerson who lets loose in a column in the Washington Post.  Here are column excerpts:

President Trump’s claim of vindication by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report depends on some creative thinking. The president, it seems, is not guilty of conspiracy with the Russians to influence the 2016 election. He is only guilty of wishing really, really hard for Russian help and having his fondest desire miraculously granted. On July 27, 2016, Trump made a public plea to the Russians to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. “Within approximately five hours of Trump’s statement,” the Mueller report reveals, “GRU [Russian intelligence] officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s personal office.”

This, evidently, doesn’t qualify as conspiracy. But can it really be a coincidence? . . . Whatever the non-collusive reason, Trump is clearly a lucky, lucky man.

What is less clear is how we are to accept a detailed, damning, 448-page moral and political indictment as good news for Trump and his administration. “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” according to the report. This included a “social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump” and “computer-intrusion operations” against the Clinton campaign. Though Trump campaign officials didn’t directly coordinate with Russian intelligence activities, they welcomed and rooted for them. More than ever, the 2016 presidential election deserves an asterisk, indicating a serious chance that it was won with foreign help.

Trump, during his campaign and well into his presidency, dismissed this influence as a myth. . . . Trump, it turns out, is perfectly willing to minimize a national security threat for political reasons. But that isn’t conspiracy, either. Just friends helping friends.

The Mueller report documents an atmosphere of routine, rewarded deception at the White House. In one case, after ordering then-White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire Mueller, Trump ordered McGahn to publicly deny that the request to fire Mueller was ever made. (McGahn, to his credit, refused both orders.) In another case, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders lied about the extent of opposition within the FBI to former director James B. Comey. Looking at the tape of her statement, it is remarkable how smoothly she dissembles. Obviously a valued skill in Trump’s orbit.

And the report strongly hints that obstruction of justice took place, even though the Justice Department does not believe the prosecution of such a crime is a legal option during Trump’s term in office.

“Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over . . . investigations . . . . The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels.”

At other times, the effort was not hidden at all: “Many of the president’s acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, occurred in public view.”

The evidence in the report is quite specific. In one instance, Trump “sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate.”

As I read it, the case for obstruction of justice is strong. And the report takes pains to point out a possible congressional role in examining obstruction claims. “The Constitution does not authorize the President to engage in such conduct, and those actions would transgress the President’s duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’ ”

[C]ongressional leaders have some major choices ahead.

So: No evidence of direct conspiracy between Trump officials and the Russians, but plenty of evidence of desired conspiracy. And: Limited ways to prosecute Trump for obstruction of justice while he is president, but strong evidence that obstruction was intended and occurred.

Already, Republicans are urging the country to move on. In this case, moving on would ignore and reward corruption on a grand scale.

Barr Has Made a Total Mess of the Mueller Report, and Undermined DOJ

Many felt that William Barr should never have been confirmed as Attorney General given his unseemly effort to audition for the position by releasing an unsolicited opinion that basically trashed the basis for the Mueller report and made the argument that the office of the president was above the law - a concept that would have shocked the Founding Fathers. Through his handling of the release of the Mueller report, Barr has confirmed the worse fears of his critics and, worse yet, has further damaged the reputation and public perception of the U.S. Department of Justice. What is puzzling to many is why Barr - who was retired and had a decent reputation - has chosen a course that will likely sully him in the view of history not to mention further undermine the public trust in governmental institutions. Is the public political fellatio of Donald Trump worth that? Barr's window of opportunity to save his own reputation and that of the Justice Department is closing rapidly and time will tell if he will opt throw away and shred of honor and principle like so many Republicans have done to date.  A piece in Politico looks at the damage Barr is doing. Here are highlights:

Ever since would-be First Gentleman Bill Clinton stepped onto Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plane in June 2016, the Justice Department has found itself in the worst position possible for a nonpolitical law enforcement agency — that of leading actor in the nation’s most hotly contested political dramas.

William Barr’s confirmation as Sessions’ successor was supposed to provide a reset to those turbulent times. A respected former attorney general who didn’t need the job, he promised that his extensive experience and end-of-career status would allow him to make decisions regardless of what a president notoriously hostile to the Justice Department’s normal practices wanted.

Instead, Barr’s handling of the conclusion of the 22-month long investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election has thrust a new cloud over the Justice Department and his leadership, one that has grown darker with the reports that some members of the special counsel’s team believe he has mischaracterized their findings and needlessly inserted himself into the process to make his own determination as to whether the president obstructed justice.

Barr is now in open warfare with the special counsel’s office, with his spokesperson releasing a statement Thursday that seemed to push back on the contention, leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post, that he could have released a summary written by the special counsel’s office rather than his own version of events.

Barr has also moved the goal posts on what categories of information would be redacted from the report, adding two new ones to the list he announced on March 24, while refusing so far to ask a court for permission to release grand jury material, as the Justice Department did at the conclusion of two previous investigations into presidential misconduct.

The attorney general’s actions raise suspicions about whether he is acting primarily to benefit [Trump] the president because they don’t make sense when viewed through any other lens. Barr is neither inexperienced nor naive, yet when deciding among the several options available to him when he received Mueller’s report, he chose the one course of action that would raise questions about his own integrity and plunge the Justice Department into political controversy.

Barr simply could have told Congress that he had received the report and would make a version available when he had completed his review and made appropriate redactions. He could have released Mueller’s principal findings, as he initially said he would do, without adding his own conclusion on obstruction of justice. Or he could have released one of the multiple summaries prepared by Mueller’s team while review of the full report continued.

Barr instead chose the one path that could call his behavior into question, while negating the entire reason for appointing a special counsel in the first place: to ensure that the taint of politics is removed from the Justice Department’s decision-making. That choice would be odd for any attorney general. It makes even less sense for one whose impartiality was questioned from the outset, given that he was chosen for the job after he wrote an unsolicited memo questioning some of the very foundations of the special counsel’s investigation.

Barr still has a chance to lift the cloud his actions have placed over his leadership, but to do so, he will have to reverse course quickly. . . . he should follow the precedent the department set in both the Starr investigation and the 2016 Clinton email investigation and provide underlying investigative materials to lawmakers.

Mueller is one of the most talented and respected prosecutors of his generation, and his integrity will accrue to Barr’s benefit, if only Barr will let it. The sniping the Justice Department has directed toward the special counsel’s office in the press over the past two weeks, both on the record and through leaks to reporters, is not just unseemly — it also hurts the entire department and its ability to do its job.

If the Justice Department has any hope of restoring the reputation that has been tarnished — sometimes fairly, sometimes not — through the past three years of political combat, it will be by leaning on Mueller’s hard-earned reputation and letting his work speak for itself. Barr should get out of the way and let that happen. Otherwise, he will deserve all the criticism he gets, and both he and the Justice Department will suffer for it.

Mueller’s Team: Their Findings More Damaging for Trump Than Barr Indicated

Is Barr covering up for Trump?

When Attorney General William Barr issued his 3 and a half page letter summarizing the Mueller report, the reaction of many - including yours truly - was that Barr was trying to protect Donald Trump and sanitize a report that likely contained many disturbing findings on the Trump campaigns contacts with Russian operatives and Der Trumpenführer's efforts to sabotage any meaningful investigation of Trump and his campaign.  Such distrust of Barr hearkens back to his unsolicited memo  to the Department of Justice on the validity of the Mueller investigation ion the issue of obstruction of justice.  Here are reminders from CNN about the Barr's memo:

Nearly a year before his letter Sunday telling lawmakers he did not believe President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice, Attorney General William Barr authored a memo saying he thought the obstruction investigation was "fatally misconceived."

Barr, then a private citizen and former attorney general to President George H. W. Bush, issued the memo to senior Justice Department officials in June 2018.  In his memo, Barr added that Trump asking then-FBI Director James Comey to let go of the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn and later firing Comey was within his powers as head of the executive branch.

In his recent letter, Barr - not surprisingly - found that no obstruction of justice had occurred. Recently, two pundits aptly described Barr's unsolicited memo as the equivalent of a prostitute hiking her skirt up to her waist to show her "wares" as Barr seemingly sought to catch Trump's attention and secure the AG nomination for himself.  Now, members of Mueller's investigative team have alleged that Barr had understated the damaging findings of the Mueller report.  Here are highlights from the New York Times:

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation.

Barr was also wary of departing from Justice Department practice not to disclose derogatory details in closing an investigation, according to two government officials familiar with Mr. Barr’s thinking.

[T]he report is believed to examine Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation. It was unclear how much discussion Mr. Mueller and his investigators had with senior Justice Department officials about how their findings would be made public. It was also unclear how widespread the vexation is among the special counsel team, which included 19 lawyers, about 40 F.B.I. agents and other personnel. . . . . the special counsel’s investigators fell short of their task by declining to decide whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed the inquiry, according to the two government officials.

A debate over how the special counsel’s conclusions are represented has played out in public as well in recent weeks, with Democrats in Congress accusing Mr. Barr of intervening to color the outcome of the investigation in the president’s favor.

Barr said that Mr. Mueller found no conspiracy between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia’s 2016 election interference. While Mr. Mueller made no decision on his other main question, whether the president illegally obstructed the inquiry, he explicitly stopped short of exonerating Mr. Trump.

Mr. Barr’s promises of transparency have done little to appease Democrats who control the House. The House Judiciary Committee voted on Wednesday to let its chairman use a subpoena to try to compel Mr. Barr to hand over a full copy of the Mueller report and its underlying evidence to Congress. The chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, has not said when he will use the subpoena, but made clear on Wednesday that he did not trust Mr. Barr’s characterization of what Mr. Mueller’s team found.

I remain adamant that the full report - redacted only to protect confidential sources and true national security issues - be publicly released ASAP.  I and other Americans do not need Mr. Barr telling us what a report says that we are perfectly capable of reading for ourselves.

The Mueller Report is Still an Indictment

As Trump brays "no collusion" and "full exoneration" and Vichy Republicans attack Democrats who seek to have the full Mueller report released, former Republican Michael Gerson provides at though exercise that even four years ago would have led to demands for a president to resign or have set the stage for impeachment.  That Trump loyalist still support the man underscores just how much Trump has debased our government and American society as a whole. It is critical that the full Mueller report be released so tat Americans can see for themselves (i) the full litany of Russian efforts to elect Trump - something the report confirms - (ii) all of the sleazy and corrupt activities of Trump minions and (iii) Trump efforts to obstruct the investigation.  While the report may not have found sufficient evidence to lock down criminal indictments against Trump, I suspect it contains much that decent, moral Americans would find troubling.  While perhaps not a criminal indictment, it is nonetheless an indictment of Trump and Trumpism.  Here are column excerpts:

A thought experiment. Suppose that on March 24 — the day Attorney General William Barr publicly summarized the Mueller report — all of the results of the special counsel's probe that have dribbled out over the last two years had been revealed at once.

Americans would have discovered that a hostile foreign power had engaged in major intelligence operations designed to elect Donald Trump -- something consistently denied by the president himself.

In this hypothetical, Robert Mueller would have simultaneously announced the indictment of 34 Russians and Americans — a network of espionage and corruption including hackers, Russian military officers and high-level operatives of the 2016 Trump campaign.

Suppose the report had revealed that 14 Trump campaign officials had been in contact with Russian nationals, including the president's son, who had met with Russian operatives in an attempt to gain information harmful to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Suppose it had been revealed that several Trump advisers and operatives had lied to the FBI and Congress in an attempt to conceal the extent of these contacts, and also that some of Trump's closest advisers — including his campaign chairman — were guilty of conspiracy and fraud.

Suppose it had been revealed that Trump himself, while a Republican candidate, had continued to pursue a multimillion-dollar business deal to place a Trump Tower in Moscow. And that there was serious though not conclusive evidence that Trump obstructed justice during the Mueller investigation.

[A] story of corruption, criminality and cover-up. The story of a presidential election that should have an asterisk explaining that the outcome may have been substantially influenced by a foreign power. This has led to an unusual circumstance. Trump supporters are doing a victory dance over the fact that he isn't a Russian agent, just a Russian stooge. And Trump's supporters are spiking the ball following an investigation that did not clear the president of obstruction charges. So it is still a legal judgment call whether or not the president is a crook. The report itself may be a catalog of horrible judgment, unethical behavior and noncriminal corruption. It may put Trump Inc. in a very bad light. If and when it comes out in full. In the meantime, the Trump administration is defendant, judge and jury.

The full report, however, may require revised judgments from some of Trump's critics as well. Perhaps the president is not a foreign agent or a criminal mastermind. Perhaps he is a weak leader who surrounds himself with clowns and criminals. Perhaps his lack of character attracts and enables other corrupt men. Perhaps he is more pathetic than dictatorial, more fool than knave. Perhaps behind the compulsive, simplistic, narcissistic exterior there is a compulsive, simplistic, narcissistic interior. Perhaps he has moved beyond good and evil, enforcing only one code: loyalty to his person. Integrity and competence be damned.

All this may not be criminal. But it mocks our country in a different way.

Barr’s Startling and Unseemly Haste

William Barr - covering for Trump?

Prior to his appointment as Attorney General, William Barr floated an unsolicited "memo" on the issue of obstruction of justice.  The memo basically concluded that a sitting president could not obstruct justice.  Stated another way, Barr concluded the president is above the law, akin to an absolute monarch from centuries ago.  Some have speculated that the memo was Barr's way of auditioning for the job of attorney general. It certainly seems to have gotten the attention of Der Trumpenführer, who not only tapped Barr for the post but who is now calling for the firing of all reporters who reported on the Mueller investigation in a manner not to Trump's liking.  So much for the First Amendment and freedom of the press.  In seemingly fulfilling his role as rubber stamp for exonerating Trump, Barr has issued a hasty and incomplete letter to Congressional leaders.  A former federal prosecutor takes Barr to task in a piece in The Atlantic and highlights questions about Barr's unseemly haste in give Trump a pass.  Here are highlights:

We cannot yet see the report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted to Attorney General William Barr on Friday. But we can see its shadow in the four-page letter Barr sent to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Sunday afternoon. The letter will be touted as vindication by President Donald Trump and his supporters, but will do little to bridge the partisan divide over Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation, and will inspire more vociferous demands to release the entire report The letter revealed that Mueller closed his investigation without recommending more criminal charges, and that no further indictments are under seal, as some had speculated. That’s a great relief for Trump and his family and associates, but it’s not the end of their federal criminal jeopardy. Barr also pointed out that Mueller “referred several matters to other offices for further action.” Next, Barr reported that the special counsel concluded that Russia attempted to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. That interference involved disinformation campaigns, efforts to sow “social discord” online, hacking the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, and distributing misappropriated emails through WikiLeaks. But crucially . . . . To use the popular cable-news vernacular, Mueller did not establish “collusion.” Trump’s triumphant supporters notwithstanding, we don’t yet know what that means. When prosecutors say that an investigation “did not establish” something, that doesn’t mean that they concluded it didn’t happen, or even that they don’t believe it happened. It means that the investigation didn’t produce enough information to prove that it happened. Without seeing Mueller’s full report, we don’t know whether this is a firm conclusion about lack of coordination or a frank admission of insufficient evidence. The difference is meaningful . . . . The other big reveal in Barr’s letter is that Mueller “determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” about whether the president obstructed justice over the course of the two-year investigation of Russian interference in the election. Instead, Mueller laid out the relevant evidence “on both sides” of the issue, but did not resolve what the special counsel saw as the “difficult issues” of fact and law concerning “whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.” Mueller’s report “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it does not exonerate him.” Mueller punted. Why would Mueller spend so much time investigating obstruction of justice but not reach a conclusion? We won’t know until we read his report. But Mueller, a career G-man, is fundamentally legally conservative. . . . He might believe that the evaluation is so inherently political that no conclusion he could offer would ever be seen as legitimate, and that the matter is better resolved through Congress’s constitutional authority to impeach (or not) the president. Even if Mueller didn’t make an explicit recommendation, we’ll probably be able to infer his conclusions by reviewing how he marshaled the evidence for and against guilt. Prosecutors, as a rule, are not good at neutral renditions of facts. The attorney general showed no such circumspection. In less than 48 hours, he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—who supervised Mueller for most of his investigation—“concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” . . . . this conclusion reflects startling and unseemly haste for such a historic matter. Crucially, we don’t know whether Barr concluded that the president didn’t obstruct justice or that he couldn’t obstruct justice. Well before his appointment, Barr wrote an unsolicited memo to Rosenstein arguing that Mueller’s investigation was “fatally misconceived,” . . . . Barr’s memo was a forceful exposition of the legal argument that the president cannot obstruct justice by exercising certain core powers such as hiring or firing staff or directing the course of executive-branch investigations. So although Barr’s letter to Congress says that he and Rosenstein found no actions that constituted “obstructive conduct” undertaken with the requisite corrupt intent, we don’t know whether he means that Trump didn’t try to interfere with an investigation, or that even if he did, it wasn’t obstruction for a president to do so. Democrats in Congress will want to probe that distinction—as they should. Barr said his goal was to release as much of it as possible consistent with the law. . . . It’s impossible to evaluate the results of Mueller’s investigation—and their legal, political, and historical significance—without the details.

The entire report needs to be released.