Trump Pardons Three Guilty of War Crimes

Donald Trump continues to destroy American morality as he pardons three U.S. Military members convicted of war crimes.  The pardons came over the protests of the military who said the moves undermined the military justice system.  Sadly, to me, it is representative of Trump's view that if victims are non-white, then it really doesn't matter. Of course, there are also parallels with Nazi Germany where Hitler protected and rewarded those guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, Trump's support among morally bankrupt evangelicals remains firm.  The Washington Post looks at Trump's actions which undermine both military justice and what moral authority America purports to hold in the Middle East and elsewhere.   Here are highlights: 

Trump intervened in three cases involving war crimes accusations on Friday, issuing full pardons to two soldiers and reversing disciplinary action against a Navy SEAL despite opposition raised by military justice experts and some senior Pentagon officials. 

The service members were notified by Trump over the phone late Friday afternoon, according to lawyers for Army Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn and former Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, the SEAL. Golsteyn faced a murder trial scheduled for next year, while Gallagher recently was acquitted of murder and convicted of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State fighter in Iraq.

The third service member, former Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, was expected to be released Friday night from prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 2013 and sentenced to 19 years for ordering his soldiers to open fire on three men in Afghanistan.

Golsteyn and Lorance received full pardons, while the president will direct the Navy to restore Gallagher to his previous rank before he retires, the White House said. His demotion marked the only significant penalty he received following his acquittal on the murder charge.

[S]ome senior Pentagon officials [tried] to change Trump’s mind, according to three U.S. officials. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said some commanders have raised concerns that Trump’s move will undermine the military justice system. Their cases have been featured frequently on conservative media, as advocates prepared cases for the president behind the scenes.

The military, he said, has “worked for decades to lay the ghosts” of the Vietnam War and war crimes committed during it to rest, and Trump’s decision risks undermining that.

“Executive clemency like this introduces doubt into the chain of command, and creates uncertainty about accountability for breaches of military rules,” said Carter
The facts of the three cases vary.

In Golsteyn’s, the Special Forces officer went from being regarded as one of the Army’s heroes in the Afghanistan war to under investigation in the 2010 death of an unarmed man in a combat zone.

The case first emerged after Golsteyn, who had been awarded a Silver Star for valor on the same deployment, said during a polygraph test while applying for a job with the CIA that he had killed the man and burned his body. . . . He set an ambush for the man, whom he believed to be responsible for the recent death of two Marines, he said. He reasoned that if the man came in his direction, he was returning to activities with the Taliban.

In Gallagher’s case, the Navy SEAL faced a court-martial this summer after he was accused of mortally stabbing a wounded Islamic State detainee in the neck and obstruction of justice for allegedly threatening other SEALs who reported him.

In Lorance’s case, nine members of his unit testified against him, including some under immunity. They said under oath that Lorance, as their new platoon leader, had ordered them to open fire on three Afghan men riding motorcycles even though their intent was not clear, after issuing death threats to local leaders.

The action follows Trump pardoning another veteran, former 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, in May in the 2008 murder of an Iraqi prisoner suspected of being a member of al-Qaeda.  Behenna was convicted of unpremeditated murder and sentenced to 25 years after stripping a detainee naked, interrogating him without authorization and shooting him twice.

And we wonder why America is hated by so many in the Middle East.

Buttigieg: Trump’s "Bone Spurs" and Potential Pardons Are An Insult to America

Today is Memorial Day when we honor those who died in America's wars and to a lesser extent those who served in the military.  My father and his brothers all served in the military in World War II. My mother's parents both served in World War I and one of her sisters served in World War II.  One of my sons-in-laws volunteered and did three tours in Afghanistan before being seriously wounded. (By the time I came of age in the Vietnam era, the draft had become a lottery and with a lottery number of 269, I was never called up).  

In contrast to my own family and millions of others, neither Donald Trump nor his father, Fred Trump, served in the military.  During World War II, the senior Trump built military housing, including in Newport News and Norfolk, Virginia (Trump, Sr. and others were later investigated by a U.S. Senate Banking committee for windfall gains in dealings with the Federal Housing Administration).  Trump, Jr. dogged the draft by claiming he had bone spurs - although the supposed affliction had no adverse impact on his playing tennis and other sports.   

Today, we will likely hear utterly disingenuous statements by the liar-in-chief talking about those who sacrificed all for their country even as the Trumps never sacrificed anything. Democrat presidential candidate finds the concept as disgusting as I do and has called Trump out for his false military deferment. Worse yet, Trump wants to pardon some who have been convicted of war crimes, including murdering civilians.  A piece in Politico looks at Buttigieg's justified condemnation of Trump.  Here are excerpts:

Calling it “an assault on the honor of this country,” Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on Sunday said “there is no question” that Donald Trump faked an injury to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.

“There is no question, I think, to any reasonable observer that the president found a way to falsify a disabled status, taking advantage of his privileged status in order to avoid serving,” the mayor of South Bend, Ind., told ABC’s Martha Raddatz on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“You have somebody who thinks it's all right to let somebody go in his place into a deadly war and is willing to pretend to be disabled in order to do it,” he said. “That is an assault on the honor of this country.”

Buttigieg, who served as a Navy intelligence officer in Afghanistan, first accused Trump of using his “privileged status to fake a disability” on Thursday in an hourlong interview with The Washington Post.

Trump was exempted from military service five times at the height of the Vietnam War. He received four draft deferments for his time in college and one medical deferment for having bone spurs. In testimony before Congress, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen said of the medical deferment: “Mr. Trump claimed it was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none.“
 Buttigieg also criticized the Trump administration's decision to deploy more than 1,500 military personnel in an effort to deter Iran. He told Raddatz "escalation is the last thing we need in the Middle East right now."

Referring to his own military experience, Buttigieg slammed Trump’s consideration of granting pardons to some service members who have either been accused or convicted of war crimes. One of those who has been considered for a pardon is former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who stands accused of murdering an ISIS prisoner and indiscriminately shooting at civilians.

"The idea that being sent to war turns you into a murderer is exactly the kind of thing that those of us who have served have been trying to beat back for more than a generation," Buttigieg said.

"For a president, especially a president who never served, to say he's going to come in and overrule that system of military justice undermines the very foundations, legal and moral, of this country," he said.

The Constitutional Crisis Has Begun

Many scoffed when I and others suggested that Donald Trump wanted to be an autocrat in the style of Vladimir Putin, Mussolini and/or Hitler.  Yet, now, based on a memo that has leaked, Trump and his lawyers - a questionable lot in some cases - are asserting that Trump is above the law.  Indeed, the law is whatever he says it is and he can end or launch investigations by the FBI or Justice Department on a whim or in the midst of a temper tantrum.   Thus, there can be no obstruction of justice if Trump is the one engaging in obstruction.  Moreover, Trump can pardon himself.  In short, Trump is akin to a Roman emperor or an absolute monarch in the Europe of old.  If Trump persists in these demands and delusions, we have arrived at a full blown constitutional crisis.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the disturbing situation.  Here are highlights:

For most of Donald Trump’s presidency, the specter of a coming constitutional crisis has loomed over the Russia investigation. The newly leaked memo by Trump’s lawyers, obtained by the New York Times, suggests that such a crisis is not merely a likelihood, but that it has already begun.

The memo proposes several tendentious interpretations of the publicly available facts of Trump’s behavior, along with some legally questionable and amateurish citations of precedent. But the most important passage is its sweeping assertion of presidential authority.

“The President not only has unfettered statutory and Constitutional authority to terminate the FBI Director, he also has Constitutional authority to direct the Justice Department to open or close an investigation, and, of course, the power to pardon any person before, during, or after an investigation and/or conviction,” they write, “Put simply, the Constitution leaves no question that the President has exclusive authority over the ultimate conduct and disposition of all criminal investigations and over those executive branch officials responsible for conducting those investigations.”

The implications of this authority are breathtaking. Trump, in their view, has unlimited control to open or close any federal investigation.

Trump has been angrily tweeting demands that the investigation into him and his allies be halted, and that the Department of Justice instead open investigations into his political enemies. These tweets have been treated as the ravings of a blowhard who just happens to occupy the most powerful position in the world, yet is somehow merely blowing off steam.

Should Trump’s legal case prevail in the courts — and the legality of such broad claims remains largely untested — it would confer upon any president, but immediately Trump, the ability to open charges against anybody the president wants to charge, and prevent investigations of anybody the president wants to protect, beginning with himself. This is l’état, c’est moi rendered as a formal legal case.

Trump cannot obstruct justice, according to his official legal stance, because justice is whatever Trump says it is. Before this is over, either Trump’s sweeping claim will survive, or the rule of law will, but not both.

A column in the Washington Post also commented on these dangerous and unprecedented - and untrue - assertions.  Here are Excerpts:

The lawyers made a variety of jaw-dropping claims and admissions. For starters, the lawyers admit that Trump dictated on Air Force One an explanation for a June 2016 meeting held with a Russian lawyer. This directly contradicts prior assertions from Sekulow that Trump had nothing to do with the statement, which set out a false explanation for the meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and assorted Russian figures. 

We should pause right there to consider the confession, for that is what it is, that the president put out a statement falsely portraying a meeting that was related to an ongoing investigation into Russian meddling with the 2016 presidential election. Even defenders of broad presidential power to hire and fire executive branch employees lack an argument that drafting a fake explanation to throw off an ongoing investigation is somehow within Trump’s Article II powers. A pack of constitutional experts savaged the argument that Trump could never be prosecuted for obstruction. Daniel Hemel writes:

The Declaration of Independence charged King George III with “obstruct[ing] the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to the laws for establishing judiciary powers.” That alone is evidence that the founding generation did not believe that heads of state were immune from obstruction charges. And while Article II instructs the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” that does not give him carte blanche to wield his law enforcement powers any way he chooses.

Laurence Tribe likewise tweeted: “Trump’s lawyers’ sweepingly Nixonian claim of unbounded presidential power is inconsistent with the core American principle that no-one is above the law. It would mean that even pardoning someone in return for a bribe is just fine. That’s simply wrong.” Trump’s lawyers, in making such a ludicrous claim of power, make both a constitutional and political error. The political error is nearly as great as the constitutional flaw is (i.e. we are not an absolute monarchy). Democrats have been struggling with how to address the “I” word (impeachment) in the campaign. Now they have the most powerful argument imaginable in the first referendum on the president since his election: Republicans support Trump’s claim to absolute power; Democrats do not. Which party should we have control Congress?
 Where does this leave us? Trump and his attorneys are prepared to argue that his power is near absolute to shut down investigations into his own conduct and that in any event he could pardon himself. That is not the system we have, but we are heading toward that constitutional face-off — especially if voters return GOP majorities ready to defend Trump’s claims to unfettered power.

Trump's Indifference to the Rule of Law

It has been a week since Der Trumpenführer pardoned white supremacist Joe Arpaio who has  - as previously noted - a horrific record of abusing the civil rights of Hispanics and costing Maricopa County, Arizona many millions of dollars, yet the condemnations keep on coming from those who care about the rule of law and have a shred of empathy for other human beings.  The Arpaio pardon and Trump's anti-transgender ban directive - both announced a week ago - underscore the reality that Trump cares about only two elements in American society: (i) Christian extremists and (ii) white supremacists (as previously noted, from my tracking of Christian "family values" for over 20 years, the two groups significantly overlap).  The take away: Trump holds the rule of law and the civil rights of citizens he doesn't like in contempt.  In his latest column, Andrew Sullivan unloads on Trump - and by extension, his white supremacist and Christofascist supporters.  Here are excerpts:

Even a week later, the stench of it hangs in the air. The pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio is one of the more chilling authoritarian moves that Trump has made so far. I say this not simply because Arpaio treated prisoners in his charge in barbaric ways; not just because the president described this brutality as Arpaio simply “doing his job”; not even because Arpaio proudly and constantly engaged in racial profiling, making Latino citizens and noncitizens alike afraid to leave their own homes. I say it for a simpler reason: because it is Trump’s deepest indication yet that the rule of law means nothing to him.

Yes, the pardon power has been abused before — as any perusal of Bill Clinton’s final days in office will confirm. But it makes a difference, it seems to me, when the president pardons a law-enforcement officer for openly breaking the law, and refusing to abide by a court order to stop doing so. It makes an even bigger difference if the pardon is granted long before the legal process has played itself out. This isn’t a pardon, as is usually the case, for someone who has served time, shows contrition and deserves some kind of mercy. It is a pardon seemingly designed to blow a raspberry at the court system, and tell anyone in law enforcement or border control or ICE or anywhere for that matter that, if you commit brutal or illegal acts, the big man has your back.

This is government as an unaccountable, legally immune thug. Of course Trump telegraphed this in the campaign by backing violence against dissenters in his rallies, championing torture, and when he recently told police officers it was fine to manhandle criminal suspects. I still have a hard time imagining a president of the United States openly showing contempt for due process or basic decency; but here we are. No one could defend this — even National Review and The Wall Street Journal were disgusted. But say what you like about Trump, this attraction to brute force, this reveling in it, is something he has never hidden.

Is it also a signal that the president could pardon — even preemptively — anyone caught up in criminality in the Mueller investigation? I suspect so, even though Mueller subtly responded to that threat last Wednesday, by letting it be known he is working alongside Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York. State crimes, after all, can’t be pardoned by the president.

An instinctual despot like Trump can find even the most benign of the president’s constitutional powers — the pardon — and turn it against the rule of law. We really need to remind ourselves of this on a daily basis if we are not to become numb to it: to advance his own interests, there is nothing this president would not do. If we enter, as we well might, a constitutional crisis, we have been warned all too clearly what this man is capable of.