Hullabaloo

Friday, May 03, 2019

 
Get ready. The DOJ is loaded for Barr

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

It is an article of faith among people who regularly tune in to Fox News' evening lineup that the single greatest scandal in American history is the framing of Donald Trump by "dirty cops" at the FBI and the Department of Justice in order to destroy his presidency. In this telling of current events, it all started as a cover-up of the nefarious crimes committed by Hillary Clinton. When she didn't win the election, they hatched the Russia investigation in order to remove Trump by other means. He is an innocent man who was wrongly accused at the hands of the Clinton-loving "deep state" cabal, and he's heroically battling back their assault even as he works his impressively large fingers to the bone making America great again.

As Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina opened the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing about the Mueller report on Wednesday morning, he channeled that alternate reality with a rambling statement about Hillary Clinton, saying that he planned to get to the bottom of this email situation once and for all. There's no need to go into the details (if you want them, Philip Bump of the Washington Post helpfully laid them all out) but here's a taste of Graham's rhetoric:

Lindsey Graham: whatabout Hillary's emails? pic.twitter.com/2a9wGIJdQJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2019

Other Republicans on the panel also spoke at length about the email scandal, encouraging Attorney General Bill Barr to follow up with an investigation into Clinton's alleged crimes as well as all the Obama-era officials they say set up the president. As Graham's home state newspaper put it:

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Monday laid out his next steps for dealing with the aftermath of Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

First up: Launch an investigation into whether Hillary Clinton, Trump’s former Democratic challenger, got help from President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice. ... Graham predicted his GOP colleagues would be “enthusiastic” about the direction in which he planned to take his committee.

I've believed that the Republicans would have to take this up officially for some time. The Fox News base of the party demands that Clinton and her "deep state" cult be stopped. Also, Graham is running for re-election in 2020.

But until now, I hadn't thought the Department of Justice would get involved in this ridiculous con job. Sure, they've fired some top people, but it sounds as though they may now be considering a more thorough purge. And it looks like the attorney general is all too happy to help.

In his testimony on Wednesday, Barr made quite a spectacle of himself. He lied about many things, of course. He denigrated special counsel Robert Mueller, clearly miffed that he had failed to clear the president of all wrongdoing, as Barr seems to believe he was required to do. You see, Barr has a strange theory that if you follow the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel policy that a president can't be indicted then the next step is to conclude that a president can't be investigated either. He said, "I think that if [Mueller] felt that he shouldn’t go down the path of making a traditional prosecutive decision, then he shouldn’t have investigated. That was the time to pull up.” In other words, any investigation must clear the president or not be undertaken at all.

We now know that Mueller was unhappy with Barr's famous four-page letter supposedly summarizing the report's "conclusions" and complained that his findings were being misinterpreted as a result. CNN reported yesterday that White House special counsel Emmet Flood complained to Barr about Mueller's report the day after it was released, saying it was "political" and legally deficient. It would appear that the cold war between Robert Mueller and the White House has now turned hot.

This is not all that surprising considering the stakes. Mueller must have known that writing his report the way he wrote it would anger the president and his allies. The interregnum between Barr's letter and the release of the actual report may have helped convince the Fox News crowd that Mueller's conclusion was indeed "No Collusion, No Obstruction, Total Exoneration," but Mueller knew that's not what it said and that people would eventually figure it out. I doubt he anticipated, however, that his longtime friend Bill Barr would so eagerly take up arms against him. For the White House to call Mueller "political" in light of Barr's behavior takes chutzpah.

In what was perhaps the most dramatic moment of Barr's appearance before the Senate committee, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., asked Barr whether anyone in the White House had asked him to open an investigation of anyone. Clearly taken aback, Barr stuttered and stammered, asking her to repeat the question, obviously desperate to buy time to figure out an answer.

WATCH: @SenKamalaHarris: "Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?"

Attorney General William Barr: "I'm trying to grapple with the word 'suggest.' ... They have not asked me to open an investigation..." pic.twitter.com/Cq1LeQ42u9

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) May 1, 2019

They don't have to ask. Trump has said publicly that he wants the "evil people" who investigated him to be investigated. He's tweeted dozens of times that "Crooked Hillary" should be in jail. Fox News reported this just last week:

President Trump told Fox News' "Hannity" in a wide-ranging interview Thursday night that Attorney General Bill Barr is handling the "incredible" and "big" new revelations that Ukrainian actors apparently leaked damaging information about then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort to help Hillary Clinton's campaign.

As the New York Times has reported, this is actually a right-wing hit job orchestrated by Rudy Giuliani and aimed at Joe Biden, whose son Hunter has been working with Ukrainians. This sort of thing is par for the course with Republicans, of course. (Recall the bogus Uranium One and Clinton Foundation stories, orchestrated by Steve Bannon, with which major newspapers smeared Clinton during the 2016 campaign.) But this time it may be different.

Lindsey Graham will undoubtedly take his investigation wherever Trump needs it to go. He will almost certainly "follow up" on this Ukrainian angle. What's more concerning is the fact that Barr appears ready to put the Justice Department to work to help the Trump campaign, which is exactly what the right-wing fever swamp accuses the FBI of doing for Clinton.

But then, self-awareness isn't exactly Barr's strong suit. In what was perhaps his most fatuous comment of his testimony on Wednesday, he proclaimed, “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon" — this as he defended the man whose ecstatic followers' favorite refrain is "Lock her up!"

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digby 5/03/2019 09:00:00 AM

 

Meanwhile, in your bowels ...

by Tom Sullivan

The worst thing the sitting president's new Roy Cohn did this week, Catherine Rampell believes, was neither dissembling in a Senate hearing room nor refusing to appear before a House Judiciary Committee hearing. Attorney General William Barr asked a federal appeals court to strike down the Affordable Care Act. In toto. For millions of Americans.

Why an administration dismissive of law would bother striking this one down is almost, but not quite a puzzle. Like Loki going to war with the Avengers in New York, Donald J. Trump, another man who would be king wants to be seen destroying it.

Rampell explains:

If the Trump administration prevails, everything in the law would be wiped out. And I do mean everything: the protections for people with preexisting conditions, Medicaid expansion, income-based individual-market subsidies, provisions allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26, requirements that insurance cover minimum essential benefits such as prescriptions and preventive care, and so on.

The Party of Trump's historic losses last November were a product of its enmity for Obamacare. But no matter. No matter that the proposed rationale for striking down the law is rejected by conservative and legal scholars opposed to Obamacare. No matter that Trump's "party of health care" shows no flicker of interest in crafting a replacement. No matter that there seems no political advantage in destroying access to health care for millions. Such delicious revenge.

Meanwhile, half of Americans still receive health coverage though employer-based plans. The four in 10 people with those plans are in high-deductible policies that still make actually accessing care unaffordable, Rampell adds. Half of such households reported delaying getting care or filling prescriptions because of cost in the last 12 months. Obamacare expanded coverage but did too little to make it more affordable.

But it is something to build on:

For instance, the latest version of a plan known as the Medicare for America Act — introduced Wednesday by Reps. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) — would create an expansive public insurance option to compete with the employer-sponsored system. The public option would cap premiums and out-of-pocket costs and have no deductibles. The bill would allow employer-sponsored plans to continue, as long as they covered a minimum average share of enrollees’ health expenses.

Inevitably, there are also refundable tax credit proposals that offer nothing to people who pay no taxes, have no savings, and live paycheck-to-minimum-wage-paycheck even if some manage to log enough hours weekly to receive an employer-based plan. Democrats have proposed those too.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a point in trying to keep her caucus focused on more than Trump's autocratic fantasies. Trump wants to be seen destroying Obamacare. Yet, being seen after the fight is won is preferable to being seen fighting and losing. So long as Democrats wage public battle against his minions, they may not notice he has been mucking around in their bowels while they are distracted.

Republicans regularly amp up their base with the fiction that Democrats are coming for their guns. Democrats may want to take a lesson. Republicans really are coming for their health care. Democrats are working to save it.


Undercover Blue 5/03/2019 06:00:00 AM

Thursday, May 02, 2019

 
Time for Them All to Step Up 

by tristero

I think Digby's right. We can't be sure that Mueller fully understands what the Trump administration is capable of doing. He should have seen Barr's tactics coming. And apparently, he didn't. And it's unclear that Mueller fully understands that he must step up and sound the alarm clearly as soon as possible — no "going to paper," but a clear direct unequivocal discourse on how much Trump and his cronies are damaging this country.

Another point: It is unlikely that Mueller —who managed an wide-ranging investigation — is fully conversant with all the nuances and complexities of every aspect of what his team found. About all the cases in which Trump obstructed justice, for example.

That is why it is critical that all investigators at the Office of the Special Counsel be called to testify to Congress. For many reasons, it is also critical that they all be called immediately. There is no reason why Mueller couldn't testify on, say, a Monday, and that each attorney involved testify in the days after for a week or more.

Let all the Special Counsel's attorneys speak publicly.
tristero 5/02/2019 08:30:00 PM

 
Time to step up Bob

by digby

Dahlia Lithwick is right in this piece in Slate. She starts by going over all the ways in which Barr denigrated Mueller in his testimony yesterday:

It wasn’t just that Barr denigrated Mueller as a “political appointee” or dismissed his March 27 letter as “snitty,” and thus clearly the work of underlings. It wasn’t just that Barr implied that Mueller was either too timid or too incompetentto come to a conclusion on the question of whether Donald Trump had obstructed justice. And it wasn’t just that Barr suggested that since the entire Mueller probe had been proven to be “based on false accusations,” it was illegitimate, which certainly suggests that Mueller devoted two long years to a—you guessed it—witch hunt. Presumably, from now on, if the president decides any legal investigation is “based on false accusations,” he can just go ahead and impede it, a framing that makes a hash of everything Mueller sought to do. When pressed Wednesday on Mueller’s bona fides, Barr snapped that “Bob Mueller is the equivalent of a U.S. Attorney. … His work concluded when he sent his report to the attorney general. At that point, it was my baby.” This is not how you talk about a colleague you respect.

All true. And this piece was written before we saw the even more scathing insults hurled at Mueller by WH counsel Emmet Flood.

It's clear that the White House and their supine minions in the DOJ have decided that Mueller must be destroyed. As I wrote earlier, I'm sure this is largely at the behest of Trump himself. It's how he operates.

Lithwick argues that Mueller is going to have to climb down from his pedestal and engage in the fight:

Mueller, a lifelong Republican, has tried—probably harder than any public figure in the Trump ambit—to avoid doing anything that would draw him into the tractor beam of bullying, name-calling, and soapy melodrama that are the final resting place for anyone who involves himself with this president. Where lesser men have attempted to split the difference, compromise at the margins, and to persuade themselves that they were still doing noble work despite allowing Donald Trump to use and exploit them, Mueller simply never engaged, even when the president was attacking him by name. It was an elegant dance, along the invisible seam of public and private, institutionalism and self-protection. This studied restraint rested on Mueller’s unwavering assumption that if he trusted the fact-finding process of the investigation and the machinery of the Justice Department, he might come out the other side intact.

Well, any hope that Barr the institutionalist or Barr the defender of the Justice Department or Barr the believer in truth-seeking processes was going to help Robert Mueller thread this impossibly small needle was vaporized conclusively this week, and now, as my colleague Mark Joseph Stern argues, Robert Mueller is going to have to talk. Efforts to speak through his filings have proved futile in the hands of someone willing to twist and compromise Mueller’s own words until they mean the very opposite of what they originally established. And now that the rift between these two old friends and colleagues has been laid bare, the only person who can do anything about it is the person who has practically made a religion of keeping his head down.

Mueller has a narrowing path along which he might hope to salvage his own words and his own work from the attorney general, who seems to have taken custody of Mueller’s “baby” and then unabashedly attempted to tell us all that the baby was actually an accent lamp all along. Nobody has been more voluble than I have about Mueller’s right and inclination to quietly do the work, then step aside. But if he doesn’t step into the limelight to say out loud what he has written, and proved, and corroborated, and supported (with evidence Barr seems never to even have inspected), his entire effort will only serve as confirmation that those of us who still believe in systems and investigations and truth are all a bunch of chumps.

I don’t envy Robert Mueller. As the one and only character in this endless gothic saga who has managed to remain untarnished by the president’s highly contagious lack of principle, I take no pleasure in arguing that he will now have to engage. His silence and doggedness should have spoken louder than words. But in the hands of someone as bent on politicizing his efforts as William Barr, his silence and doggedness have now been weaponized against him. The special counsel cannot just live amid the heroic metaphors anymore.

I have no idea if he will do it. The report shows that they had uncovered tons of probable cause to believe Trump obstructed justice and made it very clear that he betrayed the country, if not criminally, by welcoming the Russian government sabotage of Hillary Clinton's campaign. So, it's fair to say that he does not believe Trump did nothing wrong.

However, he is one of the few remaining "institutionalists" in the Republican party so it's not impossible to believe that if he's called to testify, he will keep to the old fashioned credo "never complain never explain," just give a dry recitation of his report and then ride off into the sunset content to let history make its judgment on his legacy. He's the only one Barr has said he will allow to testify ... which makes nervous.

On the other hand, he has seen counterintelligence evidence. It's possible that even if he doesn't act out of his own ego that he will see this as a matter of patriotism.

There are very few heroes in our politics, particularly these days. So, I wouldn't hold my breath. Mueller may end up being just like the rest. But if he isn't, he's going to have to step up in a big way, now.

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digby 5/02/2019 06:00:00 PM

 
The "deterrent" was to take the children and not return them

by digby




This latest on the family separations at the border is just chilling:

On the same day the Trump administration said it would reunite thousands of migrant families it had separated at the border with the help of a "central database," an official was admitting privately the government only had enough information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids, according to emails obtained by NBC News.

"[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful," a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. "We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children."

In the absence of an effective database, the emails show, officials then began scrambling to fill out a simple spreadsheet with data in hopes of reuniting as many as families as they could.

The gaps in the system for tracking separations would result in a months-long effort to reunite nearly 3,000 families separated under the administration's "zero tolerance" policy. Officials had to review all the relevant records manually, a process that continues.

Nearly a year later, as many as 55 children separated last year under zero tolerance are still in Health and Human Services (HHS) custody at shelters around the country. The shortage of data has also complicated efforts to find many other children, potentially thousands, separated prior to zero tolerance. The administration's lawyers have said in court filings that reunification could take years.

On June 20, 2018, President Donald Trump ended his separation policy by executive order amidst immense public pressure. Three days later, the Department of Homeland Security issued a fact sheet proclaiming the "United States government knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families."

The document said that DHS and HHS, the agency that cares for undocumented children when they are separated from their parents, "have a process established to ensure that family members know the location of their children," with "a central database which HHS and DHS can access and update."

But at the time, there was no database with information for both parents and children. Some of the necessary information was missing altogether. Behind the scenes, officials began exchanging emails, provided to NBC News by the House Judiciary Committee, that revealed how unprepared the agencies were to reunite families.

On the afternoon of June 23, Thomas Fitzgerald, a data analyst at HHS, e-mailed Matthew Albence, then the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's enforcement and removal operations and now the acting head of ICE. ICE was and remains the agency responsible for detaining, releasing or deporting separated parents.

Fitzgerald asked for "alien numbers" of separated parents to be filled into a spreadsheet of 2,219 children, along with whether or not the parent was already deported, among other information. Alien numbers are assigned to every migrant apprehended by Border Patrol and are how the government tracks them.

Albence replied several hours later. The first line of his email asks, "[A]re you saying you don't have the alien number for any of the parents?"

"[T]he type and volume of what you are requesting," Albence said, "is not something that we are going to be able to complete in a rapid fashion, and in fact, we may not have some of it."

Fitzgerald wrote back to Albence, confirming HHS did not have a way to connect the thousands of children to their parents. He said he had information for a handful of parents, "about 60."

The emails confirm a finding by the DHS Office of Inspector General last September. In a report on family separations, the IG said that conversations with ICE employees indicated there was "no evidence" of a centralized database "containing location information for separated parents and minors."

A former administration official told NBC News that there was a central database, "but the database did not contain enough information to successfully reunite parents and kids. …The information sharing from DHS provided initially was not enough to be able to quickly reunite parents and kids."

Former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other government officials repeatedly claimed that the Trump administration was keeping track of separations. In a June 19, 2018, press conference at the White House, Nielsen insisted all separated children were being tracked.

"It is not that I don't know where they are," said Nielsen. "I'm saying that the vast majority of children are held by Health and Human Services."

Albence did not respond to a request for comment. Fitzgerald referred questions to DHS. DHS said that DHS and HHS took the information about parents entered on spreadsheets and added it to a SharePoint site already populated by HHS with information about unaccompanied children.

HHS referred NBC News to a June 26, 2018 quote from Secretary Alex Azar: "There is no reason why any parent would not know where their child is located. I've sat on the ORR portal with just basic keystrokes, within seconds could find any child in our care for any parent."

In a statement, HHS spokesperson Evelyn Stauffer said, "HHS knows where each and every unaccompanied child in HHS custody is at any given time, and that was true during the summer of 2018. What Secretary Azar said was true and is still true today."

Three days after the emails between Fitzgerald and Albence, Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California ordered the Trump administration to reunite families within 30 days.

Once that deadline passed with hundreds of families still waiting in limbo, Sabraw expressed his frustration with the government agencies responsible for reunifying families.

"Each had its own boss," Sabraw said in his San Diego courtroom. "And they didn't communicate, so what was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn't know where the children were, and the children didn't know where the parents were. And the government didn't know, either."

Lee Gelernt, lead lawyer for the ACLU in the separations case, said Wednesday, "It is now clear beyond doubt that the government never had a proper tracking system but unfortunately they pretended in the beginning that they did. It is likely there's still much more for the public to learn about how bad things really were."

For sure.

Personally, I think they did this knowing full well that they would not be able to reunite kids and parents. The whole point of this disgusting practice was deterrence. They believed that if they separated kids and parents couldn't find them, word would filter back to the asylum seekers in other countries that the US government was taking their kids and not giving them back.

I'm not being hyperbolic:

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that separating migrant families at the border could deter illegal immigration and that he was considering several options to tighten border security.

In June, Trump abandoned his policy of separating immigrant children from their parents on the U.S.-Mexico border after images of youngsters in cages sparked outrage at home and abroad.

But some Trump administration officials have said the policy, under which some 2,600 children were separated from their parents, was needed to secure the border and deter illegal immigration.

Trump seemed to support that argument on Saturday.

“If they feel there will be separation, they don’t come,” he said of migrants during comments to reporters at the White House.

Taking the kids was the plan. Keeping them gave it teeth.


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digby 5/02/2019 04:30:00 PM

 
If you want proof that Republicans can buck Trump if it's really important to them ...

by digby



... look no further than the way they nixed his choices for the Fed. Stephen Moore withdrew today. He boo-hooed about it to Fox News:

President Trump’s Federal Reserve board pick Stephen Moore is “bummed out” over withdrawing his bid Opens a New Window.
“It was very disappointing that this couldn't go forward but you know the fact is that this kind of sleaze campaign over the last three or four weeks was just really too tough for me and my family and you know we just decided it was much better for Donald Trump to select someone who doesn't have a 30-year paper trail,” he told FOX Business’ Neil Cavuto on Thursday.

“If people are looking at things that I was writing 25 years ago, and you know looking through my divorce records, and it just was it was too difficult for us, and I feel bad because I feel like I've let a lot of people down and the president, most of all," he said.

"He was incredibly nice at times and when I told him about this and he understood. But you know I'm bummed out frankly that I'm not going to be over there the fact because I think I could have some ideas that the Fed really needs.”

Republicans are happy to act as if they have no power because the Trumpies out in Trumpland love the president so much that they can't risk going against him. But obviously, when they and their rich donors really don't like something, they have no problem opposing it.

Let's not kid ourselves any further. Every time they go along with Trump's agenda it's because they want to.

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digby 5/02/2019 03:00:00 PM

 
The Trumpies are so happy with Bill Barr

by digby




The Daily Beast reports on the White House ecstasy over Bill Barr's hackishness:

Shortly after Attorney General William Barr’s Senate testimony ended on Wednesday, the Trump White House convened a conference call with surrogates and media allies. On it, Steven Groves, who serves as a deputy press secretary, assured listeners that the attorney general had not just done “a great job” but, according to a person on the call, “dismembered” Democratic lawmakers who sparred with him over whether the president had tried to obstruct justice.

What had seemed, to most outside observers, as a shaky moment for the administration—with the attorney general peppered as to why Special Counsel Robert Mueller had written him expressing frustration with Barr’s portrayal of Mueller’s findings—was internalized at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as a triumph.

“We have Barr’s back,” a senior White House official told The Daily Beast shortly after the Capitol Hill hearing wrapped following hours of testimony. And if there was any doubt that Trumpland was feeling emboldened by the proceedings it was dispelled just hours later, when Barr formally declined to attend a follow-up session with House Democrats on Thursday, citing, in part, his belief that he’d made himself readily available already to lawmakers.

White House officials maintained that the decision to ghost on the House Judiciary Committee was Barr’s alone. But among allies of the president, it was a glorious little F-U to the nattering critics in Congress.

“No, I don’t think [Barr] should appear before House Judiciary—they’re playing games with him,” John Dowd, Trump’s former lawyer in the Russia investigation who still keeps in touch with the president, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “This is the attorney general of the United States. This is a high official of a coequal branch. You don’t treat him that way.”

Congressional Democrats, Dowd added, had been “juvenile” and asked “stupid questions.”

Lol. But the Executive branch telling congress to go fuck itself and the president namecalling like a four-year-old every single day for two years is extremely respectful.

Barr’s hearing on Wednesday and his refusal to testify on Thursday mark yet another escalation in the fight between congressional Democrats and the Trump administration over access to, and the interpretation of, the Mueller report. What had started out as a battle over the institutional powers of coequal branches has morphed into name-calling and overt political posturing, with the administration increasingly adopting the position that it simply won’t abide by Congress’ prerogatives.

Barr’s appearance came just hours after The Washington Post reported that Mueller wrote a letter to Barr in March, in which he said that the attorney general’s summary of his report “did not fully capture the context, nature and context” of it. In his opening remarks, Barr addressed his interactions with Mueller leading up to the release of the special counsel’s report. But while he faced some tough questions by Democrats on the committee, Republicans largely gave him cover from the vitriol of his critics.

“I think he was treated disrespectfully,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said of the questioning of Senate Democrats. “I thought he did an extraordinary job, was very professional throughout the hearing. What I saw most, out of all of that, was when you lost on the outcome of the investigation and a decision on no underlying crime, no obstruction, then they’re just trying to use it as fodder for as long as they can, I don’t think it lasts very long.”
[...]
As Barr was stonewalling House Democrats, the Department of Justice was also blowing past its 10 a.m. deadline to submit the full, unredacted Mueller report to the judiciary committee, which had issued a subpoena for the report several weeks ago. Nadler said on Wednesday evening that the committee is seeking a contempt citation for the report.

The stonewalling from the administration has led to an uptick in meetings between various House committees about how to both compel Barr’s testimony and force President Trump to comply with congressional investigations. One senior Democratic aide said party leadership felt that one way to get Trump to capitulate was to continue using public testimonies by senior officials to “name and shame” the administration with the hope of bringing the focus back to Mueller’s findings.

But some Democrats are already thinking past Barr. On Wednesday, various lawmakers called on Mueller himself to testify, demanding that the Department of Justice officially set a day for such a hearing, which it has so far been reluctant to do.

Mueller’s testimony would be a fireworks display-type ending to a two-year-long investigation. But Democrats also believe that it could open new doors for investigating the president and his family.

For the White House and the Department of Justice, that would prove to be a nightmare, especially as Trump and his team gear up for the 2020 campaign. But it might not be one they can avoid. Several lawyers and former DOJ officials who spoke to The Daily Beast said there is no legal foundation or reason why the department would not allow Mueller to testify even if he is still technically a DOJ employee.

“I don’t see a legal basis on which they could prevent him from testifying,” said Elliot Williams, a the former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legislative Affairs at DOJ, adding that any slow-walking by DOJ is “political if nothing else.”

“I think it is improbable and politically suicidal for the administration to not have Mueller testify at this point given the enormous public interest in his testimony,” he added.

Of course the administration is going to do this. They have perfected the counter-narrative approach to politics. With their state media, it's fairly easy to do it. For the rest of us it feels like gaslighting but it serves their partisan purposes.

That Senate Republicans have all lined up behind it remains shocking. I don't know why, to be honest. They've shown over and over again that they have no honor. But still ...



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digby 5/02/2019 01:30:00 PM

 
The White House officially declares war on Robert Mueller

by digby



Flood is doing his job here. They are fighting impeachment now (even if the Dems are too timid to fficially call it that) and they need to do damage control on the executive privilege waivers. This will go to court. But by officially calling him a hack (as opposed to Fox News and Trump's twitter feed) they are ensuring that Mueller himself is going to have to fight back. I feel confident that Trump insisted they go this way.

This is war.

The White House has accused special counsel Robert Mueller's team of playing politics with the investigation and wildly straying from their mission in a letter sent to Attorney General William Barr last month and released Thursday afternoon.

In the five-page letter, a top White House lawyer, Emmet Flood, raised several concerns with the substance and format of Mueller's report, which did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump's campaign and the Russians but did unearth substantial evidence of obstruction by Trump, but without saying if the President should be prosecuted.

Flood slammed Mueller's approach to the obstruction investigation. Even though current Justice Department guidelines say a sitting president cannot be charged, Flood wrote that Mueller needed to "either ask the grand jury to return an indictment or decline to charge the case."

"The (special counsel) instead produced a prosecutorial curiosity -- part 'truth commission' report and part law school exam paper," Flood wrote.

"Far more detailed than the text of any known criminal indictment or declination memorandum, the report is laden with factual information that has never been subjected to adversarial testing or independent analysis," he added.

Trump, however, has been touting the report and Barr's analysis as proof he was exonerated. "No Collusion - No Obstruction!" he tweeted April 19 and has repeated several times.

The letter is dated April 19, one day after the Justice Department released the redacted report to the public.

In the report, Mueller directly explained how those internal Justice Department rules against indicting a president had a major impact on his internal deliberations. In effect, Mueller framed his entire obstruction investigation around the notion that he couldn't bring any charges against Trump even if he found ironclad evidence against him, but wanted to preserve the evidence and included references to Congress' unique constitutional role to hold a president accountable.

Mueller explained in his report that he saw the effort in part as preserving details because the President "does not have immunity after he leaves office" and that his team "conducted a thorough factual investigation in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh and documentary materials were available."

Another part of the letter explains the White House argument that Mueller overstepped his role by providing a "road map" that Congress could use to initiate impeachment proceedings. Mueller never said this directly in his report, but some Democrats and commentators have said that the report could give Congress what it needs to take the next steps against Trump.

"Under a constitution of separated powers, (Justice Department officials) should not be in the business of creating 'road maps' for the purpose of transmitting them to (Congressional) committees," Flood wrote.

The letter criticizes Mueller's decision to document nearly 200 pages of extraordinary details from its obstruction investigation. Justice Department regulations require Mueller to submit a "confidential report" to the attorney general explaining decisions whether not to charge people under investigation. The regulations don't impose limits on the length or detail of the report.

Essentially, the White House letter argues that Mueller's team was playing politics when they specifically stated in the report that it "does not exonerate" Trump of obstruction of justice.

"The (special counsel's) inverted-proof-standard and 'exoneration' statements can be understood only as political statements, issuing from persons (federal prosecutors) who in our system of government are rightly expected never to be political in the performance of their duties," Flood said, echoing Trump's longstanding position that Mueller's team is biased.

With an eye toward upcoming battles with House Democrats, the letter also makes clear that the White House wants to preserve all executive privilege for all future proceedings. Just because the President did not assert privilege for the report doesn't mean he will not do so in the future.

"The President therefore wants the following features of his decision to be known and understood," Flood wrote. "His decision not to assert privilege is not a waiver of executive privilege for any other material or for any other purpose."

As hundreds of others have already said, including myself, Trump just wants to run out the clock before the election and hopes the economy, Russia and general cheating will carry him over the line and get him back the House 18 months from now.

Fasten your seatbelts.

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digby 5/02/2019 12:00:00 PM

 
Funniest headline of the day

by digby



Via Politico:

Three Senate Democrats voted for William Barr to be attorney general. Now at least two of them say they might have made a mistake.

After revelations that special counsel Robert Mueller took issue with Barr’s presentation of the Russia investigation findings, a pair of centrist Democrats said they are having second thoughts about having supported Barr’s confirmation earlier this year.


Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who is the most vulnerable Democratic senator up for reelection next year, said he is “greatly, greatly disappointed in what I am seeing in the attorney general.” While Barr did follow through on releasing a redacted version of the Mueller report and didn’t quash the investigation, Jones now has much deeper concerns.

“I also thought he would bring this institutional stability to the Department of Justice — and not be the president’s personal lawyer. And he seems like he is moving and has moved toward a less independent role,” Jones said in an interview. “That bothers me for the 12 remaining investigations out there.”

Asked whether he regretted his vote, Jones replied: “I’m getting close to that. I haven’t said that yet. But it sure is so disappointing. I’m getting close. You might want to check tomorrow” after he reviews the hearing.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who also initially supported Barr, said if Mueller’s issues with Barr prove out, “Absolutely, I have buyer’s remorse. I would have made a big mistake.” Manchin said he will lean on Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to bring Mueller in for a hearing, though Graham has said he has no plans to do so.

“It’s troubling, absolutely. The difference between the interpretation between what Mueller really meant and what he intended. And he thought he didn’t present it properly. And Barr said he basically did represent properly,” Manchin said. “We’ve got to get that cleared up. And I would encourage my friend Lindsey Graham to bring Mueller in as quickly as possible.”

The third Democrat who supported Barr, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has requested a meeting with Barr about the discrepancies between his view of the special counsel’s report and Mueller’s, an aide said.

Red state Democrats always think they will somehow benefit from votes like this and they never do. Jones and Sinema are up for election and Manchin is just ... Manchin. But the only way they will keep their seats in 2020 is if there is if Democrats win a decisive victory. They certainly won't win because they voted with the Republicans for William Barr. To wring their hands about it now is just silly.

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digby 5/02/2019 10:30:00 AM

 
And the media gives Rudy a little kiss

by digby



The New York Times has a big story today ostensibly about Joe Biden's son's activities in Ukraine. It's very hard to follow and it's hard to understand why it merits a big story at this point.

Until you get many paragraphs down:

[T]he renewed scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s experience in Ukraine has also been fanned by allies of Mr. Trump. They have been eager to publicize and even encourage the investigation, as well as other Ukrainian inquiries that serve Mr. Trump’s political ends, underscoring the Trump campaign’s concern about the electoral threat from the former vice president’s presidential campaign.

The Trump team’s efforts to draw attention to the Bidens’ work in Ukraine, which is already yielding coverage in conservative media, has been led partly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for Mr. Trump in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Giuliani’s involvement raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is endorsing an effort to push a foreign government to proceed with a case that could hurt a political opponent at home.

Mr. Giuliani has discussed the Burisma investigation, and its intersection with the Bidens, with the ousted Ukrainian prosecutor general and the current prosecutor. He met with the current prosecutor multiple times in New York this year. The current prosecutor general later told associates that, during one of the meetings, Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Trump excitedly to brief him on his findings, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Giuliani declined to comment on any such phone call with Mr. Trump, but acknowledged that he has discussed the matter with the president on multiple occasions. Mr. Trump, in turn, recently suggested he would like Attorney General William P. Barr to look into the material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors — echoing repeated calls from Mr. Giuliani for the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens’ Ukrainian work and other connections between Ukraine and the United States.

Mr. Giuliani said he got involved because he was seeking to counter the Mueller investigation with evidence that Democrats conspired with sympathetic Ukrainians to help initiate what became the special counsel’s inquiry.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, called for investigations into the Bidens’ connections with Ukraine.CreditJoshua Roberts/Reuters

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, called for investigations into the Bidens’ connections with Ukraine.CreditJoshua Roberts/Reuters

“I can assure you this all started with an allegation about possible Ukrainian involvement in the investigation of Russian meddling, and not Biden,” Mr. Giuliani said. “The Biden piece is collateral to the bigger story, but must still be investigated, but without the prejudgments that infected the collusion story.”

This is the lede but they didn't frame it that way.

This is an early warning that it's highly likely the press is going to to be running right-wing propaganda again.

Update: Brian Beutler points out that this is actually a harbinger of something even worse:

Donald Trump is still the president today, and absent any meaningful effort to penalize him for what he’s already done, he won’t walk away from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation chastened. He will instead, as I wrote after watching House Democrats’ horrifying response to the Mueller report, fill the void of accountability with autocratic ambition—including by seeking revenge against the people who began the investigation in the first place, and encouraging foreign autocrats to sabotage his Democratic presidential challengers.

Both of those dangers have already begun to materialize—but there are others as well.

Buried several paragraphs into this New York Times story about the work Joe Biden’s son Hunter did for a Ukrainian energy company while his father was Vice President, we learn that Trump’s own criminal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has engaged that country’s prosecutors to investigate the Bidens, and Trump himself has asked his loyalist attorney general, William Barr, “to look into the material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors—echoing repeated calls from Mr. Giuliani for the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens’ Ukrainian work.”

Through this reporting we can infer why (or one of the reasons why) a cat got Barr’s tongue at his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked him if “anyone at the White House had asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone.”

.@SenKamalaHarris: Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?

BARR: ..... ah .....

HARRIS: Seems like something you should be able to answer

BARR: I don't know ....... pic.twitter.com/8FIqrGzSrm

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2019

Barr isn’t just Trump’s cover up artist. In his last stint as attorney general he completed the Iran-Contra coverup, and, in the waning days of the George H.W. Bush administration, he pressured federal prosecutors in Little Rock, AR, to build a case against associates of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in the hope of ensnaring them in a scandal that might save his boss’s presidency.

In the intervening decades, Barr has only grown more conspiratorial and contemptuous of the rule of law. Two years ago he emailed New York Times reporter Peter Baker, “I have long believed that the predicate for investigating the [Uranium One] deal, as well as the [Clinton] foundation, is far stronger than any basis for investigating so-called ‘collusion,’” exposing the psyche of a man steeped in the authoritarian language of right-wing propaganda. If Trump wants the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens on the basis of whatever Giuliani cooked up with Ukrainian prosecutors, Barr is precisely the kind of attorney general who will make it happen. If that turns into a dead end, he will find something else. Other Trump loyalists—including Peter Schweizer, who cooked up the Uranium One conspiracy theory ahead of the last election—would like DOJ to investigate whether the Chinese government has leverage over the Bidens. Any port in the storm.

Peter Schweizer, whose earlier book spurred an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation, alleges that China targeted family of Joe Biden with business deals https://t.co/98oQEpy5y8 via @WSJ

— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) April 25, 2019

All of these developments form the backdrop of a scheme to knock out the Democratic candidate Trump is known to fear the most. Trump associates have been unusually frank, without seeming coy, about their concern that Biden could defeat Trump in the general election, and they would apparently like to neutralize the threat by embroiling Biden in a politically motivated criminal investigation.

This isn’t a clever strategy, but it is blunt and chilling, and, if successful, can and will be repeated to hobble whichever Democrat Trump fears second most, and ultimately on whichever Democrat wins the party’s 2020 presidential nomination.

It so nice of the New York Times to help out.

Again.

Remember:



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digby 5/02/2019 09:00:00 AM

 

Above the law

by Tom Sullivan

American democracy? Welcome to Fifth Avenue. (The mouth is almost right.)

Stunning among other stunning statements Attorney General William Barr made Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee was his blithe declaration that the president is above the law.

Responding to questioning by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Barr claimed repeatedly Donald Trump had been "falsely accused" of coordinating with Russia. Deploying the "no underlying crime" red herring, Barr asserted that the president as head of government and the Department of Justice was entitled to close down an investigation into himself if he felt it was off the rails:

Barr said this situation was unique because the president has the “constitutional authority to supervise proceedings,” and if he feels a proceeding was “not well founded” or “groundless,” he could legally shut it down.

“The president does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course,” Barr said. “That’s important because most of the obstruction claims that are being made here . . . do involve the exercise of the president’s constitutional authority, and we now know that he was being falsely accused.”

Wild from Barr: If the president feels a proceeding is unfounded, "the president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused." pic.twitter.com/SMpiIXia92

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 1, 2019

The supposed chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America declared President Donald J. Trump his own grandpa prosecutor, judge, and jury. Bill Barr declared Trump king.

As Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) tweeted repeatedly during the proceeding, Barr never specified what details in the Mueller report he repeatedly mischaracterized were false. Democrats never pressed him to name them.

What the Mueller Impeachment Referral found — after failing to get Trump to sit for an interview — was there was not enough evidence to bring formal conspiracy charges provable in court. Details such as what became of the Trump campaign internal polling data Paul Manafort gave to a suspected Russian intelligence asset and what Roger Stone's campaign role was in coordinating with Wikileaks on releasing stolen emails remain muddy. As is whether Trump's conduct in dangling pardons before his associates obstructed Mueller's finding out. But there was plenty enough misconduct, Mueller suggested, to launch an impeachment investigation.

The report states, "[W]e were not persuaded by the argument that the President has blanket constitutional immunity to engage in acts that would corruptly obstruct justice through the exercise of otherwise-valid Article TI powers. 1091" (Pg. 178, Pt. II) Footnote 1091 refers to impeachment as a remedy.

The always-caustic Rick Wilson predicted Barr's move before he made it, warning Tuesday evening that with his knowledge of Washington's "folkways and expected behaviors" he has twice lulled Democrats into thinking he is a rational, pre-Trump Republican. They clearly haven’t caught on that he is not. Perhaps Wednesday disabused them. Wilson cautions, "Impeachment for [Trump] is reality TV catnip ... Once it fails, he’s free to rape and pillage the remains of Washington." Wilson declares, "The GOP is Trump now, and Trump is the GOP."

Former F.B.I. director James Comey explained in the New York Times Wednesday how that occurred:

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

Giving silent assent as Trump lies about what “everyone thinks” and offering up the fawning praise he demands, Comey writes, slowly "pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent" until they are lost. Comey may be sanctimonious, but it doesn't mean he is wrong.

Republicans, the party of wealth and the "petite bourgeoisie" have found their mad king in Donald Trump. I have long written that the royalist strain among us, present since before the Revolution, has never slept far below the surface. That sleeping desire for absolutism has awakened.

Comey is not alone in seeing how it has overtaken us bite by bite:

He slipped several times, but the biggest slip seemed to be planned. Barr argued that Trump (or any president) could shut down an investigation into his own crimes, by simply declaring himself “falsely accused.”

Barr is a monarchist. Trump is the GOP’s king.

Hole card seen.

— Shockratees 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🐄 (@ThatShockratees) May 2, 2019

Fascism, Stalinism, monarchy, despotism - all names for what fills the void when democracy is dismantled. It’s what self-dubbed “libertarians” meant to do all along.

— Shockratees 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🐄 (@ThatShockratees) May 2, 2019

Getting government-by-the-people out of the way, piece by small piece, until the vacuum opens and government-by-ONE-person rushes in to fill it.

It’s been the GOP right-wing’s project for decades. And it was inevitable that foreign enemies of democracy co-opted it as their own.

— Shockratees 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🐄 (@ThatShockratees) May 2, 2019

This is a perilous moment. Best to make yourselves heard and felt.


Undercover Blue 5/02/2019 06:00:00 AM

Wednesday, May 01, 2019

 
If the shoe was on the other foot, would Republicans be so blase?

by digby



Barr pretty much gave a green light to any foreign country that wants sabotage American elections. He's protecting Trump but the way the Republicans are acting, it's quite obvious that they believe this is a big advantage for them generally.

And they are actually right to say that. Democrats would turn on their own if they did this. Republicans will not. Clearly. This is a Republican-only strategy.

However, it's still fun to see what they say when someone asks them what they would do if a Democrat were in the same position:

On @AJUpFront, I asked Trump campaign adviser Marc Porter if he was ok with the Democratic 2020 presidential candidate calling on China to hack Trump’s emails, or for the candidate’s kids to meet in secret with representatives of the Iranian government:pic.twitter.com/g9zpDjg0Zb

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 1, 2019

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digby 5/01/2019 05:30:00 PM

 
Bill Barr's snitty testimony

by digby



Emptywheel has a nice succinct round-up of what we learned from Bill Barr today:

Bill Barr just finished testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It was remarkable.

Among the opinions the Attorney General espoused are that:

You only need to call the FBI when being offered campaign assistance by a foreign intelligence service, not a foreigner

It’s okay to lie about the many dangles hostile foreign countries make to a political campaign, including if you accepted those dangles

Because Trump was being falsely accused (it’s not clear of what, because the report doesn’t address the most aggressive accusation, and many other accusations against Trump and his campaign are born out by the Mueller Report), it’s okay that he sought to undermine it through illegal means

It’s okay for the President to order the White House Counsel to lie, even about an ongoing investigation

It’s okay to fire the FBI Director for refusing to confirm or deny an ongoing investigation, which is DOJ policy not to do

It’s okay for the Attorney General to call lawfully predicated DOJ investigative techniques “spying” because Fox News does

Public statements — including threatening someone’s family — cannot be subornation of perjury

You can exhaust investigative options in a case having only obtained contemptuous responses covering just a third of the investigation from the key subject of it

The Attorney General also got himself in significant trouble with his answers to a question from Charlie Crist about whether he knew why Mueller’s team was concerned about press reports. His first answer was that he didn’t know about the team’s concerns because he only spoke with Mueller. But he later described, in the phone call he had with Mueller, that Mueller discussed his team’s concerns. Worse still, when called on the fact that the letter — as opposed to Barr’s potentially suspect representation of the call — didn’t mention the press response, he suggested Mueller’s letter was “snitty” and so probably written by a staffer, meaning he assumed that the letter itself was actually from a staffer.

But that’s not the most amazing thing.

The most amazing thing is that, when Corey Booker asked Barr if he thought it was right to share polling data with Russians — noting that had Trump done so with a Super PAC, rather than a hostile foreign country, it would be illegal — Barr appeared to have no clue that Paul Manafort had done so. He even asked whom Manafort shared the data with, apparently not knowing he shared it with a guy that Rick Gates said he believes is a Russian spy.

That’s remarkable, because he basically agreed with Ben Sasse that Deripaska — with whom Manafort was sharing this campaign data — was a “bottom-feeding scum-sucker.”

So the Attorney General absolved the President of obstruction without having the faintest clue what actions the investigation of which Trump successfully obstructed by floating a pardon to Manafort.

This is what stunned me:

In one of his more forceful defenses of Trump, Barr said Wednesday that the president had been “falsely accused” of coordinating with Russia and that it helped inform the decision to say that Trump could not be charged with obstructing justice.

Barr was responding to questions from Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) about why the absence of an underlying crime — in this case, that Trump conspired with Russia — mattered in the obstruction case. Leahy pointed out that obstruction could prevent investigators from identifying an underlying crime.

Barr said this situation was unique because the president has the “constitutional authority to supervise proceedings,” and if he feels a proceeding was “not well founded” or “groundless,” he could legally shut it down.

“The president does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course,” Barr said. “That’s important because most of the obstruction claims that are being made here . . . do involve the exercise of the president’s constitutional authority, and we now know that he was being falsely accused.”

In other words, the president is above the law. There is no one else in this country who can proclaim that he is being falsely accused and then shut down an investigation. Only a president. Or, more precisely, a king.

And, by the way, he was not falsely accused. He was clearly happy to benefit from a Russian government sabotage of his opponent and it remains unknown whether or not he was under Russian influence when he did it. He sure as hell has acted like he was during the campaign and after.

.





digby 5/01/2019 03:30:00 PM

 
Everyone should tweet this quote at Trump

by digby


His top toadie, Bill Barr, made this headline today:

"No, I didn't exonerate. I said that we did not believe that there was sufficient evidence to establish an obstruction offense which is the job of the justice department."

So much for "TOTAL EXONERATION!"

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digby 5/01/2019 02:30:00 PM

 
Barr should be removed for this alone

by digby

Not only does Barr hesitate, but watch closely what Barr ends up narrowly saying: Barr says only that presidential campaigns offered dirt from a "foreign intelligence service" should report to the FBI. He seemed to wait and dodge to avoid saying "foreign government." NUTS. https://t.co/TpWxxGonXV

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) May 1, 2019

I guess it speaks to my continued naivete but I find this absolutely shocking. Barr had been asked in an earlier round about whether or not a there was anything illegal about foreign nations infiltrating and the American political system and he hedged. Coons followed up with this question and Barr's answer was chilling. He knows foreign government can hear him and he knows they are going to hire cutouts and intermediaries again --- and he wants them to do it. I wish I knew why these people are so sure that foreign adversaries are going to help Republicans, which they obviously do, but I'm almost afraid to dine out.

And for those who think Barr is some kind of goodwill ambassador for legitimate international understanding when he says there's nothing wrong with political actors being paid by foreign interests to infiltrate political campaigns, he also hinted that he was interested in looking into foreign influence in "the government."

 If he goes the way of the partisan "purge" of the top brass of the FBI that had been alarmed by Trump's relationship with Russia,  that really is McCarthyism, only this time it will be purging those who are concerned about Russia rather than those who are sympathetic to it.

This guy is something else.

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digby 5/01/2019 01:30:00 PM

 
Trump may end up yearning for the good old days of the Mueller Witch Hunt

by digby



My Salon column this morning:

The big news today is the Washington Post's Tuesday night's bombshell report revealing that Robert Mueller was not a happy prosecutor when Attorney General Bill Barr wrote that four-page PR document. He wrote his own letter to Barr and then spoke with him on the phone in the days after, complaining that Barr's summary  “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Special Counsel's work.

According to DOJ veterans, this was a very big deal:

Exactly. It’s a declaration of war, as I just tried to explain on @donlemon because everybody realizes it’s a loaded bomb that could go off anytime. That’s why I said for the laconic and obedient Mueller, it’s almost like lighting yourself on fire in front of the DOJ. https://t.co/PPw8L592PT

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) May 1, 2019

This uproar will likely last for a few news cycles, which probably has the president quite relieved. He's happy to have the Congress battle the DOJ instead of focusing on the problem that's really keeping him up at night. That would be the congressional inquiries into his personal and business finances. I think he'd rather be impeached for betraying the country than have his books opened up to the public.

He's got his hands full. The Ways and Means Committee is chasing his tax returns. The Financial Services and Intelligence Committees have subpoenaed his banking records. The US Attorneys Office in the Southern District of New York is looking into inauguration fund irregularities and that campaign finance case with Trump named as "individual one" is still out there. State of New York regulators and the Attorney General have opened investigations into possible bank and insurance fraud by the Trump Organization. And two separate cases involving Trump's alleged violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution are currently wending their way through the courts, one of which passed a big hurdle on Tuesday.

There are also 14 unknown investigations that were referred by Mueller to other jurisdictions. Trump's loyal consiglieri William Barr will likely have filled him in on those but unless they are dropping them, he has to be worried. Any federal investigation involving him will likely look into his finances. And as we all know, that is his "red line" which for some reason he believes he has a right to draw.

He seems to be very confused about the separation of powers, complaining that the Democratic House majority isn't "impartial"  and is just trying to win 2020, which means he needn't cooperate with their requests. This is also known as "politics" a profession he probably should have thought twice about entering if he didn't want anyone looking at his finances, particularly since he refuses to divest himself of his companies and spends most weekends as president promoting them.

The New York Times deep dive into the Trump family's systematic tax fraud over the course of many decades should certainly be enough to justify the release of Trump's tax returns. If laws need to be changed to prevent such activity, the congress has every right to see them as do the American people.
And as the ongoing investigations by Pro-Publica and WNYC have shown in their "Trump Inc" podcast series, the ground is incredibly fertile for investigations into the business. The Trump Organization has been a cesspool of fraudulent activity for decades.  (The piece about the branded development projects in which Donald and Ivanka Trump lied to buyers and falsified documents to banks alone is mind-boggling all on its own.)

Trump's been stonewalling all the congressional requests, refusing to hand over documents and instructing the various agencies not to cooperate. The administration has said they will fight subpoenas and contempt citations in court and the Justice Department is apparently willing to fight for his right to do whatever he wants. Finally, this week, he took the extraordinary step of suing the banks that have been subpoenaed by the Financial Services and Intelligence committees looking into possible compromise and conflicts of interest with Trump and foreign governments and domestic businesses.

From what most of the legal observers say, the lawsuit is almost comically absurd:

OF NOTE: Trump's lawsuit against Deutsche Bank attributes to House Democrats a bunch of things they didn't say.

And one is actually the headline  of a story about the NY state attorney general (not a quote) https://t.co/86WaKIqEYz: pic.twitter.com/5VWtj3BC67

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) April 30, 2019

The suit claims the Congress is harassing his children, Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka, neglecting to note that all three are executives in the Trump Organization and Ivanka is a senior adviser to the president. His lawyers, as usual, are anything but professional.

Trump likes to sue, we know that.  He learned to do it at the knee of his mentor, Roy Cohn who, according to journalist Marie Brenner, derived his power "largely from his ability to scare potential adversaries with hollow threats and spurious lawsuits."  Brenner writes that they bonded over an early case of Trump bigotry:

As Donald Trump would later tell the story, he ran into Cohn for the first time at Le Club, a members-only nightspot in Manhattan’s East 50s, where models and fashionistas and Eurotrash went to be seen. “The government has just filed suit against our company,” Trump explained, “saying that we discriminated against blacks . . . . What do you think I should do?” 

“Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove you discriminated,” Cohn shot back. The Trumps would soon retain Cohn to represent them.

Cohn went on to teach Trump everything he knew.

Whether or not the president will prevail in this suit is unknown. But it's possible that he'll at least be able to delay the release of financial records until after the election. Trump had better hope so anyway because House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced the hire of a heavy hitter, Patrick Fallon, former chief of the FBI’s Financial Crimes Section, according to two sources familiar with the move. What that indicates is that the Intelligence Committee is going to be looking at Trump's foreign business deals.

Mueller's investigation hewed closely to a mandate pertaining to criminal conduct the 2016 election and Russian interference and his report does mention the Trump Tower Moscow project as a potential point of leverage. But there is so much more that goes back years and points to a strong suspicion of money-laundering. Trump has brushed off the charge in the past saying simply that he might have sold some condos to Russian buyers. He did. And those sales are very suspicious. By all accounts, if anyone can untangle the details of those transactions, its Fallon.

For the first two years of his presidency, Trump was under scrutiny by a tight-lipped prosecutor with a narrow mandate. Now he's dealing with at least a half dozen congressional probes happening in the middle of his re-election campaign, run by people who like the cameras just as much as he does. He may soon find himself wishing for the good old days of the Mueller Witch Hunt.

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digby 5/01/2019 12:00:00 PM

 
Bill Barr, unitary executive extremist

by digby




Grover Norquist always said that Republicans only need a president who can hold a pen, meaning that it didn't matter whether he or she was a "real conservative" as long as they could get elected and sign rightwing legislation, specifically tax cuts, issue orders to dismantle the "administrative state," and pack the courts with extremist judges. Right-wing ideologues have long pressed for an authoritarian strongman definition of the presidency which they call the "unitary executive." Their dream has been delivered by the incompetent boob Donald Trump.

The GOP Congress delivered on the tax cuts and functionaries in the Executive Branch are working feverishly to destroy the regulations that keep us healthy and safe. Bill Barr has taken on the job of perversely ensuring that this erratic, bizarre presidency solidifies unaccountable presidential power.

The long-term goals of the conservative movement are being realized. No wonder they all back Trump unquestioningly.

Here's a piece of a long Politico profile of Bill Barr that will send chills down your spine:

Now that Barr has provided him with political cover from Mueller’s report, Trump is lavishing him with praise. Days after Barr released a four-page summary of the report’s conclusions that Mueller himself found problematic, Trump told his friend and Fox News host Sean Hannity that Barr was a “great gentleman” and a “great man.” In a tweet on Monday, Trump gloated that while Barr is “highly respected,” Democrats now pretend not to remember their onetime hero Bob Mueller.

Other Republicans are just as exuberant about Barr, who they believe embodies the ruthless competence of previous Republican administrations that has often been sorely lacking in the current one. After his combative news conference moments before the release of the Mueller report, one GOP operative wished aloud that Trump would drop Vice President Mike Pence from the ticket in 2020 and add Barr instead. Other prominent Republicans speak of him in almost adulatory terms. “Barr is the closest thing we have to [former Vice President Dick] Cheney,” said Chuck Cooper, a conservative litigator and Barr ally who, like the attorney general, has led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. “He’s a man. He has a very strong sense of purpose and confidence.”

To Democrats, Barr is merely shilling for Trump, putting politics ahead of the law — “waging a media campaign on behalf of President Trump,” as House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler put it. To them, he is an expression of the corruption of the Republican party under Trump, one among many conservatives who might have had second thoughts about the president but now follow in lockstep. That’s a theme they will press in two Congressional hearings this week, beginning with a Wednesday session before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But people who know Barr and have tracked his career for years say the story is more complicated. Trump and Barr barely have a personal relationship, according to White House aides. Barr may have donated $2,700 to Trump in the 2016 general election, but only after he threw $55,000 to Jeb Bush in the primaries. They say that it’s not Donald Trump whom Barr is fighting for, but a vision of the presidency.

Advocates for the "unitary executive"
Barr’s first interaction with the Trump White House came in the spring of 2017 when he met with Pence to talk about representing him in the Mueller probe. Barr waved off the offer, instead recommending a handful of friends to do the job. About a year later, when the president’s children were unhappy with Trump’s legal representation, Barr got another phone call — and turned down another offer, this one to join the president’s personal legal team.


In late 2018, when the White House was on the hunt for a new attorney general, Barr might as well have been on speed dial. He is a longtime friend of White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who worked for him at the Department of Justice in the 1990s and who pressed him to take the job. Again, Barr begged off, urging the White House to consider his friend J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge — or former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl — or his Kirkland & Ellis partner Mark Filip.

Ultimately, his friends managed to talk him into it. “We had discussions over a period of time, and I encouraged him to take it,” said George Terwilliger, a conservative attorney and longtime friend of Barr’s.

Barr’s social and professional circle was critical in drawing him into Trump’s orbit. Barr pals, including Terwilliger, Cooper, Luttig and former Virginia Attorney General Richard Cullen are part of a group of elite conservative litigators who were once wunderkinds in the the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. They grew up together and have fought countless political battles alongside one another.

The Trump era has been no different. Cullen represents Pence in the Russia probe. Cooper represents former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And Luttig was the runner-up for the attorney general post when Trump tapped Barr in December, according to multiple sources.

They are united by a firm belief in a theory of robust presidential power dusted off by Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese. Known among legal scholars as the theory of the “unitary executive,” they argue that the Constitution grants presidents broad control of the executive branch, including — to take a salient Trump-era example — the power to fire an FBI director for any reason at all.

Barr made his first imprint in this battle as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the George H.W. Bush administration, when he authored a controversial memo giving the FBI the right to seize fugitives abroad without the consent of the foreign government in question. As deputy attorney general, he told George H.W. Bush he had the power to send U.S. military forces into Iraq without congressional authorization

Conservative heroes from Robert Bork to the late Justice Antonin Scalia have been advocates of this theory. Bork carried out President Richard M. Nixon’s directive, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, to fire independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox because he determined the president had the right to do so. Scalia, in a 1988 dissenting opinion, argued that the president had the power to fire any executive branch official, including an independent counsel.

“A lot of The Federalist Society heroes are people who participated in or were advocates for the unitary executive,” said University of California law professor John Yoo, himself a proponent of the theory, which became a flash point in the George W. Bush administration after Yoo penned memos advising Bush that the Constitution grants the president virtually unlimited authority to use force abroad and justifies the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

Enter Bill Barr. Before he agreed to take the attorney general job, he drew on the unitary executive theory in the 18-page memo he sent to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last June — a document his critics say amounted to a veiled application for his current job. In that memo, Barr argued that obstruction of justice is limited to things like witness tampering and destroying evidence and that the president has “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding.” The implication: Trump was acting on firm constitutional ground when he fired FBI director James Comey, regardless of his motivation, and that doing so was not an effort to obstruct justice. Neither were Trump’s subsequent, but thwarted, moves to fire Mueller himself.

Described by his friends as supremely confident in his views, Barr said at his confirmation hearing that he had circulated the memo widely “so that other lawyers would have the benefit of my views.”

"Supremely confident" doesn't even begin to describe it. There is a touch of megalomania in Barr, a mirror of what a president like Trump would look like if he weren't a simple demagogue. If they get away with this, there may be no going back.

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digby 5/01/2019 10:30:00 AM