The Trumpist Regime's Criminality Is Getting On Everyone's Nerves

SURPRISE!! Look who doesn't want Mueller to testify publicly

House Judiciary Committee member David Cicilline (D-RI) was a guest on Fox News Sunday yesterday, where he confirmed that Barr is going to wind up with a contempt citation if he continues to prevent Congress from seeing government documents relevant to Trump's treasonous activities with the Russians. The deadline is this morning (at 9AM). "Members of our committee need to see the full report and the supporting documents so we can continue to do our work, conduct oversight in a responsible and sober way." This is going right over the heads of Fox News viewers who overwhelmingly see this as a baseless anti-Trump escapade by disgruntled Democrats.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released yesterday, shows that voters are fed up with government. They hate Trump; they hate the Democratic Party; they hate the Republican Party and they hate William Barr. The only polled figure or entity who came out above water was Robert Mueller. 31% of voters have a positive view and just 19% have a negative view-- compared to 39% with a positive view of Trump and 49% with a negative view of Trump. Mueller is up 12 and Trump is down 10. But not among the topsy-turvy Fox viewers, where people admire Trump and distrust Mueller.

Robert Mueller Investigates by Nancy Ohanian

Republican national security expert Max Boot wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post yesterday, This Nation Is At The Mercy Of A Criminal Administration, a sentiment widely shared among Democrats, but not at all among Republicans. "imagine," he suggests, "that you live in a town that has been taken over by gangsters. The mayor is a crook and so are the district attorney and police chief. You can’t fight city hall. But at least you know you can turn for help to the state or federal government. Now imagine that it’s not a city or state that has been taken over by criminals-- it’s the federal government. Where do you turn for help? That is not a theoretical concern. After the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, it’s our grim reality." As they might say in Shtitsel, "Oy!"

Even before Mueller’s probe ended, federal prosecutors in New York had implicated President Trump in ordering his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to violate federal campaign finance laws. Mueller then documented at least six ironclad incidents of obstruction of justice by Trump along with numerous instances of misconduct that, while not criminal, are definitely impeachable. The New York Review of Books reported that two prosecutors working for Mueller said that if Trump weren’t president, he would have been indicted.

Now the administration is obstructing attempts to bring the president to justice for obstruction of justice. William P. Barr isn’t the attorney general; he is, as David Rothkopf said, the obstructor general. We now know that Mueller wrote (in Barr’s description) a “snitty” letter objecting that Barr’s deceptive summary of his work, designed to falsely exonerate Trump, “threatens to undermine … public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Yet when Barr testified to Congress after receiving the Mueller letter but before releasing the Mueller report, he claimed not to know whether Mueller disagreed with his conclusions. “He lied to Congress,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) charged. But even if it could be proved that Barr committed perjury (no sure thing), who would prosecute him? Is he (or his deputy) going to appoint a special counsel to investigate himself? Unlikely. And if he did appoint a special counsel, would he heed the counsel’s conclusions? Also unlikely.

Barr’s jaw-dropping performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday dispelled any lingering confidence in the impartial administration of justice-- the bedrock of our republic. He actually testified that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “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.” Given that no president has ever felt justly accused of any misconduct, this means that the president is above the law. Barr is endorsing the Nixon doctrine: “Well, when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

The administration makes clear that this is precisely its intent with its scandalous stonewalling of Congress. Barr himself refused to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Trump is suing to prevent his accountants and financial institutions from sharing his business records with Congress, while his treasury secretary is refusing to comply with a lawful demand for his tax returns. Trump is also blocking numerous current and former officials, including former White House counsel Donald McGahn, from testifying about his misdeeds. His conduct is redolent of the third article of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon for failing “to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas” from Congress.

While conferring legal immunity upon himself, Trump is eager to weaponize the legal system against his opponents. The Mueller report documents three separate occasions when Trump demanded a Justice Department investigation of Hillary Clinton. Now, the New York Times reports, Trump and his attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, are attempting to instigate a criminal probe of his leading 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, on what appear to be trumped-up charges of corruption. In one of the more chilling exchanges during his Senate testimony, Barr would not say whether “the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested” that he open an investigation. If the answer were “no,” he would have said so.

It is hard to think of any president in the past 230 years, including Nixon, who has ever sabotaged the rule of law so flagrantly or so successfully to protect his own hide. And, sadly, it is hard to imagine that anything can be done about it before Nov. 3, 2020. The House could try to compel compliance with its subpoenas, but the Justice Department will never file criminal charges, and the courts could take years to decide a civil suit. The House could vote to impeach Trump or Barr-- which they richly deserve-- but that would be a purely symbolic act and could backfire politically because Senate Republicans, like the O.J. Simpson jury, would vote to acquit regardless of the evidence.

So for the next 18 months, at a minimum, this nation is at the mercy of a criminal administration. I am in despair as I have never been before about the future of our experiment in self-rule. Before Mueller filed his report, it was possible to imagine the president being brought to justice. That fantasy is no longer tenable. Instead we are left with the dismaying likelihood that the president will now feel emboldened to commit ever greater transgressions to hold onto power-- and thus delay a possible post-presidential indictment.

I suspect, though, that Fox Nation doesn't read the Washington Post. Over the weekend, the editorial board of the Salt Lake Tribune quoted Federalist No. 51 by James Madison: "But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." For those who might find it too obtuse or abstract, the editors explained what they are getting at:

Madison’s plan for the survival of popular government was nowhere to be seen last week, as Republican members of Congress put their loyalty to a president of their own party ahead of their sworn duty to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

By abandoning the role the Constitution assigns them, to jealously defend the power of their branch of government against encroachments by other branches, Republicans in Congress surrender their duty, their power and their part in defending American democracy.

Ambition no longer counteracts ambition.

And for what?

To get themselves on the good side of a chief executive who is so clearly corrupt, engaging in obstruction, campaign and ethics violations, using the presidency as a cash cow for his personal business interests, who disrespects the separation of powers, freedom of the press, the rights of minorities and immigrants and our long-standing international alliances.

Some will look at the situation and argue that the Democrats are being as partisan in their questioning of the president and his attorney general as the Republicans are in their defense of both.

Maybe. But there can be no question that, at least in the matter that was before the Senate Judiciary Committee the other day, these blind squirrels have come upon a very large cache of nuts.

Senate Republicans, including Utah’s Mike Lee, spent the day feeding Attorney General William Barr softball questions and trying to make the case that there was nothing to see, there’s no collusion and no corruption and no obstruction of justice. Time to move along.

These are arguments that can only come from willful partisan ignorance of the facts as they are before us.

The report from special counsel Robert Mueller laid out a litany of fishy contacts during the campaign and acts by the new president that would have been obstruction of justice if anyone had carried out the president’s orders. Or if it were considered possible, as Justice Department guidelines faithfully followed by the Mueller team says it is not, to indict a sitting president.

Mueller’s handicap through all of this is that he is an honorable man who stands by the rule of law, operating in a city that is neither. Investigating a president through the federal grand jury system is difficult because prosecutors are used to assembling and presenting their evidence in secret and only making it public if there is an indictment-- which triggers a process in which the accused is able to defend himself.

No indictment, because the president can’t be indicted, means no trial. Means no chance for the president to defend himself. Means it all gets packed up and delivered to the attorney general and then, maybe, to Congress and to the American people.

One bright spot in all of this-- small but important-- is the call from Utah’s other senator, Mitt Romney, for Congress to hear from Mueller directly. That is exactly what should happen, and soon.

It may be painful for the special counsel to publicly call out the attorney general for willfully misrepresenting-- that is, lying about-- the conclusions of his report and the underlying evidence.

But Mueller can handle it. Even if the Republicans in Congress cannot.

Editorial boards around the country are expressing similar sentiments-- without mention of Mike Lee or Mitt Romney. Republican senators who will have to face the voters next year in swingy states-- like Iowa (Joni Ernst), Colorado (Cory Gardner), Maine (Susan Collins), Arizona (Martha McSally), North Carolina (Thom Tillis), maybe even Georgia (David Perdue), Texas (John Cornyn) and Kentucky (McTurtle)-- don't want their Fox Nation viewers seeing these kinds of editorials in local newspapers. One more thing to consider though: Pelosi's role in refusing to impeach the criminal and treasonous Trump-- and for strictly political reasons. America deserves better than Nancy Pelosi.

Ball and Chain by Nancy Ohanian