William Barr's Department Of Crime And Corruption

Before Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered, King Henry II was heard shouting "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" Ever since, tyrants have adapted the phrase to make themselves clear about having something wicked down without having to resort to specificity. When Trump was screaming for "his Roy Cohn," the zeitgeist puked up William Barr. Trump has been delighted ever since. And with good reason.

Barr is destined to take his place, in the history books, along earlier Attorneys General like A. Mitchell Palmer, who served under Woodrow Wilson, Harry Daugherty, was served under Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, John Mitchell, who served under Nixon and one of his execrable Trumpist predecessors, Jeff Sessions.

Yesterday a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, voted 2-to-1 to order the lower court judge who tried Michael Flynn to dismiss the case. The decision was written by a fake judge appointed by Trump, Neomi Rao, and backed up by another Republican, Karen Henderson. Ttrump has sp polluted the federal judiciary that these fake judges didn't care that Flynn had plead guilty twice.

Yesterday, reporting for the Washington Post, Matt Zapotosky and Karoun Demirjian covered the politicization and perversion of the Trump/Barr Department of Justice. They tepidly noted that a federal prosecutor’s testimony yesterday that he was pressed by supervisors to offer a more lenient sentencing recommendation for a friend of Trump’s capped a remarkable four-month stretch in which Barr repeatedly bent the Justice Department to Trump’s political interests-- generating significant controversy but no personal consequence.

Since February, Barr has intervened in two criminal cases to the benefit of those who once advised Trump; ousted a U.S. attorney who is investigating Trump’s personal lawyer; and dutifully implemented Trump’s vision for a forceful crack down on demonstrators in the District protesting police violence.

Democrats and legal observers have decried the moves-- calling on Barr to resign or be investigated by his agency’s internal watchdog-- and morale inside the Justice Department has plummeted, according to several Justice Department employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter frankly. But lawmakers, who already held Barr in contempt last year for defying congressional subpoenas, seem to have little in the way of practical recourse.

Republicans, who control the Senate, would short-circuit any bid to impeach and remove Barr, who they have asserted is drawing ire because he is trying to ferret out the corruption of his Justice Department predecessors in a Democratic administration.

“I think Barr’s conduct has made it clear that he is not acting as the attorney general for the people of the United States, but as a private attorney to protect the interests of the president,” said former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade. “What can be done about William Barr? I really think the only thing that can be done is impeachment. And I think that this Republican Senate has shown it doesn’t really have any appetite for that.”

The tension over allegations of Barr’s malfeasance reached new heights Wednesday as the House Judiciary Committee took testimony from two current prosecutors, including one who had worked on the team of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The hearing came just as an appeals court panel dealt a blow to Barr’s critics, siding with the Justice Department and ordering a reluctant lower court judge to immediately drop the criminal case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, as Barr had sought.

Aaron Zelinsky, who formerly worked for Mueller and is now an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland, said political leadership had pressured him and other career prosecutors to issue a lighter sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend convicted of lying to Congress. Zelinsky made clear that he thought the reason for the pressure was inappropriate.

“What I heard repeatedly was that this leniency was happening because of Stone’s relationship to the president, that the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice and that his instructions to us were based on political considerations,” Zelinsky said.

Zelinsky’s testimony was buttressed by a different prosecutor, who works on antitrust matters and said that Barr had personally intervened to spur investigations of mergers in the marijuana industry, even when career officials thought such work was unnecessary.

The prosecutor, John Elias, said the reason seemed to be Barr’s personal distaste for the marijuana business. He also said the Justice Department’s antitrust division was made to investigate deals between the state of California and four automakers to limit emissions, a day after Trump tweeted his displeasure about the arrangement.

“Personal dislike of an industry is not a valid basis upon which to ground an antitrust investigation,” Elias said.

House Democrats said that the prosecutors’ testimony showed that Barr has politicized the Justice Department to help Trump and his friends. In a strident opening statement, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called Barr “the president’s fixer.”

“The cancer that we must root out is his decision to place the president’s interests above the interests of the American people,” Nadler said.

Legal analysts said the hearing itself was remarkable: prosecutors such as Zelinsky are virtually never permitted or willing to speak to Congress at all, let alone to describe the deliberations surrounding a particular criminal case. They negotiated their appearances independently of the Justice Department, but their lawyers conferred with department officials about limits on their testimony.

“Mr. Zelinsky’s courageous testimony makes more painfully explicit and shocking the brazenness with which the attorney general and other Justice Department officials now readily manipulate cases to serve the president’s political ends,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department counterintelligence official now in private practice. “And it also indicates how impervious these officials think they are to any meaningful accountability and consequences for their wrongful conduct.”

...In Barr’s first months on the job, Mueller’s team delivered to the attorney general its final report, and Barr stepped fully into controversy. Instead of quickly releasing the report’s executive summaries, Barr condensed the findings into a four-page letter he sent to Congress. The letter declared Mueller had not found evidence to substantiate a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election, and had not reached a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice. Barr said he had evaluated that question himself, and determined that Trump had not.

The bare-bones description so infuriated the special counsel team that Mueller sent a letter to Barr complaining that the attorney general “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the investigative report. Barr ultimately pushed to make public a largely unredacted copy of Mueller’s entire report, though on the day of its release, he gave a news conference characterizing it in a way that closely mirrored Trump’s talking points.

In recent months, critics have alleged that Barr has sought to undo the special counsel’s work. Zelinsky testified that career prosecutors initially won their fight over Stone’s sentencing recommendation and filed essentially the request they wanted. But early the next morning, Trump tweeted his displeasure, and Barr directed that a new memo be filed, prompting Zelinsky and three other career prosecutors to withdraw from the case.

Barr has said that he did not discuss the case with the president and that his intervention was not a result of the president’s tweet. In the episode’s aftermath, he gave a remarkable interview saying Trump’s social media missives “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

Barr asked U.S. Attorney John Durham in Connecticut to review the FBI’s Russia investigation and U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen in St. Louis to review the Flynn case-- unusual moves that critics say are meant to fuel Republican attacks on an inquiry that dogged Trump’s presidency. Last month, at Jensen’s recommendation, Barr had the Justice Department move to walk away entirely from the prosecution of Flynn, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI’s about his dealings with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Ryan Fayhee, a former Justice Department prosecutor now in private practice at Hughes Hubbard & Reed, said that Barr had “clearly participated in the systematic undoing of the Mueller investigation,” noting that-- in part because of coronavirus-related releases-- none of those Mueller charged are currently in prison.

“It’s thinly veiled and troubling to say the least,” Fayhee said. “Bill Barr is very bright, capable, and ran a Department of Justice that didn’t look anything like this the last time around-- and didn’t act like this the last time around. The only different factor is the person in the White House.”

Critics have noted that Barr, too, has taken other steps that have fallen in line with the president’s interests. Like Trump, he has voiced skepticism about mail-in voting, telling the New York Times Magazine it could be susceptible to a foreign operation, even though current and former election officials dispute that.

At Trump’s request, he led the law enforcement response to recent protests in the District over police violence and controversially ordered the pushing back of protesters from outside of Lafayette Square near the White House on June 1. That led to police using chemical irritant and horses against largely peaceful demonstrators, just before Trump walked across the square for a photo op at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Barr has said the events were not related.

Last week, Barr moved to oust Geoffrey Berman as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Berman’s office has been investigating Rudolph W. Giuliani, a personal lawyer to Trump, though the Justice Department has disputed that Berman’s removal is related to any particular case.

A spokesman for Barr said Wednesday that Barr had agreed to appear before the Judiciary Committee on July 28; he has not made such an appearance since Democrats took over the House majority in 2019. Though analysts note that he is unlikely to face any legal consequences for his various recent moves, he still has to answer to his peers, the public and his own department. Thousands of Justice Department alumni have endorsed various letters calling for Barr’s ouster, and this week, a group of professors at the George Washington University Law School, from which Barr has a degree, condemned his actions.

“At some point,” said McQuade, the former U.S. attorney, “you lose the room.”

Why Did Trump Order Barr To Fire Geoffrey Berman Friday Night?

Yesterday Neal Katyal, a former Acting Solicitor General, and Josh Geltzer, Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, penned a piece for The Atlantic on why Trump keeps losing at a conservative Supreme Court. "The legal reasoning may look like it turns on obscure technicalities," they wrote, "but the administration’s cases are falling apart because of something much more deeply wrong... Trump keeps losing not because of something obscure, but because of something fundamental: his abuse of the executive branch. Much of his administration’s approach to governance rests on attempting executive actions that lack any meaningful justification rooted in expertise, or even rational thought."

Trump’s abuse of the executive branch is one of the most damaging aspects of his presidency, because it rejects a reasoned approach to making government policy. Trump has made clear-- most notably during the impeachment process-- that he disdains the civil servants who bring deep expertise and valuable experience to important policy questions. So it’s not surprising he blew off their advice that adding a citizenship question to the census would not help in any meaningful way and would harm the core enterprise of the census itself. Trump doesn’t care what they have to say, and his Cabinet members—like the commerce secretary-- seem not to care, either. Such disregard is not merely some technical violation-- it’s a body blow in Trump’s assault on civil servants.

This is part of Trump’s bigger disregard for law and process. Trump has made clear time and again that he doesn’t really care what the law says... Trump doesn’t see law as a constraint, but something to be manipulated-- and that’s clearly a message his Cabinet seems to have received. Consequently, they play fast and loose with the law. The Court, in this decision and last year’s, is essentially saying that the law still matters.

Ultimately, that’s precisely what’s at stake as long as Trump is president. If all that matters is a president’s policy preferences, then law-- including judicial review-- is basically a facade: Dress it up enough, and it’ll pass muster. But if law matters-- if building a record and considering facts and providing honest reasons matter-- then Trump is sure to keep losing.

Once Trump realized he couldn't manipulate U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara he fired him and quickly called in Geoffrey Berman-- a long time Republican campaign donor who had maxed out to Trump and who had worked as a volunteer on the Trump transition team-- for an interview. Satisfied that he could manipulate Berman, he had Attorney General Pete Sessions appoint him to head the Southern District of New York-- at the same time he appointed 16 others to head DOJ offices around the country on an interim basis until the Senate could confirm them; Trump never formally nominated any of them and the Chief Judge of the Southern District of New York, acing on behalf of a unanimous court, then appointed Berman U.S. Attorney until the Senate confirms someone nominated by the president.

Berman soon started investigating Trump cronies and allies, including Trump fixer Michael Cohen, Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY), far right domestic terrorist Cesar Sayoc, Putin assets Natalia Veselnitskaya, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Halkbank, the largest state-owned bank in Turkey-- causing Trump difficulties with Turkish autocrat and Trump briber Recep Tayyip Erdoğan-- and Trump procurer Jeffrey Epstein, whose case resulted in the firing of Trumpist Labor Secretary Alex Acosta. And... Giuliani.

Trump wanted him gone and on Friday night he was preemptively fired by Trump hatchet man William Barr, who called it a "resignation." That sparked this popular meme to start trending on social media:

Barr indicated that Trump intends to nominate the lapdog SEC chairman Jay Clayton to replace Berman-- who has exactly ZERO prosecutorial experience, exactly the kind of prosecutor that would be ideal for Trump's purposes. Meanwhile, Berman at first publicly refused to vacate the office and said that until a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate, the office’s "investigations will move forward without delay or interruption." Presumably, one of those investigations is of great concern to Señor Trumpanzee. By late yesterday, Berman, no doubt under immense pressure, had folded and agreed to step down. Interestingly, Trump claimed he had nothing to do with the firing and Barr claimed that he was ordered to fir Berman by Trump.

Jim Himes is a senior member of the Intelligence Committee and chair of its Subcommittee on Strategic Technologies and Advanced Research. Saturday morning he told me that "The AG’s foolish attempt to forcibly 'resign' the US Attorney must be investigated by the Congress. Neither Barr nor anyone in the White House gets the benefit of the doubt anymore. If Barr’s action was designed to protect the President from investigation he should resign."

I look forward to the day that Texas progressive congressional candidate and former Austin City Attorney Mike Siegel is serving on the House Judiciary Committee. I asked him how he reads this DOJ mess. He got right to the point-- and fast-- telling me that "Protecting our democracy can’t wait for the electoral cycle. AG Barr is undermining the rule of law, debasing the DOJ and turning federal prosecutors into Trump’s personal minions. The House should impeach Barr and until then, use every tool at their disposal to impede his corrupt abuses."

Ted Lieu is co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, which helps the House Democrats formulate messaging. I hope his tweets this weekend are indicative of how the whole caucus feels about Trump and Barr firing Berman. Lieu, a prominent member of the House Judiciary Committee, sent his first tweet on the scandal almost immediately after the attempt by Barr to deceive the American people and make it look like Berman had resigned: "Wow, not only is US Attorney for SDNY Geoffrey Berman not resigning, he went out of his way to say that SDNY’s investigations and important cases will continue unimpeded. Was Bill Barr of the Justice Department trying to obstruct an investigation or case by attempting to fire him?"

An hour later he addressed other Department of Justice employees directly, reminding them that "All of you took an oath. That oath was not to Donald Trump or Bill Barr. It was to the Constitution. If Trump or Barr gives you an order that conflicts with the Constitution or statutes, I urge you to follow the example of US Attorney Berman."

Then in the wee hours of the morning he tweeted directly at those same employees again: "There is a 16 alarm fire due to the perversion of DOJ by Bill Barr. I urge you to file motions with the courts ASAP; use whistleblower statutes; report to IG; or contact the House Judiciary Committee. Do everything you can to ensure the rule of law is followed."

After some sleep and, presumably further reflection, Lieu tweeted that "We are witnessing the most corrupt Administration in US history. Donald Trump and Bill Barr have repeatedly fired government officials to protect themselves or their friends. From the FBI Director to multiple Inspectors General to Jessie Liu to the attempted firing of Berman."

Late Saturday, following a day of chaotic Trumpian melodrama, Lieu tweeted "Bill Barr will not investigate himself. But we on the House Judiciary Committee can and will investigate him. The spectacle he created in firing US Attorney Berman is part of a broader pattern of apparently corrupt behavior where Barr has intervened to protect Donald Trump and his friends."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

We don't live in a sane world. That much is clear every time we see Trump on TV and no one is dragging him off in chains. Such is the human condition. But, in a sane world, Trump would not exist, not just as President Of The United States but as anything at all.

Also, in a sane world, no media outlet would call William Barr the Attorney General of the United States. Instead, and I highly recommend this, every one would stop lying and call Trump's Attorney General what he really is: Trump's Consigliere. He is Godfather Trump's Tom Hagen, or, if you must, Roy Cohn; maybe a combination of both.

Now, next time you hear the words "Justice Department," a department that has always been misnamed, ask yourself why, with all of the lawyers employed there, not one has the patriotism to come forward as a whistleblower.

The story of Chapo Guzmán's celebrated jailbreak just keeps becoming more and more bewildering

NYRB accompanies Alma Guillermoprieto's post with this photo of "a Mexican federal police officer inspecting Chapo Guzmán’s escape tunnel, July 16, 2016."

by Ken

I've held off trying to deal with the bizarre story of the July 11 jailbreak of master Mexican drug cartelist Chapo Guzmán because there isn't any aspect of the story that makes the tiniest grain of sense, and I kept figuring that if we waited awhile, some missing pieces of the puzzle would begin to form a picture of some sort.

Instead, not just the additional facts but the added speculations have only compounded the confusion and incomprehensibility of what the New York Review of Books' Alma Guillermoprieto describes in a new post, "Guzmán: The Buried Truth," as "an unbroken string of punchlines, arguably the greatest pie-in-the-face embarrassment any Mexican government has ever had to deal with," which has Mexicans "still riffing compulsively about it." (Sample: "A startled Bugs Bunny emerges from his hole; 'You'll never guess who I just ran into!' ")

I was delighted to see that Guillermoprieto, NYRB's crackerjack Latin American correspondent, was weighing in. Alas, in the end she only widens, deepens, and solidifies the confusion. But along the way she adds some interesting detail and speculation.

The official story, which has Chapo dropping out of his cell through that foot-square excavation in the concrete floor of his cell's shower, conveniently hidden from camera view by a short privacy wall, into a 60-foot-deep mile-long tunnel accessible at either end only by a right-angle straight-vertical tunnel to the surface -- which just happened to hit that exact spot in Chapo's cell, all excavated while his cell next-cell neighbor was one of his bitterest enemies, David Cárdenas Guillén, a leader of the self-styled Cartel del Golfo," who would have had every reason to blow the whistle on him but "claimed to have heard no noise of any kind from the neighboring cell -- ever."

I've only scratched the surface of the improbabilities and seeming impossibilities built into the official account. "Millions of Mexicans believe that there is no such tunnel," Guillermoprieto writes, noting that reporters have only been allowed to see a few feet of the alleged tunnel, at either supposed end -- and that even if one wants to believe the official account: "[R]eally, with all the cooperation Guzmán received, and all the money and trickery he must have had to deploy in order to get that tunnel built and precisely choreograph his escape, wouldn’t it have been easier just to stroll out the front door?" Which is, we may recall, the explanation Chapo himself is supposed to have offered to prosecutors for his previous prison escape, which had come with a wildly improbable official "explanation" about his escapingin a laundry cart.

For a while there seemed some promise in a connection between the new escape and the formal request by the U.S. government, less than three weeks earlier, for Chapo's extradition. President Enrique Peña Nieto seemed pretty clear that the Mexican government had no intention of handing Chapo over, but it seemed almost reasonable to speculate that both Chapo and somebody in a position to facilitate an escape weren't so sure, and wanted to make sure that the prisoner wouldn't be in a position to sit down for chinwags with U.S. authorities. The problem, Guillermoprieto notes, is that the tunnel would then have to have been built between June 25 and July 11, when it "appears to have been under construction for at least a year."

Well, there is a theory that takes this into account, sort of:

Guzmán turned himself in voluntarily last year after the government—fearful of what Chapo might tell about his high-level connections in Mexico—agreed not to extradite him. This would also explain the government’s strange initial reluctance to accept loudly-proferred US assistance after Guzmán vanished. This is conspiracy delirium of the highest order, but given the government’s utter failure to account for the many questions surrounding his escape, it’s been as good an explanation as any.

NOW THERE'S A "BREATHTAKING NEW VERSION"! YAY!

It's presented by "the unusually well-sourced and serious weekly magazine Proceso," in its July 19 issue:

According to the magazine, Chapo really was taken prisoner unawares last year in his home state of Sinaloa, but not by Mexican security forces. Instead, he was arrested by DEA agents and US marshals disguised as Mexican marines. This information comes from two unnamed and uncharacterized US sources who spoke to a Proceso reporter in Washington, DC. According to the sources, US intelligence had been successfully tracking Guzmán during the first three weeks of February 2014, thanks to a combination of satellite surveillance and information provided by his associates. On the night of February 22, when Guzmán checked into a quiet beachfront hotel in the resort city of Mazatlán, and had his wife and twin daughters join him, the agents told Proceso they were able to pinpoint the room their intended prey was in.

According to Proceso, the US agents notified no one that they were about to arrest Guzmán, except for two Mexican Marines they needed but didn’t quite trust. (The US agents did not provide the marines with details of the operation until they were at the hotel door.) It isn’t clear where, or with whose approval, the agents got the uniforms and three armored cars they used that night, but no government official in Mexico City was notified of the operation—“neither in the Attorney General’s Office nor in the Interior Ministry,” Proceso quotes one of the US officials as saying. “We were afraid that the information would be leaked and as on other occasions the plans would come to nothing,” according to someone identified by the magazine as “one of the officials of the Obama Administration.”

It wasn’t until the helicopter carrying Guzmán to Mexico City was in the air that the US agents “notified the highest levels of the Mexican government of the capture of the Sinaloa capo,” Proceso quotes the officials as saying. When the disguised agents removed their ski masks on landing, the waiting members of the Peña Nieto administration were shocked to see that they were not Mexicans. The episode did not end well for diplomacy; “Our agents shared [the information they had] with [then Mexican Attorney General Jesús] Murillo Karam, but that gentleman, with his anti-Americanism” refused to approve extradition, the Proceso article concludes.

Note that this "breathtaking" backstory still doesn't explain Chapo's jailbreak. Okay, how about this? Guzmán "got wind" of the frustration of the U.S. DoJ which led to the extradition request "and decided it was time to go, whatever means he may have used to do so."

Which is as close as we come to an "explanation." For the rest, Guillermoprieto piles on the improbabilities of the official story (could this hovel of a cell really have been Chapo's, considering the luxury suite he lived in in his previous incarceration? could this supposedly impregnable prison really be built on a foot-thick concrete slab? etc.), along with a reminder that the Mexican government has not only refused proper access to the famous tunnel but has kept all security videos (from their maximum-security prison), which must surely contain relevant information, tightly under wraps.

There seems general agreement that the official Mexican story is in significant part, if not in its entirely, fictional. But, frustratingly, this doesn't seem to bring us any closer to the truth, and the Mexican authorities seem singularly unintereted in allowing any enlightenment, which must itself be an important element of the real story. Whatever it is.

One thing is sure, though. The government government owes its people a way better set of lies. Or is the fact that the authorities don't care if anyone believes them also part of the story. Whatever it is.

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Probably telecom dualopolists AT&T and Verizon now hate NYS AG Eric Schneiderman as much as the banksters do -- and the more corrupt state AGs

Iowa AG Tom Miller: He's shocked, shocked, that anyone could question his toughness with the banks after he raised hundreds of thousands of simoleons from the financial sector upon announcing his intent to "investigate" the banks, which he has done so, so hard. I bet the joke'll be on the banksters when Tom hurls all that filthy lucre back at their stinking feet! (Anytime now, Tom.)

by Ken

Before we descend to the hilarity of sleazebag of the week Tom Miller, let's make sure to get the news out -- and this is big news, regarding what was looking like an unstoppable takeover of T-Mobile by AT&T. From Bloomberg:

U.S. Files to Block AT&T, T-Mobile Merger

By Tom Schoenberg, Sara Forden and Jeff Bliss - Aug 31, 2011

The U.S. Justice Department sued to block AT&T Inc.’s proposed $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile USA Inc., saying the deal would “substantially lessen competition” in the wireless market.

The government is seeking a declaration that AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG (DTE), would violate U.S. antitrust law, according to a complaint filed today in federal court in Washington. The U.S. also asked for a court order blocking implementation of the deal, the largest announced acquisition of the year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“I don’t see any room to settle the case,” said Bert Foer, head of the American Antitrust Institute in Washington, in an interview. “They have clearly drawn a line in the sand.”

AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson’s proposed purchase of Bellevue, Washington-based T-Mobile, announced in March, would combine the second- and fourth-largest carriers to create a new market leader ahead of No. 1 Verizon Wireless. The new company would dwarf current No. 3 carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. (S), which argued against the deal.

“AT&T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low- priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market,” the government said in court papers. Dallas-based AT&T fell as much as 5.5 percent in New York trading after Bloomberg News broke the news of the lawsuit. . . .

Now I don't suppose the DoJ is likely to discuss how it reached the decision to intervene, but there's good reason to think that some role, and possibly a major one, was played by the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Antitrust Bureau Chief Richard Schwartz issued a statement today saying that his boss "looks forward to reviewing the Department of Justice’s complaint to determine the best course forward on behalf of New York consumers and businesses."

Since March, Attorney General Schneiderman has played a major role in the review of the proposed AT&T, T-Mobile merger. Working in close partnership with the Department of Justice, this office has played a leadership role in a group of 26 states conducting interviews and gathering evidence central to this investigation. We have conducted numerous interviews of business enterprise customers throughout New York State and throughout the country to assess whether the merger would result in harm to competition to the business enterprise market, and closely analyzed the parties' claims that the merger would lower costs and improve service to consumers.

Attorney General Schneiderman remains particularly concerned that the proposed merger would stifle competition in markets that are crucial to New York's consumers and businesses. This includes concerns about vulnerable upstate communities, where concentration in some markets is already very high, and the impacts on New York City’s information-intensive economy, which is particularly dependent on mobile wireless services. Simply put, the impacts of this proposed merger on wireless competition, economic growth, and technological innovation could be enormous.

(The release notes that Schneiderman announced in March "that this office would conduct a comprehensive review of the proposed merger.")

It comes as something of a surprise to think that there are people with decision-making authority in the DoJ who might actually be listening to AG Schneiderman. The last we heard, he was being kicked off of the the coalition of state AGs' executive committee that's been exploring some sort of settlement with the big banks over their conduct in the collapsed mortgage industry, presumably out of pique over Schneiderman's outspoken opposition to the proposed "settlement," whereby the banksters would kick in some cash in exchange for being relieved of pretty much any further liability -- allowing them, in other words, to "move on" rather than being forced forever to "look back."

Which is apparently how we address all major problems in the 21st century. We just move on

To be sure, Schneiderman isn't alone among the state AGs. There's a small but hardy band (necessarily hardy, considering how they're regarded by most of their fellows) who also take their oath of office seriously. That number emphatically doesn't include the Big Cheese of the state AGs, Iowa's Tom Miller, the man who masterminded the "settlement" and the man who apparently gave Schneiderman the boot.

Miller meanwhile is feeling aggrieved. His longtime sidekick, Assistant AG Patrick Madigan, whined:

We’ve been accused of being in bed with the banks. To say that to a group of people who have spent the last seven to 10 years fighting mortgage abuses day in and day out is an insult of the highest order. It's just unreal.

Yeah, Pat, an insult of the highest order. Just unreal. I expect you and Tom were really insulted by the unreal Taibblog post Matt Taibbi wrote back in April, titled "Best Way to Raise Campaign Money? Investigate Banks," which began:

A hilarious report has come out courtesy of the National Institute of Money in State Politics, showing that Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller – who is coordinating the investigation into the banks’ improper mortgage dealings – increased his campaign contributions from the finance sector this year by a factor of 88! He has raised $261,445 from finance, insurance and real estate contributors since he announced that he was going to be coordinating the investigation into improper foreclosure practices. That is 88 times as much as they gave him not over last year, but over the previous decade.

This is about as perfect an example of how American politics works as you’ll ever see. This foreclosure issue is a monstrous story that is somehow escaping national headlines; essentially, all of the largest banks in the country have been engaged in an ongoing fraud and tax evasion scheme that among other things has resulted in many hundreds of billions in investor losses, and hundreds of thousands of improper foreclosures. Last week, the 14 largest mortgage lenders a group that includes bailout all-stars like Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, managed to negotiate a settlement with the federal government that will mandate some financial relief to homeowners who have been victims of improper foreclosure practices. It’s unclear yet exactly what damages and fines will be involved in the federal settlement, or how many homeowners will be affected. But certainly there are some who believe the federal settlement was a political end-run around the states’ efforts to extract their own deal from the banks.

"If the banks had to pay what they actually owed" from their mortgage-related malfeasances, Taibbi wrote, "they would probably all go out of business."

In a dandy post on Tom 'n' Pat's Iowhining, Marcy Wheeler takes a closer look at this "fighting mortgage abuses" that, according to Pat, he and Tom have been doing day in and day out these past seven to ten years. (Doesn't that three-year spread leave a lot of days-to-days unaccounted for?) Notes Marcy:

As in the settlement they signed onto with Countrywide in 2008? The one that–according to NV Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, Bank of America has basically blown off?

In her filing, Ms. Masto contends that Bank of America raised interest rates on troubled borrowers when modifying their loans even though the bank had promised in the settlement to lower them. The bank also failed to provide loan modifications to qualified homeowners as required under the deal, improperly proceeded with foreclosures even as borrowers’ modification requests were pending and failed to meet the settlement’s 60-day requirement on granting new loan terms, instead allowing months and in some cases more than a year to go by with no resolution, the filing says.

The complaint says such practices violated an agreement Bank of America reached in the fall of 2008 with several states and later, in 2009, with Nevada, to settle lawsuits that accused its Countrywide unit of predatory lending. As the credit crisis grew, the settlement was heralded as a victory by state offices eager to help keep troubled borrowers in their homes and reduce their costs. Bank of America set aside $8.4 billion in the deal and agreed to help 400,000 troubled borrowers with loan modifications and other financial relief, such as lowering interest rates on mortgages.

(See DDay for more on Masto’s complaint.)

Perhaps Madigan doesn’t understand this. But pointing to a settlement that, in retrospect, appears to have largely been a PR stunt as proof that you’re not in bed with the banks sort of proves the point that you are.

Back in April, Matt Taibbi ventured that the flow of cash from people in and around the mortgage industry to Tom Miller was "just something to keep an eye on," adding, "It would be interesting to see a similar analysis on the money these same characters have thrown at the Obama administration in the last year."

Interesting indeed -- I wonder if anyone ever did such an analysis. As he wrote of the bonanza Tom Miller created for himself by making noises about investigating the banks: "This is about as perfect an example of how American politics works as you’ll ever see."

At least for today, however, on the matter of the AT&T takeover of T-Mobile, the Justice Department has taken a different path. It's something.

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On a crucial issue, the matter of parenting, the DoJ's DOMA-support brief argues that gays and lesbians are just plain folks

It's worth noting that even as it defends DOMA, the
DoJ brief is explicitly distanced from such sentiments.

by Ken

As I wrote what follows, I realized that it sounds mostly like (yet another) Bad News post. In fact, it's a Sort of Good News post. It just takes awhile to get to the sort-of-good news.

By now we're used to the grim spectacle of the Obama Justice Dept. rising to the defense of appalling federal laws, laws the administration claims to oppose, undergoing challenge in the courts, and we all know the explanation: It's just the way things are done. If duly legal federal laws are challenged in the courts, we're told every time, the administration of the moment is expected to defend them as long as there's a reasonable legal justification.

We've also established that this isn't exactly law, more like custom -- you know, the thing to do. And we also know that there's a fair amount of question as to how invariable the practice has been. I don't know that anyone has come up with a long list of challenged laws that Republican adminstrations have defended despite their ideological disagreement. Perhaps it's just that no one's gotten around to compiling that list. It's also pointed out each time out that if a (nominally) Democratic administration fails to honor the custom, just wait and see what a Republican one will do, although my own (purely intuitive) hunch is that the next right-wing Republican administration is going to do just whatever its predecessors have done: whatever it damn well pleases.

Beyond the fact of the administration jumping to the defense of hateful laws, there has been, in the case of the Obama DoJ, exception taken to the vociferousness of the defenses provided, which has seemed to go well beyond the call of duty, incorporating language that it's all too easy to see right-wing judges (and especially justices) incorporating in opinions affirming the hateful status quo, even purporting to pay deference to the arguments of the administration -- in "hey, they said it, not us" fashion.

So it seemed like yet another enactment of this upsetting ritual when, like clockwork, the DoJ jumped into the fray of the appeal. On CBS News's "Political Hot Sheet" blog on Friday, Stephanie Condon posted a nice summary of where we are, beginning:

Gay Rights Groups Angered by Justice Department's DOMA Defense

The gay rights community is pressing President Obama to take a bolder stance in favor of gay marriage after the Justice Department on Thursday filed a brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act.

Mr. Obama says he is opposed to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriages, and the Justice Department has explicitly stated that the president maintains that position. However, after a district judge ruled in July that DOMA is unconstitutional, the Justice Department announced it would appeal the ruling because it has an obligation to defend all federal laws.

Gay rights advocates take issue with that logic.

"The Administration claims that it has a duty to defend the laws that are on the books, despite the President publicly decrying DOMA as discriminatory. We disagree," the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) said in a statement. "And at the very least, the Justice Department can and should acknowledge that the law is unconstitutional."

Condon goes on to explain:

"Now is the time for the President to stand firmly against bigotry and discrimination in our laws and for the full inclusion of our community in marriage," the group said in its statement.

In its brief, the Justice Department argues that the federal government should maintain its current laws on marriage while the states experiment with their own marriage laws.

DOMA, the Justice Department argues, "is supported by an interest in maintaining the status quo and uniformity on the federal level, and preserving room for the development of policy in the states."

The appeal explicitly addresses Mr. Obama's opposition to the law.

"Indeed, the President supports repeal of DOMA and has taken the position that Congress should extend federal benefits to individuals in same-sex marriages," the Justice Department says. "But a consensus behind that approach has not yet developed, and Congress could properly take notice of the divergent views regarding same-sex marriage across the states."

All very familiar, right? Sigh.

But maybe not quite. My legal-whiz informant calls attention to some crucial arguments that the DoJ brief (here's the link again) chooses not to make, and explicitly so. "Since the enactment of DOMA," the brief notes, "many leading medical, psychological, and social welfare organizations have concluded, based on numerous studies, that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are as likely to be well-adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents." My informant adds: "The government then goes on to cite, and place its imprimatur upon, the studies and statements of policy that have found that LGBT parents have equally good outcomes with their kids and should not be discriminated against. (See brief at 29-30 & n.26.)"

I can't say this make me happy about the government brief. But amid the disappointment, I think it's worth taking a step back to acknowledge just how large a step this is, one that not so many years most of us would have regarded as over the moon: the U.S. Dept. of Justice arguing in official court papers that when it comes to parenting, gays and lesbians are regular people.

At a time when the crazed diehards of the loony right -- the very people from whom, it always seems to me, marriage really needs defending -- are making their to-the-death stand in support of the proposition that LGBT folk are deranged degenerates (on the "it takes one to know one" principle?), this is something, and something real. Of course it will be counterargued by that next right-wing administration we were just talking about, which we can expect to care not a whit for any precedent it doesn't like, this administration position in fact reflects where the country at large is now, and is likely to become even more solidly persuaded, especially given the abundant indications that younger people just don't give a damn about their neighbors' gender preferences.

We're still a long way from "home free," of course, and the remaining struggles are going to be fiercely fought. The most immediate need, surely, is an unequivocal, readily enforceable LGBT employment non-discrimination act, and clearly ENDA is nowhere on the thuggish Republican House leadership's horizon. But important as the front lines of any battle are, sometimes -- especially when it comes to hearts-and-minds battles fought among the citizenry -- the most important action happens away from the front. Of course to people who live in total ignorance of what sort of people LGBT people are (answer: people just like any other kind, with the usual mix of the good, the bad, and the in-between), it's mortal combat between good and evil. However, increasingly to people who have visited reality, the question is arising: What the hell was all the fuss about?

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In case you were worried that someone would be held accountable for the destruction of the CIA torture tapes, it seems you can relax

Hamster Shredder - Because micro generation is the future, and everyone is responsible

This hamster-powered shredder, the brainchild of weird genius Tom Ballhatchet, probably wouldn't be much good for videotapes, and the hamster probably wouldn't much enjoy a bed of videotape shards. Luckily, the CIA has access to higher-tech gear.

"The deadline for prosecuting someone under most federal laws is five years."

-- from Pete Yost's AP report, 

"No charges for destroying CIA interrogation videos"

by Ken

Okay, that thing about the statute of limitations may not sound like stop-the-presses news, but it really does seem to be the heart of this afternoon's breaking news about the investigation into the destruction of that heap of torture tapes. Surely no one believes that on the very last day of that five-year window, after three years' worth of investigation spanning two presidential administrations, the special prosecutor assigned to whitewash . . . sorry, I mean to look into the CIA's deep-sixing of 92 videos of al-Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri being interrogated with what seems to have been a veritable cascade of waterboarding has decided, nuh-uh, it's all cool on the evidence-destruction front.

It's still possible that somebody might get his knuckles rapped for fibbing in the course of the investigation. Why, the AP's Pete Yost reports that the special prosecutor, John Durham, is continuing "an investigation into whether the harsh questioning went beyond legal boundaries." This line of inquiry, as we'll see, was actually initiated by the Obama Justice Department, which thereby set itself off ever slightly from the GWB DoJ, unless you count practical results, of which -- I'm going way out on a limb and guessing -- there won't be any. It's a shame there aren't, like, videotapes of the torture being carried out. (Oh, right. Oops!)

I'm not so much interested in making living hells of the lives of the on-the-ground torturers, who may conceivably have had reason to believe that what they were doing was duly authorized, especially when you consider the kind of people up the chain of command who would have had the authority to authorize. Now those are the people who need to be held to account, ideally as high up that chain as the evidence will lead. Hmm, evidence, evidence . . .

Yost fills in the background on the CIA's unhappy venture into Candid Camera Land:

In January 2008, President George W. Bush's last attorney general, Michael Mukasey, appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham a special prosecutor to investigate the videotape destruction. Later, President Barack Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, added the inquiry into the conduct of the harsh questioning.

A team of prosecutors and FBI agents led by Durham has conducted an exhaustive investigation into the matter, said Matthew Miller, chief Justice Department spokesman.

"As a result of that investigation, Mr. Durham has concluded that he will not pursue criminal charges for the destruction of the interrogation videotapes," Miller said.

The department's carefully phrased announcement did not rule out the possibility of charging someone with lying to investigators looking into the tape destruction.

Irony enthusiasts my appreciate the information that the videotaping of the interrogations was begun "to prove that interrogators followed broad rules Washington had laid out." However, almost immediately "top officials at agency headquarters in Langley, Va., began discussing whether to destroy the tapes." They were concerned, you see, that if the tapes should somehow get out, the "dozens of CIA officers and contractors cycled in and out of Thailand to help with the questioning" could be identified.

Yost details the history of the apparently inexorable march to destruction of the tapes, based on a cornucopia of documents unearthed in the course of the investigation. It all appears to tracks uncannily with flashes of political heat concerning U.S. torture policy, which can apparently be summed up as:

"We don't torture, except when we do, and when we do it's OK, 'cause if the president does it it's legal, so shut the fuck up or you'll make us really mad, and who knows what we might do?"

I suppose it is a coincidence that the five-year term expires smack in the midst of George W. "We Don't Torture Ha-Ha" Bush's book tour. Do you suppose these developments may trigger nostalgia for those good old days?

For those who keep track of such things, it took about 3½ hours to destroy the tapes. At least we aren't being asked to believe that, possibly wracked by guilt or despondence, they committed suicide.

By way of reminder: U.S. law forbids the use of torture, and we are signatories to international agreements that require us to investigate and prosecute accusations of same. I just thought I'd mention it. Carry on.

#

In re. Yoo and Bybee v. Law, Ethics, and Decency: Does any right-winger ever consider for even a second telling the truth?

Of course Rachel gets it, and Michael Isikoff gets it, and their viewers get it. But the rest of the country, under the benevolent bipartisan gaze of our free-from-principle Village elders, doesn't give a hoot about the rule of law and thinks torture is a good thing. But still, do they always have to lie about it? (Answer: Yes, apparently they do.)

"The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. The Charter of this Tribunal evidences a faith that the law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, 'under ... the law.' And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment."

-- Opening Statement of the Chief Prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, at Nuremberg, from the website of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee, lawsnotmen.org

by Ken

I really don't want to go into DoJ stooge David Margolis's 69-page report declining to take any legal action against should-be-disgraced former DoJ stooges Jay Bybee and John Yoo, the "Torture Boys," who disgraced the obligation of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to provide the executive branch with accurate information about the law. (Of course it's a cosmic irony that after the Bush regime turned the OLC into a crime-covering travesty, the law-hating crime enthusiasts of the Right have blocked the nomination of the superbly qualified Dawn Johnsen to head the OLC, the very job that, so thoroughly bungled, catapulted Torture Boy Bybee onto the federal bench.)

It sucks, of course. Some welcome heat is being generated by the lawyers and journalists of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee, which under the Freedom of Information Act secured the release of a host of DoJ documents -- unfortunately in heavily redacted form -- including the three versions of DoJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report, all now overturned by the Margolis judgment. There is, for example, this comment from journalist Kristina Borjesson, an RJSC member:

To read the contents of the first OPR report, the subsequent reports, and then the DOJ conclusions, is to read an account of a classic whitewashing process, one that has been exercised often since the Iran-Contra hearings and before. The first report presents the real evidence, a parade of enumerated horribles that, by the final report by Margolis, have been erased or minimized according to the interests that the reviewing parties want to protect. The end result is always the same: no accountability for laws broken. These were not little legal infractions committed by the OLC lawyers. These were infractions that destroy the very fabric of our democracy.

And there's this comment from RJSC lawyer Peter Weiss, who participated in the FOIA filing:

We deplore the fact that David Margolis, speaking for the department, has gone very far toward accepting Yoo and Bybee's argument that, in times of emergency, legal norms as fundamental as the absolute prohibition of torture may be violated with impunity by the President and other high officials. If that is to become official US policy, it will merely reinforce the international movement toward universal jurisdiction for particularly heinous crimes, instead of leaving it to American courts to deal with Americans accused of such crimes.

But even the RJSC gets it wrong when it comes to characterizing the Margolis report: "The committee expressed grave concern that David Margolis, a senior lawyer in the Department of Justice, wrote a final opinion in January which completely exonerates the two lawyers for legally justifying the illegal torture of detainees."

Deep breath. THE DECISION DOES NOT "COMPLETELY EXONERATE" THE TORTURE BOYS. If you want to say it "lets them off," fine. But it's pretty unkind about the quality of their legal work.

What it comes down to, if you read what Margolis actually wrote, is that he doesn't see that it's likely to be provable that Yoo and Bybee weren't sincere in issuing the legal opinions for which the Office of Professional Responsibility recommended they be referred to their respective bar associations for disciplining. That, in Margolis's mind, is the legal issue: As long as they sincerely believed the bullshit that torture, which is unambiguously illegal under international and U.S. law, can be massaged to cleanliness, and that the president of the United States can under certain circumstances do any damn thing he pleases and fuck the law, for which there isn't a single word in the Constitution that provides the remotest hint of the shadow of a possibility of justification, but as long as they sincerely believe it, it's difficult to prove that they recklessly rendered bad legal opinions or deliberately advocated contrary-to-law positions.

Justice Jackson at Nuremberg: I know the defense that defendants were "only following orders" came up a lot (and was always rejected), but I don't recall that we established a Nuremberg Loophole excusing war-crimes defendants who were "sincere."

Now if people as sensibly attuned to the issues as the RJSC folks slip into declaring the Boys "exonerated," you can probably imagine what's going on on the truth-be-damned Right. Or can you? Glenn Greenwald has already declared himself surprised, in a vintage GG piece, "The flailing falsehoods of America's war criminals":

I didn't think it was possible, but former Bush officials -- desperately fighting what they know will be their legacy as war criminals -- have become even more dishonest propagandists out of office than they were in office. At National Review, Bill Burck and Dana Perino so thoroughly mislead their readers about the DOJ report . . . that it's hard to know where to begin.

Glenn, it appears, has actually read the Margolis report. And on the issue of whether "Yoo intentionally or recklessly provided misleading advice to his client," he points out, Margolis writes, "It is a close question."

"Just think about that for a minute," says Glenn.

Margolis said that whether Yoo "intentionally or recklessly provided misleading advice to his client" when authorizing torture -- about the most serious accusation one can make against a lawyer, as it means he deliberately made false statements about the law -- "is a close question." That's the precise opposite of what Burck and Perino told National Review readers about Margolis' conclusion ("This shouldn’t have been close — and it wasn't, on the merits").

Moreover, Margolis repeatedly adopted the OPR's findings that the Yoo/Bybee torture memos -- on which the entire American torture regime was constructed and which media elites now embrace in order to argue against prosecutions -- were wrong, "extreme," misguided, and the by-product of "poor judgment."

He refers readers to Yale Prof. Jack Balkin's detailed analysis of the opinion on Friday, under the piquant head, "Justice Department Will Not Punish Yoo and Bybee Because Most Lawyers Are Scum Anyway." According to Balkin, says Glenn, "The only thing that saved Yoo in Margolis' eyes was that attorney ethical rules have been written by lawyers to protect themselves, and the bar is therefore so low that it basically includes only 'sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems.'"

And remember, Margolis described his judgment about actionability against the Torture Boys as "a close question." So there is no remotely conceivable sense in which Yoo and Bybee can be said to have been "cleared" or "exonerated," any more than anyone under investigation by a prosecutor's office that declines to prosecute can be said to have been. Less, actually, because rarely does such a person have a judgment delivered that says, "The decision was oh so close, you know this close, to going the other way."

In fact, one reason that should have been given more weight is the consequence of failing to take action: the possibility that the proponents of rampant government criminality can claim their heroes to have been "exonerated."

But did that stop the Washington Post from editorializing ("No punishment for torture memos' authors, but no exoneration, either"; at least they got the "no exoneration" part right) from claiming, "Mr. Margolis noted that the lawyers acted in 'good faith' under extremely difficult circumstances and with the benefit of several court decisions that could be read to support their approach"? Well, some stuff sort of along those lines is in there, but do you get the sense from this characterization that Margolis in fact described his decision -- hailed by the sleepy-at-the-wheel WaPo editorialist as "courageous" -- not to recommend action as "a close call"?

Actually, what the editorial says is that Margolis "correctly and courageously overturned a skewed recommendation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility." Well, perhaps the final OPR report was skewed, but as those who have now read the redacted versions of the three OPR reports tell us, the skewing going on was all in the direction of watering it down, to make it more live-and-let-live Village-friendly.

Of course, by the time the "skewed" OPR report was scuttled by the Margolis one, it was a snap for the war criminals and their enthusiasts on the Right to claim "exoneration." I'm with Glenn on this one. You have to wonder, is there any lie those people won't tell to cover their butts?

#

UPDATE From The Celebrated Songwriting Team Of David Swanson And Robert Allen Zimmerman

Tangled Up in Yoo
By David Swanson

Early one mornin' the sun was shinin',
Prisoners layin' in bed
Wond'rin' when the guards would come
And kick them in the head.
The folks who wrote the torture memos
Sure did have it rough.
They never got enough exercise.
The new condo wasn't big enough.
One victim standin' at the side of his cell
Blood dripping on his shoes
Admitted Iraq had WMDs
Lord knows that made the news but was it true,
Tangled up in Yoo.

Yoo was married to his belief
That nobody could force
A president to obey the law
And wartime only made that worse.
Yoo drove that point as far as he could
And overruled the rest
Of the lawyers who gave into him
All agreeing it was best.
He turned around to look upon
The damage he had done
I heard him whisper over his shoulder,
"They'll lock me up some day on the avenue,"
Tangled up in Yoo.

Yoo had a job training fascist youth
Writing up a book for a spell.
But he never did like it all that much
And one day the ax just fell.
So he drifted round to campuses
Wherever they would let him speak
About presidents crushing testicles
And disinheriting the meek.
But all the while he was alone
The past was close behind,
Yoo broke a lot of statutes,
Prison never escaped his mind, and he just knew,
Tangled up in Yoo.

Yoo was talkin' in a corporate place
And I stopped in to hear.
I just kept lookin' at the side of his face
In the spotlight so clear.
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I started calling John Yoo's name,
I handcuffed him to the back of his chair
Said to him, "Does it feel the same?"
Yoo muttered somethin' underneath his breath,
I read him his Miranda rights.
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When he admitted it was the right thing to do.
Tangled up in Yoo.

Yoo left a bundle of memos behind, legalizing crimes.
"I thought you'd never come for me," he said
"And it really blew my mind."
Then he opened up a book of laws
And handed it to me
Written by all kinds of people
Over two or three centuries.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written purely so we'd indict Yoo,
Nothing else to do.

Yoo authorized aggressive war
and lawless imprisonment,
warrantless spying and torture techniques,
That was the way Yoo went.
Then he started into peddling lies
And something inside of him died.
He had to sell his heart and bones
And Yoo froze up inside.
And when finally the bottom fell out
Yoo became withdrawn,
The only thing he knew how to do
Was to sing his lying song, like a bird that flew,
Tangled up in Yoo.

So now Yoo's goin' to be tried,
The law got to him somehow.
All the people he used to know
They're co-conspirators now.
Some are ex vice presidents.
Some lead glamorous lives.
Don't know how it all got started,
I don't know what they're gonna tell their wives.
But me, I'm still on the road
Trying to make a point.
Yoo always did feel the same,
He just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in Yoo

Holy Joe, Rudy, and Rush know you don't have to pay a price for public lying. But truth-telling can kill you -- ask Greg Craig

When it comes to manipulating a terror-prone public with lies and obfuscations, Rudy gives Rush a run for his money.

by Ken

We say we want pols who "say what they mean and mean what they say," but we really don't, do we? Americans want lies. They demand lies. They want lies that will make them feel better than reality. Ironically, the lies they like best are usually ones that you'd think would make them feel worse, feeding on their deep-set terrors, rage, and hatred. But it turns out that, if you stoke those internal demons right, many Americans enjoy suffering from them -- and it takes their minds off the absence of any good news to offer them from reality. (Is it any wonder they've developed such contempt for reality?)

At the same time, we easily forget why public figures tend to be so guarded about saying what they mean and meaning what they say. It has a way of biting you in the butt.

Case in point: In yesterday's Washington Post our pal Al Kamen was reflecting on the unceremonious departure of White House Counsel Greg Craig, and recalled a detail he had previously reported:

Too much passion


White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, commenting Friday on the long-expected resignation of White House Counsel Greg Craig, told reporters that Craig never wanted to be an administration lawyer.

"Greg is, as you know, somebody who served in a previous administration in foreign policy. That's his passion," Gibbs said. He called Craig a "reluctant acceptor" of the counsel position.

So why didn't he land a foreign policy job? we wondered. And why can't he get one now?

Oh, yeah. Forgot about this item we wrote just after the election, the one about Craig's March 2008 hit memo on Clinton, his law school classmate and longtime pal.

After a passing shot at Clinton's "failed effort" on health insurance, Craig, a senior State Department staffer during her husband's presidency, argued that her "claims of foreign policy experience are exaggerated." He then delivers a claim-by-claim rebuttal, from her helping to broker the peace in Northern Ireland -- "gross exaggeration" -- to helping open Kosovo's borders, to urging President Bill Clinton to intervene in Rwanda, and so on, including that sniper-fire thing in Bosnia.

In contrast, Obama, Craig wrote, "does not use false charges and exaggerated claims to play politics with national security." Whew. Brutal.

Once Clinton was named secretary of state, a foreign policy job for Craig was not gonna happen. And you can bet she hasn't forgotten.

Which should be an object lesson in just how careful you have have to be if you want to make your way through the corridors of power. Look, anyone who signs on to a presidential campaign knows he/she is rolling the dice. If your candidate wins, and the People Who Matter see you as having made an important contribution, your résumé should find its way into the elite pile for People to Be Taken Care Of. It goes without saying that if you bet on a losing candidate, you're up Doody Creek, and you're going to have to be a master of fancy footwork or plain old-fashioned groveling and butt-kissing.

According to those traditional terms, Greg Craig was just playing the game. No one is suggesting that anything he wrote in the fateful memo was untrue, and if it was, well, impolitic, he had every reason to think his was a winning gamble when, first, his candidate bested Senator Clinton for the Democratic nomination and, then, won the election. That, surely, should have been his cue to put those final polishing touches on the réseumé, and maybe craft a covering letter that made prominent mention of that memo of his that did such damage to the rival candidate's claims of foreign-policy expertise.

Wouldn't you just like to see videotape of the first moment that player Craig learned that for real the president-elect was considering Senator Clinton as his secretary of state? I think we can understand it totally from her standpoint too. If you had someone who did to you what Greg Craig did to her, and you then found yourself in a position to influence his hirability, would you have any impulse to let bygones be bygones? No, I didn't think so. Of course the president appoints scads of people to foreign-policy-related jobs that aren't in the State Dept. and aren't within the chain of command of the secretary of state. It's for considerations like this that "over my dead body" and other similar expressions of discouragement were crafted.

I haven't noticed any rush by the White House to find another spot for our Greg. If he wants another government job, it's looking as if he's going to have to wait for most of not all of the people in the present administration to move on to other opportunities, and then find a presidential candidate to back, and hope his good service in a winning campaign effort is recognized with a nice offer. (Probably not White House counsel.) If he hedges his bets a little more next time around, I think we would all understand.

ANNALS OF THE RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Usually when public figures publicly pull their punches, or just plain lie, it's not their fellow pols they have in mind; they're pitchin propaganda to the proles. And when they do it skillfully, it isn't always easy to debunk the fiction.

Yesterday Howie and I were e-chatting about which of us might venture to say something about the latest bogus wingnut issue: the totally manufactured threat to national security posed by (a) relocating Guantanamo detainees to U.S. prisons and (b) actually trying such of them as are to be tried in U.S. courts. The first part is so pathetically stupid that even some of the nuttiest of the wingnuts are refusing to go along. As Sam Stein reported yesterday on Huffpost:

[O]n Sunday, a group of highly respected conservative figures lent their support to the transfer, calling it necessary to "preserve national security" while simultaneously avoiding "sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition."

In a joint statement prepared by the Constitution Project, David Keene, founder of American Conservative Union, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and former representative and presidential candidate Bob Barr say moving suspected terrorists to the Thomson, Illinois prison facility, "makes good sense." Taxpayers, they note, have already invested $145 million in the facility, which has been "little used." And the surrounding community, they add, could benefit from increased employment once the prison becomes filled.

"The scaremongering about these issues should stop," they add, noting that there is "absolutely no reason to fear that prisoners will escape or be released into their communities."

To believe otherwise, you have to be arguing that American prisons are incapable of securing prisoners, which is an especially loony argument to come from the right-wing loonies, because prisons are the American institution they believe most fervently in. In economic terms, prison-building is about as close as Republicans have come to a jobs policy since the Great Depression.

But more important, to argue that there's a security risk in moving detainees to U.S. prisons, you are now officially declaring yourself nuttier than Grover Norquist. Until now surely our Grover would have stood as the closest a human mind has ever approached scientifically absolute nuttiness.

And yet, as Sam also reported, leading GOP Senate candidate Rep. Mark Kirk has already positioned himself at the front of the line of scumbag nutjobs seeking to terrify voters for electoral advantage, declaring, ""As home to America's tallest building, we should not invite Al Qaeda to make Illinois its number one target." At some point, are we going to have to have a Butterfly-Net Brigade to get these people off the streets and into the institutional care they need?

It's been fascinating watching the model of the New Conservatism emerge on its four-legged base of insanity, stupidity, dishonesty, and criminal predation. In each domain it's been like watching gifted athletes pass memorable milestones on their way to breaking existing records. On the path to utter insanity, the "Just Say No" Republicans have now left Grover Norquist in the dust.

The issue of proper trials, as with the DoJ's announced intention to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others, is trickier. The argument against is just as bogus, but committed and brazen liars -- you know, people devoid of the tiniest shred of ethics or indeed any kind of principles, like Holy Joe Lieberman, Rudy Giuliani, and Rush Limbaugh -- know they can have a field day hoodwinking Americans who are too lazy to use their brains, or feel that it's an infringement on their rights even to ask them to.

Due process of law is of course supposed to be one of the unshakable pillars on which the American republic is built. But of course Rudy's and Holy Joe's boundless hatred of everything America stands for makes it easy for them to make a mockery of our most basic principles. It could be that they're angry because they thought in eight years the Bush regime had once and for all dismantled the concept of American justice, one of the things about our system that used to be the envy of the world. Of course it's meaningless to people whose preference is to transform America into a jackbooted ultra-right-wing dictatorship.

But these issues are much easier to obfuscate, involving as they do many principles, like "justice" and "due process," that are too abstract for processing by, say, the average Fox viewer. I don't imagine that Joe and Rudy and Rush are telling them that the real obstacles to civilian trials for the Guantanamo detainees is the rampant lawlessness of our government in its grotesquely incompetent investigation of the suspects. The real challenge is going to be scraping together enough evidence that can pass the basic tests of legality and fairness that the Roberts Court hasn't had enough time to strip away.

No, the Far Right propagandists aren't likely to dwell on that. (Actually, Rudy does raise the issue, but he manages to make it sound like due process is an evil terrorist plot. That's pretty inventive, but I have a feeling it may be too subtle for the target audience. So maybe I was wrong, and Rudy isn't as skilled at this as Rush.) They prefer to play on the psychotic delusions of crap-brained entertainments like 24, which similarly trades on the stupidity and gullibility of its viewers to fob off its lies. Whether they do it for ratings or votes, what the propagandists of the Far Right have incommon is that they're past masters at using terror to scare the bejezus out of their sheeplike countrymen. When it suits their purposes, the devils of the Far Right like to portray liberals as weak-kneed nervous nellies. In fact, nobody is more cringingly gutless than the red-blooded, fag-hating, macho-in-their-own-minds white males who are the standard targets of the Far Right demagogues. These people love to be scared out of their panties.

If you'd like some more reasoned discussion of the detainee-trial issue, our friends at Think Progress have done a bang-up job in a post piquantly titled "Faith in Our Justice System" in today's edition of The Progress Report. If you're not signed up to receive The Progress Report daily, it's one of the smarter and more useful things you can find in your e-mailbox, and it's a snap to sign up for.

With regard to the patented Fox process of manipulating its gullible viewers, by the way, Noah has a post coming up tomorrow I think you'll really enjoy.

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