Should Trump Be Impeached? He Builds The Case Against Himself Tweet By Tweet

If you were watching NBC's Today show Monday, you likely saw Kellyanne Con-man making the case-- a case the Regime makes more and more frequently-- that the media should ignore Trump's tweets. They wish-- but that's how Trump chooses to interact with the American people. When's the last time he held a press conference like a normal president? What the Regime was embarrassed about at the moment was just Trump bothering the mayor of London while he was trying to deal with a terrorist incident-- something likely to lead to Trump being subtly uninvited as a state guest of the U.K.-- but his deceitful, nonsensical babbling about Senate Democrats obstructing his nominees. The aggrieved, victimized Trumpanzee-- like the moron degenerates who support him-- is whining about something he has no understanding of. Imagine this concept: no one's obstructing any nominees because there aren't any nominees. The orange-hued buffoon is too busy golfing and tweeting to nominate them.

So far, the worst president in all of American history has nominated only 10 ambassadors, out of 188 positions he's supposed to fill. And what makes that even worse, is that he fired all the ambassadors who were in place without any intention of or plan for replacing them. He'd rather just cry about it and point fingers. In fact, there are only 6 pending ambassadorial appointments wending their way-- in an orderly, responsible fashion-- through the Republican-controlled Senate. And one that horrid wife of New Gingrich, who Señor Trumpanzee is foisting on Pope Francis.

Over all, there are 15 Trump appointments waiting confirmation by the Senate-- not just ambassadorial but all jobs-- while 39 have been confirmed. There are still 442 jobs the imbecile hasn't nominated anyone for. Like, for example, the U.S. Attorneys. Eager to further obstruct justice, he suddenly fired all the U.S. Attorneys in the country-- every single one of them-- and forced them to leave their offices immediately. And he had-- and still has-- no replacements lined up. Trump is a danger to the United States. Congress should begin impeachment proceedings. And if the Democrats win back the House in 2018 and Pelosi pulls one of her "off the table" bullshit excuses, she should be unceremoniously fired by the Democratic members from leadership-- and replaced by someone who will do what she won't. Whatever this fiasco cost Vladimir Putin, it was the best investment he ever made in his whole miserable life.

A moment in history: The incoming POTUS personally picks one of the top U.S. attorneys, and he's of the other party

From nypost.com, 12:04pm [click to enlarge]:


From nydailynews.com, 2:47pm [click to enlarge]:


by Ken

For a few hours earlier today, as you can see above, there was Drama in the Air regarding the scheduled powwow between the president-elect and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara. As it happens, during that very time period I happen to have been in occasional televisual contact with developing news, while I was working at getting a new TV cable box installed and getting all my TVs and cable boxes humming.

The above screen shots from the websites of NYC's tabloids chronicle this moment in history in the making. From the written record, here's what the Daily News's Victoria Bekiempis and Adam Edelmann reported after the fateful meeting, as described in the dispatch above headlined "Preet Bharara will stay on as US Attorney at Trump's request":

Preet Bharara said Wednesday that he'd agreed to stay on in his role as Manhattan U.S. Attorney at President-elect Donald Trump's request.

Following a meeting with Trump inside Trump Tower, Bharara explained that he had been summoned by the President-elect to discuss remaining in his position and had made up his mind "to stay on."

"The President-elect asked, presumably because he's a New Yorker and is aware of the great work that our office has done over the past seven years ... to discuss whether or not I'd be prepared to stay on as the United States attorney to do the work as we have done it, independently, without fear or favor for the last seven years," Bharara told reporters inside the lobby of the mogul's Midtown abode.

"We had a good meeting. I said I would absolutely consider staying on. I agreed to stay on," Bharara said, adding that he'd already notified Trump's pick for U.S. Attorney General, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), of his choice.

The News reported earlier this month that Trump would likely ask" Bharara to stay on in his role, despite the fact that incoming Presidents typically bring in their own people to replace the current crop of U.S. attorneys across the country.

"He has a very high regard for him," a campaign official told The News shortly before the election about Trump's fondness for Bharara's tenacity. "Obviously it's caught his attention what (Bharara's) done in New York. It's the same approach Mr. Trump would like to bring to Washington."

Bharara, since he was appointed by President Obama in 2009, has made public corruption a key focus, bringing down elected officials from both parties, including former state Assembly Democratic Speaker Sheldon Silver and ex-state Senate GOP Majority Leader Dean Skelos.

His decision to stay on could spell bad news for Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio, whose administrations are both the subjects of ongoing investigations by Bharara's office.

At first blush Bharara, who has developed a certain reputation as a corruption fighter, doesn't seem all that Trumpish a plan -- especially considering how atypical it is for a new administration to extend the term of a U.S. attorney from the opposite party (not to mention how atypical it is to have the president rather than the attorney general as the public face of a USA hire, and how large the Southern District of NY looms among U.S. legal jursidictions).

Of course on brief reflection it registers that Bharara -- who was so publicly involved in bringing down the leaders of both houses of the monumentally screwed-up NYS Legislature, Republican Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver -- is in a position to cause considerable embarrassment (and worse) to important NYS Democratic players, notably Gov. Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. Which sounds not so much like the new president rampaging against either Democrats as such or corrupt pols but more likely harboring no good thoughts toward greedy pols whose greed runs counter to his own. I'm suggesting that it's not particularly wheeler-dealering that he's targeting as it is practitioners of the wrong kind, who get in the way of what he considers the righteous wheeler-dealers.

Still, even though Bharara's retention was already anticipated in inside circles, it's got my attention. It's hardly the kind of move one would have expected from former GOP presidential candidates Young Johnny McCranky and Willard Romney, not to mention the spectral presences who constituted the Rest of the 2016 GOP Presidential Field. Or, for that matter, the kind of pick that Attorney General-designate Jeff "I Do Too Wear Shoes, Leastwise Most of the Time" Sessions to have urged on the president-elect.

Most presidential administrations have preferred to maintain the appearance of their U.S. attorneys functioning as guardians of justice answerable to their boss the AG rather than to the country's top pol. In reality, of course, they're political actors as well, especially in Republican adminstrations. Think of Ed Meese's Dept. of Justice in the Reagan years, and especially the right-wing enforcing-muscle division Karl Rove turned the DoJ into in the time of George W. "Chimpy the Prez" Bush. Do the optics matter a whole lot?

I don't draw any large conclusions from any of this, other than a case of Trump-being-Trump. I just take note of it.

#

Maybe "Smelly Shelly" Silver is answerable to the laws we have after all: Part 2, Laws? What laws?

Just what connection do I see between Smelly Shelly and "Moneybags Mikey" Khodorkovsky?


Man with a microphone (but is anyone listening?): Ex-oligarch, ex-convict Mikhail Khodorkovsky "has grandly declared that he would guarantee Putin's safety if he left power peacefully."

by Ken

Last night, in Part 1 of this two-part "Maybe 'Smelly Shelly' Silver is answerable to the laws we have after all" series, I took note of the multi-count indictment handed down Thursday by a federal grand jury against former NYS Assembly Speaker "Smelly Shelly" Silver. The indictment covers nearly $4 million squirreled away by the Smellyman in a pair of schemes involving sums paid to him by law firms essentially in exchange for -- or so the feds allege -- using his position to either steer state funds in desired directions or to secure passage of desired legislation.

There had been, you'll recall, heavy speculation that Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his team were reluctant to press the grand jury for an indictment knowing how difficult it is to prove a quid pro quo in the movement of money into the pockets of a politician. We heard from a source, Susan Necheles, "a former prosecutor who has defended political corruption cases," who said that if you can't prove NYS legislators' quid pro quo, "even when the people they're earning money from also want political favors from them," then "that's not criminal, it's just politics."

And in fact, we're hearing blowback from Albany about how mean USA Preet is being to them, and showboating. Just last weekend a bunch of crybabies bent the ear of the New York Daily News's Kenneth Lovett for a moderately amusing piece, "Albany lawmakers cry foul over Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's tactics," which came with a deck so long, there seemed hardly any need to read the actual piece:

While many are praising his willfulness to take on corruption in Albany, more than a dozen lawmakers and other insiders are upset over the means by which Bharara conducts his business, including his way of keeping the spotlight on him and his method of attacking the entire legislature as one.

Now the fact is that USA Preet never said, or in my hearing hinted, any such thing. If that's what these upstanding legislators are hearing, maybe they're hearing some other voices, possibly voices much closer to them. As for horning in on a state legislature, which shouldn't even fall under his jurisdiction, and the charge of showboating, I don't think it's my imagination that until the day Smelly Shelly was arrested, when understandably all hell broke loose, USA Preet kept about as low a profile as someone in his position finally could. And even on arrest day, it wasn't the Preetster who was out front, but his guys and the FBI guys who worked on the investigation.

For that matter, I don't see any reason to believe that USA Preet would have ever gotten involved in the Albany cesspool if the State Legislature had shown the slightest inclination to set and maintain any decent sort of ethical standards. But they haven't, and they don't, and unless they're forced, they won't.


SO WE ASK WHAT DO SMELLY SHELLY AND
"MONEYBAGS MIKEY" HAVE IN COMMON?"

Yes, finally we're getting to the point I've been threatening to make for ages now. When the shocking story of Smelly Shelly's arrest broke, I still had floating around my head pieces of Julia Ioffe's January 12 New Yorker profile of the bloodied-but-unbowed Russian ex-oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovksy, "Remote Control: Can an exiled oligarch persuade Russia that Putin must go?." Actually, I've already shared my "money" quote, and I don't think I can do much better than to share it again, with maybe a little boldfacing.

First I need to repeat the context I set when I presented the quote originally: "Before Khodorkovsky was brought down by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, you'll recall, he had at a remarkably young age amassed a fortune that made even the fortunes amassed by the other rampaging oligarchs look ho-hum. And today, while he remains, as Ioffe puts it, 'unapologetic,' he's a little, um, defensive about what he did."

We might add just this additional bit of context for the breakout of the wealth grab that characterized Russia's economic transformation from SSR to post-Soviet entity:

Boris Yeltsin’s post-Soviet government implemented radical market reforms but instituted almost no legal structure to control them. Khodorkovsky was perfectly positioned to take advantage.

Now here's what Moneybags Mikey told Ioffe (as noted, with emphasis added):

When people say, ‘It was impossible to live back then without violating the law,’ I say, ‘Come on, don’t make me out for a fool,’ ” he said, with a sneer. “When there are so few laws and they’re so imperfect, you have to be a total idiot not to be able to find a way to do what you want without violating the existing laws.”

He had only taken colossal advantage of a nearly lawless landscape. “Back then, I didn’t grasp the fact that people of a slightly older generation than me simply couldn’t adequately assess the opportunities in front of them,” he said. “In this case, we are—or I was—also victims of the same problem. Because we got property but in a flawed way.”

He went on, “We weren’t the Rockefellers, but we weren’t modern Americans, either.”

Did you get that?

MONEYBAGS MIKEY: "When there are so few laws and they’re so imperfect, you have to be a total idiot not to be able to find a way to do what you want without violating the existing laws."

And JULIA IOFFE: "He had only taken colossal advantage of a nearly lawless landscape."

Now do you see why coverage of Smelly Shelly's day of shame set me thinking again about Moneybags Mikhail?


"SO FEW LAWS, AND SO IMPERFECT":
WELCOME TO NYS LEGISLATIVE ETHICS

One refrain you'll note throughout the coverage of Smelly Shelly's legal situation: NYS legislators are in fact allowed, almost without restriction, to rack up outside income," because our Legislature is presumed to be part-time. That's right, every once in a while our legislators entrust the care of the family farmstead over to the rest of the family and the farmheads and set out on the arduous trek to Albany, where they transact some official business and promtply set out on the return trek to the farm. It's citizen democracy at its best.

Yeah, right.

The fact remains that the way the Legislature was set up, it's practically assumed that legislators will do outside work, since they can hardly be expected to support their families on the pittance coughed up by the State of New York. Actually, it's far from what you or I would probably consider a pittance, especially when you add in all the extras, in either perks or outright cash, members earn for doing pretty much anything beyond showing up.

You're probably thinking, well, that's kind of iffy. After all, when your job is doing the state's business, it might seem awfully difficult to avoid conflicts of interest in performing outside work. Still, it's easy enough to see which sources of income might fail the smell test by looking at legislators' disclosure forms for their sources of outside income. Well, ha-ha and ha! Because the legislators don't have to disclose all their sources of outside income.

This is one of those utterly unaccountable oversights that somehow the Legislature has never gotten around to rectifying. Oh, I'm sure they've meant to, and somehow every time they have, well, something came up. Like they had to hurry home to chop some firewood or slop the pigs.

This was in fact one of the things our governor, "Boy Andrew" Cuomo, had in mind when he organized that commission that caused such a ruckus to look into ethical problems in state government. It was so important to him that as soon as the the "money guys" of some state legislators being poked at by commission investigators happened also to be "money guys" of Boy Andrew. Wham, end of investigation, end of commission!

Nevertheless, just this month Boy Andrew was back at it. As the head read on a post by Newsday's Michael Gormley, "Cuomo says he will force State Legislature to accept his ethics measures." As far as I know, the governor has made no mention of forcing himself to ponder gubernatorial ethics.

Still, the law is what the law is, and when you look at the rackets set up by, or at least on behalf of, Smelly Shelly, it's hard -- at least for me -- not to think of Moneybags Mikey declaring, "When there are so few laws and they’re so imperfect, you have to be a total idiot not to be able to find a way to do what you want without violating the existing laws."

Certainly that includes finding out just how far you can stretch those laws. When you dig into the details of the crimes alleged by the federal prosecutors, and see all the devices and strategies devised to hide what is alleged to have been going on, and the gaps even in following such laws as there are, you get a pretty good idea that everyone involved understood perfectly well how bad these things stunk. So it's kind of a relief that on the basis of the evidence the U.S. attorney's office presented to that grand jury, the jurors decided that yes, the charges deserve to be pursued to trial.


ONE LAST LESSON FROM THE SERIAL
PLUNDERING OF MONEYBAGS MIKEY

I would have liked to touch on a bunch more points that crop up in Julia Ioffe's profile of Khodorkovsky, which is definitely worth a read if you have newyorker.com access. As she notes, Mikey has freely reinvented himself ideologically a number of times, by coincidence all times when his reinvented self happened to suit his current financial self-interest. Forget presenting a "democratic" alternative to Russia's once and apparently for-all-time (at least until he loses control) strongman Vladimir Putin. None of those selves would seem well adapted to a principled "for love of Mother Russia" alternative.

For example, when Khodorkovsky started making his fortune through his sleazily won control of Yukos, the former state oil monopoly, Ioffe -- drawing on a 2002 Foreign Affairs article by Leo Wolosky, "at the time the deputy director of the Economic Task Force on Russia at the Council on Foreign Relations" -- notes:

Very little of this wealth was making it back to the parts of the country that were producing it. Instead of paying taxes, which could have been used to repair the decaying Soviet infrastructure, Khodorkovsky and his colleagues were depositing the funds in an offshore network.

"Whole regions of Russia are being impoverished," Wolosky said.

And we can hardly bypass Moneybags Mikey's anounced vision for the future:

Khodorkovsky is preparing for a revolution, convinced that Putin, despite his overwhelming popularity and his support inside the military and the security services, will soon fall from power. Khodorkovsky’s efforts may seem quixotic or irrelevant to almost everyone in Russia who bothers to pay attention, and yet he persists. He has people inside Russia organizing activists and preparing them for the 2016 parliamentary elections, even though he doesn’t believe that they will have an effect on real politics in the country. He has launched a Web site where Russian journalists write about the government’s many sins. One of his allies is busy working on a post-Putin constitution. Less than a year out of prison, Khodorkovsky has grandly declared that he would guarantee Putin’s safety if he left power peacefully.

“When the moment comes, the leftists will be organized, the neo-Nazis will be organized, and Putin will have the special services at his disposal,” an Open Russia activist told me. “And, when it’s go time, we want to have our hundred thousand people in the mix, too.”

But to get back to our subject, I did promise you a story I think relates, concerning the problematic relationship between Khodorkovsky and his future nemesis Putin. By the time the latter came to power, Ioffe tells us, Mikey had already performed his most recent self-reinvention, this one breaking out of oligarchitude. The time had come for him to stabilize his wealth, for which it was necessary to make Yukos a regular international-trading-and-investment-partner-grade company, and the stark reality was that "in order for our capitalization to grow, we needed a more transparent political system."

This was certainly not a traditional oligarchical position. Surely the last thing economic pillagers and plunderers want is political transparency. But Mikey's situation had changed. He wasn't trying to make a fortune; he'd already made it, and now he wanted to hold onto it.

Which seems, alas, to have somewhat clouded his perception of what was going on around him. Putin, we're reminded, came to power "promising to rein in the oligarchs." Does it really need saying that just about the last thing he had in mind was "a more transparent political system"? Yikes!

This situation was sketched for Ioffe by Natalia Gevorkyan, "who helped conduct the interviews with Putin that make up his autobiography, First Person." Ioffe writes (with, again, some highlighting from me):

After being elected to the Presidency, in 2000, Putin began to surround himself with K.G.B. alumni and friends from St. Petersburg, men who had fallen behind in the nineties. Now that they were in power, the imposition of legal structures and transparency was not in their interest; it would only prevent them from amassing the sort of wealth that Khodorkovsky had.

By 2002, Putin had driven two powerful oligarchs––Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky––out of the country and seized their media assets. According to [onetime Khdorkovsky business partner Leo] Nevzlin, Khodorkovsky didn’t understand the signals the Kremlin was sending: show fealty or leave. On February 20, 2003, at a business round-table with Putin, Khodorkovsky pointed to a questionable deal that had caught his attention as an oilman. He implied that Igor Sechin, an old friend of Putin’s who was also in the K.G.B., had enriched himself through the deal. When Khodorkovsky asked Putin to look into it, Putin snapped, “Yukos has excess reserves, and how did it get them?” The message was clear: you got yours, now stay out of the way as we get ours.

In the months that followed, Yukos’s offices were raided by the prosecutor general’s office. That summer, shortly after Khodorkovsky’s fortieth birthday, his lieutenant Platon Lebedev was arrested. Yukos employees fled the country, and Khodorkovsky’s friends and lawyers advised him to do the same. He refused.

The rest is history.


I'M NOT SAYING SMELLY SHELLY'S NYS
IS JUST LIKE MONEYBAGS MIKEY'S RUSSIA

Still, there is a certain angle from which the view looks kind of similar. Think of the way those NYS legislators bridle at outside interference in their little empire. (Say, is this not the Empire State?) Ethics-mongerers come and go, sometimes even in the governor's office, or a U.S. attorney's. But the principle that seems honored above all else in our State Legislature is: The people who came before us got theirs; now it's our turn to get ours.

I bet President Putin would understand.

#

Maybe "Smelly Shelly" Silver is answerable to the laws we have after all: Part 1, The indictment

He used to be such an important person, not just respected but feared. Now the feds are sitting on nearly $4 million of his moolah, he's facing real prison time, and he's got some Internet clown calling him "Smelly Shelly."

by Ken

So much for the hopes of former NYS Assembly Speaker "Smelly Shelly" Silver to wriggle out from under the heap of hurt piled on him last month by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara ("Say it ain't so, Shelly Silver -- and see whether anybody believes you") at the indictment stage. (I see that I myself referred erroneously to Smelly Shelly having been "arrested and indicted." No, he was arraigned upon arrest, but the indictment(s) remained to come.) In recent days observers have been pointing to this coming Monday as a turning point in his case -- the date by which the feds would have to either properly indict him or -- well, not. There was talk that USA Preet might have difficulty getting the grand jury to issue an indictment because of the difficulty of proving a quid pro quo for the roughly $4 million they say piled up in the Smellyman's coffers via corruption.

Just yesterday morning, for example, Bloomberg News's Patricia Hurtado filed a report that was headlined "Grand Jury Deadline For Sheldon Silver Tests Case's Strength." In her report, Patricia shared insight from a couple of insiders:

Susan Necheles, a former prosecutor who has defended political corruption cases, raised doubts about the charges and said they’ll fail without convincing proof of a quid pro quo.

“We have a part-time Legislature which is allowed to earn money on the side, even when the people they’re earning money from also want political favors from them,” she said.

“That’s not criminal,” she added. “It’s just politics.”

E. Stewart Jones Jr., a lawyer who last year won an acquittal for former New York Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno on corruption charges, said there’s nothing illegal about referral-fee arrangements that are disclosed to clients.

“These relationships have existed for decades,” he said in an interview. “The lawyers have done nothing but refer a case, and that’s been permissible and ethical.”

No doubt, proving a quid pro quo where political corruption is concerned is tough. You don't usually find a document along the lines of:

I, the undersigned [insert name here], acknowledge payment of $[insert amount here] from [insert name of political figure and office held] in exchange for his/her promise to [insert brief description of favor promised; please limit to 250 words, or attach extra sheets].

Signed, [sign document here]

Or audio or video tapes to the same effect.

Sure, there are dumb pols, but you like to think that a guy who -- speaking entirely hypothetically here -- has the smarts to engage in a couple of rackets that net him a minimum of $4 isn't apt to be that stupid. On the other hand, it isn't entirely unknown for a prosecutor to assemble a case with circumstantial elements that require a jury to connect some of the dots, based on the evidence.


SMELLY SHELLY IS INDICTED

Unfortuntately for Smelly Shelly, he's a step closer to having his fate decided by a jury, because yesterday the feds got their grand-jury thumbs-up. The NYT's William K. Rashbaum reports (links onsite):

A federal grand jury in Manhattan voted on Thursday to indict Sheldon Silver on the fraud and extortion charges that were the basis of his arrest last month, and led to his ouster as speaker of the State Assembly.

Mr. Silver was arrested on Jan. 22 on a five-count criminal complaint that detailed two alleged bribery and kickback schemes in a case that has upended Albany. The three-count indictment, handed up in the United States District Courthouse in Manhattan, charged him with mail fraud, wire fraud and extortion under the color of official right.

Two charges in the complaint — a mail fraud conspiracy count and an extortion conspiracy count — were not included in the indictment. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment on why the counts had been dropped.

The indictment of Mr. Silver, 71, a Lower East Side Democrat who had served as the powerful speaker for two decades, suggests there is little prospect of plea discussions at this stage in the case, and moves the matter toward a possible trial. He remains a member of the Assembly.

Mr. Silver’s lawyers, Joel Cohen and Steven Molo, said in a statement that their client was not guilty. “We can now begin to fight for his total vindication,” the statement said. “We will do our fighting where it should be done: in court.”

Mr. Silver is scheduled to be arraigned at 3 p.m. on Tuesday before Judge Valerie E. Caproni of Federal District Court. She will preside over the case.

So at this point all that stands between Shelly and a jury of his peers is whatever plea agreement his legal team can hammer out with the prosecutors. If you wanted to look at the process cynically, you might say that the principal effect of today's development is to dramatically redefine the positions from which the two sides will now be negotiating.

No doubt, though, the prosecution team is going to be hearing that phrase "quid pro quo" a lot during the back-and-forth. Proving that Smelly Shelly -- and here, it shoujld be noted, we're no longer speaking hypothetically -- used his position to stockpile potential lawsuit referrals in exchange for the millions of dollars in referral fees he racked up, or that he used his control of Assembly purse strings to move public moneys into the hands of other parties in exchange for other payoffs -- this really and truly isn't a snap.

Don't get USA Preet mad!

But the Smellyman's team has to know now that USA Preet isn't about to back down. His public statements have given strong indication that he's really peeved about the blatant corruption in Albany, not least because of the way our governor, Boy Andrew, summarily shut down the investigation he himself had set in motion -- peeved both by the rampant corruption and by the way he got snookered into cooperating into an investigation that turned out, as soon as investigators' inquiry into some of the legislators' money guys turned out to be looking at some of Boy Andrew's money guys, to be just a bit of political theater, a mere side show really, that could be shut down at the governor's convenience (or perhaps inconvenience).

Now if there's anything we learned from all those seasons of Law and Order, it's that prosecutors sometimes take the cases they prosecute personally. And while you don't want this to get out of hand -- law enforcement really shouldn't be a matter of a class of lawyers pursuing grudges -- it's certainly not entirely a bad thing. It might have been nice if USA Preet and other federal and state prosecutors had taken the massive malfeasances involved in the Great Economic Meltdown of 2008 more personally. Yes, yes, I know, a U.S. attorney can never get ahead of what he can prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, and sometimes making cases that you lose is worse than not making any cases at all. Still . . .

Let's not pretend that Smelly Shelly is, even if everything the feds say about him is true, the most corrupt officeholder in the U.S. today. But what he's accused of is big-time, and the amount of trust invested in someone who occupied as powerful a position as he did has to make him accountable. It might be nice if some other prosecutors in other jurisdictions were inspired by USA Preet's present example.


TOMORROW: Once and for all, what do Smelly Shelly and "Moneybags Mikey" Khodorkovsky have in common?

#

Say it ain't so, Shelly Silver -- and see whether anybody believes you

"For many years, New Yorkers have asked the question, how could Speaker Silver, one of the most powerful men in all of New York, earn millions of dollars in outside income without deeply compromising his ability to honestly serve his constituents? Today, we provide the answer: He didn't."

—Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District
of New York, at yesterday's press conference

"At the news conference, Mr. Bharara offered a stinging assessment of a state capital where money flows freely and deals are cut behind closed doors -- sometimes at the expense of taxpayers, and to the enrichment of lawmakers. He said the charges against Mr. Silver 'go to the very core of what ails Albany.'

"Mr. Bharara added, somewhat ominously, that his office had a number of other public corruption investigations that were still continuing. 'You should stay tuned,' he said."

-- from reporting by the NYT's William K. Rashbaum,
Thomas Kaplan, and Marc Santora

"The day before his arrest, Mr. Silver was in Albany, where he attended Mr. Cuomo’s State of the State address and had a prominent seat on stage next to the governor. . . .

"After the disclosure, Mr. Silver said he had done nothing wrong but declined to comment in detail."

-- from the NYT report

by Ken

When Sheldon Silver became speaker of the New York State Assembly, in February 1994, succeeding deceased-in-office Speaker Saul Weprin, the governor was Mario Cuomo, the first of five governors he has served alongside, the most recent being, of course, Mario's boy Andrew. This has made hime, for 21 years, one of the two or three most influential pols in the state.

Yesterday our Shelly was arrested by FBI agents for arraignment at the U.S. Courthouse on five federal corruption counts.

As the team of NYT reporters assigned to the story yesterday put it: "[T]he complaint against Mr. Silver outlines a capital culture rife with back-room dealing, where money and influence shape public policy for the benefit of private agendas."

Two things were pretty clear back in 2014 when Mario Cuomo's boy Andrew shut down the commission he himself had previously willed into existence with the supposed mission of rooting out corruption in state government. First, the commission had been decommissioned because its investigators were getting unacceptably nosy about business dealings of people in Boy Andrew's circle, including even His Boyhood himself. Second, if there was anyone who was really, really peeved by Boy Andrew's little comedy of corruption non-fighting, it was Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

USA Preet had been consulting and coordinating with the commission, and you got the feeling that he felt he'd been had -- that Boy Andrew, while pretending to be serious about exposing corruption in the way business is done in Albany and possibly doing something about it, had in fact been treating him like some kind of schnook for buying into the gag, like as if Boy Andrew had been serious about corruption-busting!

You also got the feeling we hadn't heard the last word on the subject of corruption in NYS government from USA Preet. And yesterday Shelly Silver surrendered his passport following his indictment on charges instigated by USA Preet's office.

People in that office, starting with the USA himself, were indicating that Speaker Shelly wasn't the only NYS pol whose business dealings they've been looking into. If Speaker Shelly's day was ruined, there are likely other NYS pols who were sweating bullets.

I was so taken aback by the news bulletings that I hardly paused in expending a nytimes.com free click on the paper's early coverage. That click turned out to be No. 5 of my allotted ten for the month of January, and I would do it again.

Now let's be clear that we operate under a legal presumption of innocence, and so as of now our Shelly is still as innocent as a new-born lamb. Still, you have to think that maybe USA Preet and his team haven't just made this stuff up. Here's some of what they're saying our Shelly did.

In a statement, Richard Frankel, the F.B.I. special agent in charge, said, “Those who make the laws don’t have the right to break the laws.”

“As alleged, Silver took advantage of the political pulpit to benefit from unlawful profits,” he said. “When all was said and done, he amassed nearly $4 million in illegitimate proceeds and arranged for approximately $500,000 in state funds to be used for projects that benefited his personal plans.”

The criminal complaint outlining the charges accuses Mr. Silver of “using the power and influence of his official position to obtain for himself millions of dollars of bribes and kickbacks masked as legitimate income.”

He is charged with honest services mail and wire fraud, conspiracy to commit honest services mail fraud, extortion “under the color of law” — using his official position to commit extortion — and extortion conspiracy.

The complaint maintains that for more than a decade, Mr. Silver devised a scheme “to induce real estate developers with business before the state” to use a real estate law firm controlled by a lawyer who had once worked as Mr. Silver’s counsel. That lawyer, according to the complaint, orchestrated payments to the speaker for referrals to the firm.

The complaint, referring to the personal injury firm, Weitz and Luxenberg, also said that “there is probable cause to believe that Silver received approximately $4 million in payments characterized as attorney referral fees solely through the corrupt use of his official position.”

Prosecutors, according to the complaint, said Mr. Silver did no work for the payment. Investigators could find no court appearances by him and no records at either law firm that showed he had done any legal work whatsoever, except for one case in which he represented an employee of the Legislature in a property dispute, but took no fee.

Oh yes, this brings us to one of my favorite details: "The authorities seized approximately $3.8 million of Mr. Silver’s money on Thursday morning." Now I suppose that in the Land of the 1% there are circles where it's regarded as no big deal having $3.8 million sitting around available for seizing on, say, some random Thursday morning in January. I figure if I emptied all my pants, really dug into the couch cushions, and tracked down the remnants of all the piles of would-be laundry quarters I've started around my apartment, the total would come to comfortably less than $3.8 million.

Now we should stress that the way the NYS Legislature is set up, members are not only allowed but assumed to have outside income; it's not supposed to be a, you know, full-time job. Is our Shelly, to pick a random example, really supposed to get by on the mere $121K salary we the people pay him? The question is whether and where a line might be drawn between what's OK in the way of outside toil and what's not, so that if, say, your business is butchery, you and your family can keep the butcher shop going while you're feverishly legislating in Albany -- between that and, say, well, the sort of thing our Shelly is accused of doing.

Here's a little more of the NYT report:

While it is legal for lawmakers, who work part time, to hold outside jobs, investigators said Mr. Silver failed to list all the payments from the Goldberg firm and Weitz and Luxenberg on his annual financial disclosure filings with the state.

The real estate firm is led by Jay Arthur Goldberg, 75, who once served as Mr. Silver’s counsel and also on New York City’s Tax Commission during the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch.

In the past, Mr. Silver has been criticized for his outside law practice, a lucrative career that supplements the $121,000 he earns as speaker.

In 2013, on his most recent financial disclosure filing, Mr. Silver listed at least $650,000 in law practice income, including work for the personal injury law firm, Weitz and Luxenberg.

But what he does to earn that income has become one of Albany’s enduring mysteries, and Mr. Silver has refused to provide details about his work aside from saying the bulk of his work was as a personal injury lawyer.

The complaint said Mr. Silver was credited with referring more than 100 clients to the firm, the majority for potential asbestos litigation. Investigators, however, spoke with more than 10 of those individuals or their surviving relatives and found that none had ever contacted Mr. Silver to seek legal representation, nor had they been contacted by him or knew of any role he played in providing any legal service.

There are aspects of this odd relationship to the law that our Shelly seems to have staked out which I want to discuss a little more -- including a seemingly out-of-left-field reference to the relationship to law outlined by an improbably related figure: Putin-struck but unbowed Russian oligarch-turned-"reformer" Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But for now let's close with one utterly unpardonable thing our Shelly has done.

Mr. Silver was easily re-elected speaker this month when the Assembly gathered in Albany to begin the new legislative session.

But as news of the arrest spread, there were signs that he might have trouble maintaining support.

State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Democrat from Manhattan, took to Twitter on Thursday to call for Mr. Silver’s resignation.

“Speaker Silver should resign for the good of the people of New York,” Mr. Hoylman wrote.

It's only to be expected that Republicans would pounce on our Shelly's misfortune. And make no mistake, when you're rummaging around the lower ranks of the human evolutionary spectrum, you're going to find NYS Assembly Republicans, essentially cut off from any sort of power for as far back as most minds go. The horrible thing is that this Hoylman yutz has a point. And this is what I consider unforgivable on our Shelly's part: to put a yutz like this Hoylman in a position where he has a point.

#

Take a bow, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara -- scourge of kook corruption

A madcap novel of the sloppiest turf war ever launched by the Brooklyn mob. Kid Sally Palumbo has been a loyal servant to the Brooklyn Mafia for years. His specialty is murder, and he is so skilled at it that he has gotten the attention of Mafia boss Papa Baccala. But unfortunately for Kid Sally, murder pays poorly. He wants to make real dough, to get respect, and to be able to tell his colleagues where to sit when they eat dinner. In short, he wants to be boss. The job would be his for the taking -- if only Kid Sally weren't a Grade A moron. . .

-- from the Reader Store overview of the 1969 Jimmy Breslin novel based on the life of Mafioso "Crazy Joey" Gallo

by Ken

Or as the publisher's description of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (which you'll find on book sites all over the Internet) puts it, Kid Sally is "a would-be capo who 'couldn't run a gas station at a profit even if he stole the customers' cars.' " (The role was played in the much-enjoyed film version by a newcomer named Robert De Niro, who was cast when another young actor, Al Pacino, pulled out to play Michael Corleone in a big-money picture to be made based on Mario Puzo's The Godfather.)

So what does The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight have to do with the price of eggs? Well, the publisher's description notes that "the title has entered into the language as a catch phrase," and as the New York media overflow with tales of local political corruption, it's the image that keeps coming to mind.

The other day Howie walked us through the great breaking story about the roundup of a few NYS pols and assorted other characters in a grand conspiracy of electoral corruption ("Queens State Senator Malcolm Smith And A Gaggle Of Corrpt Republicans Arrested By The FBI"). It's a story that would have been even funnier if Jimmy Breslin were around to write it -- a story about a network of payoffs involving a phony Indian money guy named "Raj" and an Orthodox Jewish wheeler-dealer named "Mo" who was real but, alas for the conspirators, an already-cooperating witness.

All of this in the service of a scheme so preposterous -- and also, we should stress, so inconsequential -- as to represent a slander on any self-respecting corrupt pol. It all revolved around getting "Wilson Pikula"s, a peculiarly NYS institution, to enable washed-up African-American Democratic Queens State Senator Malcolm into the Republican mayoral primaries in NYC's five counties, where he would have had absolutely zero chance of doing anything except embarrassing. That is, even if a bunch of the bribe-takers hadn't taken the money and then reneged on their promises. (This possibility, we know from the government tapes, actually had occurred to Senator Smith. He just never figured out any way of dealing with it.)

I can't say I've read deeply in the paperwork that's been made available, but still -- really, now! As far as I can tell, there wasn't even any public money changing hands. Sure, if there were public officials taking bribes, they should be dealt with, though as soon as one learns that the crooked wheels of this conspiracy were oiled by a cooperating witness, one can be forgiven for wondering whether this whole nutty scheme would have been hatched, let alone gone anywhere, without government support.

Yet there it is: "political corruption," stopped dead in its tracks by the FBI at the behest of the fearless corruption-fighting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. The other "corruption" scandals we've been hearing about from unflinching prosecutors -- both financial and political -- aren't as colorful, or entertaining, but they seem to me every bit as inconsequential.

Does anyone imagine for a second that any aspect of this nonsense has anything to do with the mountain of financial and political corruption, real corruption, that New York, both city and state, are choking under? The kind where the big-money players using influence and cash either to siphon money out of the public till or, more frequently, to manipulate the craven political actors to do their bidding and ensure a supercharged return on their investment?

Yet just the other day, DNAinfo.com, from which I've come to expect better, was touting: "Preet Bharara, New Sheriff of Albany, Eyed for Higher Office":

He's the star prosecutor who, in one week, has taken down one state senator, two assemblymen, a councilman and two GOP bosses in two alleged bribery plots that have rocked the political world.

And he hints more heads will roll.

It's just the latest in a series of high-profile catches for Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has spent the last four years lassoing one corrupt city politician after the next — fueling renewed speculation that the self-appointed Sheriff of Albany might harbor political ambitions of his own. . . .

Bharara has spent the past four years in the headlines and splashed across magazine covers for his work taking down corrupt politicians, prosecuting terror suspects and insider trading, and recovering stolen cash, including the largest-known recovery in municipal contract fraud in U.S. history following the CityTime debacle.

This week, his takedowns included Queens State Sen. Malcolm Smith, City Councilman Daniel Halloran and Bronx Assemblyman Eric Stevenson in connection with two elaborate alleged bribery schemes, including one that tried to get Smith on the ballot for New York City mayor.

Since August 2009, he has nabbed a whopping 15 elected officials and associates in public corruption cases, including State Sen. Carl Kruger, who was sentenced to seven years in prison, and Councilman Larry Seabrook, who was sentenced to five years behind bars. To highlight his cases, the office created a colorful chart featuring all the names, positions, charges and outcomes of each of the arrests.

Non-New Yorkers may be forgiven for assuming that this roster of "elected officials and associates" must matter. Trust me, these are nobodies -- if possible, less-than-nobodies. Oddballs and odd men out, what we might call "kook corruption." Can we expect some poor schlepp of a state assemblyman to be tagged for collusion with a bunch of circus clowns getting out of a Volkswagen?

Whereas does anyone believe for a second that New York City (and State) isn't chock full of somebodies and supersomebodies in urgent need of indicting? The kinds of people who are tied into the kind of people who are real movers and shakers, and in their corruption make our political and financial cuture stink to high heaven?

Do we really have to ask, for example, how many prosecutions the U.S. attorney for the Southern District has launched involving actual actors in the financial meltdown that followed the blowing of the housing bubble? Is anyone else getting the feeling that, hand in hand with the financial concept of "too big to fail," we now have a legal category of candidate felons who are "too big to touch"?

In the nauseating DNAinfo.com puff piece, amid speculation that jobs Preet Bharara might be angling for are U.S. attorney general and director of the FBI, there is this curious note:

But one source in the Justice Department noted that, given the current political climate, there are not many open jobs for Bharara, who formerly served as chief counsel to Sen. Chuck Schumer, leading the 2006 Congressional investigation into the firings of United States attorneys under the Bush administration.

Now this is tantalizing, though I can't say for sure I know what it means. Is the idea that Preet is tainted for being too tough, too willing to investigate? We can't tell, because nothing more is made of it.

And all I can recall of what should have been one of the great scandals of the "Chimpy" Bush administration -- the politicization of the entire Executive Branch, including most unforgivably the Justice Department -- never became a scandal of any consequence. Faced with the stark perversion of the administration of law enforcement by the federal government, there should have been a rash of headlines, firings, indictments, and people in high places spending millions of dollars on PR "handlers."

Somehow it didn't happen, though. I'm sure Senator Schumer and his stalwart chief counsel tried their darnedest, but somehow it just wasn't good enough.

#

Rick Renzi's Going To Spend A Lot Of Time In Prison-- But What About Jerry Lewis?

Last year, after months and months of bickering and posturing and half measures, the Republican House leadership finally forced serial criminal Rick Renzi (R-AZ)-- the R is for "racketeer"-- to retire from politics. He was replaced by a quasi-Democrat who votes with the GOP more frequently, at least on important substantive issues, than she votes with the Democrats. (Her ProgressivePunch score is a dismal 32.61.) Today the Justice Department announced that it has expanded its case against Renzi, adding 5 new corruption charges against the former key John McCain ally and campaign operative.

Prosecutors added insurance fraud and racketeering accusations in a second superseding indictment filed in late September. It is the second time the government has added charges to the original indictment, first filed in February 2008.

The government added a conspiracy to commit insurance fraud charge to the indictment. Explaining the charge, the government argued that Renzi, co-defendant Dwayne Lequire and others willfully embezzled funds and premiums from a risk retention company called Spirit Mountain to pay Renzi’s “substantial personal expenses.” Lequire helped conceal the embezzlement by transferring other funds into accounts of Renzi’s insurance company, Patriot Insurance, including proceeds from a line of credit and the real estate deal at the heart of the corruption case against him, the prosecutors allege.

Renzi is accused of telling executives for Resolution Copper Mining that he would not support a land swap bill unless they bought his former business partner’s property. Another company agreed to the deal, and Renzi pocketed more than $700,000 from it, according to the indictment.

The trial has been postponed while the judge deals with a barrage of Renzi motions to get the charges dismissed, to get evidence suppressed and to disqualify the prosecution team, etc. So far all of the obstructionist motions that have been ruled on have been denied. That got him to just file more. Meanwhile, the remnants of the most corrupt regime to have ever infested the nation's capital took a failed stab at forcing Charlie Rangel step down from his Ways and Means Committee chair. "To allow Mr. Rangel to continue to serve," says GOP hatchetman John Carter (R-TX), "as Chairman of the very committee with IRS oversight, without paying a nickel in penalties, and with no end in sight to his ethics investigation, sends a clear message to the American public that this government refuses to abide by the same laws they impose on the working people of this country."

It kind of makes you wonder what message the right-wing fringe loon Carter and his partisan cohorts thought was being sent to the American public while California Congressman Jerry Lewis was the head of the Appropriations Committee-- spending a million dollars a year fending off a halfhearted Bush Justice Dept. investigation while arranging for earmarks for every campaign donor he's ever had. And he's still up to his old tricks, just this week putting in for a $3 million earmark for Goldman Sachs, Pegasus Partners and Resource Capital Funds. In Lewis' case, Karl Rove was able to get rid of not one, but two-- Carol Lam and Debra Yang-- Justice Department attorneys sniffing around a little too close for comfort.

I don't doubt that Rangel has played fast and loose with rules governing ethical conduct-- and possibly criminal conduct; he is, after all, a politician. The Ethics Committee is investigating him, and I'll be interested in seeing what they come up with. Meanwhile, if Rangel set out to rip off the taxpayers of America and worked really hard at it, he might catch up with Rick Renzi before the next Republican wins the White House-- but he'll never catch up with Jerry Lewis.

Which brings us to a simple question: Why hasn't the new Administration staffed up the Justice Department? The answer, of course, is pure Republican obstructionism. They are simply holding up confirmations for months and months over their unrelated series of manufactured hissy fits. After senseless months of bottling up the nomination of Tom Perez to head the civil rights division, when it came to a vote yesterday Perez was confirmed 72-22, only the worst and most blatant obstructionists-- like Sam Brownback (KS), Miss McConnell (KY), Jeff Sessions (KKK), Jim DeMint (SC), John Ensign (NV), David Diapers Vitter (LA) and John Thune (SD)-- voting no. Confirm US Attorneys who will investigate criminal activities of members of Congress? I don't think so.

Coincidentally, People For the American Way president Michael Keegan was highlighting the obstructionist aspect of this problem today as well, pointing out Republicans' refusal to confirm Dawn Johnsen to her Justice Department post.

“For months now, Senate Republicans have been blocking the confirmation of President Obama's nominees to key positions in the federal government. Dawn Johnsen, the President's eminently qualified nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, has been waiting longer than almost anyone else–nearly eight months!
 
“But they can’t play politics with justice forever. People are getting fed up with the constant obstruction. The logjam will be broken soon, and it couldn’t happen quickly enough.
 
“Dawn Johnsen enjoys the support of former OLC heads from Republican and Democratic administrations. Republican Senator Richard Lugar, her home state Senator, has endorsed her. She served with distinction as acting head of OLC during the Clinton administration. Legal scholars and current and former colleagues have attested to her legal acumen and integrity.
 
“Simply put, Dawn Johnsen is anything but a controversial nominee. But she and other highly qualified nominees are being held hostage in a game of petty politics. Americans want the best possible people in charge of government, and it’s time for Senate Republican leaders to call off their blockade.”

Will NJ voters really replace Jon Corzine with a poster boy for the Bush regime's corruption of U.S. justice?

It's the economy, stupid: Governor Corzine may have contributed to his own problems, but surely only the state of the economy makes it seriously possible that he could lose to a grandstanding sleazebag like Chris Christie.

"Once upon a time we had a concept of 'disgrace'. People with money, power, office, social position, actually cared about whether they acted dishonorably, because if they did they wouldn’t get invited to corporate boards and dinner parties. People would cross the street to show their disdain. Now we give them book contracts, TV deals, visiting professorships, and they get interviewed as experts by the media."

-- Michael Froomkin, in a Discourse.net post,

"The Threat Level Remains Unchanged"

by Ken

Luckily for most of our governors, 2009 -- being a political "off" year -- isn't a time when many of them have to face an electorate rendered increasingly angry and panicky by a year's experience of the Bush Depression. In fact, only one sitting governor is facing the voters this year: New Jersey's Jon Corzine. (The only other state electing a governor is Virginia, where Tim Kaine is finishing his allotted second term, so there's no incumbent on the ballot.)

I feel bad for not writing about the New Jersey race sooner. I guess it's just been hard to grasp that Corzine could be in trouble, especially against a political and moral nothing like former U.S. attorney Chris Christie, whose entire career reads as a majestic buildup to the great day of his own indictment perp walk.

Goodness knows, Governor Corzine has contributed to his own electoral troubles. He came into office with an arrogance that clearly put New Jerseyans off even when he had a point, as with the budget showdown not long after he took office in 2006, which led to a six-day government shutdown that has never been forgotten. Add to the brusqueness of his CEO style a trail of "rich guy"-type scandals, and it's not surprising that the governor doesn't have a vast reservoir of voter good will to fall back on.

Still, Corzine is a guy of substance, and in times of economic stress, his background and skills -- especially as tempered by the wisdom in matters of public service he has gained in his first term -- are good credentials for helping New Jersey survive and recover from the economic meltdown. He is a solid progressive, and would surely deserve reelection if he were facing serious competition. But when he's up against a guy whose political values seem limited to right-wing Republican platitudes ("tax cuts"!) and old-style cronyism, it goes beyond "no contest" to a matter of considerable urgency.

Of course this is a terrible year for a sitting governor to be running. In the early months of the meltdown, Americans seemed to grasp that the economy not only wasn't going to be turned around in a month, but having gotten where we were, it was going to be a long road back. I never had a lot of faith in those assurances, though. When people are feeling this kind of economic hurt, which we knew was likely to get worse before it got better, the perception of a "long road" becomes highly subjective. I think a lot of people have moved into "Are we there yet?" mode.

And governors are between a rock and a hard place. However badly the Obama administration has mismanaged the "stimulus" -- with its preposterous attempt to appease shithead Republicans who hope to dance on the administration's grave and its reliance on economic advisers who swear by the old adage, "What's good for the Wall Street gang and the banksters is good for, well, the Wall Street gang and the banksters" -- it has succeeded in pumping streams of spendable money into the economy. Paul Krugman has suggested that the large number of government-funded programs already in existence have assured a flow of cash that is likely what saved us from a full-fledged depression.

Some of that money has gone to the states, but not nearly enough, which has forced them into the position of having to drastically cut spending and raise taxes, thereby seriously reducing the amount of money consumers have in pocket and are willing to spend. But what else is a governor to do?

(There are, of course, shithead governors who came up with the brilliant idea of trying to reject federal stim funds. You know, geniuses like Louisiana's Booby Jindal and South Carolina's Mark Sanford, gentlemen from whom we will be happy to sign up for economics instruction as soon as (a) Governor Booby dislodges his head from his heinie and (b) Governor Mark apologizes for his sorry-ass existence.)

In this respect New Jersey is luckier than most states in having a governor prepared to seriously address the state's economic woes -- that is, assuming its voters have the sense to retain his services. At the moment, even though Governor Corzine's personal wealth is reportedly much depleted by recent events (leaving him badly positioned to self-finance a campaign as expensive as this one is likely to be; he has pointed out that he's not Mike Bloomberg), it's surely the case that New Jersey needs Corzine more than Corzine needs New Jersey.

I suppose we could, and should, be examining a host of policy issues, looking at what the governor has done and proposed, and comparing all of that with what candidate Chris Christie is saying. I trust that there are people doing that, and maybe at some point we'll get around to it. But for now only two points concern me:

(1) Jon Corzine has accomplished a fair amount in his first term under a panoply of trying conditions. He's exceptionally well qualified for the job and has undoubtedly learned a great deal that will make him a better governor in his second term, if he gets one, and in any case he is the only serious candidate in the race.

(2) Chris Christie is a sorry specimen of your small-time wannabe big shot, who doesn't seem to believe in much of anything but is content to spew doctrinaire right-wing ideology, and whose principal operating principle is knowing a guy who knows a guy who . . . .

I have no qualms in taking the position that Christie should never be elected to any position, should never again occupy any public office, if only for one reason: He was Karl Rove's idea of a satisfactory U.S. attorney.

I apologize for resurrecting a hoary old scandal like that of the Bush regime's purge of U.S. attorneys who refused to go along with the regime's mandate to subordinate the administration of federal justice to acting as the enforcement arm of the Bush political machine. Even now, with all the testimony that John Conyers' House Judiciary Committee was finally able to extract from the apparent pointpersons of the purge, regime political mastermind Karl Rove and then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers, testimony that I gather from people who have ventured into it is severely incriminating with regard both to the Bush regime's political perversion of the U.S. attorneys' job and to the role played by Master Karl, the son of a bitch has the temerity to go on TV (after all, he's a "commentator" now!) and insist that he's vindicated and owed an apology by the media who have been hounding him with baseless allegations.

What will save Rove from doing time is the apparent absence of a smoking gun -- you know, something like him dancing in a T-shirt that says, "I Broke Every Law in the Book Prohibiting Politicization of the Justice Dept." (There is also, of course, the more immediately pressing charge that Rove masterminded the framing of Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, which needs to be pursued relentlessly, first to restore the freedom and reputation, if not the career, of a man who was railroaded out of office and into prison, and second to establish the principle that political hatchetmen operating under cover of the White House really aren't allowed to conspire to overthrow the legally elected government of one of the 50 states.)

As the U.S. attorney scandal was breaking, and frequently thereafter, I wrote here that, next to the disastrous war that the Bush regime lied the country into, the worst of its vast array of malfeasances was its carefully orchestrated destruction of the "justice" function of the Department of Justice, and one of the principal tools was the purge of U.S. attorneys, the DoJ's regional administrators of the federal justice system, who refused to play along.

Just think, to pick a famous example (and one that the Rove and Miers testimony seems to confirm happened exactly the way we thought it did), of David Iglesias being fired for refusing to bring bogus indictments against New Mexico Democratic pols threatening the reelection of New Mexico Republicans like then-Sen. Pete Domenici and then-Rep. Heather Wilson. Is it really so hard to see how direct and immediate a threat this is to American democracy?

From what we already know based on the reporting and piecing together that has already been done regarding the U.S.A. firings, behind almost every one lies a story -- some similar, some different -- so ugly, so unlawful and anti-constitutional, and so dangerous to our most basic American values that it should by itself have constituted an impeachable offense. I'm sorry, but this is another of those things we can't "just put behind us." That isn't going to neutralize the threat to our electoral system. I think for that it's necessary for some people to spend a chunk of time in a federal penitentiary, or the next time we have a U.S. administration that's inclined to repeat the abuses of the Bush regime, those people are going to feel free to do so.

Nevertheless, as important as this, it isn't anywhere close to the most important issue at stake in the U.S.A. firings.

This is another point I first encountered thanks to Paul Krugman, though I'm sure many other people made the same connection. Okay, this line of thinking goes, we've learned about some of the kinds of things that could get you fired from the Bush DoJ. But what about the 84 U.S. attorneys who weren't fired? What did they have to do to retain the favor of Karl Rove's White House political operation?

For starters, I hope no one has forgotten the study undertaken by Donald Shields and John Cragan of Bush DoJ prosecutions undertaken in the years 2001-06, which found:

Data indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

Beyond that, well, we know of some individual cases, as in Alabama's Middle District, where U.S.A. Leura Canary apparently served as pointperson in the Rove conspiracy against Governor Siegelman. But since we're apparently never going to get a proper investigation into the reasons for the firing of the Bush U.S.A.s who were fired, we have even less chance of learning what exactly the un-fired 84 did to keep their jobs.

Possibly many of them did nothing more than avoid doing anything to offend the White House political operation. And surely it would be a shame to tar them all with the same brush. Or would it? This is what happens when you pervert the Executive Branch the way the Bush regime did. All of its actions become suspect. And rightly so, I think.

Certainly there's plenty of indication that in the District of New Jersey Chris Christie was very much Karl Rove's kind of U.S.A., never shying from political prosecutions and doing all the influence-peddling and cronyism you expect from a Rove-certified U.S.A. That's without the so-far-acknowledged two conversations that Christie and Rove had while Christie was still in office about his running for New Jersey governor. You don't have to have the blazing insight of a political mastermind to see that Rove recognized his kind of political hack and was only too happy to send him out into the world to do Satan's work.

But one thing I don't think should happen is the seamless reintegration of Rove's Rogues into civilian life. I am taking a serious liberty in quoting the following splendid paragraphs from a post today by University of Miami Law School Prof. Michael Froomkin on his Discourse.net blog, "The Threat Level Remains Unchanged." Michael was writing about former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who apparently writes in his forthcoming book something he actually acknowledged as far back as 2005: that he at the very least suspected that the Bush regime was using the famous multicolored terror alerts for political purposes. And yet he went on uncomplainingly with his business.

We don't have any admission of culpability from Chris Christie, of course, and in the good professor's evidence-based world, I doubt that he would accept my guilt-by-association condemnation. However, I do know that Michael was and is profoundly concerned about the abuses of the Bush DoJ, including the U.S.A. firings, and so with that proviso -- that I'm not presenting legally sufficient evidence to link Christie to the following paragraphs -- I am nevertheless taking the liberty of quoting them in this connection:

Once upon a time we had a concept of “disgrace”. People with money, power, office, social position, actually cared about whether they acted dishonorably, because if they did they wouldn’t get invited to corporate boards and dinner parties. People would cross the street to show their disdain. Now we give them book contracts, TV deals, visiting professorships, and they get interviewed as experts by the media.

Maybe it’s time to bring the notion of respectability back. If we won’t have public justice to sort out truth from fiction, no special prosecutors until after the statute of limitations has run, maybe instead we need a quiet form of the private personal justice we can manage based on the facts on the public record. Shun Ridge. Shun Yoo. Shun Rove. Shun Gonzales. Shun all the torturers and torture enablers, and shun the perverters of law and justice. Don’t ever put anything their way. Don’t give them a visiting gig. Don’t invite them on TV. Don’t buy their books. And make it contagious. Make them professional lepers. Make the people who give them treats sorry they did it.

But it won’t happen. Not because there’s always the risk that social shunning gets out hand, brings out the worst in some people who then punish the innocent, for all that these are real and demonstrated dangers not to be taken lightly. No, it won’t happen because the people who put those unprincipled traitors to law and decency in power and who then coined it thanks to their connivance at kleptocracy hope to do it again and again and again. And that means that even used and dishonored tools need to be kept on financial life support so as not to discourage their successors.

Angry? I’m beyond angry. I’m tired of angry.

#

Attention, Morning Sedition fans: Planet Bush Bureau Chief Lawton Smalls is back, and he insists indignantly, "I will not be stimulated!"

"Congratulations, Marc, you got your wish. The United States of America is officially a Communist state. Everything you wanted -- redistribution of wealth, atheism, nanny state, meth orgies, enforced homosexuality, abolition of sports, mandatory drug addiction, on-demand abortion, preschool prostitution, free jazz, beards -- it's all there. We've gone to hell in a handbasket, hell in a tie-dyed handbasket, and I'm pointing a finger at you."

-- former Morning Sedition Planet Bush Bureau Chief Lawton Smalls (at 21:18), on yesterday's Air America Radio Break Room Live

by Ken

We have important stuff to talk about, like whether Senate Dems will muster the 60 votes they need to be able to proceed to confirmation of Hilda Solis as a secretary of labor who's actually concerned about the interests of working people. (And why is that Americans are so hostile to working people, and do we pay a price for it?)

And what's the deal with the Obama Justice Dept. apparently asking the remaining 51 U.S. attorneys (out of the total 93 -- did the other 42 really just disappear?) to stay in place, at least temporarily. Aren't these the worst of the Bush-DoJ-worst USAs? Were they at least asked for the letter of resignation standard at the start of a new administration, so that they can be replaced, as per custom, in the first year or two? You know, so the Republicans don't screech "politicization" when they're finally replaced?

Important stuff, but meanwhile, although I've known that Sam Seder and Marc Maron are doing something on Air America Radio in the afternoon, since I don't have afternoon radio access, it's been murky to me exactly what. But I just stumbled on a half-hour clip of yesterday's Break Room Live, where Marc -- with Sam in Los Angeles this week -- among other things greets old Morning Sedition friend, erstwhile Planet Bush Bureau Chief Lawton Smalls.

In case you're wondering what Lawton is so worked up about in the above excerpt, it's:

"That stimulus package. Uh! Lord, it even sounds dirty. Now what secretary from the Department of Gay thought that one up?"

Marc rattles off a list of provisions with the package, and to each one Lawton declares, "Pork!" But doesn't the new president have to do something about the economic disaster? The solution to everything, Lawton insists, is, 'Tax cuts, Marc, the bigger the better -- they're straight out of the Bible!"

"Hussein Obama Fearcard scared everyone into believing there's a, quote, recession -- I'm doing that thing with my fingers -- so he could strong-arm this stimulus poison down America's throats."

And of course, as always, as soon as Marc issues Lawton a reality check, the poor fellow is reduced to bawling like a baby (as illustrated in the AAR video images) -- for a while, at least. Welcome back, Lawton!

Note: I think you can play a clip of just Lawton's appearance from the AAR website, but I couldn't get an embed code. Eventually I've got to go back there and try to figure out what the heck this BRL thing is. AAR does like to keep its secrets.


UPDATE: I SHOULD HAVE MENTIONED THAT LAWTON
SMALLS IS REALLY OUR FUNNY FRIEND KENT JONES

Most of us first encountered Kent, who now does the "Just Enough" segment on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, as one of the hugely talented writer-performers on Air America Radio's brilliant and brutally unsupported morning show, Morning Sedition. Those of us who made the move from Morning Sedition to Rachel's totally different but also quite brilliant AAR morning show continued to hear Kent on that. Now I've turned to Wikipedia to fill in the picture a bit:

After the cancellation of Morning Sedition in December 2005, Kent continued to write and perform on The Marc Maron Show until its cancellation in July 2006. He most recently appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, with daily Sports and "Kent Jones Now" segments and additional co-hosting, especially during her "Ask Dr. Maddow" and "Pet Story" segments. The Lawton Smalls character still makes "calls" to The Sam Seder Show and was on the Nov 7th 2006 live webcam election coverage with Rachel Maddow.

Kent left Air America on Friday, December 14th, 2007, as a result of a "business decision" by the management.

Somehow, "business decision" doesn't seem quite the word to describe what's gone on at AAR since, well, its creation.

#

As we hear astonishing new revelations of gov't misconduct in the Siegelman case, Russ Feingold emphasizes the need to restore the rule of law

"Whoever is the new attorney general has to be strong enough to weed out the Karl Rove clones who have been embedded in U.S. attorneys' offices throughout the United States. If not, it is going to eat at our system for years to come."

-- former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, in a TPMmuckraker interview

"[Senator] Feingold is convinced that this is a critical moment. If the next president does not reverse the Bush administration's doctrines, he fears that they will no longer simply be the policies of one extremist president. The danger is that they will be the nation's new understanding of the Constitution."

-- Adam Cohen, in a NYT "editorial observer" column yesterday

by Ken

If you get caught plotting, or maybe even whispering about, the overthrow of the government of the United States, I think we all know you're in for a really nasty time. But what if you're plotting the overthrow of an elected governor of one of the states? Better still, what if you're the government of the United States plotting the overthrow of a governor, using your own -- or rather our own -- Justice Department, not only to frame said governor on a bogus legal charge, but to rig the judicial process from start to shocking finish?

As regular DWT readers know, there's nothing hypothetical about the above. It actually happened, to former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a Democrat who fell into the crosshairs of Bush regime political hatchet man Karl Rove. Startling as it was at first to grasp that a sitting governor could be targeted and obliterated that way, in a plot that reached up to the highest echelons of the White House, that's old news now.

What we're still learning, however, is the nitty-gritty of how the plot was actually conducted, and I have to say that even after eight years of being numbed by the level of outrage regularly roused by the outrages of the Bush regime, each successive wave of revelations about the Siegelman case shocks me more. I mean, the sheer effrontery of what they thought they could get away with. Of course, come to think of it, as of now they're still getting away with it. By now a whole clutch of regimistas should have been at minimum fired and disbarred, and more likely prosecuted and sent away.

Governor Siegelman, in the above-referenced TPMmuckraker interview, described the latest revelations -- reported by Adam Zagorin in Time magazine -- as "more shocking than anything that has come before" and "outrageous criminal conduct in the U.S. Attorney's office and the Department of Justice." The governor's appeal is scheduled to be heard in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on December 9.

THE UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATORS:
HOLY JOE AND BAMBOOZLIN' SUSAN

This seems an appropriate moment to pay tribute to two key figures in maintaining the coverup of the vast network of Bush regime misconduct, the two chairs of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

We start with a DWT fave, the despicable Holy Joe Lieberman. I have perhaps been remiss in focusing lately on the sleazy ineptitude of his stewardship of homeland security matters in the 110th Congress. When it comes to congressional oversight of the regime's monumental malefactions, the field was left entirely to the House committee chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman. In this respect alone, Holy Joe's de facto participation as a co-conspirator in the coverup of previous Bush regime misconduct, not to mention his complicity in ongoing misconduct perpetrated under his unwatchful eye, he may have committed his most damning betrayal, not just of the Democratic Party he thinks still owes him his committee chairmanship, but of the American people.

Of course, Holy Joe has only chaired Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs since 2007. But he also chaired the committee -- back when it was was still the Committee on Governmental Affairs -- from the time in 2001 when Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords left the Republican caucus and organized with the Democrats until the Republicans retook control of the Senate in 2003.

From 2003 until 2007, thus bracketing the expansion of the committee's mandate to include homeland security in 2005, the chairman was none other than that self-proclaimed "independent" Republican, "Bamboozlin' Susan" Collins. Senator Susie's record of governmental affairs "oversight" surely qualifies her as one of the most super of the Bush regime super-stooges.

I don't know whether it's "ironic" or "only to be expected" that the latest revelations in the Siegelman case involve shocking misbehavior by U.S. attorney Leura Canary and the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted the case after Canary supposedly recused herself (but in reality, we learn, was still advising them). The misconduct turns out to have been more flagrant than anyone knew or suspected, or even imagined.

(Qualification: "Anyone," in this case, has to be taken to exclude all those familiar with a stack of evidence including extensive e-mails which the Justice Department has been sitting on for an indeterminate period, apparently hoping the material, which of course should by law have been turned over to the defense as soon as it was discovered, could be kept secret while the Siegelman appeal is pending. However, a frustrated whistleblower in the U.S. attorney's office passed the material on to the House Judiciary Committee, where chairman John Conyers made it public.)

The revelation that no legal observer seems able to believe is that, in total violation of one of the most basic principles of the trial system, the Siegelman prosecutors had a whole series of communications with the jury, during deliberations. I'm no lawyer, but it seems pretty clear to me that once the appeals court hears just this information, at a bare minimum the trial has to be thrown out. Here is Christy Hardin Smith's take in her excellent FDL report yesterday:

Beyond being incredibly stupid, this is a material breach of ethics. No, and I mean NO, ex parte communications are to occur with jurors which are not immediately disclosed fully and completely to opposing counsel and the judge throughout the trial. Ever.

But during the deliberations process where any instance of bias can be crucial to the dynamics on reaching a verdict? You can bet this will come up on appeal. There should also be serious investigation and consideration of severe sanction from the state bar and from the trial judge, whose orders on post-trial juror contact were blatantly violated as well.

I have never heard of conduct this egregious that did not result in severe, swift and ugly sanction. But this hasn't been a usual case, now has it?

And what do you know? We find ourselves back at the subject of the politicizing of the U.S. attorneys, the network of federal prosecutors who are responsible for day-to-day administration of federal justice, which flared into public consciousness, or at least into some of the public's consciousness, with the firing of that shocking number of U.S. attorneys for refusing to engage in purely politically motivated prosecutions against Bush regime enemies, or in some cases for proceeding with perfectly sound prosecutions of persons under the protection of the Bush regime.

As honorable former U.S. attorneys of both parties have been quick to insist, one of the central issues of the job is keeping politics out of the ongoing business of deciding whom to prosecute and on what charges. The more we learned about the firings, the clearer it became that they were merely the tip of the iceberg in the story of the politicizing of DoJ, which during the tenure of Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales as attorney general seemed to become the primary mission of just about the entire departmental command, in close coordination with -- surprise! -- Karl Rove and his hit squad in the White House.

One obvious question was what all the other U.S. attorneys had done to keep their heads off the chopping block. We know a lot more about what Leura Canary, for one, did for her party, including lying about recusing herself from the Siegelman case, supposedly before any significant decisions were made, because of her husband's Republican Party connections (notably ties to Karl Rove; and, oh yes, he managed the campaign of Siegelman's 2002 GOP opponent).


RUSS FEINGOLD SPEAKS OUT ON THE URGENT
NEED TO RESTORE JUSTICE TO THE COUNTRY

If the battered elements of the Republican Party have any interest in trying to find their soul, they might want to seek counsel from some of those fired U.S. attorneys, who had a bird's-eye view of the systematic dismantling of the federal justice system during the Bush regime.

Throughout the life of the U.S. attorney scandal, I've tried every way I could think of to communicate what seemed to me the scope of the perversion of our system of government it revealed. As I've written a number of times here, allowing always for the catastrophe of the invasion of Iraq, it seems to me the Bush regime's gravest breach of faith with the basic principles of American constitutional government. (Of course the two are far from unrelated. With the DoJ transformed into the political enforcement arm of the regime, the entire military operation has had blanket protection from legal scrutiny -- with a generous helping hand from the see-no-evil "oversight" provided by the likes of Senator Susie and Holy Joe.)

One of my happiest inspirations, or so I thought at the time, was imagining that freshman Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, himself a former U.S. attorney, who had done some refreshingly sharp questioning of witness in his Judiciary Committee hearings on the subject, might play a role in helping ordinary Americans understand how crucial the integrity of the U.S. attorneys is to the administration of justice across the country. I have no reason to think that the senator ever heard about my suggestion, but I realize that even if he'd wanted to give it a go, he would have had a heck of a time getting anyone's attention -- starting with the Infotainment News Media themselves, who I'm sure know that their viewers and readers don't know or care what U.S. attorneys do.

As if the rescue and rebuilding of the Justice Department didn't pose a formidable enough challenge to the next administration, the economic meltdown has fallen in its lap, and threatens to overwhelm all other priorities. Of course, as with the Bush regime's war-making activities, the transformation of the DoJ -- and indeed the entire federal regulatory system -- from a watchdog to a lapdog has been a central feature of the financial disintegration, providing across-the-board protection against prying eyes.

So I'm delighted to have restoration of the rule of law placed front and center as an issue for the new administration by our friend Sen. Russ Feingold. I realize lately that I seem to be on an all-Russ, all-the-time kick, but this is a useful reminder that it's not just in matters of foreign relations that Russ has in recent years come to function as an often-lonely defender of core American values.

In the "editorial observer" piece in yesterday's NYT from which I quoted up top, Adam Cohen wrote about Senator Feingold's concerns:

Mr. Feingold, who is chairman the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, already has left his imprint on campaign finance, with the McCain-Feingold law, and has been a leading critic of pork-barrel spending and corporate welfare.

Now he has a new cause. Before the election, Mr. Feingold argued that whoever won should make a priority of rolling back Bush administration policies that eroded constitutional rights and disrupted the careful system of checks and balances. Now that Mr. Obama — a onetime constitutional law professor who made this issue a cause early in the campaign — has won the election, there is both reason for optimism and increased pressure on the president-elect to keep his promises.

Mr. Feingold has been compiling a list of areas for the next president to focus on, which he intends to present to Mr. Obama. It includes amending the Patriot Act, giving detainees greater legal protections and banning torture, cruelty and degrading treatment. He wants to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to restore limits on domestic spying. And he wants to roll back the Bush administration's dedication to classifying government documents.

Many reforms could be implemented directly by the next president. Mr. Obama could renounce Mr. Bush's extreme views of executive power, including the notion that in many areas, the president can act as he wants without restraint by Congress or the judiciary. Mr. Obama also could declare his intention not to use presidential signing statements as Mr. Bush did in record numbers to reject parts of bills signed into law.

Congress also has work to do. Many of the excesses of the last eight years have been the result of Mr. Feingold's colleagues' capitulation as much as presidential overreaching. He expects Congress to do more than just fix laws like the Patriot Act. He wants the Senate to question presidential nominees closely at their confirmation hearings about their commitment to the rule of law. And he hopes Congress will do its duty to impose the rigorous supervision it rarely imposed in the Bush years.

Restoring the rule of law will not be easy, Mr. Feingold concedes. Part of the problem is that it is hard to know how much damage has been done. Many programs, like domestic spying and extraordinary rendition — the secret transfer of detainees to foreign countries where they are harshly interrogated — have operated in the shadows.

And it would be a mistake to overlook Congress's role. Members from both parties voted for laws like the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which stripped detainees of habeas corpus rights, and looked the other way while the rule of law was diminished.

Still, Mr. Feingold is convinced that this is a critical moment. If the next president does not reverse the Bush administration's doctrines, he fears that they will no longer simply be the policies of one extremist president. The danger is that they will be the nation's new understanding of the Constitution.

#