For the Record: Trump's Legacy

Attorney General Yates? Just sayin. Photo by Heratch Ekmekjian/NYTimes.

Seriously, I'd hope it would be constitutional and legislative changes to prevent something like this from happening again: force presidents to financial transparency instead of expecting them to be "gentlemen" about it, guarantee DOJ independence, protect civilian and...

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 3, 2020

military employees from retaliation when they reject illegal orders or blow whistle, provide real legal teeth to prevent presidents from profiting from office.....

But I'm afraid it's not going to happen.

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 3, 2020

The No Trumps Bridge Act of 2023. That's the kind of legacy I'd like to see.

And in response to an irritating "let us look forward" column by Paul Brandus:

Grift for the Mill

Haunted by the story of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is where the Justice Department's immigration policy is administered from, and thus the employer of the nation's 400 immigration judges, and sends all its employees a near-daily bloggy compilation of memos and news clippings and the like:

But on Monday, tucked between stories from The Washington Post and a public radio station, the briefing included a summary of and a link to a blog post from what the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a “Hate Group”: Vdare.com, a frequent platform for white nationalists espousing anti-Semitic and anti-immigration rhetoric.

The Vdare post singles out immigration judges by name, uses their photos and refers to them with an anti-Semitic slur. 

Coming the same week, as Reis Thebault notes at the Washington Post, as Trump scolded American Jews for being "disloyal" when they vote for Democrats and singled out the fanatical Jew-hater Henry Ford for praise, and a growing recognition that the White House may have an anti-Semitism problem. As the president of the judges' union, Ashley Tabbador, explained in a letter to the EOIR director James McHenry, the post was creating a hostile work environment:

Mueller: The Airport Paperback

Here's some drafting for the airport novel version. Superscript notes identify material that's exclusive to the Mueller Report. Material on Flynn in the previous sketch is not yet known to these characters, although I guess it will be. Sorry I can't seem to get rid of the links and blockquotes.

Justice League of America #1, October 1960, art by Murphy Anderson, via Wikipedia.

Sally Yates, the slender blonde with the soft Southern accent who'd become the acting attorney general three days earlier, as the new president was being inaugurated, swept her hair back with an impatient hand. "I'm really freaked out about it," ^{[M II:30 fn 134]} she told Andy McCabe, the FBI nerd, contemplating her from the other side of the desk, as Mary McCord, DOJ national security specialist, shook her head from side to side next to him.

"This" was General Mike Flynn, fired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the previous administration and now the new chief of the National Security Council. A craggy-faced fanatic from the paranoid wing of his Republican party, he'd become indispensable to his candidate, Donald J. Trump, a pudgy, pasty hotel-keeper and television schmoozer, lending him an air of austerity and toughness, one of the men the candidate called "my generals", but he'd been turning out to have more in his past than just his enmity with the outgoing president.

Why did the White House deny Trump got the idea from watching TV?

Maybe because he didn't. But then...

Couch Potato–in-Chief: Image via Daily Beast: 

As the drama of yesterday's US attorney firings progressed, one of the things you had to keep thinking about was the firings of eight US attorneys by George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales in 2006, for their refusal to join in the prosecution of fake "voter fraud" cases at the urging of the Department of Justice and vile worm Hans von Spakovsky.

OK, it wasn't at all the same thing—this week's massacre is at the beginning of a presidential term, when it's normal for all the working US attorneys to leave, and half of them have already done so. The odd thing is that the Trump administration is so peremptory and almost violent in ordering them out, not only not allowing them to wrap up the cases they're currently working on and waiting until they have successors lined up, which would be the normal procedure since the Clinton administration, but demanding that they vacate the physical office space by the end of the working day.

Annals of Deception: Jeff Sessions

Photo via Politico.

From the Wikipedia biography (in its current state) of United States Attorney General–Designate Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, on his experience as US Attorney in Alabama in 1981-93:

Sessions' office investigated the 1981 killing of Michael Donald, a young African-American man who was murdered in Mobile, Alabama by a pair of Ku Klux Klanmembers.^[13][14] Session's office did not prosecute the case, but both men were arrested and convicted.^[15]

As a U.S. Attorney he filed several cases to desegregate schools in Alabama. And he also prosecuted Klansman Henry Francis Hays, son of Alabama Klan leader Bennie Hays, for abducting and killing Michael Donald, a black teenager selected at random. Sessions insisted on the death penalty for Hays.^[16]

That second paragraph startled me for a few reasons, especially because it wasn't there last time I looked at this (which wasn't long ago at all), and because it directly contradicts the first paragraph, for which I'd checked the documentation—duh, of course Sessions did not prosecute the Michael Donald lynching case (nobody ever calls it a lynching, but the killers hung their victim's body from a tree), since he was US Attorney and the case was tried in state court by Mobile District Attorney Chris Galanos; and because in this way there is a demonstrable lie in a Wikipedia article, which really pisses me off.

The paragraph was added on November 25 between 17:46 and 17:59 by somebody under the username Azarbarzin, and the link is to a November 18 article by Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard, which seems to be based on lies Sessions told Hemingway:

Note from the counterinsurgency

Mike Brown.

I really understand, I think, why the Justice Department finds it so hard to prosecute murderous police officers like Darren Wilson for civil rights violations against the people whose lives they have taken like Michael Brown. Only Wilson can possibly know what he meant to do to Brown and how he felt, whether he truly was in terror of what he perceived as a vicious giant or was rather high on his own lethal power, and nobody can make him testify. And he probably doesn't altogether know himself, for that matter, the ability of the human unconscious to hide our own motivations from us being what it is.

Verrilli I say unto you

The Department of Justice doesn't know whether the warrantless wiretapping given to it as a parting gift by G.W. Bush's 110th Congress is constitutional or not, and would like to find out:

Five years after Congress authorized a sweeping warrantless surveillance program, the Justice Department is setting up a potential Supreme Court test of whether it is constitutional by notifying a criminal defendant — for the first time — that evidence against him derived from the eavesdropping, according to officials.

Prosecutors plan to inform the defendant about the monitoring in the next two weeks, a law enforcement official said. The move comes after an internal Justice Department debate in which Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. argued that there was no legal basis for a previous practice of not disclosing links to such surveillance, several Obama administration officials familiar with the deliberations said.

A couple of quick points: [jump]

Image from Jammer-Store.

The curious case of the penitent president. I

I have the funniest feeling President Obama has suddenly remembered us—the loyal imposition, you know, who don't have any objection to a bit of socialism, or to Reverend Wright and Bill Ayres (in his post-terrorist aspect), or to spending a few years per century without a war being on—and is sending us faint signals from his Fortress of Solitude, if we listen carefully.

Playground superhero. From Whiskywords.

One of these was last Wednesday's Times article (by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage) trying to explain how the Obama administration found itself prosecuting six different cases of leaks under the Espionage Act, which, as you've heard, is twice as many as the number of prosecutions under all previous US presidents put together. In the first place Obama is said to have had nothing to do with it: [jump]

Cheap shots and chasers 6/22

Look out, Tom! It's another one! From the Portland Mercury.

Eat your heart out, Friedman—those benighted North Africans who will never amount to anything because of their uncreative classrooms and rote learning, unlike the Singaporeans and South Koreans with their uncreative classrooms and rote learning, are going to save the world from global warming.

The Tunisian company Saphon Energy is selling a new approach to wind power using an ancient technology, with a four-foot circular sail on the top of a pole where it captures the kinetic energy of the wind that sways it back and forth. It's noiseless, and harmless to birds. Read the whole story at TPM and check out the company's website.





Now that retired pitcher Roger Clemens has been found not guilty of lying to Congress about his alleged use of steroids and HGH in his second trial (the first trial fell apart when prosecutors showed the jury inadmissible evidence), I wanted to take another look at this map, unearthed by bmaz at emptywheel a little while back, illustrating the bases covered in the FBI/Department of Justice investigation of Clemens in the four years they worked on the case, giving you a powerful sense of what an enormous elephant they constructed to pick up this little pea. "Any more questions," bmaz asked plaintively at the time, "why DOJ cannot get around to prosecuting banksters?" And that was when it still seemed likely they might get a conviction!

Still and all, it goes to show you: The arcs of the Department of Justice bend toward the moral universe, but they're too damn long.

What a difference a day makes! Before the elections, Antonis Samaras of Greece's New Democracy Party was such a Gloomy Gus, and now?

“Samaras today is completely different than what he was two weeks ago,” [hard-right politician George] Kirtsos said. “Two weeks ago, he was very negative about cooperating with Pasok.”

You have to read the Times story pretty carefully to find out why, but it's there all the same:

Critics say that Mr. Samaras destabilized Greece with his insistence on calling elections to replace the government led by Lucas Papademos, the technocratic prime minister whose mandate was to sign Greece’s second loan agreement.

“He just wanted to be prime minister,” said Thanos Veremis, a political historian who said he voted for New Democracy as a last resort. “It was pure ambition, pure and simple. Even in this state of collapse, he wanted to be Nero, playing his harp.”

Yes: after the May elections nobody wanted to ask Samaras to be prime minister and he had a great big sad. So they had to have another election—that's €47.9 million, cheaper than the €70.4 million they spent in May, but still a good bit for a bankrupt treasury to shell out. But hey, Antonis feels better now, so it's worth it, right? Thugs.

You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

There was an exchange between Josh Gerstein of Politico and Matthew Miller, former spokesman for the Holder Department of Justice on the question of whether the Obama administration has a policy of prosecuting government whistleblowers, or just leakers of classified information, mentioning Thomas Drake of the National Security Agency, who was certainly a whistleblower and certainly got prosecuted; Miller explained that it was now fairly clear that Drake was a bona fide whistleblower, because the prosecution failed to convict him of anything but a technical violation.

Drake, who certainly did not get off scot-free—he lost his job and his pension—responded at the Daily Kos with a number of comments, including this:

So under the Miller theory, if a defendant wins, they are a whistleblower, but until the government loses they are 'leakers' endangering the lives of soldiers and national security?

That's the point, isn't it? The "system worked" as they like to say, but it wasted an awful lot of DOJ time and money, not to mention a lot of the life of an authentic American hero. Why couldn't the prosecutors have known in advance that this was a bad case to bring?

Why couldn't they have seen, on the one hand, that his disclosures (of the NSA's illegal warrantless wiretapping and data mining programs) were made in the public interest, and on the other that the disclosures, made to congressional committees and government officials, were in any case protected communications under the Whistleblower Protection Act?

What do they think is the purpose of prosecuting leakers of government information, and how did they imagine it would apply in this case? I'll be getting back to this question and other areas in which the National Security State seems able to overrule the expressed convictions of that great presidential candidate Barack Obama in subsequent posts, but for the moment I just wanted to vent.