None of Biden's Cabinet Appointments Will Be More Important Than This One

 

I'm talking Attorney General, natch.

We need a person of the highest caliber to clean out and disinfect the Department of Justice from the Trumpian politicization pursued by William Barr. He who coddled Trump's buddies, dropping charges against Michael Flynn and intervening on behalf of Roger Stone. He who took the hint after Trump tweeted that people should "liberate" themselves from COVID-19 lockdowns in states and cities and who announced that the DOJ would formally begin reviewing and challenging state public health orders. He who approved of LGBTQ discrimination laws under a very capacious interpretation of "religious freedom" and who got himself into the Christian dominionists' neighborhood when he warned that “militant secularists” were behind a “campaign to destroy the traditional moral order.” He who actually asked Congress to give him the power to hold people in detention without trial indefinitely. That last one couldn't make it past a Democratic majority in the US House.

Gonna take a person of impeccable character, someone strong on civil rights and the protection of the weak, someone totally committed to voter enfranchisement, someone to whom favoritism or presidential interference causes a gag reflex. I've been reading about the leading contenders.

Sally Q. Yates

Former US attorneyShe was deputy attorney general (the official who actually runs the department) from 2015 to the early days of the Trump administration. Wikipedia: Following the inauguration of Trump and the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 20, 2017, Yates served as Acting Attorney General for 10 days. Trump dismissed her for insubordination on January 30, after she instructed DOJ not to make legal arguments defending Trump's Muslim ban (Executive Order 13769). Yates thought the order was neither defensible in court nor consistent with the Constitution. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld a revised version of the travel ban in a 5-4 partisan decision.

Before she pushed back on Trump's targeting of Muslims, she had warned the White House that National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had lied to the FBI and was acting as a foreign agent in very close proximity to the president.

In other words, Trump had plenty of reasons to fire her. All of which makes her a model of virtue.

Following her dismissal, Yates returned to private practice.

She comes from legal royalty. Her grandmother was one of the first women admitted to the Georgia bar. Gran worked side-by-side with Yates's grandfather, also an attorney. Yates's father was an attorney and became a judge on the Georgia Court of Appeals for a long tenure (1966-1984). Yates herself, as a US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, prosecuted political corruption (of which Georgia had its fair share) and she became head of the DOJ's Fraud and Public Corruption division. She was lead prosecutor of Eric Robert Rudolph, the notorious Atlantic Olympics bomber who successfully hid out in western North Carolina for months. 

Bonus points: She'll be good on TV.

Doug Jones

There'll be sentiment to give him a job after his loss of his Senate seat in Alabama.

US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 1997-2001, during which time he successfully prosecuted two Klan members for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four Black girls. (It's generally accepted that it was the wave of voting by Black women that got him the seat in the Senate.) He also had a hand in the Eric Robert Rudolph prosecution. It was Jones who secured the indictment against him for domestic terrorism.

In 2018 Jones won a longshot candidacy for Jeff Session's old Senate seat in a special election, beating connoisseur of teenaged girls Roy Moore by two percentage points. He lost that same seat two years later, like everyone predicted he would, to a blockhead coach with very little clue. Roll, Tide!

Considered a "moderate," Jones voted for Trump initiatives about 35% of the time, but he also voted for the conviction of Trump at his impeachment trial. All things considered, he's probably a little less "blue dog" than Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Jones would also bring a Southern accent to TV and could be as effective on that medium.

 

William K. Black

Wikipedia: Lawyer, academic, author, and a former bank regulator. Black's expertise is in white-collar crime, public finance, regulation, and other topics in law and economics. Black was litigation director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) from 1984 to 1986, deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) in 1987, and Senior VP and the General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco from 1987 to 1989, which regulated some of the largest thrift banks in the U.S. He was a central figure in exposing Congressional corruption during the Savings and Loan Crisis.

According to Bill Moyers, "During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. Bi-partisan enough for you? The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating — after whom the Senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named — he sent a memo that read, in part, 'get Black — kill him dead.' Metaphorically, of course. Of course." 

Black became very outspoken on the criminality behind the 2008 crash and 2009 recession. Black asserted that the banking crisis was essentially a big Ponzi scheme; that the "liar loans" and other financial tricks were essentially illegal frauds; and that the triple-A ratings given to these loans were part of a criminal cover-up. President Obama declined to prosecute the banks while Black thought that trying to hide how bad the situation was would simply prolong the problems. He fingered Obama's treasury secretary Timothy Geithner as engaging in the cover-up and claimed that Obama's team did not want people to understand what went wrong or how bad the banking situation was.

Given that past criticism of the Obama administration, Black is probably not a leading contender, though his appointment would make the Bernie forces happy ... which in turn would make McConnell very dyspeptic.

William K. Black

Jeh Johnson

Secretary of Homeland Security for Obama's 2nd term. Previously the General Counsel of the Department of Defense from 2009 to 2012 during the first years of the Obama Administration. He is currently a partner at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and a member of the board of directors of Lockheed Martin Corporation and U.S. Steel. Johnson is a 2018 recipient of the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Award, has debated several times at the Oxford and Cambridge Unions and is the recipient of ten honorary degrees. In private life, Johnson has been a frequent commentator on national and homeland security matters on NBC, MSNBC, FOX, CNN, ABC, CBS and PBS.

Too corporate for me but probably not for Biden.

Deval Patrick

Former Governor of Massachusetts for two terms, and before that served as the United States Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division under President Bill Clinton. He ran briefly as a vanity candidate for president in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Xavier Becerra

Currently Attorney General of California since 2017. He previously was a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing downtown Los Angeles in Congress from 1993 to 2017. Becerra was Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus from 2013 to 2017. 

 

Lisa Monaco

Federal prosecutor who was the Homeland Security Adviser to President Barack Obama, the chief counterterrorism advisor to the president. In this capacity, she was a statutory member of the United States Homeland Security Council.

Monaco previously served as the Assistant Attorney General for National Security from 2011 to 2013, and as the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department. In 2017, Monaco became a senior national security analyst for CNN.

The Body Count -- Richard Pilger

A Reoccurring Feature on Who's Jumping Off Luxury Liner Trump

Yesterday, minutes after Attorney General William Barr waded into Trump’s unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud and told federal prosecutors that they were allowed to investigate “specific allegations” of voter fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified, Richard Pilger, the Justice Department official who oversees investigations of voter fraud, stepped down from his position.

“Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” Pilger wrote to his colleagues, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.” 

Barr’s directive ignored the Justice Department’s longstanding policies intended to keep law enforcement from affecting the outcome of an election.

“It would be problematic enough if Barr were reversing longstanding Justice Department guidance because of significant, substantiated claims of misconduct — that could presumably be handled at the local and state level,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “But to do so when there is no such evidence — and when the president’s clear strategy is to delegitimize the results of a proper election — is one of the more problematic acts of any attorney general in my lifetime.” 

In the meantime, the act of a career Department of Justice official in charge of investigating election crimes is one of the more honorable decisions we've witnessed this month.

Where Do We Go Now for Justice?

The only thing worse than a Trump is a Barr and a Trump.

If you like that combo for its boogaloo, then you go right ahead and vote for it. The majority of the rest of us won't be joining you. We actually think that our participation on November 3rd is our last chance to save the Republic. Our much touted "rule of law" has morphed -- just since Barr got confirmed as A.G. in Feb. 2019 -- into a kind of Soprano Family reality series, without the charm. Boss Donnie has an endless appetite for "a favor though" -- he often needs his henchmen sprung and there's some people who need whacking. William Barr has been there to pull the levers and make the hit.

The outrage of only last night -- the commutation of the seven felony convictions for Roger Stone (what! no outright pardon?) -- sprouted from Stone's loyal soldier act, his refusal to rat out the boss to save himself from prison. Rule of Law? No. One law for the boss and his associates, another for the rest of us.

William Barr laid the predicate for that inevitable outcome. He had overruled the sentencing recommendations for Stone made by his department's own career prosecutors -- with Boss Trump celebrating on Twitter like an Adderall-snorting Tony Montana -- which prompted four Justice Dept. career prosecutors to resign from the Stone case (one left the DOJ entirely). At Roger Stone's sentencing hearing, Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that it was pretty obvious to her that the president had been trying to subvert the rule of law by publicly attacking her, the jurors, and the Justice Department lawyers, all with the generous enablement of William Barr.

Gangster fashion

And that's really the least of it. Barr has been systematically decapitating U.S. Attorney offices in the jurisdictions currently conducting investigations of Boss Trump and his associates -- the Washington, DeeCee, office and the Southern District of New York. For Washington's US Attorney office, Barr got rid of the competent woman in charge and put in his right-hand aide Timothy Shea. The Washington office was handling both the Roger Stone and the Michael Flynn prosecutions, and Shea has been helpful there, strewing the floor with marbles.

Barr also got rid of Geoffrey Berman in the Southern District of New York. Berman was investigating hush-money payments to various goomahs not to mention the "business activities" of Boss Trump's consigliere Rudy Guiliani.

We cannot stand for this, not as a people, not as a nation, not as a citizenry that has been brought up to believe in justice.

We Do Not Consent To Being Governed This Way

[From reporting by WashPost journalists]

Attorney General William P. Barr personally ordered law enforcement officials to clear the streets around Lafayette Square just before President Trump spoke Monday, ... a directive that prompted a show of aggression against a crowd of largely peaceful protesters, drawing widespread condemnation.

The forceful effort to squelch the demonstration came as Trump has sought to flex the federal government’s muscles in response to a wave of unrest across the country, filling the streets in the District with federal law enforcement officers from multiple agencies....

The president — furious about criticism that he has not done enough to stop the protests and violence that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — told senior advisers Monday that they had to show they could control the streets of Washington and the area around the White House....

Trump cheered on the dramatic show of force, tweeting Tuesday: “D.C. had no problems last night. Many arrests. Great job done by all. Overwhelming force. Domination.”

His willingness to press the outer limits of presidential powers was sharply denounced by local leaders and congressional Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who compared Trump’s actions to that of a dictator. Several Democratic House chairmen pressed the administration for testimony and documents about the decision to disperse protesters outside the White House with force....

On Monday evening, officers from the Park Police and other agencies used smoke canisters, pepper balls, riot shields, batons and officers on horseback to shove and chase people gathered to protest the death of Floyd. At one point, a line of police rushed a group of protesters standing on H Street NW, many of whom were standing still with their hands up, forcing them to race away, coughing from smoke. Some were struck by rubber bullets....

D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) said in a statement that the District was “now reckoning with an unhinged president responding to nonviolent demonstration with war-like tactics.” ...

The use of such aggressive force startled some veteran former officers of the Secret Service and other federal agencies, because it appeared to be rushed and unprovoked by protesters.

The line of officers rushing protesters, many of whom were standing still with their arms in the air, violated the normal protocol for clearing protesters, something the Secret Service accomplishes dozens of times a year in Lafayette Square without ever tossing smoke canisters or using riot shields.

“Usually officers hold a line and don’t move forward unless there is provocation,” said one former Secret Service agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe operational procedures. “The officers give constant warnings and communicate clearly with the crowd. But here it seems like there is some time pressure; they were acting like a bomb is about to go off.”

Another veteran former Secret Service agent who reviewed video of the treatment of protesters said he feared that the order from Barr signaled a worrisome shift in who calls the shots about deploying use of force....

The Body Count -- Dana Boente

A Reoccurring Feature on Who's Jumping Being Pushed Off Luxury Liner Trump

After a 38-year career with the Justice Department, the FBI’s top lawyer Dana Boente was asked to resign on Friday. Two sources familiar with the decision to dismiss Boente said it came from high levels of the Justice Department rather than directly from FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Boente has been under fire for his role in the investigation of Michael Flynn, whose criminal charge for lying to the FBI was recently dropped by the Justice Department based in part on the argument that his lies were not material to an underlying investigation. Boente signed one of the warrants renewing the FBI’s authority to surveil Flynn. The warrants, known as FISA warrants, were renewed several times and had to be approved by a judge.

Boente said in a recently leaked memo that material put into the public record about Flynn was not exculpatory for the former national security advisor. The memo undermines the Justice Department’s latest position that material about Flynn was mishandled by prosecutors.

Wray formally asked for Boente’s resignation, but the decision to end his tenure at the FBI came from Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, according to two sources.

The FBI, Knock Knock Knocking on Dick Burr's Door

The Los Angeles Times broke the news last night (their site is protected by a paywall, so I'm relying on a secondary source) that Sen. Richard Burr surrendered his cell phone yesterday when the FBI served a search warrant at his Washington home. The G-men are investigating "whether Burr used information he obtained as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to sell a significant share of his stocks before the coronavirus outbreak upended the markets."

Apparently, there was a previous (first) search warrant that was used to collect information from Burr’s iCloud account. Some of the data collected from Apple was then used as evidence to obtain the warrant for Burr’s phone.

"Burr was one of just three senators who voted against the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which extended insider trading regulations to U.S. senators and representatives. At the time, he called the legislation 'ludicrous.' ”

“This is a very, very big deal,” Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, tweeted Wednesday night. “This is not something the FBI or DOJ does lightly. It requires layers of review, the blessing of a judge, and consideration of severe reputational harm to a sitting US Senator.”

"Reputational harm"? You don't say.

"A search warrant indicates that investigators were able to show to the satisfaction of a federal judge or magistrate probable cause to suspect a crime occurred and an expectation of the search yielding evidence."

So if a serious investigation of Richard Burr's activities are underway, one wonders what's going on with the similar stock-dumping accusations against Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and for that matter the accusations against senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) that date from the same time.

Some people are already forecasting a resignation for Burr and two, not one, US Senate seats on the ballot in North Carolina in November. I'm maybe more interested in the conspiratorial suggestion that Trump's grudge against Burr, for once upon a time subpoenaing Donald Trump Jr. in the Russia investigation, has motivated his handmaiden at the Department of Justice, William Barr, to send the FBI against Burr.

Our President Would Be a Better Crook If He Could Stop the Strut

In his interview with ABC News, Attorney General William Barr said it was “time [for Trump] to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases.” He added that such statements from Trump “about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending here, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors and the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.”

Shorter, clearer William Barr: "Listen, moron, STFU so I can help your friends and hurt your enemies without the entire effing world cluing in on what I'm doing because you can't keep your fingers off the keyboard."

The Body Count -- Career Prosecutors in the US Department of Justice

A Reoccurring Feature on Who's Jumping Off Luxury Liner Trump

All four career prosecutors handling the case against Roger Stone withdrew from the legal proceedings yesterday — and one, Jonathan Kravis, quit his job entirely — after the Justice Department under Attorney General and Trump-enabler William Barr signaled it planned to undercut their sentencing recommendation for Trump’s longtime friend and confidant. 

The career prosecutors handling the case recommended that a judge sentence Stone — convicted in November of obstructing Congress and witness tampering — to between seven and nine years in federal prison. First, Trump attacked the prosecutors on Twitter. Then Barr's department, in an unprecedented interference with justice, also intervened.

One by one, the career prosecutors, two of whom had worked on Mueller’s investigation, filed notices in court of their intention to leave the case. Though none of the prosecutors gave a reason, their asking to do so was highly unusual and suggested they could not ethically affix their names to the government’s revised position. 

Former Justice Department officials and others characterized the department’s abrupt shift on the Stone case as an egregious example of the president and his attorney general manipulating federal law enforcement to serve their political interests. David Laufman, a former Justice Department official, called it a “shocking, cram-down political intervention” in the criminal justice process. “We are now truly at a break-glass-in-case-of-fire moment for the Justice Dept.,” he wrote on Twitter.

Eric H. Holder Jr., attorney general under President Barack Obama, said it was “unprecedented, wrong and ultimately dangerous.” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) said the move amounted to “obstruction of justice.”

“We are seeing a full-frontal assault on the rule of law in America,” Pascrell said. “Direct political interference in our justice system is a hallmark of a banana republic. Despite whatever Trump, William Barr, and their helpers think, the United States is a nation of laws and not an authoritarian’s paradise.”

Forward My Mail To Brazil

Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer

News broke late last night that Trump's "own Roy Cohn," Attorney General William P. Barr, has opened a criminal inquiry into the possibility that members of his own Justice Department, including the FBI, ginned up "the Russia hoax" out of personal, "deep state" animus toward his boss.

Trump needs fall-guys to blame, enemies to destroy (that's why he's all over Ukraine too), and he would most especially like proof of disloyalty about a select handful of government employees, starting with former CIA chief John Brennan and including Andrew McCabe at the FBI and Peter Strzok. Don't forget Comey. And throw in Mueller while you're at it. That's what he wants, that's what he demands. And by Gawd, and with the Good Lord's help, William P. Barr will finger 'em!

Never mind the rock cold fact that Robert S. Mueller III secured indictments of more than two dozen Russian military operatives for interfering in the 2016 election. He knows their names. He knows what they did. He knows the actual keystrokes they made on their computers in St. Petersburg to promote Trump and tar Clinton.

But never mind that. Twitterman has made it perfectly clear that he expects the Justice Department to be his battle axe against his political enemies. After all, they're guilty of "treason" -- how many times now has he used that exact word? A most threatening word, because you remember how we treat traitors.

From "Brazil," 1985

Mueller also said in that report you didn't read that he had “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Trump or his aides engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians but that the campaign welcomed the sabotage and expected to benefit from it.

So when I heard Rachel unspool that Barr news at 9 last night, and then I sat down this morning to read the NYTimes story for myself, I kinda went to "Brazil" in my head. Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" in the 1985 movie of the same name. That "Brazil" is a head trip, a fantasy landscape of escape for our hero from an authoritarian and cruel government. The movie ends with the chief of the Department of Information Retrieval saying to the man doing the torture on our hero, "He's got away from us." And the torturer, holding a scalpel ready to slice, replies ruefully,  " 'Fraid you're right. He's gone." 

Escaped mentally. It's the only escape, the movie proposes.

Hence the 1985 movie poster:

Doesn't Trump and his big pug Barr make you want to take a head trip and never return?

Gotta fight that. Gotta keep my head in the game. Gotta keep up my resistance.

Whaaa! A Republican Who Not Only CAN Read But Who Did Read!

Rep. Justin Amash, a very conservative Republican who represents the 3rd District of Michigan, read the Mueller report -- all of it as redacted by A.G. Barr -- and made this string of comments below on Twitter yesterday. Beginning about 24 hours ago, Amash wrote what amounts to what surely will become an historical document -- a declaration of logic and principle now missing from the makeup of (pretty much) all other Republican members of Congress (Lindsey Graham, we're especially looking at you).

You've probably seen the 1st comment in this string, but have you read the whole? And can you appreciate the fortitude it took to write it?

Here are my principal conclusions: 1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report. 2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct. 3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances. 4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

I offer these conclusions only after having read Mueller’s redacted report carefully and completely, having read or watched pertinent statements and testimony, and having discussed this matter with my staff, who thoroughly reviewed materials and provided me with further analysis.

Barr’s misrepresentations are significant but often subtle, frequently taking the form of sleight-of-hand qualifications or logical fallacies, which he hopes people will not notice.

Under our Constitution, the president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” While “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is not defined, the context implies conduct that violates the public trust.

Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment.

In fact, Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.

Impeachment, which is a special form of indictment, does not even require probable cause that a crime (e.g., obstruction of justice) has been committed; it simply requires a finding that an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct.

While impeachment should be undertaken only in extraordinary circumstances, the risk we face in an environment of extreme partisanship is not that Congress will employ it as a remedy too often but rather that Congress will employ it so rarely that it cannot deter misconduct.

Those who haven't read the Mueller Report have no right to attack Rep. Amash's conclusions, especially the Non-Reader in Chief. (You haven't read it either, have you, Virginia Foxx?)

Twitterman went full schoolyard bully this morning, calling Amash a "loser" and "a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy." No attempt in that juvenile rejoinder to dispute Amash's logic and his understanding of the Constitution.

"Amash, who has been described as the 'new Ron Paul' due to his Libertarian beliefs, has broken ranks with the Republican party before — and especially against Mr. Trump, whom he did not endorse in 2016. Earlier this year, he was one of 14 Republican representatives who tried to override Mr. Trump's veto over an emergency declaration for the border wall. In March, Amash did not rule out running for president as a Libertarian in 2020." [Caroline Linton]