Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[barmar]

I would venture a wager that Chas_P has not even read the Mueller report so he doesn't know what it said. Right up front it says that his phrase "could not establish" does not mean he found "no evidence of", only that criminality could not be established sufficiently to charge. (Not getting cooperation from Manafort - after Individual-1 dangled a pardon - could have made it impossible to get that evidence. Which would be obstruction, which DOJ, in a Catch-22, said internally cannot be used to indict a sitting president)

And even in a criminal case, being found "not guilty" is not really a determination that you didn't do it. It just means that the evidence presented wasn't sufficient to convince the judge or jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

OJ being the most well known example. Everyone knows he did it, and the evidence was sufficient in the civil case, but he got off in the criminal case because the bar is higher.

[awm]

It seems as if the result of Mueller’s investigation was:

 

1. There was definitely obstruction, or at least sufficient evidence to indict were Trump not president. However, they could not charge Trump with this because of DOJ policy. Further, Mueller did not want to state “Trump obstructed justice” since (without a normal trial) Trump could not clear his name. So the report is essentially asking Congress to “try the case” in absence of a court.

2. While there was some evidence for conspiracy, Mueller could not gather enough to indict. This is in part due to the obstruction (key witnesses kept lying) and again doesn’t really “clear” Trump of anything.

3. The spin/misdirection by the new attorney general may ITSELF qualify as obstruction.

 

Anyway, Congress will certainly be interviewing Mueller and a number of his employees and it will be interesting to see if their story matches the above (or is more similar to Barr’s interpretation).

 

Another interesting question is why Mueller issued his report when he did. Usually the investigation ends with evidence of guilt, evidence of innocence, reason to believe that despite uncertainty about guilt/innocence no more evidence can be gathered, or ends due to external pressure. The third possibility (no more evidence to be gathered) was definitely not the case since we know there’s this continuing court case with Mueller trying to get evidence from a foreign company. And we also know it wasn’t “evidence of innocence” at least for obstruction where Mueller was clear that he didn’t exonerate. So either Mueller felt he had sufficient evidence of guilt (but didn’t want to say so due to DOJ policy) or he was externally pressured (Barr?) to end early. This will also be interesting to pursue.

[kenberg]

The O.J. case has been mentioned. Jimmy Hoffa was the case I thought of. back when Robert Kennedy was AG he was putting major effort into getting Hoffa. I recall JH in a TV interview gloating about how often he had been investigated but not convicted.

 

Analogies are always risky, but the O.J. case concerned one action on one night, the Hoffa case was a pattern of behavior. Of curse Hoffa eventually got convicted, but again it is interesting that his first conviction was for jury tampering,which is to say he was caught trying to avoid conviction for his earlier activities. A form of obstruction, I would call it.

 

Whether we speak of Hoffa or O.J., or many others, the fact is that it is difficult to convict those with wealth and connections. Nobody ever doubted that Hoffa was connected to the mob, the problem was to convict him on a specific act. Usually you get them, that's if you get them at all, for some crime that is in some sense a side issue. Jury tampering, obstruction of justice, lying to a grand jury etc. Capone was convicted of tax evasion, not murder or bootlegging.

It's not pretty. It would be good to convict people for the crime that is at the root of it all rather than the peripheral crimes committed in the cover-up. But with the powerful, it doesn't usually go that way.

 

Trump is a scumbag. Don't need any report to conclude that. Now we get down to the lawyers. Not a place I like to be. Perhaps it is true that if the glove doesn't fit we must acquit. Or maybe we can say screw the glove, I recognize what happened here.

 

[y66]

Talk about damning by association. It is to Trump's credit and his followers' that Charles Manson, Jim Jones and Hannibal Lecter have not been mentioned or were redacted.

[kenberg]

Talk about damning by association. It is to Trump's credit and his followers' that Charles Manson, Jim Jones and Hannibal Lecter have not been mentioned or were redacted.

 

Yes, and where is Clarice Starling when we need her?

 

But I was thinking about various crimes and how they get prosecuted. Trump says that Paul Manafort has been treated really badly. Well, yes, in that he would not have been caught except for the investigation into Trump. My guess is that there are a lot of Paul Manaforts out there happily laundering money etc but it takes serious effort to successfully prosecute them so unless their name comes up in an investigation with a very large budget and considerable profile they just mosey on unnoticed. Poor Paul, he should have stayed away from Trump. As we all should, although the reasons are different for us.

 

[y66]

Yes, and where is Clarice Starling when we need her?

 

But I was thinking about various crimes and how they get prosecuted. Trump says that Paul Manafort has been treated really badly. Well, yes, in that he would not have been caught except for the investigation into Trump. My guess is that there are a lot of Paul Manaforts out there happily laundering money etc but it takes serious effort to successfully prosecute them so unless their name comes up in an investigation with a very large budget and considerable profile they just mosey on unnoticed. Poor Paul, he should have stayed away from Trump. As we all should, although the reasons are different for us.

I was just thinking about Manafort and his protégé Rick Gates. Mueller may be done with them but there are several investigations for awm's to be pursued list involving Manafort and Gates that will also be interesting. Manafort's role in all of this and in the way the lobbying business has changed in the last 30+ years may not rise to the Trump level on the scum meter but it's close.

[Winstonm]

Yes, and where is Clarice Starling when we need her?

 

 

 

I guess you didn't read/watch the sequel to Silence of the Lambs because Clarice turned out to be Kellyanne Conway. :(

 

I think the thing that bothers me most at this point is that the cards are face-up on the table, and those who continue to support Individual-1 and his corrupt regime have run out of excuses. Still, they persist. I really thought we were better than this.

 

But then, I thought we were better when in 1963 John Kennedy was killed. I still hoped it was true when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I even continued to hope that our better side would turn up eventually after Bobby Kennedy was gunned down.

 

Then, in May of 1970, I lost all hope - the National Guard turned on our own people and gunned down 4 students at Kent State. No one was ever held to pay for that atrocity.

 

Now this. I had always hoped we were better. Clearly, we are not.

[kenberg]

I guess you didn't read/watch the sequel to Silence of the Lambs because Clarice turned out to be Kellyanne Conway. :(

 

I think the thing that bothers me most at this point is that the cards are face-up on the table, and those who continue to support Individual-1 and his corrupt regime have run out of excuses. Still, they persist. I really thought we were better than this.

 

But then, I thought we were better when in 1963 John Kennedy was killed. I still hoped it was true when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I even continued to hope that our better side would turn up eventually after Bobby Kennedy was gunned down.

 

Then, in May of 1970, I lost all hope - the National Guard turned on our own people and gunned down 4 students at Kent State. No one was ever held to pay for that atrocity.

 

Now this. I had always hoped we were better. Clearly, we are not.

 

You might get a kick out of this admittedly personal post. As mentioned, I am divorced. My ex-wife is married to a guy named Mort who has been having difficulties associated with aging. My daughter recently went down to visit him after he was hospitalized for a fall. He was in a bit of a fog but when he came out of it she asked him how he was and his first response was "Trump is evil and half the g**d*** country still f***ing supports him." She decided that he was recovered and back to normal.

[johnu]

 

Continues to humiliate himself by posting in this thread.

[johnu]

I guess you didn't read/watch the sequel to Silence of the Lambs because Clarice turned out to be Kellyanne Conway. :(

 

I think the thing that bothers me most at this point is that the cards are face-up on the table, and those who continue to support Individual-1 and his corrupt regime have run out of excuses. Still, they persist. I really thought we were better than this.

 

But then, I thought we were better when in 1963 John Kennedy was killed. I still hoped it was true when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I even continued to hope that our better side would turn up eventually after Bobby Kennedy was gunned down.

 

Then, in May of 1970, I lost all hope - the National Guard turned on our own people and gunned down 4 students at Kent State. No one was ever held to pay for that atrocity.

 

Now this. I had always hoped we were better. Clearly, we are not.

 

Roughly 60-65% of Americans think we can be better. 35-40% of Americans think we would be better if the South had won the Civil War and rich white Christian males were in total control.

[barmar]

Trump is a scumbag. Don't need any report to conclude that.

And his supporters mostly don't even deny that. "But he's our scumbag."

 

They don't care about his history of misconduct in both his business and personal lives, or how he bent or broke the rules to get into office. He tells them what they want to hear, and he convinced them that his policies that benefit the rich will trickle down to them.

[y66]

The absurdity of the claims by many of these same folks to be the upholders of law and protectors of life and Christian values are beyond even the talent of Mel Brooks to depict.

[y66]

From Medicare for Kids, a cheap step toward single-payer health care, explained by Matt Yglesias at Vox:

 

Behind the scenes, Democrats in Washington are trying to think about what they’ll do if the party wins the White House in 2021 on a Medicare-for-all platform but still hasn’t made much progress on the critical question of what taxes you’d raise to pay for it.

 

A natural fallback is to try to find ideas that put the country on the path to the single-payer vision without requiring nearly as much in the way of immediate tax hikes. To many, that means gravitating toward an idea that almost happened in the late stages of the original Affordable Care Act debate — opening up Medicare to a younger class of older people, either by reducing the Medicare eligibility age to 55 or at least creating a structure for the 55-and-older crowd to “buy in” to Medicare.

 

A much better idea, however, would be to do the reverse and create a universal health insurance program for children. It’s much cheaper, meaning it could be paid for with relatively modest and politically popular tax hikes on the rich and provide a clear, simple benefit to millions of families. New polling shows it’s an extremely popular idea. And most importantly, because kids would age out of the program rather than aging into it, they and their parents would create a natural constituency for further expansions so they can hold on to a benefit they currently enjoy and would fear losing.

Is this stepping stone approach too smart for Dems?

[hrothgar]

the following is well worth reading

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/ben-wittes-five-conclusions-mueller-report/588259/

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

The Washington Post’s fact-checking operation has now counted 10,000 “false or misleading claims” by Donald Trump during his presidency.

 

It’s hard to convey how big a deal this is. To begin with: It’s real. Anyone can go through the Post’s data and find plenty to argue with – maybe one statement isn’t really false, another was just an exaggeration and some other one was nit-picky. But even if the fact-checkers are wrong an implausible three out of four times, that’s still 2,500 false or misleading claims by the president in two-plus years.

 

That’s simply not normal. We don’t have equivalent historical data, but I’m confident that even Richard Nixon, who told more than a few important whoppers, didn’t come close to Trump’s level of habitual dishonesty. Barack Obama, George W. Bush? As I’ve said many times, most politicians actually care a lot about establishing a reputation for reliability. Oh, they’ll spin. They’ll present the best-looking version of events that can still count as the truth. But they will very rarely say something that flat-out isn’t so. And if they’re called on it, they’ll usually retreat to a more justifiable position. Trump, instead, just keeps going.

 

Does he get away with it? In the sense that he’s still president, I suppose so. But his professional reputation is in tatters, which reduces his influence, worsens his relationship with Congress, hinders his ability to negotiate and impedes his broader agenda. It’s hard to say definitively, but Trump’s lack of honesty also likely contributes to his unusual unpopularity. Overall, in fact, Trump has been the least popular president of the polling era, despite objective conditions – such as a strong economy and relative peace overseas – that would usually boost his numbers. Whatever the cause of Trump’s persistently low ratings, we can say with some confidence that he’s not fooling anyone, except (perhaps) the most partisan Republicans.

 

Meanwhile, his conspiracy-mongering and false statements about political opponents encourage the very worst kind of partisanship among both party actors and ordinary voters. Again, negative campaigning is normal. But it usually has some relationship with reality. The whole thing is highly corrosive to democratic government. Healthy representation depends on politicians communicating with constituents about what they’ve promised and what they’ve done. Trump’s insistence on making stuff up makes that impossible.

Edit:

 

"Man, if Trump had a dollar for every lie he’s told, he’d say he had a billion dollars" -- Stephen Colbert

[Winstonm]

WaPo;

 

BREAKING NEWS

Schiff says House will make a criminal referral of Trump ally Erik Prince for possible perjury

The House Intelligence Committee chairman said Prince may have lied to the panel over a meeting he held with a Russian financier in the Seychelles days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president.

[y66]

Guest post from Paul Krugman who, to his credit, is clearly trying hard not to be shrill which is not easy:

 

Does anyone remember Donald Trump’s inaugural address? Instead of offering the uplift normally expected of a new president, he painted a grim picture of “American carnage” — of urban areas ravaged by violent crime, of rampaging gangs of brown-skinned immigrants.

 

It was a startling vision. It was also totally false. Violent crime is near historic lows; urban areas haven’t been this safe in decades, maybe ever. Immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

 

Yet there is some real carnage taking place in 21st-century America — not in the big bad cities, but in rural areas and the small towns of the heartland. These are the areas seeing the biggest surge in “deaths of despair” — the evocative term Anne Case and Angus Deaton use for mortality caused by suicide, drugs and alcohol. These are also the places where we see social decay on multiple fronts, with collapsing families and a startling number of prime-aged men not working.

 

Some commentators attribute this social dissolution to a mysterious collapse of traditional values. But a much more plausible explanation is that we’re seeing the results of economic forces that have stranded many Americans, leaving them with diminished opportunities.

 

What are these economic forces? The geography of economic activity always involves a tug of war between “centripetal” forces that tend to make jobs and wealth cluster together in established centers, and “centrifugal” forces that push them away from those centers.

 

For several decades after World War II, centrifugal forces dominated: Old urban centers were in relative decline, and poorer regions of America were rapidly getting richer. But around 1980 things went into reverse. Maybe it was the rise of the knowledge economy, which gave new luster to big metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers, and led even more college graduates to move there. Maybe, also, it was the decline of resource-based employment in industries like coal — and farming.

 

Can anything be done to reverse this trend? Trump won over many voters in the declining regions by promising to bring back the old jobs. But this was playing to a fantasy of a past that is long gone, a point perfectly illustrated when Representative Andy Barr of Kentucky invited Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to visit a coal mine in his district — except that there aren’t any active mines in his district.

 

We can do a lot to improve the lives of people in the heartland — if they’ll let us. Kentucky, as it happens, enthusiastically embraced the Affordable Care Act, establishing a well-run marketplace and expanding Medicaid. As a result, the number of uninsured nonelderly adults fell by two-thirds. This was vastly better than what happened in neighboring Tennessee, which rejected most of the Act’s benefits.

 

But can we restore the heartland’s economic vibrancy? The truth is that nobody knows how to do this. The region already receives huge de facto aid from richer states, because it receives the full benefits of federal programs while paying relatively little in federal taxes. But the forces behind regional decline — and the political backlash — are a huge problem with no easy answer.

[Winstonm]

We can do a lot to improve the lives of people in the heartland — if they’ll let us. Kentucky, as it happens, enthusiastically embraced the Affordable Care Act, establishing a well-run marketplace and expanding Medicaid

 

The paradox is baffling - this same group of people also brought us Mitch McConnel. It is difficult to understand the political dynamics at work. It seems to be partly racism and partly religion mixed with a high degree of denial.

 

At the same time, I'm reading How Democracies Die, and it is a sobering history lesson of America's relationship with native-born autocrats and demagogues. It is a quaint coincidence - or is it? - that after being censured by Congress, Joseph McCarthy still had 40% approval ratings by a Gallup poll. Until he was shot, George McGovern had a one-million vote advantage over George McGovern in the Democratic primaries, and Huey Long proclaimed that he was the Louisiana constitution. Again, an assassin stopped a would-be run for president.

 

Our system of providing representation for the 60% has failed - both parties and the electoral college failed in eliminating a demagogue from the electoral equation - and now the GOP has become the home of the anti-democracy 40%.

 

The rule of law is only effective when it is non-partisan; but while stacking the courts with partisans, the GOP has and continues to try to eliminate all safeguards to a challenge to its power. This is not only un-democratic, but un-American.

[PassedOut]

Until he was shot, George McGovern had a one-million vote advantage in the Democratic primaries, and Huey Long proclaimed that he was the Louisiana constitution. Again, an assassin stopped a would-be run for president.

Robert Kennedy

[hrothgar]

Robert Kennedy

 

George Wallace actually

[Winstonm]

George Wallace actually

 

Yes, I meant to write George Wallace had a one million vote advantage over George McGovern.

[johnu]

Dennison's government paid personal attorney Guiliani Barr lied to the American people and committed perjury before Congress.

 

Robert Mueller Told William Barr He Mischaracterized His Findings: Report

 

Mueller complained to Barr that his four-page letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance,” of the special counsel report, according to the Post.

 

“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations,” Mueller wrote in a March 27 letter, the Post said.

 

Did Bill Barr Lie to Congress?

 

Jerry Nadler tweeted

I note with interest AG Barr’s 4/10 Senate testimony. “Q: Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion? A: I don’t know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion.” Now it appears that Mueller objected in this 3/27 letter.

[y66]

David Leonhardt at NYT on Rod Rosenstein:

 

Rod Rosenstein joined the Justice Department as a young lawyer in 1990, and he has worked there ever since. So he has had plenty of time to absorb the department’s internal culture.

 

That culture, created in the aftermath of Watergate, calls for department officials to be less partisan and more independent than members of any other cabinet department. They are supposed to follow the letter and spirit of the law, even when doing so makes life uncomfortable for the president or his appointees. They’re supposed to care, above all, about justice.

 

In Rosenstein’s tenure as the deputy attorney general, he failed to live up to the standard.

 

He didn’t always fail, to be clear. In some important moments, he stood up for the Justice Department’s ideals, above all by appointing Robert Mueller as special counsel. But principle isn’t supposed to be something that people turn on and off, depending on political expedience. And Rosenstein was far too willing to act expediently:

 

He provided President Trump political cover — transparently cynical cover — for the firing of James Comey. Rosenstein wrote the memo that enabled Trump to claim he was firing Comey for good cause.

 

Rosenstein was willing to bend Justice Department practice meant to prevent political appointees from meddling in law-enforcement decisions.

 

Once Mueller’s investigation was over, Rosenstein helped the Trump administration mischaracterize its conclusions. He didn’t stick up for Mueller when William Barr, the attorney general, wrote a misleading letter about the investigation (a letter Mueller found unfair). Then Rosenstein stood by Barr while Barr gave a press conference in which he acted like Trump’s lawyer.

 

Finally, Rosenstein announced his resignation this week with a sycophantic letter to Trump, evidently meant to burnish Trump’s image.

 

Again, Rosenstein is a complicated figure who acted honorably at times. But I suspect he himself realizes he compromised his principles. Last week, he gave a bizarre goodbye speech, sprinkled with sarcasm and petty attacks. It was not the speech that a person secure in his own record would have made.

 

What others are saying

 

“Rod Rosenstein’s tenure, for its many faults[,] also included moments of genuine service to and defense of this nation,” tweeted Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey. “Deep down, I fear he is someone we may miss when he is gone.”

 

“No one should be celebrating Rod Rosenstein’s resignation,” tweeted Julie Zebrak, a Democratic activist and former Justice Department official. Without him, “the wall between D.O.J. and the White House will be weakened even further.”

 

“Rosenstein ended his career as a dutiful functionary, allowing Trump to trash the rule of law while claiming he had upheld it,” concludes New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait.

 

Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe: “Self-serving. Self-protective. Filled with ethical compromise. Not exactly disgraceful. But not graceful either. Anything but heroic.”

 

“History is not likely to treat Rosenstein well,” writes The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. “He was weak when strength was required, cowardly when courage was called for.”

 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo argues that when Rosenstein was free to make his own decisions (appointing Mueller, for example), he acted ethically. When he was constitutionally subordinate (to the president during Comey’s firing and to Barr after Mueller’s report), he followed orders. “Rosenstein’s sullen and defensive comments over the last couple weeks shows he thinks he managed to thread the needle but also knows it was quite ugly,” Marshall writes.

[Winstonm]

Barr in front of the Senate committee is the live watching of the death throes of democratic norms.

[y66]

Quote of the day from Matt Yglesias at Vox:

 

I normally have a good sense of who’s deluded and who’s lying but the various people professing to be surprised that the Iran-Contra coverup guy who Trump obviously picked to lead a coverup turns out to be dishonest have me thrown.