Barr Complains That Trump’s Tweets Make It “Impossible” To Carry Out His Corruption…. Er, I Mean, Job

Ken AshfordCourts/Law, Political Scandals, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

Welp, this is an interesting development:

He complains about Trump’s tweets, as everyone does (even Republicans). And he’s right of course. It certainly looks like Trump has asked Barr to intervene in the Stone sentencing (Barr still denies this).

There are two plausible explanations for William Barr’s surprising criticism of President Trump yesterday.

The first is the literal one. Barr, the attorney general, lashed out at Trump — for “a constant background commentary that undercuts” the Justice Department — because Barr is legitimately upset. He’s upset not only about the perception that Trump is inappropriately interfering in investigations but also the reality of it.

The second explanation is the performative one. Barr criticized Trump, perhaps even with Trump’s approval, to shore up the Justice Department’s credibility as an independent agency that makes decisions based on the law, not the president’s whims. In this scenario, Barr is happy to use the Justice Department to help Trump but would prefer the help to be less obvious.

To many, including myself, Barr is untrustworthy, and what he is signaling is for Trump to stop saying the corrupt part out loud.

Digby disagrees:

I don’t buy that this was all carefully choreographed by Barr and the White House, however. Barr may have signaled to Trump that he needed to make some kind of statement to calm the troops and Trump may have agreed. But there is no way that Trump OK’d Barr calling him a bully or telling him what he can and cannot do. In fact, while the White House issued a statement saying that Trump hadn’t minded what Barr said, it very pointedly said that Trump would keep tweeting because he has freedom of speech like everyone else.

I suspect Trump is furious over this. Lou Dobbs of Fox Business, one of Trump’s most loyal media mouthpieces, certainly was, turning angrily on Barr only a day after praising him extensively. It is simply not believable that Trump has suddenly developed the emotional maturity and strategic intelligence to accept a subordinate publicly insulting him and challenging his decisions in order to advance a larger agenda. Having that happen on the same day that he heaped praise on Barr in an interview with Geraldo Rivera had to sting.

Trump responded this morning, both agreeing that he never told Barr to do intervene, but that there is nothing wrong even if he did.

“I didn’t do it but it was okay if I did” is a pretty common Trump defense. He used it in Trump-Russia collusion; he used in L’Affaire Ukraine. Translated it means, “I did it.”

Yesterday, Trump even revealed a lie about his involvement with Giuliani going to Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Bidens:

The reversal came Thursday in a podcast interview Trump did with journalist Geraldo Rivera, who asked, “Was it strange to send Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine, your personal lawyer? Are you sorry you did that?” Trump responded, “No, not at all,” and praised Giuliani’s role as a “crime fighter.”

“Here’s my choice: I deal with the Comeys of the world, or I deal with Rudy,” Trump said, referring to former FBI Director James Comey. Trump explained that he has “a very bad taste” of the US intelligence community, because of the Russia investigation, so he turned to Giuliani.

“So when you tell me, why did I use Rudy, and one of the things about Rudy, number one, he was the best prosecutor, you know, one of the best prosecutors, and the best mayor,” Trump said. “But also, other presidents had them. FDR had a lawyer who was practically, you know, was totally involved with government. Eisenhower had a lawyer. They all had lawyers.’

“Trump had previously denied that he sent Giuliani to Ukraine. Asked in November if he directed Giuliani to “do anything” in Ukraine, Trump said, “No, I didn’t direct him,” but went on to call Giuliani a “great corruption fighter.” Giuliani says he’s exposing legitimate corruption in Ukraine, even though his claims about former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden have been widely debunked.

Anyway even after Trump’s response, many are not buying this whole Trump/Barr kerfuffle:

And so the DOJ continues to be a Trump political investigation machine. I mean, who needs Rudy when you have a whole department of government workers to do your bidding?

The latest? The DOJ is investigating the CIA about the roots of the Trump-Russia investigation:

Since his election, President Trump has attacked the intelligence agencies that concluded that Russia secretly tried to help him win, fostering a narrative that they sought to delegitimize his victory. He has long promoted the investigation by John H. Durham, the prosecutor examining their actions, as a potential pathway to proving that a deep-state cabal conspired against him.

Questions asked by Mr. Durham, who was assigned by Attorney General William P. Barr to scrutinize the early actions of law enforcement and intelligence officials struggling to understand the scope of Russia’s scheme, suggest that Mr. Durham may have come to view with suspicion several clashes between analysts at different intelligence agencies over who could see each other’s highly sensitive secrets, the people said.

Mr. Durham appears to be pursuing a theory that the C.I.A., under its former director John O. Brennan, had a preconceived notion about Russia or was trying to get to a particular result — and was nefariously trying to keep other agencies from seeing the full picture lest they interfere with that goal, the people said.

But officials from the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency have told Mr. Durham and his investigators that such an interpretation is wrong and based on a misunderstanding of how the intelligence community functions, the people said. National security officials are typically cautious about sharing their most delicate information, like source identities, even with other agencies inside the executive branch.

Mr. Durham’s questioning is certain to add to accusations that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies, like Mr. Brennan, who has been an outspoken critic of the president. Mr. Barr, who is overseeing the investigation, has come under attack in recent days over senior Justice Department officials’ intervention to lighten a prison sentencing recommendation by lower-level prosecutors for Mr. Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven.

UPDATE: Is this a signal to Trump?

It is sure to piss Trump off. Maybe the point of Barr’s interview was trying pre-emptively to blunt Trump’s reaction to this decision.

Trump Goes After Federal Judge

Ken AshfordCourts/Law, L'Affaire Russe, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

Actually, Trump is not only attacking the judge but the integrity of the system, calling into question whether the jury was biased.

The “fore person” was a black female Democrat (according to the unreliable Fox News) and that alone is what makes her have “significant bias”. (I’m not sure how that looks not good for the “Justice” Department, but I can’t get into Trump’s mind).

Trump is literally like some kind of deranged mob boss who hates justice and the rule of law.

NY Times today:

To career prosecutors around the country, the Stone case raised new fears of what is to come. Until now, according to conversations with more than a dozen career lawyers in some of the 93 U.S. attorney’s offices, they had watched other divisions in the Justice Department execute significant shifts in response to Mr. Trump while the work of prosecuting crimes was largely unaffected by the politics of the moment. Now career prosecutors said they worried they might face more pressure.

“In essence, the leadership of the Justice Department has commandeered the sentencing in a politically sensitive criminal matter, reversing the position uniformly accepted and promoted by the career prosecutors,” said David Laufman, a partner at Wiggin and Dana and a former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section.

The withdrawal of the prosecutors sent a clear signal, said Greg Brower, a former prosecutor who once headed the F.B.I.’s congressional affairs office. “They all disagreed” with how top Justice Department officials intervened, he said.

“Beyond that,” Mr. Brower said, “they likely also believed there are ethical considerations that forced their decision.”

Prosecutors across the United States, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, said this week that they had already been wary of working on any case that might catch Mr. Trump’s attention and that the Stone episode only deepened their concern. They also said that they were worried that Mr. Barr might not support them in politically charged cases.

Hillary has something to say:

And Trump is getting some harsh blowback from his former Chief of Staff John Kelly:

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council aide and impeachment witness President Donald Trump fired Friday, was just doing his job, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told students and guests at a Drew University event here Wednesday night.

Over a 75-minute speech and Q&A session, Kelly laid out, in the clearest terms yet, his misgivings about Trump’s words and actions regarding North Korea, illegal immigration, military discipline, Ukraine, and the news media.

Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, said that Vindman is blameless and was simply following the training he’d received as a soldier; migrants are “overwhelmingly good people” and “not all rapists”; and Trump’s decision to condition military aid to Ukraine on an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden upended long-standing U.S. policy.

Vindman was rightly disturbed by Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July, Kelly suggested: Having seen something “questionable,” Vindman properly notified his superiors, Kelly said. Vindman, who specialized in Ukraine policy at the National Security Council at the time, was among multiple U.S. officials who listened in on the call. When subpoenaed by Congress in the House impeachment hearings, Vindman complied and told the truth, Kelly said.

“He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave,” Kelly told the audience at the Mayo Performing Arts Center. “He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

Although Trump has long insisted that his call to Zelensky was “perfect,” Kelly made clear that Trump indeed conditioned military aid on Zelensky’s help digging up dirt on the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

That amounted to a momentous change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine—one that Vindman was right to flag, because other federal agencies needed to know about the shift, Kelly said.

“Through the Obama administration up until that phone call, the policy of the U.S. was militarily to support Ukraine in their defensive fight against … the Russians,” Kelly said. “And so, when the president said that continued support would be based on X, that essentially changed. And that’s what that guy [Vindman] was most interested in.”

When Vindman heard the president tell Zelensky he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, that was tantamount to hearing “an illegal order,” Kelly said. “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”

Throughout the appearance, Kelly laid out his doubts about Trump’s policies. Trump has held two formal summits with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, hoping to scuttle the country’s nuclear program through personal diplomacy. Kelly said the effort was futile.

“He will never give his nuclear weapons up,” Kelly said. “Again, President Trump tried—that’s one way to put it. But it didn’t work. I’m an optimist most of the time, but I’m also a realist, and I never did think Kim would do anything other than play us for a while, and he did that fairly effectively.”

***

He also disapproved of the president’s language about migrants, he said. When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he famously described some migrants coming into the U.S. from Mexico as “rapists” and criminals.

Kelly said most migrants are merely looking for jobs. “In fact, they’re overwhelmingly good people … They’re not all rapists and they’re not all murderers. And it’s wrong to characterize them that way. I disagreed with the president a number of times.”

***

Responding to questions from the audience, Kelly faulted Trump for intervening in the case of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted last year of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State fighter. Trump reversed a Navy decision to oust Gallagher, in a chain of events that led to the resignation of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer.

“The idea that the commander in chief intervened there, in my opinion, was exactly the wrong thing to do,” Kelly said. “Had I been there, I think I could have prevented it.”

Kelly also said: ”So if you only watch Fox News, because it’s reinforcing what you believe, you are not an informed citizen.”

The news this morning is that Hope Hicks is returning to the White House. My working theory is that it may be a move by his staff to bring the President under control, since he seems to be suffering from increasing dementia and erratic behavior. Trump listened to her advice when she was there before.

UPDATE: Trump responds to Kelly…

All else aside, if a boss keeps hiring people who are incapable of doing their jobs, that would seem to call into question the abilities of the boss.

ANOTHER UPDATE — 20 minutes after his John Kelly tweet:

Oh… here we go:

FURTHER UPDATE:

The Alarm Is Sounded As Trump Uses DOJ As His Own Vendettas Law Firm

Ken AshfordPolitical Scandals, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

With the Justice Department in turmoil over the decision by higher-ups to downscale a sentencing recommendation for longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, Trump tweeted:

This is a straight-up celebration of the fact that in intervening for Stone — who was convicted of obstructing Congress and witness tampering in connection with investigations into Russian subversion of our election — Barr is doing the president’s political bidding.

In their original recommendation of a stiff sentence for Stone, prosecutors explicitly noted he’d obstructed an investigation designed to provide a full accounting of that attack on our political system.

But now Trump is openly declaring that in interfering, Barr is helping to delegitimize that investigation entirely. In short, Barr — who has tasked prosecutor John Durham with “reviewing” the investigation’s origins — is helping Trump make the Russian attack disappear.

This is extremely serious. The DOJ had to understand that filing a supplemental memo would undermine the line prosecutors and make the department look terrible. Yet they were willing to do that, apparently because that’s what the president wanted.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is demanding that Attorney General William Barr testify publicly over the Justice Department’s decision to reduce the recommended sentence for Trump associate Roger Stone.

Harris is asking Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to call Barr before the panel, of which she is a member.

“I request that you immediately schedule a hearing for Attorney General William Barr to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee so that the committee and the American people can understand the Justice Department’s decision to overrule its career prosecutors in this case,” Harris wrote in a letter to Graham.

But Graham has shut that avenue down:

And remember this?

I saw it live at the time, and the way he answered — I knew it was a significant and maybe even historic question, I still believe that…. even more.

But there is a larger picture. The war between Mr. Trump and what he calls the “deep state” has entered a new, more volatile phase as the president seeks to assert greater control over a government that he is convinced is not sufficiently loyal to him. With no need to worry about Congress now that he has been acquitted of two articles of impeachment, the president has shown a renewed willingness to act even if it prompts fresh complaints about violating traditional norms.

“The president is entitled to staffers that want to execute his policies, that he has confidence in,” said Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser, who supervised Colonel Vindman and his brother, Yevgeny Vindman, also an Army lieutenant colonel, who was dismissed last week from the National Security Council staff even though he did not testify in the House hearings. “We’re not a banana republic where lieutenant colonels get together and decide what the policy is.”

The administration plans to withdraw the nomination for Pentagon comptroller of Elaine McCusker, a Defense Department official who questioned the aid freeze, The New York Post reported. While the Senate has not been notified of such a move, an administration official said it was likely to happen after budget hearings this week.

McCusker could not be reached for comment, and a Pentagon official referred questions to the White House, which had no comment. Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters that he had “a feeling everything is going to be fine with the nomination.” But friends of McCusker said she was aware that her nomination was in jeopardy.

Just Monday, McCusker was the one left explaining the wielding of another Trump administration ax. Appearing before reporters in her role as the Defense Department’s acting comptroller, she sought to describe why the Pentagon was proposing to eliminate the $7 million subsidy to Stars and Stripes, a newspaper for American troops.

“We have essentially, decided that, you know, kind of coming into the modern age, that newspaper is probably not the best way that we communicate any longer,” she told reporters.

But McCusker’s crime is quite literally having attempted to follow the law. Over the summer, the Office of Management and Budget was trying to hold up aid for Ukraine that Congress had passed into law, because it was trying to extort Ukraine to investigate Trump’s rivals. Defense Department officials, who were supposed to allocate the funds, attempted to implement the policy. Just Security obtained the email chain.

The emails show McCusker advising budget officials as to what the law said. She was not acting especially rigid about it. As Just Security’s summary notes, “The emails show officials bending over backwards to make every conceivable accommodation to keep the process moving without actually being able to obligate the funding.” One message shows McCusker writing to another official, “We need to continue to give the WH has [sic] much decision space as possible, but am concerned we have not officially documented the fact that we can not promise full execution at this point.” That is, she was trying to do everything in her power to give White House officials room to set the policy as they saw fit, without violating the law.

Importantly, the Government Accountability Office later examined the question, and found that McCusker was right. Holding up the aid was indeed illegal. (It’s not complicated: Congress passed a law providing the aid, so refusing to carry it out would obviously violate it.)

Another political appointee who may lose a nomination is Jessie K. Liu, who served as United States attorney for the District of Columbia when her office prosecuted Stone, Manafort and other high-profile cases.

She stepped down in December, when Mr. Trump nominated her to be the under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes. But yesterday, the White House withdrew her nomination, a person familiar with the matter said.

Then there is Victoria Coates. At the White House, Coates, a deputy national security adviser, has twisted in the wind amid feverish speculation about whether she would be pushed out. She has been the subject of a whisper campaign suggesting that she is the anonymous author of a book about being a member of the resistance inside the administration — which prompted the literary agents for the actual author to deny the claims.

Robert C. O’Brien, Coates’s boss at the National Security Council, rejected the speculation in an appearance yesterday at the Atlantic Council. “This town is amazing when it comes to whispers,” he said, adding he did not know who the author was. “I think writing ‘Anonymous’ is inconsistent with working at the White House or working at the N.S.C., so whoever wrote ‘Anonymous’ probably shouldn’t be there.”

But O’Brien is presiding over a broader housecleaning at the National Security Council. Since being appointed last fall, he has said he wants to shrink the staff to closer to what it was under President George W. Bush. At the Atlantic Council appearance, he said he would be finished “by the end of the week” reducing the staff of policy professionals to 115 or 120 from the 175 when he took over.

Which brings us back to Trump and Biden. Following Trump’s acquittal last week, Giuliani and his allies continued ramping up their probes into Hunter and Joe Biden and Ukraine matters. And on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told CBS’s Margaret Brennan that the Department of Justice had established an “intake process” whereby Giuliani could pass off information he gathered from Ukraine to prosecutors. 

“I have no idea what he’s got. I have no idea if the information is credible or not,” Graham told The Daily Beast in a phone interview. “Anything that comes out of Ukraine needs to be run through intelligence. Rudy is also on TV saying he has the smoking gun. When somebody goes on TV and talks about what they got in Ukraine… that needs to be checked. Everyone should be suspicious.”

Graham went on to denounce the Democrats’ embrace of Lev Parnas, a former associate of Giuliani who recently pushed out recordings of President Trump advocating for the firing of former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. 

“You know, we have the Democrats who are embracing Parnas… putting people on TV to make outlandish claims. We should run him and that information through the system,” Graham said, adding that he was “skeptical” of any information emanating from Ukraine.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Attorney General Bill Barr acknowledged that the department would evaluate Giuliani’s information but waved off any notion that the president’s personal attorney was being given special attention or priority. The Washington Post later reported the District Attorney’s office in Pittsburgh had been tapped to handle the case.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are actively working to gather additional information on the Bidens and Burisma. Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI), Graham, and Chuck Grassley—the Republican chairmen of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and the Finance Committee, respectively—previously requested the State Department hand over any documents tied to the Bidens or Ukraine. 

A source briefed on the investigation confirmed to The Daily Beast that it is focusing on witnesses from Blue Star and the State Department who are seen as close to Biden: David Wade, the communications chief for the former vice president; former Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken; and Amos Hochstein, an envoy for energy policy in the Obama administration. 

As previously reported by BuzzFeed, Senate investigators have said they expect to soon get records from the National Archives about meetings in 2016 between Obama administration officials, Ukrainian representatives and the Democratic National Committee, the source said. Once the archive and State documents come through, investigators plan to set up witness interviews, the source said, adding that investigators have indicated the probe could extend into the summer.

“We don’t give our investigations artificial deadlines and we haven’t speculated on any timeframes,” a spokesman for Grassley said. “We follow the facts where they lead and each inquiry is done on a case by case.”

Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who has long claimed the Ukrainian government meddled in the 2016 election to damage Hillary Clinton, has previously stated that he’s agreed to cooperate with the probe into the Bidens. He told The Daily Beast he shared additional documents with investigators on Monday. The lawmakers leading the investigation have sought to investigate claims related to Ukraine and 2016, including Telizhenko’s. Telizhenko said the documents included emails, and did not share further detail about the materials, which he said were in response to queries from the Senate investigators.

So that’s all the abuse of power in a nutshell, one week after impeachment acquittal.

UPDATE: Oh man…. here he goes.

UPDATE: A bit too late…

Shit..,,. even Ben Shapiro has issues with Trump/Barr/Stone:

NH Primary Results

Ken AshfordDemocrats, Election 2020Leave a Comment

Sanders won the most votes in Iowa, even if he narrowly lost the delegate battle. He won the New Hampshire primary. His support among people of color has grown in polls, while his chief competitor for those voters, Joe Biden, has been fading in the overall contest. He has climbed to the lead in some national polls. And he is raising more money — and has more money — than any of his rivals who are not billionaires.

Four stories coming out of New Hampshire.

(1) Klbacher does well after Friday’s debate, propelling her to third. Can she capitalize on it? As a fiscally moderate Democrat who opposes the “Medicare for all” and free four-year college plans of her liberal rivals, Ms. Klobuchar was in sync with the smaller-government tilt of plenty of Democrats in the state. Her emphasis on bipartisanship and pragmatism was a fit with New Hampshire’s large number of unaffiliated voters, or independents, who could participate in the Democratic primary. And she often mentioned her support for New Hampshire’s two centrist female senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan.

(2) What the fuck happened to Elizabeth Warren? And what the SERIOUS fuck happened to Joe Biden? Both were frontrunners (especially Biden) for most of the race so far. If winning is contagious, losing can be an even more infectious campaign disease. It erodes support, money and confidence in a sudden rush of voter and donor panic. And Biden now faces more than two weeks — an interminably long stretch — until the primary on the calendar his advisers have long circled as his political “firewall”: South Carolina’s. It was telling that when he ditched New Hampshire before the polls closed, he headed there instead of Nevada, whose nominating contest is next.

(3) Buttigieg was able to capitalize on his Iowa squaker win and it paid off. His second-place in New Hampshire and a delegate victory in Iowa will lend his campaign major momentum. The question now is what, exactly, will happen to that energy as the contest moves to a more diverse playing field. Buttigieg’s campaign has spent months trying to win over people of color, highlighting policy plans and a handful of endorsements from black lawmakers. Yet in polling, Buttigieg has shown no strength with the black and Latino voters who make up a significant portion of the Democratic Party electorate in Nevada and South Carolina, the next two nominating contests. After that, the race moves to Super Tuesday, a mix of big, diverse states like California and Texas, and Southern states where black people are expected to make up a majority of Democratic voters.

(4) Andrew Yang and Duval Patrick call it quits.

You want to know about the GOP primary in NH? Fine.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Attorney General Bill Barr acknowledged that the department would evaluate Giuliani’s information but waved off any notion that the president’s personal attorney was being given special attention or priority. The Washington Post later reported the District Attorney’s office in Pittsburgh had been tapped to handle the case. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are actively working to gather additional information on the Bidens and Burisma. Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI), Graham, and Chuck Grassley—the Republican chairmen of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and the Finance Committee, respectively—previously requested the State Department hand over any documents tied to the Bidens or Ukraine. A source briefed on the investigation confirmed to The Daily Beast that it is focusing on witnesses from Blue Star and the State Department who are seen as close to Biden: David Wade, the communications chief for the former vice president; former Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken; and Amos Hochstein, an envoy for energy policy in the Obama administration. As previously reported by BuzzFeed, Senate investigators have said they expect to soon get records from the National Archives about meetings in 2016 between Obama administration officials, Ukrainian representatives and the Democratic National Committee, the source said. Once the archive and State documents come through, investigators plan to set up witness interviews, the source said, adding that investigators have indicated the probe could extend into the summer. “We don’t give our investigations artificial deadlines and we haven’t speculated on any timeframes,” a spokesman for Grassley said. “We follow the facts where they lead and each inquiry is done on a case by case.” Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who has long claimed the Ukrainian government meddled in the 2016 election to damage Hillary Clinton, has previously stated that he’s agreed to cooperate with the probe into the Bidens. He told The Daily Beast he shared additional documents with investigators on Monday. The lawmakers leading the investigation have sought to investigate claims related to Ukraine and 2016, including Telizhenko’s. Telizhenko said the documents included emails, and did not share further detail about the materials, which he said were in response to queries from the Senate investigators.

Republican voter registration in NH is down roughly 20k voters from 2016 to now. It’s a reminder that Trump’s increased GOP popularity is in part because in some places, the GOP registration rolls have shrunk.

Eager that Democrats were getting attention, Trump tweeted this:

JFC

Up next is Nevada caucauses.

Political Meddling In Stone Sentencing: A Story In Three Tweets & DOJ Implosion

Ken AshfordCourts/Law, Crime, L'Affaire Russe, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

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“Made before the Trump Tweet”? I seriously doubt that. Trump’s tweet was at 2 a.m. Clearly, Trump was meddling and Barr’s DOJ got cowed.

Judge Jackson is gonna drop the fucking hammer on this guy. Trump is gonna pardon him anyway but I would like to see the judge bring in the folks at DOJ who did this and explain why.

“Your honor, DOJ’s position on this case is consistent and sanctions are certainly not warranted here. Our position, as we have always stated, is, um, just wait, just a minute … *furiously scrolls through the president’s twitter*, um…”

This is why in previous administrations, the rule was a very clear “the president does not comment on ongoing cases”.

It could be that DOJ now thinks its guideline calculation was too aggressive, or that some enhancements shouldn’t apply. In this case, however, it wasn’t just DOJ that thought 7 1/4 to 9 was the right guideline range – the court probation office did too. From Stone‘s memo:

Whether or not the sentence is inappropriate, now that the president has weighed in to it, every future action by DOJ or the court is now flooded with the perception of partisanship that undermines public trust in the impartiality of the judicial system, whether or not warranted.

I guess now we wait for DOJ to file that they had a Damascene moment on their way back from the courthouse about the guideline appropriateness, the judge will say “wtf ffs, why did you pour gasoline all over this trashfire, now I basically have to impose the guideline sentence”

And then it will be appealed and/or commuted because the sentence was outside of the prosecutorial recommendation, and whichever way you look at it, this is going to be such a dumpster fire of what’s left of DOJ’s credibility.

Jeff Sessions would not, in a million years even on his most partisan day, have allowed for something like this to happen. That’s how bad it is. Bill Barr is unfit for office. He is not upholding his sworn oath to the constitution of the United States. He must go.

UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler, who has been following the trial closely, thinks this is an attempt to keep Stone from talking:

I believe the brazenness of this fight may be a reflection of the damaging information Roger Stone may have about Trump’s own conduct.

The trial itself provided ample evidence of what Mark Meadows considers “collusion” involving Donald Trump personally. It showed the campaign — and probably Trump personally — were working through Stone to optimize the WikiLeaks releases from the very day they came out on June 14, 2016. It showed that Stone was informing Trump personally about his efforts to optimize the releases. After some arm-twisting to adhere to his grand jury testimony, Steve Bannon testified he knew of all this, contrary to some of what he had said in earlier testimony that Trump would learn about. Erik Prince was in the loop. Gates testified that Stone was strategizing with Jared Kushner on all this. And it appears that Paul Manafort was in the loop, too.

But all that really damning evidence came out in a trial that only had to prove that Stone had lied to cover up the actions he took to optimize the release of the WikiLeaks emails. The trial did not need to explain what Stone’s actually back channel was, what he had to do to obtain it, and how involved Trump was in that process. And the trial did not explain it.

Indeed, there’s evidence I’ll lay out at more length in a follow-up that the government chose not to lay out all it knew. That is, it appears the government came to trial prepared to present evidence about the underlying “collusion,” but ultimately decided to hold it back for now.

At multiple times during the trial, however, the prosecution pointed to suspiciously timed phone calls, right before or after Stone discussed WikiLeaks with Gates, Manafort, or Jerome Corsi. Only Stone or Trump can tell us what happened between the two men, what Trump’s actually role in maximizing the degree to which his campaign benefited from Russia’s theft of his opponent’s email.

Immediately after the trial, Stone made an intense effort to get Trump to pardon him, with his wife Nydia appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show to ask directly and a man with a vuvuzela inside the White House calling for a pardon gates.

Since that time, Stone was silent, until the time that the Probation Office provided the sentencing range for the crimes that was built in to the way that Mueller charged this just over a year ago. That is, by charging Stone with witness tampering, Mueller built in the possibility that Stone would be facing the steep sentence recommended yesterday. And that steep sentence may have been envisioned not as the sum of what Stone’s actual actions entailed — certainly every single warrant save the last four showed probable cause that Stone had done far more, but rather as leverage to get Stone to tell what he knows about Trump’s involvement in all this.

Bill Barr was brought in as AG to bury abundant evidence that Trump was personally involved in efforts to maximize the Russian operation, to deny all the ways that Trump did cheat to win. From his initial misleading claims in the wake of the report’s release, he was always suppressing the centrality of Roger Stone in all this.

So it’s fairly safe to conclude that DOJ’s reversal today is not just an effort to prevent a rich white man, Roger Stone, from facing the full consequences of his actions, but to prevent voters from learning what another rich white man did to cheat to get elected.

Yes, ultimately Trump will commute what is left of Roger Stone’s sentence, probably on November 4, just like he fired Jeff Sessions the day after the 2018 election. But I suspect that Roger Stone, rightly, isn’t going to leave anything to chance. And so neither can Bill Barr.

UPDATE: At least one of the career prosecutors are having none of it —

The filing notes that Zelinsky has resigned from the Justice Department “effective immediately.” This confirms what I suspected: Stone sentence recommendation was changed for inappropriate reasons. Ity’s awesome that Zelinsky stood up (though it should be the political appointees who do this and insulate the career prosecutors from politics).

And now…

Barr needs to be subpoenaed _today_ to explain this Stone fiasco. And if he refuses the House needs to send an officer to go get him. This cannot go on.

Former Attorney General weighs in:

Chuck Schumer:

Nice, but I doubt the DOJ will let the IG review their work.

For those wondering, there’s just Michael Marando left on the Stone team. (At 4:47 — we’ll see how long that lasts.)

FINAL UPDATE: And the fourth prosecutor, Michael Marando drops out as well.

NH Primary Day

Ken AshfordElection 2020Leave a Comment

For the first time since 2004, no candidate dropped out after the Iowa caucuses, sending the full field of Democratic candidates on to New Hampshire’s primary.

Iowa was won by Buttigieg, or maybe Sanders — nobody is quite sure. But it looks good for both of them going into New Hampshire.

Sanders won 60% of the vote in 2016, beating Hillary’s 38%. But it is a larger field. After the debate on Friday night, Klobachar has risen in the polls.

What’s really amazing is how Biden and Warren have plummeted. Biden can still hold on, because he is still popular in South Carolina, the next state.

But Dixville Notch, Hart’s Location and Millsfield  have all voted, so this is how it stands until 7 pm.

Whatever happens in NH will set the tone for what’s next: Nevada’s caucuses on Feb. 22, South Carolina’s primary a week later and then Super Tuesday on March 3, the delegate motherlode when California, Texas and 12 other states vote.