HAS THIS BEEN THE PLAN SINCE AUGUST 2017?
November 7, 2018/0 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
Maggie Haberman just observed that Jeff Sessions’ resignation letter is not dated. While some of the details in it — such as his claim to have “prosecuted the largest number of violent offenders and firearm deendants in our nation’s history” — seem to reflect the full 22 months of his tenure, nothing in it clearly marks it as having been written today. So I think that is what probably happened.
But there’s a scenario that makes me wonder whether this isn’t what Trump has been planning since July 2017, the last time Trump got really furious with Jeff Sessions.
Consider this timeline:
July 19, 2017: Maggie and Mike tee up a question (obviously working from the White House script) about how investigating Trump’s finances would represent crossing a red line.
July 26, 2017: In a CNN interview, Whitaker describes how you could defund the Special Counsel and thereby end his work.I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced, it would recess appointment and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigations grinds to almost a halt.
August 6, 2017: Whitaker uses the Red Line comment Maggie and Mike teed up to describe Mueller pursuing Trump’s finances as improper.
On July 25 and 26, 2017, Trump took to Twitter to bitch about Sessions.
On September 22, 2017, Whitaker was hired to be Sessions’ Chief of Staff.
In other words, Trump may have been pursuing this plan since July 2017.
If so, then Mueller may have already anticipated that, because he asked four questions about that episode in March, as well as questions about what he did in response to Sessions’ earlier recusal.
What did you think and do regarding the recusal of Mr. Sessions?
What efforts did you make to try to get him to change his mind?
Did you discuss whether Mr. Sessions would protect you, and reference past attorneys general?
What did you think and what did you do in reaction to the news of the appointment of the special counsel?
Why did you hold Mr. Sessions’s resignation until May 31, 2017, and with whom did you discuss it?
What discussions did you have with Reince Priebus in July 2017 about obtaining the Sessions resignation?
With whom did you discuss it?
What discussions did you have regarding terminating the special counsel, and what did you do when that consideration was reported in January 2018?
What was the purpose of your July 2017 criticism of Mr. Sessions?
Whatever it was, Trump obtained Sessions’ resignation before today’s press conference, so it’s possible Whitaker already tired to move against Mueller today, relying on the ground work he laid over a year ago.
The one thing that would suggest otherwise is the plea deal Manafort entered. I’ve argued that it is pardon proof, partly because it would include state charges and partly because Manafort would lose all his ill-gotten gains if Trump didn’t pardon him first. For reasons I won’t write up yet, I’m not sure that’s entirely true (though Manafort has provided a lot of information in the last several months).
That’d be way better planning than Trump has pulled off on any other thing. But then, protecting himself is the thing he’s best at.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/11/07/h ... gust-2017/
emptywheel
By forcing Jeff Sessions to resign, rather than firing him, Trump gets to put in Whittaker, who will start starving the Mueller investigation from a budget standpoint.
He probably can't prevent Mueller from unsealing anything he banked by Friday.
https://twitter.com/emptywheel
MATT WHITAKER CAN’T PREVENT MUELLER FROM UNSEALING ANY SEALED INDICTMENTS
November 7, 2018/0 Comments/in Mueller Probe /by empty wheel
After spending a 1.5 hour press conference denying he “colluded” with Russia, Trump just proved he did by forcing Jeff Sessions to resign. He announced Sessions’ Chief of Staff, Matt Whitaker, will be the Acting Attorney General. DOJ has already announced Whitaker will take over oversight of the Mueller investigation. Before he was even hired as CoS, Whitaker pointed to the Red Line Trump’s stenographers at the NYT teed up for him, suggested Mueller had crossed it, and that that represented going too far.
He has also laid out how to kill the Mueller investigation — by defunding it.
All that said, Mueller was surely expecting just such an eventuality. And the fact that they got Roger Stone attorney Tyler Nixon to testify Friday suggests they were prepping for it.
The only question is whether they got the grand jury to approve whatever indictments they were working on. I’d be surprised if Mueller didn’t (unless Rosenstein prevented him from doing so).
If that’s the case, then Whitaker is not going to help Trump get out of his legal troubles. That’s because Chief Judge Beryl Howell, not Whitaker, will make the decision about unsealing anything sealed in this grand jury investigation.
So if Mueller prepared for this very predictable eventuality, then Trump may have just fired a key player in his racist agenda for naught.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/11/07/m ... dictments/
The new acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, wrote this last year: "Mueller's investigation of Trump is going too far."
Incoming House Oversight Committee Chair RepCummings: “Congress must now investigate the real reason for this termination”
If Trump Fires Mueller
The New Republic
Here’s what the post-midterms world might look like: Democrats control the House by a decent margin. But they pick up just one seat in the Senate, allowing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to exploit that more powerful legislative body to guard the White House. (Both electoral outcomes are likely, according to predictions.) Then, before special counsel Robert Mueller has the chance to reveal any of the work his team has been quietly doing during the campaign season, President Donald Trump finds a way to end or severely curtail Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Trump’s boldest move would be to fire Mueller himself. Shortly after Mueller was appointed in May 2017, Trump’s team claimed that the special counsel had conflicts of interest—claims that Trump might use to justify firing him. More recently, Trump has complained that the investigation—which by special counsel standards has barely begun—has gone on too long. If Trump is planning on firing Mueller, he’s most likely to do it right after the election, since it will take two months before the new Congress is sworn in and any political consequences will be delayed.
If Trump does not want to fire Mueller directly, he could derail the investigation in a couple ways. He could replace Mueller’s supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein has forced Mueller to spin off unrelated parts of the investigation, but for the most part has permitted Mueller to proceed as he wishes, much to the chagrin of the White House. If Rosenstein were fired and no other staff shake-ups were made, his automatic replacement would likely be Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who has previously accused the FBI of overreach and claimed that former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by Trump over the Russia affair, had shielded Hillary Clinton from possible prosecution. Democrats worry that an empowered Francisco could fire Mueller himself.
Alternately, Trump could convince Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has recused himself from the Russia investigation, to resign. Trump could replace him immediately with either Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar or Department of Transportation General Counsel Steven Bradbury, both Senate-approved officials who could take over temporarily under the Vacancies Reform Act. Both are reportedly under consideration to replace Sessions; both could fire Mueller if named attorney general.
Finally, Trump might even carry out a Wednesday Morning Massacre, working his way through the Department of Justice until someone decides they’ll back a claim that Mueller has engaged in misconduct—then use that accusation to justify firing him directly.
That would leave the new Democratic majority in the House as the chief means of carrying on the Mueller investigation. What could Democrats actually accomplish?
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There are three main elements to a Mueller-less Russia investigation: 1) what Democrats could investigate whether or not Mueller is fired; 2) what they would be missing if Mueller were to be axed; and 3) what Democrats can salvage from an aborted investigation. Let’s take them in turn.
Democrats can call a whole lot of witnesses.
In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, Rep. Adam Schiff of California promised that if he were to become chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence under a Democratic majority, the committee would provide “a full accounting” of Russia’s entanglements with the Trump campaign and Trump White House.
He said the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, under Rep. Elijah Cummings’s leadership, would address how Trump “is profiting off the presidency,” indicating that that committee would investigate Trump’s possible violation of the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits the president from receiving payments from foreign governments. These payments may include those made to Trump’s inauguration committee, some of which came from Russian donors.
Schiff also suggested that the House Judiciary Committee would focus on “potential abuse of the pardon power [and] attacks on the rule of law,” which could include Trump’s daily attacks on the FBI, his tampering in FBI investigations, and the pardons he reportedly floated to his former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and one-time campaign chief Paul Manafort, before both entered plea agreements and started cooperating with Mueller.
If Democrats win the House, Rep. Adam Schiff will likely play a central role in the House’s investigations into Russia’s role in the 2016 election.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Schiff suggested his own committee would examine Russian financial influence over the president, which could cover Trump’s various business dealings in Russia. But it’s also likely that the Financial Services Committee, under Rep. Maxine Waters of California, would conduct much of that work.
In March, Schiff and the other Democrats on the Intelligence Committee released a status report naming witnesses Republicans had refused to call in their own cursory probes into Russia’s ties to the White House. These witnesses included White House aides Stephen Miller and Keith Kellogg, as well as former administration officials like former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and K.T. McFarland, who served under Flynn.
Between them, these witnesses could provide more insight into the Trump campaign’s interest in pursuing a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as into whether Russians were offering stolen emails from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in exchange for such meetings. The witnesses could also shed light on Trump’s personal involvement in Mike Flynn’s reassurances to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential transition in December 2016, that the Trump administration would seek to reverse Obama-era sanctions on Russia.
Schiff said he could also call Roman Beniaminov, who worked with Rob Goldstone, the music promoter who first set up the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 in which Donald Trump Jr. sought to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton. Beniaminov learned in advance that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would be dealing “some negative information” on Clinton.
Democrats would also call witnesses related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the Trump-affiliated firm gained access to the data of millions of Facebook users. Those witnesses could provide insight into how the Trump campaign exploited Facebook’s personal data to suppress certain kinds of voters in 2016. The legal concern here is two-fold: first, whether Cambridge Analytica employees from the U.K. worked for Trump illegally in the United States; second, whether Trump’s PAC, where some of those employees worked, coordinated improperly with the campaign. Given reports that Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix had discussions with billionaire Trump supporter Rebekah Mercer about optimizing the release of the emails stolen by Russia, Democrats would also inquire whether Cambridge Analytica exploited data stolen by Russians.
Perhaps the most incendiary testimony could relate to how Russians Aleksandr Torshin and Maria Butina, with the assistance of Republican operative Paul Erickson, used the National Rifle Association as a vehicle to draw the Republican Party closer to Russia. While Butina was arrested in July and Erickson is reportedly under active investigation, court documents relating to Butina’s prosecution describe Rockefeller heir George O’Neill Jr.’s active cooperation in Butina’s operation, down to his learning about Putin’s personal approval for the effort to host a series of “friendship and dialogue dinners” at which Russians could foster pro-Russian policies. “[A]ll that we needed is <<yes>> from Putin’s side. The rest is easier,” Butina wrote O’Neill in March 2016.
In the March plan, Democrats also said they would compel more information and testimony from witnesses that Republicans had let off easy. For example, the report lays out how both Donald Trump Jr. and Trump’s former campaign chair Corey Lewandowski refused, in past appearances before the Intelligence Committee, to describe communications pertaining to the June 9 meeting in Trump Tower.
The report also calls for more materials from the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen pertaining to a 2016 bid to brand a Trump Tower in Moscow that continued well into the election year. And it argues that Erik Prince, the former head of the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater, must fully explain his meeting in the Seychelles with the head of a Russian investment firm, Kirill Dmitriev. Reporting since Prince testified to the committee in November 2017 suggests Prince lied about the meeting being an effort to set up a backchannel between Trump’s team and Russia.
Democrats have also promised to subpoena Twitter, WhatsApp, Apple, and the Trump Organization to learn more about communications that might be part of a conspiracy. For example, they’d like to obtain records showing which people, including Trump associates, communicated with Russian military intelligence mouthpiece Guccifer 2.0 or WikiLeaks, the outlets that released the Clinton and DNC emails stolen by Russia. In addition, Democrats would like to learn whether Trump associates communicated using encrypted messaging applications—messages that might have been missed in prior records requests.
So Democrats have a fairly robust plan for the investigations they’ll conduct if they win a majority in the House. But even that would only scratch the surface.
Democrats don’t have Mueller’s investigative prowess.
The steps laid out by Schiff don’t account for what happens if Mueller is fired before finishing his investigation. That’s a problem because, at every step of his probe, Mueller has identified key players in Russia’s 2016 election operation that no one, including members of Congress, had yet discovered.
A few examples: A rural California man, Richard Pinedo, sold Russian internet trolls the identities they used to sow division among voters on Twitter and Facebook during the election—a role only disclosed when Mueller indicted the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm based in Saint Petersburg. That same indictment described, but did not name, three Trump campaign officials in Florida who interacted with Russian trolls organizing a “Florida Goes Trump” rally in August 2016. (Those three people have never been publicly identified, and if they’ve been interviewed by any congressional committee, that fact remains secret.)
Meanwhile, Sam Patten, a Republican lobbyist, started cooperating with federal prosecutors a good three months before it was publicly reported. Patten was the partner of the Russian-Ukrainian consultant and suspected Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik, who interacted with Paul Manafort during the Trump campaign.
The most visible signs of Mueller’s investigation since February pertain to longtime Trump hatchet man Roger Stone, and yet where that aspect of the probe might lead remains a mystery. Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg, Stone assistant John Kakanis, Stone social media adviser Jason Sullivan, Stone associate Kristin Davis, radio host Randy Credico, and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi—all appeared before Mueller’s grand jury.
Longtime Trump aide Roger Stone is an integral, if mysterious, figure in Mueller’s probe.John Sciulli/Getty Images for Politicon
Mueller’s team also interviewed Ted Malloch, an associate of the British anti-immigration firebrand Nigel Farage. They questioned Trump aide Michael Caputo, while Stone aide Andrew Miller is currently fighting a grand jury subpoena in the District of Columbia Circuit Court. By May 25, at a time when just four of his associates had publicly revealed their testimony, Stone said eight of his associates had already been contacted by Mueller’s team. (Another witness against Stone received a subpoena but has never been publicly identified.)
While public reports have focused on questions about Stone’s interactions with Guccifer 2.0 or WikiLeaks, some of the Mueller team’s activity may relate to Stone’s dirty election tricks, which were funded by dark money groups. It’s unclear how such fundraising might relate to allegations that Stone cooperated with Russia. So even for the part of the Mueller investigation that has been most public, there are big gaps in the public record—gaps that committees in the House might not be able to close.
And that’s just witnesses. Mueller has also obtained a great deal of records and communications that no committee in Congress is known to have obtained. As one example, on March 9, Mueller obtained search warrants for five AT&T phones, having shown probable cause those phones included evidence of a crime. At least one of those phones belonged to Paul Manafort (which is how details of the warrant became public), but the identities of the other people who had their phones searched remain undisclosed.
Then there’s the money angle. Buzzfeed has done great reporting on Suspicious Activity Reports on bank transfers associated with the Russian investigation. It has also raised questions about whether Treasury has cooperated with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the one committee that requested financial records relating to the investigation. But there’s no sign any committee in Congress has examined Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transfers—financial flows that have figured prominently in Russia’s campaign disruption efforts. If the Mueller investigation is sidelined, congressional investigators might need to access the secret connections Mueller’s team has spent 18 months discovering.
How would they go about doing that?
Democrats can use a Watergate playbook.
House Democrats might follow the precedent set during Watergate—the last time that a president tried to thwart an investigation into election corruption by firing the Department of Justice officials conducting it.
Mueller’s activities thus far have been laid out in plea deals and highly detailed “speaking” indictments, which provide far more information about the actions involved than strictly necessary for legal purposes. But according to the regulation that governs his appointment, at the end of his investigation Mueller must also provide the attorney general with “a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the special counsel.” Also upon completion of the investigation, if the attorney general overrules an action Mueller wanted to take, he or she must notify the chair and ranking members of the Judiciary Committee.
It’s not clear what, within the scope of the regulations, would happen to such a report in the scenario laid out here, where Mueller got fired on some trumped-up claim of improper action. The only thing that would necessarily get shared with Congress is the report on why the attorney general had overruled Mueller, which wouldn’t necessarily include details of what else Mueller had discovered. Indeed, Neal Katyal, the former Obama administration lawyer who wrote the special counsel regulation under which Mueller operates, recently advised Rosenstein to provide a report to Congress before a meeting with Trump at which he might have been fired.
But Rosenstein might not permit such reports under department regulations. Rosenstein has refused to share information on the investigation in the past, citing the Department of Justice policy on not confirming names of those being investigated unless they are charged. And thus far, even Republicans attempting to undermine the investigation have not sought investigative materials from Mueller, instead focusing on the FBI investigation up to the time when Mueller was hired on May 17, 2017. That’s partly because under rule 6(e) of grand jury proceedings, information can only be shared for other legal proceedings (such as a state trial or military commission).
Yet a Watergate precedent suggests the House could obtain the report if Mueller were fired.
A Watergate precedent may be the key to protecting the Mueller investigation.Pierre Manevy/Express/Getty Images
Some Freedom of Information Act requests have recently focused attention on—and may lead to the public release of—a report similar to the one Mueller is mandated to complete. It was the report done by Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, referred to as the “Road Map.” The Road Map consists of a summary and 53 pages of evidentiary descriptions, each citing the underlying grand jury source for that evidentiary description. In 1974, Jaworski used it to transmit information discovered during his grand jury investigation to the House Judiciary Committee—which then used the report to kickstart its impeachment investigation.
Before Jaworski shared the Road Map, however, he obtained authorization from then-Chief Judge John Sirica of the D.C. Circuit Court. In Sirica’s opinion authorizing the transfer, he deemed the report to be material to House Judiciary Committee duties. He further laid out how such a report should be written to avoid separation of powers issues. The report as compiled by Jaworski offered “no accusatory conclusions” nor “substitute[s] for indictments where indictments might properly issue.” It didn’t tell Congress what to do with the information. Rather it was “a simple and straightforward compilation of information gathered by the Grand Jury, and no more.” Per Sirica, that rendered the report constitutionally appropriate to share with another branch of government.
If Mueller—whose team includes former Watergate prosecutor James Quarles—were fired and he leaves any report behind that fits the standards laid out here, this Watergate precedent should ensure it could be legally shared with the House Judiciary Committee.
Can Trump do anything to stop them?
The D.C. Circuit Court recently heard a case, McKeevy v. Sessions, on whether judges can release historic grand jury materials. Chief Judge Beryl Howell, who is presiding over the Road Map FOIAs as well as the Mueller grand jury, has stayed the Road Map FOIA to await its results. But McKeevy is a request for public release of grand jury materials, rather than disclosure to a government body with the constitutional duty to conduct its own investigations. As such, it probably wouldn’t affect the Watergate precedent.
So if Trump challenges the conveyance of Mueller’s report to the House Judiciary Committee, he would be making an argument not even Richard Nixon made. It is also an argument that the U.S. v. Nixon precedent—which held that due process limits the president’s claims of privilege—likely would not support.
Still, Trump will have one more way to stall, though probably not kill, House efforts to pick up where a fired Mueller left off. Under current House rules, committee chairs have the authority and the majority votes to issue subpoenas; if Democrats win a majority, they could even set new rules in the new Congress permitting committee chairs to issue subpoenas by themselves. But because the Department of Justice traditionally enforces subpoenas, congressional committees led by the opposition party have traditionally struggled to enforce subpoenas they do issue, especially for White House officials. That would be doubly true if Trump replaced Sessions with someone even more interested in obstructing real accountability for the president.
Even under Republican control of Congress, Trump officials have avoided or sharply limited their testimony by suggesting executive privilege might cover their testimony—without actually making Trump invoke it. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and then-Director of National Security Agency Mike Rogers dodged testimony in this fashion, before ultimately testifying in a session closed to the public. More egregiously, former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks and Lewandowski refused to answer some of the questions posed by the House Intelligence Committee, notably declining to share information on the presidential transition.
Given two recent precedents—forcing the testimony of George Bush’s White House Counsel Harriet Miers (and consigliere Karl Rove) in the investigation into the firing of U.S. Attorneys and the cooperation of Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder in the investigation into the Fast and Furious scandal—a Democratic House will likely be able to compel cooperation from witnesses, even if it might take a while.
At a fundraiser in July, Rep. Devin Nunes, the Republican who thwarted all of Schiff’s investigative ambition on the House Intelligence Committee, explained that unless the Russian investigation were stopped, then the only way to thwart it would be for Republicans to retain the majority in the House. “We have to keep the majority,” he said. “If we do not keep the majority, all of this goes away.”
It might take time and a whole lot of litigation for the Mueller investigation to come to light. But Nunes may well prove to be right.
https://newrepublic.com/article/151929/ ... es-mueller
Trump Is Provoking a Full-Blown Constitutional Crisis
We must resist his vow to end birthright citizenship by massive, militant, coordinated action.
By Sasha Abramsky November 1, 2018
14th Amendment
Trump’s chaos strategy, which involves throwing so much filth into the air with such frequency that it becomes almost impossible to focus on the bigger picture, has been in overdrive the past few days.
He has tweeted that we face a “National Emergency,” and that a caravan of destitute, desperate asylum seekers from Central America are coming to “invade” the United States. And he has promised that they will be met by a military response. To this end, Trump has activated more than 5,000 armed, active-duty military personnel, with many more on standby, along the US-Mexico border—and on Wednesday he announced he might increase the deployment to 15,000—thus putting the US armed services at risk of violating the Posse Comitatus Act. Their deployment—a naked stunt, grotesquely named Operation Faithful Patriot, which in an era of poisonous political fearmongering risks a border bloodbath—begins just days before the midterm elections.
Trump has pledged to build huge tent cities in the desert to detain indefinitely vast numbers of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, despite the Flores settlement, which specifically bars the indefinite detention of children, and in the face of America’s international obligations to hear all asylum cases. Trump will likely use the same sham national-security arguments that he used in imposing his travel ban against large numbers of Muslims in his determination to completely shut the US border to Central American refugees. And now he is promising to sign an entirely unconstitutional executive order designed to wipe out, with a signature, the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
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This isn’t just chaos-as-normal. This is a full-frontal assault on the notion of constitutional, democratic governance. If he gets away with it—if Congress tolerates an executive order, or if senators such as Lindsey Graham introduce legislation to dilute the birthright-citizenship principle, and the electorate turns a blind eye to such blatantly unconstitutional governance—then the American Republic as we have known and lived it will have died.
That sounds hyperbolic. But this is a moment that historians in the future will examine and judge us on. They will either applaud us for having the courage to resist with all of our moral energies, to generate what Martin Luther King Jr. called “soul force” in the face of tyranny, and in doing so to force Trump’s ethno-fascism into retreat; or they will condemn us for sitting on the sidelines and waiting for congressional saviors who never came, while Trump and his nationalist friends put a torch to the constitutional structures of this extraordinary Republic.
Don’t expect mass resignations from Trump’s cabinet over this; for, although they have all sworn to uphold the Constitution, in reality they are behaving far more as if they have sworn a personal loyalty oath to The Boss. If this insanity is to be stopped, the stopping will have to come from us, the people, not from a morally neutered cabinet or an utterly degraded Republican Party.
Never, in my 46 years, have I so keenly felt that the eyes of history were upon us. My great-great-grandparents and my great-grandparents fled pogroms and poverty in Eastern Europe. Some sought salvation in the United Kingdom, others in America. They arrived in the United States and were processed through Ellis Island, near the great torch of freedom that is held aloft by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. They came here and made new lives, as peddlers and office workers. Their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren became dancers and musicians, businessmen, scientists, doctors, lawyers, union members, civil servants, laborers, writers. Some succeeded financially; others just made do. Some lived happy lives, others sad ones. In other words, they became Americans—with all the hopes and fears, successes and failures, of every other American story.
Current Issue
They came to America, as did my wife’s family, as did the families of all of my friends, as did the families of my readers, as did the families of my colleagues and my students, as did the families of Donald Trump, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and all the other architects of today’s nationalist nightmare, because this country represented something better. This country represented something new. This country had let the world know that its arms were open to strangers, and that it was a big enough place emotionally to make room for those who spoke different languages, ate different foods, worshiped (or chose not to worship) different gods. They came, as immigrants throughout history have done, because they wanted something better, safer, for their children. And they came because here, in this wondrous land, they could become citizens, and their children could become citizens: They would no longer be regarded as second class, as Jews were in Eastern Europe and Russia, internally exiled in a land of pogroms, in a purgatory of state-sanctioned violence.
What Trump is proposing, in his extraordinary assault on the 14th Amendment, would unravel not just a complex set of citizenship rules but the dream that anyone, from anywhere, can become an American. It is clearly designed to reinject racial and cultural criteria into citizenship status, and to further dehumanize brown and black migrants who have, throughout Trump’s vicious presidency, been continually described as “criminals” and “infestations.” It puts at risk not only new immigrant families, but the democratic fabric of post–Civil War America; for the 14th Amendment, at its core, was designed to protect the rights of African-Americans.
And, once birthright citizenship for the children of future immigrants is denied, what’s to stop this awful administration from taking the next step and revoking the citizenship of the children of those who came here without papers, or to others it deems undesirable? This step-by-step dismantling of citizenship protections is a policy reminiscent of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws—which themselves were at least partly inspired by racist US anti-miscegenation statutes and race-based immigration quotas.
More generally, if Trump is successful in dismantling birthright citizenship, it would endanger the status of every other constitutional amendment. If he gets away with shredding an amendment that clearly guarantees birthright citizenship to all those born here, what legal theory could then stop him or a subsequent leader from, say, overturning by fiat the 19th Amendment, which guarantees all women the right to vote? Or the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech? Or the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two full terms in office?
How should we respond? We should not simply hope that sanity will prevail and that this idea will be canned when Trump somehow has a “road to Damascus” awakening. He won’t. And we cannot wait for Congress, or a now hyper-conservative Supreme Court, to grow a spine. They likely won’t either. And we cannot just repeatedly click the “sad” or “angry” emojis on Facebook. That doesn’t do anything except help us blow off steam.
This moment cries out for coordinated action.
The people, in their millions, are slow to arouse. But when aroused, the force of the many is unstoppable. That is one of the signature lessons of history. If the 14th Amendment is overturned by fiat, we, The People, should coordinate massive and militant strikes and work stoppages. There are tens of millions of immigrants in this country, and millions more who are the children of immigrants. Together, we are a vast, powerful, force. Elected officials in states and cities should pledge to uphold the Constitution and defend citizenship by refusing to cooperate with a federal government held hostage by extra-constitutional extremists, and by ordering state and city agencies in turn to engage in active non-cooperation. We should be protesting in Washington and in every state capital, in numbers that simply cannot be ignored. Forget about a million-person march. This assault on citizenship rights needs to be met by tens of millions saying “not in our name.”
As the free-speech advocate Mario Savio famously put it in 1964, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
California, with close to 40 million people, is in a particularly strong situation to lead on this. If Trump can simply walk away from the 14th Amendment, California, with its millions of immigrants, should make clear that it, too, is willing to walk away from the absurd constitutional framework that gives all states two senators. Since California has roughly 70 times the population of the smallest state, it should quite simply refuse to continue to abide by a rigged system that is producing ethno-nationalist results increasingly intolerable to modern, democratic, human-rights-oriented values, and increasingly at odds with the beliefs held by the great majority of Americans. That’s not so outlandish a concept: After all, if constitutional provisions really are up for grabs, as Trump now says they are, if the talismanic power of that 230-year-old document really is waning, let’s put the monstrously antidemocratic Senate structure into the mix as well.
If this constitutional crisis intensifies—and make no mistake, the shredding of a constitutional amendment by executive action would be a full-blown constitutional crisis—the three West Coast blue states, along with any others that care to join them, ought to be willing to coordinate a response involving the granting of birthright state citizenship. To protect basic US constitutional rights, they should be prepared, as a last resort, to issue a “True United States passport” operative within the geographic boundaries of those states that join in, and guaranteeing protection of status and social benefits to any state-born child of immigrant residents. That wouldn’t be sedition; that would simply be the states following the US Constitution rather than the illegal Führerprinzip that Trump now seems to advocate in its place.
Let California and other progressive states dare the US government to come into our communities and illegally try to strip our neighbors and friends of their constitutionally guaranteed citizenship.
For short-term political gain, Trump-the-demagogue is stoking a potentially vast constitutional crisis. Our democracy itself is now very much on the line. We must meet that challenge head on.
https://www.thenation.com/article/trump ... al-crisis/
Donald Trump Is Setting Up A Lame-Duck Crisis | Crooked Media
President Trump is preparing to thrust the country into a crisis as soon as the midterm elections are behind him—irrespective of which party wins the race for control of Congress—and Republicans are lining up to make sure he gets away with it, on the condition that he takes no disruptive steps until after they confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
It’s hard to interpret the events that have transpired over the past several weeks any other way. The exact contours of the crisis he will ultimately provoke aren’t entirely clear, but the basic shape of it is: He has concluded that he can only escape serious personal and legal consequences—from a number of threats, but particularly from Special Counsel Robert Mueller—with brazen abuses of power, and is laying groundwork to take those steps as soon as he can get away with them, aware that a change in partisan control of the House could stymie him just after the new year.
The most alarming thing about it is there may be no way to stop him.
Trump has been tempted to place himself above the rule of law since the beginning of his presidency, and increasingly so since Mueller took over the Russia investigation. What’s remarkable about the current moment is that Republican efforts to discourage Trump’s most corrupt instincts are faltering as Trump’s determination to follow through hardens.
Over the course of his presidency, Trump has sought to fire Mueller and to make his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, reverse his recusal from the Russia investigation. He has explored ways to pardon his way clear of legal jeopardy. According to multiple reports, he has been thwarted by his White House counsel, Don McGahn, and by Sessions himself, both of whom, in turn, enjoyed institutional backing from Senate Republicans.
Just a few months ago, Senate Republicans warned Trump that they would not confirm a new attorney general if he endeavored to fire Sessions for corrupt reasons, and have made their loyalty to McGahn abundantly cleared.
On Wednesday, Trump essentially fired McGahn. Yes, McGahn reportedly wanted to step down later this year anyhow, but Trump made his departure a foregone conclusion, without consulting him, amid a swirl of important revelations—including that McGahn spent much more time voluntarily answering Mueller’s questions than Trump’s personal lawyers knew, and has intervened to stop Trump from pardoning his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
As he maneuvered to knock out that guardrail, he simultaneously brought pressure to bear on key Republican senators, who have suddenly come around to the view that Trump will, or even should, fire Sessions—just so long as he waits until after Kavanaugh has been confirmed—which in effect means until after the election. “The fix is in,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN).
This is the backdrop against which we should interpret the Republicans’ urgency to confirm Kavanaugh, marked most importantly by their abrupt reversal on the question of whether the Senate should insist upon reviewing Kavanaugh’s paperwork from his service as George W. Bush’s staff secretary—records that comprise the vast majority of Kavanaugh’s correspondence. That reversal followed a private meeting between key Senate Republicans and McGahn, who is the White House point man for judicial nominations, and whose personal lawyer—Kavanaugh’s former colleague Bill Burck—is managing Kavanaugh’s document production.
Democrats see these unorthodox machinations as part of an effort to bury damaging information in Kavanaugh’s records, and they may well be. But they could just as easily constitute an effort to make sure Kavanaugh is confirmed more quickly than a thorough review of his paper trail would otherwise allow.
Yes, it’s possible that Republicans will lose control of the Senate in January, so they naturally feel a bit hurried. But they are intent on confirming Kavanaugh before the election in November, foreclosing on the possibility of using the lame duck session to more completely review Kavanaugh’s public-service record. Their haste looks fairly arbitrary, unless we interpret it as an effort to lock in another Supreme Court justice before Trump takes drastic steps to protect himself from Mueller—steps that might otherwise place the Supreme Court seat itself at risk, harm Republicans in the midterms, or both.
The implication of recent reporting is that those steps will include, at a minimum, pardoning Manafort and firing Sessions. We can see his intentions both in overt and behind-the-scenes steps he’s taken against McGahn and Sessions in recent days, and in reports that he has consulted with his personal, criminal lawyers about both pardoning Manafort, firing Sessions, and impeachment.
Depending upon how willingly Republicans in the Senate will go along with Trump’s designs, Trump may also seek to rush a new, unrecused attorney general through the confirmation process, or abuse the vacancies act to install an acting attorney general who might corruptly interfere with the Mueller investigation.
If Republicans do well in the elections, all this scheming will have proved unnecessary, and Trump will be given a free hand to obstruct any investigation he’d like. But if Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress, the lame-duck period will be the critical window during which Trump can take corrupt steps to insulate himself from justice. By the time Democrats took control, their ability to set things right would be limited. They could conduct oversight, which would damage Republicans politically, but Republicans would at the very least have the power to block impeachment and the restoration of the Mueller investigation.
Ironically, Democrats may be better positioned to preempt a series of events like this now, from the minority, than after the election. They could align belatedly against Kavanaugh’s confirmation, which would shift the spotlight on to vulnerable Senate Republicans—all of whom would have to vote for Kavanaugh without access to his complete record to see him confirmed. House Democrats could announce that they will subpoena those records, and call McGahn to testify about his meeting with Senate Republicans, if they win control of the House. If steps like these successfully pushed the Kavanaugh confirmation into the lame duck session, Trump’s window to bring about a crisis would shrink. Additionally, Trump’s best laid plans could come undone if Mueller secures more indictments between now and the election. But on the current course, a crisis appears inevitable.
https://crooked.com/articles/donald-tru ... ck-crisis/
Jeff Sessions has already proven he has no interest in protecting trump, and now Sessions has every reason to cut a plea deal or immunity deal with Robert Mueller, if he hasn’t already. And Mueller, who is already basically at the finish line, may now be motivated to make his big move against Trump sooner than he’d planned.