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Can't recall a worse day for DOJ': Trump's acquittal fuels his 'dictatorial' instincts as he obliterates the Justice Department's last shred of independence


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  • Since he was acquitted last week following an impeachment trial, President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr have carried out a series of targeted firings and legal interventions that have the DOJ in turmoil.

  • "Can't recall a worse day for DOJ and line prosecutors," a former prosecutor told Insider. "A robbery in broad daylight in the middle of Chicago is more subtle than Barr's obsession to shield Trump and his co-conspirators."

  • "I am aware of no precedent remotely like it in the history of the DOJ," another longtime former prosecutor told Insider. "It seems to me to be a classic hallmark of a dictatorial [or] fascist government."

  • One former senior DOJ official who worked with the special counsel Robert Mueller when he was FBI director told Insider the last few days have been "a devastating breakdown" in the checks and balances on Trump's power.

  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As California Rep. Adam Schiff wrapped up his closing arguments in President Donald Trump's impeachment trial last week, he warned Senate Republicans that if they didn't vote to remove the president from office for abusing his power, he would "do it again."

"He has not changed. He will not change," Schiff said. "A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way. He has done it before and he will do it again."

In the end, the Senate acquitted Trump in a nearly party-line vote, with key swing-vote Republican senators like Susan Collins and Lamar Alexander voting to acquit while expressing hope that the president had learned his lesson from the bitter trial.

Here's what's happened since:

  • Last Friday, Trump fired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who testified against him in the House of Representatives' impeachment hearings. Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., indicated that Sondland and Vindman were fired in direct retaliation for their impeachment testimony.

  • On Monday, Attorney General William Barr acknowledged that he had set up an "intake process" for the Justice Department to vet material that Rudy Giuliani, who is Trump's personal lawyer, collects from Ukrainian sources about former Vice President Joe Biden.

  • On Tuesday, Barr and his top aides publicly overruled the career prosecutors working on the government's case against the longtime GOP strategist Roger Stone and called for a lesser sentence than the one prosecutors had recommended. Barr's intervention led to the withdrawal or resignations of all four prosecutors working Stone's case.

The Daily Beast reported late Tuesday that since his acquittal, Trump has privately urged Giuliani to continue working on obtaining damaging information on the Bidens and to update him and the DOJ on his findings.

"I think he feels like the chains are off now," one senior administration official told the outlet. "It's like things have taken a turn. The gloves are off. And everything that used to be hush hush is now just…out in the open."

Indeed, current and former officials told Insider they struggled to find any precedent for the "breakdown" of the Justice Department's historic independence that has largely kept it insulated from political interference, with one saying Barr's moves have turned it into "an arm of the Trump political machine."

rudy giuliani
rudy giuliani

(Photo by Anthony Devlin/Getty Images)

'A classic hallmark of a dictatorial [or] fascist government'

Jeffrey Cramer, a longtime former federal prosecutor who spent 12 years at the DOJ, didn't mince words when reacting to the string of developments.

"Can't recall a worse day for DOJ and line prosecutors," he told Insider. "A robbery in broad daylight in the middle of Chicago is more subtle than Barr's obsession to shield Trump and his co-conspirators."

In reference to Barr's decision to create a direct line for Giuliani to funnel information to the DOJ about the Bidens, Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who worked with members of the special counsel Robert Mueller's team, told Insider: "I am aware of no precedent remotely like it in the history of the DOJ. It seems to me to be a classic hallmark of a dictatorial [or] fascist government."

Barr's facilitation of Giuliani's research is all the more striking given that the former New York mayor is currently under investigation by the Southern District of New York over whether his efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine violated foreign lobbying laws.

The Trump team's push for political dirt on Biden from Ukraine — which it carried out while Trump withheld vital military aid from the country — also made up the crux of the impeachment inquiry.

Typically, the DOJ's investigations begin with evidence of potential criminality that's uncovered by professional investigators with agencies like the FBI, the IRS, the DEA, and others.

Those investigators then examine the evidence and present it to nonpartisan career prosecutors at US attorneys' offices across the country who make a decision whether or not to prosecute based on the law and the facts. Those cases are then submitted to the DOJ for approval on the basis of whether there's sufficient evidence to file charges to a grand jury.

But in this case, for Giuliani — who is acting as Trump's personal agent — to instigate the potential investigation of Trump's political rival is an "unimaginable" and "gross perversion" of the system," Cotter said. "It undermines the credibility the DOJ has spent over century building. It reduces the DOJ to an arm of the Trump political machine."

One former senior DOJ official who worked with Mueller when he was FBI director told Insider the last few days have been "a devastating breakdown" in the checks and balances on Trump's power.

Barr, this person added, is essentially functioning as Trump's bag man and is "the single most powerful weapon in the president's arsenal."

Cramer echoed that point, adding, "AG Barr must realize he is running an organization where he has no respect beyond a few at Main Justice."

In light of Trump's and Barr's actions over the last several days, some Democratic lawmakers have called for Michael Horowitz, the DOJ's inspector general, to launch an investigation. That said, there's nothing stopping the president from ousting Horowitz as well.

Indeed, reports have surfaced over the last few months that the president is weighing firing Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general who played a pivotal role in sparking the impeachment inquiry when he informed the House Intelligence Committee of an "urgent" and "credible" whistleblower complaint against Trump, in accordance with federal law.

"The buffers are quickly disappearing," Jens David Ohlin, a vice dean at Cornell Law School and an expert in criminal and constitutional law, told Insider. "The usual buffer is a president who doesn't intervene and an attorney general who protects an independent Justice Department. But it appears that we have neither now."

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cant-recall-worse-day-doj-110000621.html

 

 

 

B/A

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Just now, md11fr8dawg said:

Wow, when did rooting out corruption and getting rid of Obummer's partisan hacks in our Gov become such a terrible thing. I say get it ALL out there. The American people are smart enough to figure it out. Even if the Lame Stream Media is carrying the left's water. JMHO>

 

That's hilarious! The party with so many convictions talking about corruption. OMG I just spit out my coffee laughing at this one.

 

B/A

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It’s called cleaning house, draining the swamp, we won, you lost....whatever you want to call it. He is the President and he can move, fire or change whatever he wants in those areas. Obummer did as well as every other president, but because it is President Trump, it’s a bad thing and all of the sudden he is trying to be a dictator....give me a freaking break. You liberals lefties are gonna blow your freakin top when he wins four more years! :D

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1 minute ago, 8th ID said:

It’s called cleaning house, draining the swamp, we won, you lost....whatever you want to call it. He is the President and he can move, fire or change whatever he wants in those areas. Obummer did as well as every other president, but because it is President Trump, it’s a bad thing and all of the sudden he is trying to be a dictator....give me a freaking break. You liberals lefties are gonna blow your freakin top when he wins four more years! :D

 

The hate for Obama is too much... Bush handed him a pile.. It took years to get back on track. Trump could've been recorded in history as a strong president, but his ego is too much. He is making bad choices, increasing debt, reducing revenue, alienating our allies, dividing our people, hiring thugs, walking all over the constitution and his presidency will go down in history as bad as his business dealings. Do you realize that he would be far wealthier if he never made a business deal and just lived off the money his dad gave him? America would be far better off, if he would simply listen to people around him instead of thinking he knows more than his generals, his accountants, his foreign policy experts, even his daughter. 

 

I find it so amazing that people want a dictator. A king. A man who has no regard for laws, our military, our children, even our seniors.

 

B/A 

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41 minutes ago, bostonangler said:

 

The hate for Obama is too much... Bush handed him a pile.. It took years to get back on track. Trump could've been recorded in history as a strong president, but his ego is too much. He is making bad choices, increasing debt, reducing revenue, alienating our allies, dividing our people, hiring thugs, walking all over the constitution and his presidency will go down in history as bad as his business dealings. Do you realize that he would be far wealthier if he never made a business deal and just lived off the money his dad gave him? America would be far better off, if he would simply listen to people around him instead of thinking he knows more than his generals, his accountants, his foreign policy experts, even his daughter. 

 

I find it so amazing that people want a dictator. A king. A man who has no regard for laws, our military, our children, even our seniors.

 

B/A 


You must be talking about the last president we had.

image.gif

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6 minutes ago, nstoolman1 said:

When you move into a broken run down house you need to spend money to repair the home, fix the fences and get the property back in shape. 

Trump was hired to do that. He doesn't own the property, he is the general contractor. If he fails he won't get hired again.

 

Excellent analogy.....he also has the right to hire and fire his sub-contractors.

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54 minutes ago, nstoolman1 said:

When you move into a broken run down house you need to spend money to repair the home, fix the fences and get the property back in shape. 

Trump was hired to do that. He doesn't own the property, he is the general contractor. If he fails he won't get hired again.

 

Trump, a general contractor...Hahahaha.  Oh the irony.  :lol:

 

GO RV, then BV

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2 minutes ago, Shabibilicious said:

 

Trump, a general contractor...Hahahaha.  Oh the irony.  :lol:

 

GO RV, then BV

 

I can see that.... Then he won't pay, just like his campaign not paying the cities he holds his rallies in... And as a lot of general contractors, he can hire illegals to do his bidding... We've seen that too. 

 

B/A

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BA, my friend , you are living in a FANTASYLAND if you think Trump is worse than Obuthead. I don't have time to rehash all the BS that fool bestowed on the US and how much money he pissed away trying his "Fundamentally Change America" philosophy. So I will attach this article from Victor Davis Hanson. He and Thomas Sowell are 2 of the brightest minds and writers of today. I may be wrong but I believe that ALL the BS by the Rats fostered on this country is about to be exposed. I pray it does and that many people in up doing much time.

 

Another Victor Davis Hanson gem!

 

The Once and Future Scandal

 by Victor Davis Hanson ( Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 2-9-20)

 

Soon the worm may turn. The real scandal is back on the horizon, and at last, we may learn that no one is above the law—most certainly not a group of smug and mediocre apparatchiks who assumed they had the moral right to destroy a presidential candidate and later an elected president.

Now that the four-and-a-half-month-long Ukraine impeachment bookend to the 22-month Mueller charade is over, it clearly accomplished nothing other than substantially raising the polls of both Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The public was reminded that Representative Gerald Nadler (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are every bit as childish, peevish, and absurd as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

 

So, we are now back to the existential issue of the entire Trump phenomenon: to what degree did the Hillarious Clinton campaign collude with high-ranking Obama officials, and the top echelons of the FBI, CIA, and the national intelligence apparatus, to surveil, defame, and hope to derail Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign by unlawful means?

 

Who in the federal government then continued Clinton’s efforts after the 2016 election to disrupt and indeed attempt to destroy the Trump transition and presidency?

 

Eventually, someone will sort out whether that post-election effort on the part of federal officials to abort the Trump presidency, abetted by the media and #TheResistance, was a simple follow-up to the Clinton-DNC-Perkins Coe-Fusion GPS collusion against candidate Trump—or a sick preemptive attempt of the administrative state to smear Trump as a “Russian asset” because of their worries about the exposure of their own prior criminality and Trump’s iconoclastic agenda.

But for now, the following statements are irrefutable.

 

Donald Trump, in concrete ways, has been far harder on Russia than was the “reset” Obama presidency, and far more helpful to Ukraine than Team Obama ever was. Trump armed the Ukrainians. He upped sanctions against Russia. He ordered lethal retaliation against Russian mercenaries in Syria. He vastly increased U.S. oil and gas production to Russia’s detriment. He jawboned Germany about its fuel dependence on Moscow. He coerced NATO to spend more on defense. He got out of an asymmetrical missile treaty with Russia. He is rebuilding the U.S. military.

 

The litany of these systematic abuses constitutes the greatest scandal in American history.

 

Unlike his predecessor, Trump did not dismantle U.S.-joint European missile defense in order to coax Putin into behaving during his reelection bid. He did not push a big plastic red reset button in Geneva to mark outreach to Putin, in rejection of prior Bush sanctions on Russians. He did not forbid the shipment of anti-tank missiles to an endangered Ukraine. He did not invite the Russians into Syria after a 40-year hiatus from the Middle East.

So, the libel of Russian collusion was absurd from the get-go.

 

It originated in 2015-16 when the deep state was terrified over the then unlikely possibility of a President Donald Trump. The “collusion” ruse involved the chief players of federal law enforcement and national intelligence agencies. All, of course, had assumed Hillarious Clinton would be president and their extralegal efforts to “insure” her victory would soon be commensurately rewarded, regardless of the illegality and unethical behavior required. And both crimes and amorality were most certainly involved.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil

The litany of these systematic abuses constitutes the greatest scandal in American history.

 

The FBI and the Justice Department deliberately misled Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges to spy on an American citizen as a way to monitor others in the Trump campaign. That crime is a charitable interpretation of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report, given that supposedly intelligent federal judges were told that the evidence for such state espionage was based on the “opposition research” of the 2016 campaign.  And yet apparently in see-no-evil, hear-no-evil fashion, not one of the squishy judges ever asked the U.S. government, who exactly had paid for the Steele Dossier and why?  After all, who was the “opposition” to Trump in late 2016?

 

Top Obama officials, such as Samantha Power and Susan Rice, in a panic over the Trump candidacy and then victory, requested the unmasking of scores of redacted names of those surveilled by intelligence agencies. Some of those names mysteriously, but certainly illegally, were leaked to the media with the intent of defaming them.

 

When Adam Schiff’s pernicious role in jump-starting the impeachment is finally fully known, he will likely be revealed as the prime schemer, along with minor Obama officials buried within the Trump National Security Council, dreaming up the entire Ukraine caper of the “whistleblower.”

 

Over the past three years during the Russian and Ukrainian farces, Schiff variously lied to the public about impending “bombshell” revelations of Trump “collusion.” His minority House Intelligence Committee memo outrageously alleged that the Steele dossier was accurate and truthful and yet was not the prime evidence for the granting of FISA warrants—two more lies exposed by Horowitz.

 

Schiff rigged the initial House impeachment hearings to exclude transparency and bipartisan access to witnesses. He read a false version of the Trump conversation with the Ukrainian president into the congressional record. He secretly data mined his own colleagues’ communications. And to the very last moments of the entire fraud, even in his dotage, he was still babbling in the Senate about the long-ago discredited “Russian collusion” and again stringing together absurd fantasies of Trump wishing to sell Alaska to the Russians.

Justice for the Wrongdoers?

Schiff was given a great gift with a quick Senate acquittal. If he had been called as a fact witness, he either would have had to lie under oath to refute his earlier myths, or continue them and compound his falsities.

 

The Mueller investigation—500 subpoenas, 22 months, $35 million—was one of the great travesties in American investigatory history. It was cooked up by fired, disgraced—and furious—former FBI Director James Comey. By his own admission, Comey conceded that he leaked confidential memos of private conversations he had with the president to create a large enough media and political storm to force the naming of a special prosecutor to investigate “Russian collusion.”

 

Comey is not yet in jail, in part, because his cronies at the FBI, including the disgraced Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, post facto, announced that the leaked Comey versions of his one-on-one talks with the president of the United States were merely confidential rather than top secret and thus their dissemination to the media was not quite felonious.

 

The rest is history. Comey’s leaking gambit paid off. It led to the appointment of his long-time friend and predecessor, former FBI Director Robert Mueller. Mueller then delighted the media by appointing mostly progressive activist lawyers, some with ties to Hillarious Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, in what then giddy journalists called a “dream team,” of “all-stars” who in the fashion of a “hunter-killer” team would abort the Trump presidency. They would prove Trump was what former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on television called a “Putin asset.”

 

In surreal fashion, the main players, under suspicion for seeding and peddling the fraudulent Steele dossier among the high echelons of the U.S. government and using such smears to cripple Trump—John Brennan, James Clapper, and Andrew McCabe—were hired by liberal CNN and MSNBC as paid analysts to fob off on others the very scandals that they themselves had created.

 

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the Mueller team finally had to concede that it was born out a conspiratorial hoax by finding after 88 weeks—punctuated by almost daily leaks to sympathetic progressive media—that there was no Trump-Russian collusion to warp the 2016 election. Nor did it find actionable obstruction of justice on the part of Trump to thwart the investigation of what was admittedly a non-crime.

 

Yet Mueller’s team was marred with problems from the outset. The amorous and textually promiscuous pair of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were both fired for their rank partisanship, although Mueller and his team initially hid the reasons for their departures and staggered their firings to suggest a natural rotation. Mysteriously, hundreds of their incriminating texts have disappeared from FBI smart devices—a weirdness reminiscent of the FBI’s willingness not to examine Hillarious Clinton’s computers that were hacked, as well as apparent unconcern that she destroyed thousands of subpoenaed emails.

 

Eric Clinesmith, another FBI lawyer, was fired by Mueller inter alia for his left-wing biases and tweeting out “Viva le [sic] Resistance”—as in long-live the World War II-like progressive resistance against the fascist and foreign occupier Trump. Clinesmith, according to the inspector general, altered an email presented as evidence before a FISA court to warp the request to surveil Carter Page. If there is any justice left in this sordid mess, he will end up in jail.

Four Years of Fakery

The end of the Mueller team was equally unceremonious. Mueller himself proved enfeebled in an embarrassing testimony before House committees, marked by the stunning admission he really had no idea what Fusion GPS was—the Glenn Simpson monstrosity that had hired the charlatan Christopher Steele, spawned the collusion myth and compromised top Justice Department officials such as Bruce Ohr, whose spouse worked for Simpson on the dossier.

 

When Mueller’s legal ramrod, progressive Andrew Weissman, finished up running the day-to-day operations of the “Mueller investigation,” in parody fashion he went to work—but of course—as a paid analyst for CNN where he no longer publicly had to suppress his loathing of the former target of his investigations.

 

The net effects of the Mueller and Horowitz investigations were variously to exonerate Trump, to expose a corrupt Justice Department, CIA, and FBI, to illustrate how the government hounded and ruined the lives of minor 2016 Trump campaign officials with largely process convictions and plea-bargained confessions, and to explain the peremptory resignations of more than a dozen top Washington officials of James Comey’s FBI—as well as the railroading General Michael Flynn.

 

Some of that skullduggery and more are currently the subjects of a criminal investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham. The American public has been assaulted for four years by an array of fake scandals, fake bombshells, and fake televised analyses that camouflaged a systematic and terrible assault on our constitutional freedoms.

 

But soon the worm may turn. The real scandal is back on the horizon, and at last, we may learn that no one is above the law, and most certainly not a group of smug and mediocre apparatchiks who assumed they had the moral right to destroy a presidential candidate and later an elected president.

 

In sum, this real scandal, dormant for over four years, had been overshadowed by a series of progressive-government-media driven melodramas, aimed at both injuring the Trump presidency—and, in preemptive fashion, shielding a virtual coup to destroy an elected president.

 

 

 

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6 minutes ago, md11fr8dawg said:

NOT at ALL Shabs. Corruption and evil should always be punished. At least that is the biblical lessons I was taught. Maybe you can enlighten me as to where I am wrong!

 

Just found the comment interesting....considering all of the wars, famine, homelessness, poverty, drug addiction, cancer, needless abortion, etc....praying for political retribution seems so trite compared to those things, so I posted my thoughts out loud.  My apologies to you Dawg for doing so.  :peace:

 

GO RV, then BV

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On 2/12/2020 at 7:17 AM, bostonangler said:

Obama is too much... Bush handed him a pile

They are both from the same cabal if you ask me.

Head I win tails you loose.

 

Look no further than o's social security number (stolen from Harrison J Bonnell) and the long history of the Bush family, from 

Prescott on down the line.

 

Yes people have to be put away.

 

We The People are getting "hosed".......

 

Peace

 

Come on RV 

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