Month: September 2019

QOTD: A Senior Republican Senate staffer

by digby

“At this point, [Trump] could be caught walking out of a Federal Reserve bank with two giant sacks of money in his hands and no Republican would vote to impeach him for grand larceny,” said a senior Senate GOP aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“Our voters want two things from their congressmen: [dumping] on the media and blindly defending the president,” the aide added. “That’s what being a Republican has come to.”

I’m sure this observation does not come as any surprise to you. I mean, it’s been obvious from the start,right? Trump supporters are conservatism stripped down to its bare bones: resentment, racism, insularity, fear of change. Under Trump they identify with him, failing to understand that his troubles stem from his own behavior and refusing, just as he does, to acknowledge that they made a mistake, instead doubling down and digging in deeper.

They are him and he is them. I’m sorry to say that about so many people but it’s not possible to deny it and maintain a grip on reality.

I am willing to say that much of this stems from the toxic kool-aid that is right wing media, a destructive force that exploits them for material gain and power. (One can say the same about the rich greedheads who care about nothing but accumulating as much money as they can, by any means necessary.)

Still, these are all adults with agency. They have access to vast amounts of information if they choose to see it. They don’t. Their temperaments and their tribal affiliations make them love the bubble in which they live and worship Trump as someone who speaks for them. That’s all on them.

That quote comes from an article by Eli Stokels in the LA Times that draws a picture of a White House that’s even more chaotic than usual. And that’s saying something:

As soon as President Trump learned he was facing an impeachment investigation on Tuesday, he upended his meetings with world leaders near the United Nations and rushed to his soaring skyscraper a few blocks away in midtown Manhattan.
Then, back in his penthouse at Trump Tower, he sought solace at his favorite place — in front of a TV with his Twitter account in hand.

By Friday, as the crisis metastasized with cascading disclosures about Trump’s requests for Ukrainian authorities to investigate his political foes, and allegations that the White House tried to “lock down” the evidence, the president was still grasping for a strategic response. Other than issuing a slew of angry tweets, he stayed out of the public eye until an evening event with Hispanic supporters in the East Room.

One administration official described the president as “shell shocked” by the sudden political gut punch even as he insists the impeachment fight will help him win reelection next year by rallying his base and angering independents.

“I think he’s badly wounded right now,” said a Trump campaign advisor who is in frequent contact with the president, one of several aides who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions. “I’m suddenly very worried about 2020.”

A senior White House advisor, Kellyanne Conway, said Trump didn’t need the kind of “war room” that President Clinton deployed while battling impeachment two decades ago.

“He’s the most battle-tested person I’ve ever met,” she said. “Why do we need an impeachment war room when the other people should have the burden of showing why they’re impeaching the president?”

The Trump campaign sought to leverage the firestorm, announced a rare $10-million television ad buy to attack former Vice President Joe Biden, and use the impeachment inquiry to make the case that Democrats and the media are bent on ousting Trump by any means.

“They lost the election. Now they want to steal this one. Don’t let them,” the narrator says.

Trump has struggled to regain his footing after being blindsided by the swiftness of the scandal only months after he survived a grueling special counsel investigation into whether his campaign had improperly colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

The final report by Robert S. Mueller III, released in April, concluded that Trump’s aides had welcomed Russia’s help but did not conspire with Moscow.

“I thought we had won,” Trump, sounding incredulous, said at a news conference Wednesday. “I thought it was dead.”

Aides say Trump is increasingly aware that he faces a more serious challenge now, and arguably a more formidable adversary, in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who is leading the impeachment fight.

At Trump campaign headquarters just outside Washington, aides are considering revving up the president’s fall rally schedule, taking his defense to cheering supporters, where he is likely to feel more comfortable and powerful.

There will be less to do in Washington anyway. Trump, who has also sought to portray Democrats as wholly consumed with ousting him from office, has warned that the impeachment inquiry could kill any thin hopes for bipartisan legislation on guns, immigration or other key concerns before the 2020 elections.

The White House, and other government agencies caught up in the impeachment inquiry, will be consumed in gathering records and documents that Congress is likely to demand for the investigation.

This is one of the major upsides of an impeachment process. It keeps the White House occupied. Gun legislation was never going to happen in this year or next, never. Trump doesn’t have very many strategic insights but the on he has is that he needs to keep his base happy. Gun nuts are among his most ecstatic supporters. He would never in a million years defy any of his staunchest supporters in the run up to

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On not being there
by Tom Sullivan

Still image from “Being There” (1979)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday afternoon that if the House impeaches President Donald Trump, the Senate would have “no choice” on holding a trial. McConnell (R-Ky.) told NPR that “if the House were to act, the Senate immediately goes into a trial.”

So he says as of Friday.

McConnell’s statement is eyebrow-raising for his suggesting this time he chooses to uphold norms rather than break them. Because the normal order of constitutional business in 2016, one would have thought, was the President of the United States (Barack Obama, you recall) had the power “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate” to appoint “Judges of the supreme Court.” McConnell chose not to uphold his “Advice and Consent” end of the constitutional bargain in the case of Merrick Garland. Until he did that, we all thought the Senate was obliged to exercise the power conferred by Constitution. McConnell opted out.

He can still choose to:

“Some people read the Constitution’s language that the Senate ‘shall have the sole power to try impeachments’ to be a mandate, requiring the Senate to conduct a trial based on the articles of impeachment approved in the House,” explained Michael Gerhardt, Burton Craige distinguished professor of jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina School of Law. “In practice, the Senate has always felt obliged to do something when it formally received impeachment articles from the House, including holding a streamlined process for President Clinton when it was apparent conviction and removal were highly unlikely.”

“As a practical matter,” he continued over email, “the Majority Leader will have substantial discretion on the process, if any, he fashions in response to the articles.”

Like the chief executive who believes Article II means he can do whatever he wants, McConnell can read Article I’s “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments” as a suggestion rather than a requirement.

My first thought was McConnell would prefer not putting his members on record condoning the actions of this president. They will own their votes for posterity. But posterity may be less of a driver for a Republican caucus filled with climate change deniers than is pissing off Donald Trump’s fanatical base. Never one to not answer a challenge, the acting president may demand McConnell deliver his acquittal. McConnell will have to decide whether bearing the judgement of history will be harsher than the wrath in 2020 of Trump and the MAGA faithful.

How McConnell chooses when the time comes will depend upon what tumbles out of the Trump White House when Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic House turns it upside down and shakes it.

The White House is by several accounts in full-blown panic. The administration’s concealment of telephone transcripts of the president’s alleged attempt to extort campaign help from Ukraine unraveled this week. The whistleblower complaint released Thursday alleged this was “not the first time” the White House had moved such records into a classified, codeword-protected computer system “solely for the purpose of protecting political sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information.”

“Administration officials,” CNN reports, “say John Eisenberg, the White House deputy counsel for national security affairs and a national security legal adviser, directed the Ukraine transcript call be moved to the separate highly classified system.” The New York Times reports that calls between Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Russian leader Vladimir Putin were stored there as well after a series of embarrassing leaks about Trump’s conversations:

The practice began after details of Mr. Trump’s Oval Office discussion with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, leaked to the news media, leading to questions of whether the president had released classified information, according to multiple current and former officials. The White House was particularly upset when the news media reported that Mr. Trump had called James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, a “nut job” during that same meeting, according to current and former officials.

The White House had begun restricting access to information after initial leaks of Mr. Trump’s calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. But the conversation with Mr. Lavrov and Sergey I. Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States, prompted tighter restrictions.

Led by the whistleblower’s complaint, this week’s revelations have loosened tongues in and around the Trump White House. Democrats have not even begun shaking and look what the Washington Post found tumbling out:

President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter.

The comments, which have not been previously reported, were part of a now-infamous meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which Trump revealed highly classified information that exposed a source of intelligence on the Islamic State. He also said during the meeting that firing FBI Director James B. Comey the previous day had relieved “great pressure” on him.

Trump welcomed foreign meddling in the 2016 elections. His MAGA faithful will not care that he has compromised U.S. intelligence or green-lighted interference in the 2020 elections from multiple foreign actors. Whether the remaining 35-40 percent of American voters will tolerate it is another matter.

Donald walks on water, oblivious to the world the rest of us inhabit. He is like Chauncey Gardiner, only an inveterate con man, bullying, vindictive, and not as well-appointed. He doesn’t understand how the Constitution works, nor government, nor his place in it. He can no more put the country before himself than he can flap his arms and fly away. The very idea of selfless public service sounds to him like a sucker’s game.

Trump spoke briefly on the prospect of impeachment on Thursday:

“[I]t should never be allowed, what’s happened to this president…. What these guys are doing – Democrats – are doing to this country is a disgrace and it shouldn’t be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it – maybe legally, through the courts.”

He has no clue. He can’t lawyer his way out of impeachment.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

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Rudy can fail

by digby

CNN:

Trump’s personal lawyer said his work for the President should be protected by attorney-client privilege.
“Ultimately, if I were to say yes and he were to say no, I can’t testify,” Giuliani said, adding that he has not talked to Trump about the possibility he would testify.

Giuliani said he has not heard from any of the three House committees investigating whether Trump acted improperly in his communications with the Ukrainians. Asked if he was concerned he would be subpoenaed by the House, Giuliani laughed.

“I consider them a joke. A sad joke. They have no legitimacy. I would think of challenging their subpoena on the grounds that they’re not a legitimate committee,” Giuliani said.

He has said that he was working as an emisary of the State Department not as the president’s personal lawyer. And he also said this:

“It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero. I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government. Anything I did should be praised.”

Not that it matter, really. Giuliani will likely fight this and it will have to be litigated so I’d guess there will be no Giuliani hearing unless he and Trump think he can run circles around Schiff and the committee.

The media is saying that the Democrats are so gunshy after Lewandowski that they won’t call him. That’s ridiculous. The first half of the Judiciary Committee hearing was bad but the second half wasn’t so they know what they need to do. Giuliani’s a mess. He’s all over the place and there is zero chance he will sit down and prepare.

After all, he’ll be busy:

Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose actions as President Trump’s personal lawyer have helped set in motion an impeachment inquiry, is set to appear as a paid speaker at a Kremlin-backed conference in Armenia on Tuesday — an event expected to include the participation of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and other top Russian officials.

Giuliani confirmed to The Washington Post on Friday that he plans to take part in a panel at the conference sponsored by Russia and the Moscow-based Eurasian Economic Union, a trade alliance launched by Putin in 2014 as a counterweight to the European Union.

According to an agenda for the event posted online, Giuliani is set to participate in a panel led by Sergey Glazyev, a longtime Putin adviser who has been under U.S. sanctions since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine five years ago.

You cannot make this shit up.

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He made him an offer he couldn’t refuse

by digby

For those who want a visual abridged summary, here’s The Godfather IV. All dialogue is from the memo. pic.twitter.com/ZViJvPuLYt

— Larry Noble (@LarryNoble_DC) September 25, 2019

Seriously, out president is a mob boss. Unfortunately, he isn’t even The Godfather. He’s Tony Soprano…

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This isn’t Rudy’s first time at the election sabotage rodeo


by digby

It seems like a good day to remind everyone of Giuiani’s earlier electoral interference. It’s not as if he’s a neophyte. I wrote this on the Friday before the election in 2016:

Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he knew the FBI planned to review more emails tied to Hillary Clinton before a public announcement about the investigation last week, confirming that the agency leaked information to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.  

Bridge Project

✔@BridgeProject21

WATCH: Rudy Giuliani admits that Trump campaign had advanced warning from the @FBI about Comey’s letter.

3,232

6:59 AM – Nov 4, 2016

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4,914 people are talking about this

“I did nothing to get it out, I had no role in it,” he said. “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents.”  

Giuliani also said he expected Comey’s announcement to come weeks before it did.  

“I had expected this for the last, honestly, to tell you the truth, I thought it was going to be about three or four weeks ago, because way back in July this started, they kept getting stymied looking for subpoenas, looking for records,” he said.  

FBI officials knew about the newly discovered emails weeks before Comey’s announcement, according to multiple reports. 

Giuliani insisted he had nothing to do with Comey’s decision to announce the probe prior to Election Day ― a move that both Republicans and Democrats have condemned. He also insisted his information comes from “former FBI agents.”  

“I’m real careful not to talk to any on-duty, active FBI agents. I don’t want to put them in a compromising position. But I sure have a lot of friends who are retired FBI agents, close, personal friends,” he said. “All I heard were former FBI agents telling me that there’s a revolution going on inside the FBI and it’s now at a boiling point.”

If you like the idea that federal government employees are choosing your president for you, you’re going to love living in Donald Trump’s America. Just be sure to salute smartly when you see one at your door.

Say hi to Attorney General William Barr.

Someday it would be really, really nice to know whatever happened to the investigation that was started to look into this little episode. It changed the world.

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Joe Wilson, RIP

by digby

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson died. I’m sorry to hear it. I knew him a little bit and he was a patriot. A real one.

The NY Times:

Joseph C. Wilson, the long-serving American diplomat whose clash with the administration of President George W. Bush in 2003 led to the unmasking of his wife at the time, Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. agent, resulting in accusations that the revelation was political payback, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 69.

Ms. Plame said the cause was organ failure.

Mr. Wilson served in numerous posts, many in Africa, in a 23-year diplomatic career that began in 1976. One posting had been to Niger, and in 2002, by then a private citizen, he was asked by the C.I.A. to travel to that country to try to verify reports that Niger had sold a nuclear material, uranium yellowcake, to Iraq in the 1990s. At the time, the Bush administration was building to a crisis point with Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, and among the issues was whether Iraq had or was developing nuclear weapons.

Ambassador Wilson concluded from his trip that the reports of a Niger-Iraq deal were false. After President Bush, in his State of the Union Message in January 2003, said that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” and then ordered an invasion of Iraq seven weeks later, Mr. Wilson felt the record needed to be corrected.

On July 6, 2003, he wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times titled, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”

“If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why),” he wrote. “If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.”

That suggestion did not sit well with Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration. A week after the Op-Ed was published, Robert Novak, a syndicated columnist with conservative leanings and Republican connections, wrote a column identifying Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. operative, a startling breach given that her work required secrecy.

An investigation into the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity led to charges against Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., not for leaking the information but for lying about his conversations with reporters about Ms. Plame and for obstruction of justice. President Bush commuted his 30-month prison sentence, and last year President Trump gave him a full pardon.

For Mr. Wilson, the decision to write the Op-Ed article was a matter of patriotic duty.

“The path to writing the op-ed piece had been straightforward in my own mind,” he wrote in a 2004 memoir, “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity.” “My government had refused to address the fundamental question of how the lie regarding Saddam’s supposed attempt to purchase African uranium had found its way into the State of the Union address. Time after time during the previous four months, from March to July, administration spokespeople had sloughed off the reality that the president of the United States had sent our country to war in order to defend us against the threat of the ‘mushroom cloud,’ when they knew, as did I, that at least one of the two ‘facts’ underpinning the case was not a fact at all.”

In a telephone interview, Ms. Plame, whose marriage to Mr. Wilson ended in divorce in 2017, said he had never regretted the decision.

“He did it because he felt it was his responsibility as a citizen,” she said. “It was not done out of partisan motivation, despite how it was spun.”

“He had the heart of a lion,” she added. “He’s an American hero.”

They say a full obituary is to follow. Let’s hope they remember to note this amazing story of personal courage:

In the wake of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he became the last American diplomat to meet with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, sternly telling him in very clear terms to leave Kuwait (Wilson, The Politics of Truth 107–27). When Hussein sent a note to Wilson (along with other embassy heads in Baghdad) threatening to execute anyone sheltering foreigners in Iraq as a deterrent, Wilson publicly repudiated the President by appearing at a press conference wearing a homemade noose around his neck and declaring, “If the choice is to allow American citizens to be taken hostage or to be executed, I will bring my own fucking rope.”

Despite Hussein’s warnings, Wilson sheltered more than 100 Americans at the embassy and successfully evacuated several thousand people (Americans and other nationals) from Iraq. For his actions, he was called “a true American hero” by President George H. W. Bush.

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Guns and Russia, oh my

by digby

Yes, of course they were:

The National Rifle Association acted as a “foreign asset” for Russia in the period leading up to the 2016 election, according to a new investigation unveiled Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

Drawing on contemporaneous emails and private interviews, an 18-month probe by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff found that the NRA underwrote political access for Russian nationals Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin more than previously known — even though the two had declared their ties to the Kremlin.

The report, available here, also describes how closely the gun rights group was involved with organizing a 2015 visit by some of its leaders to Moscow.

Then-NRA vice president Pete Brownell, who would later become NRA president, was enticed to visit Russia with the promise of personal business opportunities — and the NRA covered a portion of the trip’s costs.5

The conclusions of the Senate investigation could have legal implications for the NRA, Wyden says.

Tax-exempt organizations are barred from using funds for the personal benefit of its officials or for actions significantly outside their stated missions. The revelations in the Senate report raise questions about whether the NRA could face civil penalties or lose its tax-exempt status.

Attorneys general in the state of New York and the District of Columbia are conducting separate probes into alleged wrongdoing at the gun rights organization. These probes have a broader scope than the Senate report, which focuses on Russia.

The thing is that the gun nuts are fine with this. They are open about their readiness to take up arms against the US government with the help of Russia. There’s nothing unusual about any of that. They’re patriots, proud to be Americans where at least they know they’re free.

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Trump and his threats: “Bing-bong”

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Under what was reportedly mounting pressure from Republicans, the White House was forced to release two damning documents this week that will likely lead to the impeachment of the president: a memorialized telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a whistleblower report about that call and many other things, including how far the White House went to cover it up. The fact that this material was released so quickly indicates that the White House expects to lose the impeachment vote in the House and are counting on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the “gravedigger of democracy” himself, either to refuse to hold a trial at all or to ensure that no such trial produces a two-thirds majority for conviction. That’s probably a good bet.

Apparently, Trump himself truly believes that he did nothing wrong. For him, plotting with Rudy Giuliani to enlist the Ukrainian government to help him smear former Vice President Joe Biden and further a kooky Russia-promoted conspiracy theory which contends that, contrary to all the intelligence findings, it was Ukraine that actually interfered in the 2016 election (on behalf of Hillary Clinton) is business as usual. So it’s not that surprising he ordered the release of a partial transcript of the phone call in which he took a page out of certain gangster movies and made Zelensky an offer he couldn’t refuse: Help me smear my political opponents and I’ll release the hundreds of millions in aid you desperately need to defend yourself.

According to the whistleblower’s report, White House staff was well aware of his behavior and went to some lengths to cover it up, adding some new impeachable offenses to the long and growing list. The whistleblower’s sources also suggested this wasn’t the only time that sort of thing had happened.

This story is much more complicated than that, of course. You’ve got various members of the administration involved, including Trump’s loyal accomplice. Attorney General Bill Barr who denies knowing anything about this despite the fact that Trump told Zelensky several times that Barr would be in touch. And there was the rather mind-boggling decision by the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, to alert the White House that a whistleblower had reported the president’s behavior — in order to determine whether to send the report to Congress. Maguire appeared before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, seeming somewhat baffled by what he had stepped into,

And what can we say about Rudy Giuliani, who seems to be on the verge of some kind of breakdown, acting like a wild man on television on a nightly basis?

Imagine being Donald Trump’s lawyer and saying this unironically to attack one of Trump’s political foes pic.twitter.com/ZqahdttkMT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 27, 2019

Here’s Rudy Giuliani reading personal text messages live on air in an effort to prove just how deeply involved in this Ukraine mess the State Department is pic.twitter.com/4uUWiE5mjA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 27, 2019

He’s even opened himself up to charges with comments like this one, to Atlantic reporter Elaina Plott:

“It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero. I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government. Anything I did should be praised.”

That indicates he has no intention of evoking attorney-client privilege in all this, which makes things simpler for the impeachment — and possible criminal — proceedings. According to Plott, Republicans hold Giuliani responsible for this entire mess, with one former senior White House aide saying that the “entire thing is Rudy putting shit in Trump’s head.”

That sounds right. But let’s pause for a moment to consider that the most powerful man on earth was so empty-headed that he believed it.

Trump has not been himself the last few days. At the UN earlier in the week, as calls for impeachment were building, his speeches and press conferences were strangely flat as he seemed to recognize that he was facing a whole new world of hurt. To those of us watching him on television, he looked subdued and perhaps a bit depressed. But a couple of the reporters in the room suggested that it was actually suppressed rage. After looking at the footage again, I think they might be right. He is very, very angry.

This was expressed most clearly in the wake of the release of the whistleblower report on Thursday morning and the congressional testimony by Maguire, the acting DNI. Trump attended a morning meeting with U.S. diplomats in New York before taking off for Washington and said this:

Basically that person never saw the report, never saw the call, heard something and decided that he or she, whoever the hell it is — they’re almost a spy. I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistleblower, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy. 

You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart, right? The spies and treason. We used to handle it a little differently than we do know.

No doubt a little chill went down some spines when the New York Times made the controversial revelation later in the day that the whistleblower is apparently a CIA officer attached to the White House. Anyone who watched Trump’s rallies in 2016 knows what he’s talking about there and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Recall that he used to describe Sgt. Bowe Bergdalh as “dirty rotten traitor” on the stump all the time, suggesting that he should have been summarily executed:

Trump is very antagonistic toward “spies” generally, even those who working for the U.S. According to Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” when Trump was told that the CIA wanted to extract an “asset” from a foreign country, he opposed it, saying, “I don’t trust human intelligence and these spies. These are people who have sold their souls and sold out their country.”

That’s more than a little bit ironic, considering Trump’s embrace of Russian interference in 2016 and his solicitation of Ukraine’s interference in 2020, this time using American military aid as leverage. He’s about to find out that there are other ways of selling out one’s country.

Still, he is the president and is obviously surrounded by many loyal enablers, some of whom hold powerful positions in law enforcement. One hopes that precautions have been taken to protect this whistleblower. Trump is mad, and he feels cornered. He is not likely to go down quietly.

Update: Here’s the president’s other lawyer Jay Sekulow on Fox and Friends this morning:

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Dis-Barr
by Tom Sullivan

Al Pacino. Still image from “…And Justice for All” (1979)

It is too early to know what the fallout could be for the attorney-enablers involved in the Trump-Ukraine affair. Former Donald Trump fixer Michael Cohen has a fair idea. He sits in jail, disbarred, for his actions taken to protect Donald Trump from himself, as well as for corrupt actions of his own. Attorneys now surrounding Donald Trump may face similar fates. Temptation is like that.

The whistleblower complaint released this week tracks closely with the call summary the White House released of the July 25 conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump appears to extort dirt on political rival Joe Biden in exchange for releasing U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

White House lawyers who facilitated burying records of that call have, at the very least, put their law licenses at risk. Ask Michael Cohen.

Michelle Goldberg writes:

According to Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law, any lawyers involved in hiding these transcripts might have done something illegal. “The rule is it is both unethical and a crime for a lawyer to participate in altering, destroying or concealing a document, and here the allegation is that the word-for-word transcript was moved from the place where people ordinarily would think to look for it, to a place where it would not likely be found,” said Gillers. “That’s concealing.”

Attorney General Bill Barr, neck deep in Trump, is named multiple times in both the complaint and the call summary. Trump repeatedly informs Zelensky he’ll have Bill Barr and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, contact Ukrainian officials about investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. Barr’s Justice Department examined the whistleblower complaint and his Office of Legal Counsel determined it need not be turned over to Congress as the whistle-blower statute requires. Just weeks after intelligence officials asked the Justice Department and FBI to investigate the call, the department’s criminal division decided there was insufficient cause to open an investigation:

Department officials and career public integrity prosecutors reviewed a rough transcript of the call and verified its authenticity, but — because a case was not opened — took no other steps, such as conducting interviews, the officials said. They looked only at whether Trump might have violated campaign finance laws, not federal corruption statutes, even though some legal analysts said there seemed to be evidence of both.

“Under any conceivable ethical standard, Barr should have recused himself,” Goldberg writes. Trump’s newest fixer did not.

The massive White House coverup of Trump’s abuse of power vis-a-vis Ukraine & Biden, including evidence concealment, is now clearly documented. Bill Barr is up to his eyebrows in the criminal conspiracy. He’s Trump’s John Mitchell. Mitchell ended up in prison. It’s all unraveling— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 26, 2019

Goldberg continues:

But Barr’s refusal to recuse creates a sort of legal cul-de-sac. It’s only the Justice Department, ultimately, that can prosecute potential federal crimes arising from this scandal. Barr’s ethical nihilism, his utter indifference to ordinary norms of professional behavior, means that he’s retaining the authority to stop investigations into crimes he may have participated in.

Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, took a starring role in the Ukraine affair as well. Murray Waas reports that floating stories about Biden’s son being involved in questionable business in Ukraine began in the early days of the Trump administration. Giuliani and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort launched a scheme to formulate “a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.” Another goal was to promote the narrative that “the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had ‘colluded’ to defeat Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid.”

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), former attorney general in California, told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews she wants to know “who in the State Department was in cahoots, or was facilitating, Giuliani’s interactions with Ukrainian officials.” Furthermore, “the New York Bar Association needs to investigate Giuliani, and probably disbar him” for his actions.

And Bill Barr and who knows who else. The president is out of order, the Department of Justice is out of order, the whole executive branch is out of order.

Donald J. Trump is an ethical black hole. He eats the souls of anyone with enough moral flexibility to venture near his event horizon. Once that’s crossed there is no escape. For Barr, for Giuliani, for Trump’s enablers in Congress and in the White House. What’s left is to find out is whether what remains of American justice can reach them there.