Month: December 2019

The Republicans got what they wanted out of the impeachment hearings


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi first announced that the House would formally take up an impeachment investigation on Sept. 24. Sometime on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee will almost certainly vote to send two Articles of Impeachment to the full House. If a whistleblower hadn’t stepped up and set this ball in motion, we would still be seeing President Trump at his rallies screaming about the Ukrainian government’s interference in the election and the corruption of Joe Biden — and the mainstream media would be chasing the story like it was a private email server. Team Trump was only days away from getting away with it.

From the moment he stepped on to that escalator in June of 2015, Donald Trump’s unethical, illegal and immoral behavior has been leading toward this day. Assuming that the full House votes to impeach and sends the case to the Senate, his name will always have the scarlet asterisk next to it as the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, a fact which reportedly upsets him greatly. In a just world, he would be the first president to be impeached, convicted and removed from office. That’s not the world in which we live, unfortunately.

The hearings this week were long and tedious, but they served an important purpose nonetheless. The two sides had different goals. The Democrats laid out the case with which most of us following this event are familiar and managed to be serious and respectful while doing it. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., kept the proceedings from careening out of control and there was even some persuasive rhetoric and memorable oratory.

Republicans had a different goal. They presented a number of defenses, many of them consisting of emotive hand-wringing, faux exasperation and yelling. As former Breitbart editor and Republican House aide Kurt Bardella wrote for NBC, this is a long-standing strategy:

Revisit the 11-hour grilling that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was subjected to by Republicans during the Benghazi hearing and you’ll see the now familiar sight of Republicans yelling and badgering their witness. As Rep. Adam Smith, R-Wash., observed that day, the Republicans’ strategy was to try and “wear you down.”

This was obviously their goal during Thursday’s marathon hearing, and it worked. It was long and tiring, mostly because Republicans kept offering amendments, many of them barely making sense, after which the whole committee had to debate them and then vote on whether to adopt them. All were voted down along party lines, votes, the final vote coming after 14 hours of debate. Clearly the Republicans had planned all along to prolong the process so they could say that the Democrats had voted to impeach in the dead of night when nobody would see it. Nadler called their bluff announcing that the committee’s final vote would be postponed until Friday morning. The Republicans melted down into full-blown hysteria, but by that time no one was listening.

Bardella writes that Republicans’ “script is built on misdirection and moving the goalposts as their paltry strategy shifts to incorporate various conspiracy theories and outlandish claims,” observing that they consciously treat every member’s time as if he were appearing on a Fox News segment.

I think that’s literally what they are doing. They are using the formal setting and the national attention to introduce people to the alternative reality that only people who watch Fox News usually see.

Take, for instance, the big signs Republican committee members have printed up and set on easels behind them. They feature things like pictures of Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on a milk carton with the words “Where’s Adam?” obviously pushing their absurd demand that Schiff be compelled to testify as a witness. (Nobody showed up in an official Trump campaign “Where’s Hunter” T-shirt, thank goodness.) Another was titled “Coastal Impeachment Squad” featuring a picture of the Democratic leadership spelling out that they are from New York, California and Massachusetts, clearly implying they are not Real Americans. At one point, they displayed the message “0 DAYS SINCE ADAM SCHIFF FOLLOWED HOUSE RULES” but removed it when thousands of people pointed out on Twitter that zero days since something occurred, in fact, means that thing occurred today.

Knowing that the Senate will not convict Trump under any circumstances offers Republicans an opportunity to use these nationally televised hearings to spread their conspiracy theories, memes and smears to a much wider audience. They are taking full advantage.

GOP members deployed their patented “process” argument constantly, of course. That was led by Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who former GOP campaign adviser Rick Wilson aptly described on MSNBC as a “screeching histrionic drama queen.” Others repeatedly insisted that the Democrats should go through the courts rather than charge the president with obstruction of Congress. Nadler finally put that one to bed by pointing out that “no privileges have been asserted. There’s nothing for a court to review.”

Perhaps one of the most startling speeches came from Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, who took the position that Trump did nothing wrong to a new level, asking, “Is it ever OK to invite a foreign government to become involved in an election, involving a political opponent? The answer is ‘yes.’ It better be — we do it all of the time.” He later tried to explain that “involve” doesn’t mean “interfere.” It was not convincing in the least. But acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was almost certainly relieved to see someone other than him make such an incriminating comment before the whole country.

The two congressmen who really carried the ball for the president over and over again were Matt Gaetz of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas. Here are just a couple of examples of how each of them aggressively played to the cameras with Fox News talking points:

“They [Democrats] talk about “abuse of power” but they were willing to obscure evidence in a basement hearing over and over. They are willing to block witnesses from coming in here and testifying before Congress …” https://t.co/Hu9TfsBWnP

— Louie Gohmert (@replouiegohmert) December 12, 2019

.@RepLouieGohmert : ‘We’re Here Because of Fraud, Not by the President,’ But Within the DOJ https://t.co/odYNVf58sU

— CNSNews.com (@cnsnews) December 12, 2019

“They [Democrats] talk about “abuse of power” but they were willing to obscure evidence in a basement hearing over and over. They are willing to block witnesses from coming in here and testifying before Congress …” https://t.co/Hu9TfsBWnP

— Louie Gohmert (@replouiegohmert) December 12, 2019

Those are just a few examples of the smears and lies those two shared on national TV on Thursday. They were bravura performances, which the president liked very much. He broke his previous record for tweets in a day, many of them retweets of the worst commentary from the Republicans on that committee.

Whether anyone who lives outside the Fox News universe would be impressed is hard to know. As I’ve written before, it doesn’t really matter. The point is to give oxygen to their disinformation and propaganda by any means necessary so it may live on. Republicans have achieved that goal. And I’m pretty sure the impeachment trial won’t be the last we hear of any of it.

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Looks Like We’re Not Going to Keep It 

by tristero

“A republic, if you can keep it, ” Ben Franklin famously said when asked whether the Founders had created a republic or a monarchy.

Looks like we’re not going to keep it. The reason? Republicans are outspending and out-talking Democrats to sway public opinion about impeachment:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is countering impeachment efforts against him with a new surge in Facebook ads, while his Democratic rivals are saying little on the subject on the social media site or the campaign trail.

Living in a republic is no walk in the park, as we all know. But it sure beats living in a dictatorship, as we’re all about to find out unless things turn around very, very quickly.

Defining democracy down
by Tom Sullivan

The Trump era is like an episode of Drew Carey’s old improv game show. Except this is “Whose Government Is It Anyway?” — the shit show where everything’s made up and the facts don’t matter.

Garrett Graff describes at Wired just how much of one Foxification has made of America:

We, as a democratic society, cannot survive such consequences-be-damned, winner-take-all, facts-don’t-matter politics. Fox News has upended Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous proclamation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Its daily programming seems driven by the idea that everyone might be entitled to their own facts, but that there is only one correct opinion:
President Trump’s.

Kurt Bardella at NBC reinforces how Foxified Republican members of Congress have become:

The conservative approach during these hearings has been to treat every member’s time like it is a segment on Fox News. The members are playing the part of Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham. Their script is built on misdirection and moving the goal posts as their paltry strategy shifts to incorporate various conspiracy theories and outlandish claims.

Donald Trump has done plenty worth condemnation. But Trump didn’t corrupt his party. He simply unmasked it. “Forget about impeachment. As a parent, as a person, I wonder: Where is Matt Gaetz’s humanity?” asks Dana Milbank about the Florida Republican’s gratuitous smears of Hunter Biden Thursday.

It was as if Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee were running on a loop Thursday. Reps. Guy Reschenthaler of Texas, Gaetz and others repeated the same lines every few hours to make sure late tuners-in did not miss their juiciest bits. Democrats did some of that themselves, just not as loudly. (I looked for a “Jim Jordan” setting on the TV remote that might
automatically reduce the volume whenever the Ohio Republican resumed shouting.) The GOTV defense began sounding like those ubiquitous, K-Tel’s greatest-hits commercials of old, only less tuneful.

Like a lot of observers, I got 2016 wrong. Decades of a steady diet of right-wing radio and Fox News had made many Americans somewhat crazy, sure. But even given the weaknesses of the Clinton campaign, I didn’t think the country was crazy enough to elect president a celebrity grifter as obvious as Donald Trump. They claimed to love America too much for that. Obviously not. As former president George W. Bush realized after Trump’s “American carnage” inauguration speech, the
country would be in for “some weird shit.”

“Do you feel confident in that?” the reporter asked.

“My .357 Magnum is comfortable with that!” he said. “End of story!” https://t.co/iBecicYvay— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) December 11, 2019

As the gentleman in the clip above demonstrates, firearms have replaced patriotism as “the last refuge” among some Trump supporters. Threats of violence in the event of electoral or legislative failure are common on the right. The president has become a kind of “Thousand
Hills Free Radio and Television” at his rallies and in his tweets. He himself has bragged he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not face consequences. His lawyers support that proposition in court. The attorney general acts as Trump’s Minister of
Propaganda. His defenders in Congress see no evil, nor hear any, and excuse what they hear from their Guinness World’s-record-eligible tweeter.

Another Moynihan contribution to the lexicon is “defining deviancy down.” It captures “the way standards and expectations, as they fall, become accepted at each new, lower level as somehow ‘normal.’“

Throughout the Trump presidency, his opponents have argued the press ought not normalize his behavior. In many ways, press coverage has. Yet, there is still some memory of normal left to provoke a flurry of editorial boards to call for Trump’s removal. Just not yet in swing states, nor in the numbers that did so during the Clinton impeachment, Politico reports.

Nerves are on edge and tempers flaring. Late Thursday night, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler abruptly gavelled his committee’s markup hearing to a close without calling for a vote on two articles of impeachment. Without consulting
ranking member Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), Nadler announced the hearing would resume this morning at 10 a.m. EST.

It had been a 14-hour day and members clearly tired. Blindsided Republicans were livid:

Republicans erupted in anger at the move, accusing the New York Democrat of wanting to put the vote on television and going back on an agreement for the committee to stop considering amendments.

Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, called the move the “the most bush league stunt I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”

“Words cannot describe how inappropriate this was,” Collins said.

But Democrats blamed Republicans for the schedule switch. They were furious at Republicans for what they believed was a blatant effort to drag out Thursday’s proceedings and delay final votes until the middle of the night. Earlier Thursday, it was widely believed that Republicans would be through offering amendments by around 5 p.m. EST.

As the evening wore on, Democrats came to believe the GOP was simply trying to bury the votes in the news cycle. So the decision was made to hold the final two votes Friday morning to ensure more people would be able to witness the
historic move — even though it enraged the GOP.

Mistrust runs deep. With good reason. So, the Chicago Tribune’s Rex Hubke offers this advice and admonishment:

“Disinformation is intended to wear critics down, to make them feel that resistance is futile, that combating nonsense with facts is a waste of time.

“You can’t let that happen. You need to keep your mind right.”

This presidency is an endurance contest to see which side of the aisle will break first, or whether the republic will. This
feels like the point in an action movie when someone wonders aloud if they’ll get out of this alive.

The Best Way to Listen to Congressional Testimony 

by tristero

Cook.

Today, while listening to hours of debate, I baked a nice loaf of bread and also cooked some Aloo Gobi (potatoes/cauliflower curry) and basmati rice. Easy to do and enabled one to concentrate on the discussions. Conclusions:

The Republicans don’t have a leg to stand on and they know it. The Democrats did a very good job of making the case (but should have added more articles of impeachment).

Oh, and the food came out well but I’ll have to wait several hours to try the bread, which is agony.

by digby

Donald Trump is obviously not a religious person but he did attend church as a kid and his pastor was none other than Norman Vinvent Peale the author of the best-selling book “The Power of Positive Thinking.” 

Little Donnie may not have absorbed any biblical lessons but he did hear Peale’s message:

At a White House congressional ball tonight, President Trump made brief comments while the Judiciary Committee members continued to debate the articles of impeachment.

“Our country is doing really great,” he said, while touting the stock market records and thanking the Pences and the first lady.  

He said his family calls the White House a home, but some presidents called it a house — and some called it much worse .

‘We’re going to have a fantastic year,” he said. “The best year in decades.”

I don’t know what he’s blabbering about with the White House. He’s the one who called it a shithole when he moved in.  But the bragging in the face of political catastrophe is far from positive thinking. It’s delusional.

This White House ball is reminiscent of the scene in Gone With the Wind where the confederates ate dancing away as the country explodes.

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Cross currents for blackmail. Once again, Trump’s actions accrue to the benefit of the Russian government.

by digby

This piece at the Daily Beast by Betsy Swan isn’t getting the attention it deserves.

Ukrainian officials spent last weekend glued to Trump’s Twitter feed.

People working closely with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have been in contact with Trump administration officials over the past several weeks discussing the relationship between the two presidents, according to four people with knowledge of the talks. Based on those conversations, Ukrainian officials came to expect that President Donald Trump would make a statement of support before Zelensky met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in France for peace talks. A statement might even come via Twitter, they said they were told.

“Through all the signals we got, we firmly believed there would be a statement,” a senior Zelensky administration official told The Daily Beast.

But as Saturday and Sunday ticked by, there was only silence from the White House. Even as Ukrainian officials have publicly been loath to criticize Trump’s pressure campaign on their country, frustrations with Washington have quietly percolated. And last weekend, they were especially acute.

On Monday, Zelensky and Putin met in Normandy, France for face-to-face negotiations on the war in eastern Ukraine. Russia had seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, and has ever since backed separatists in the eastern part of the country. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were on hand for the talks. Putin and Zelensky agreed to exchange “all known prisoners,” according to The Washington Post. Another round of talks is expected in several months.

Words of support from the United States in the lead-up to the Normandy talks could have given the Ukrainian president more leverage with Putin, according to the Zelensky administration official and two additional people close to his administration. Instead, Trump spent the weekend on Twitter tweeting about Fox News pundits, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and CNN. It was a particularly busy weekend of social media for him, with more than 100 tweets and retweets by Politico’s count. But no word on Normandy.

And the next week put salt in the wound. On Tuesday, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and made an appearance at the White House.

One of the people close to the Zelensky administration said the silence from White House—combined with Lavrov’s photo-friendly visit to Washington—sent “a terrible signal” and was “most unfortunate.” According to a read-out of Trump’s meeting with Lavrov, the president “urged Russia to resolve the conflict with Ukraine.” The Ukrainian official called the episode “frustrating.” Ukrainians say they view the coupling of Trump’s pre-Normandy silence and the administration’s decision to welcome Lavrov as a signal in an of itself—and not a good one.

Zelensky administration officials are now reconsidering their strategy on communication with and about the Trump administration, the official said. Thus far, Zelensky administration officials have stayed in line with the Trump administration’s narrative on the president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine activity and the focuses of the impeachment inquiry. But they say they have little to show for it, and may take a different public relations strategy in the future.

A Time interview published earlier this week captured Kyiv’s willingness to publicly bolster Trump’s version of events. Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Zelensky, contradicted a key assertion that European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland made in congressional testimony last month. Sondland had said he pulled Yermak aside during an event in Warsaw and urged him to have Kyiv announce Trump-friendly investigations. Yermak, meanwhile, told Time that no such conversation happened. The statement was a body blow to a key impeachment witness’s testimony, though Sondland’s lawyer said he stood by his description of events.

In a separate interview, Zelensky said he did not speak to Trump in terms of “you give me this, I give you that.” Trump tweeted out a link to the interview and thanked Zelensky for the comment.

Trump’s relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a key focus of Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. The inquiry began after an anonymous Intelligence Committee official filed a whistleblower complaint in August alleging that Trump pressured Zelensky to announce investigations of a company linked to the Bidens and of alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election. The complaint said that Trump was withholding military aid from Ukraine until those investigations were announced. Trump has vehemently denied allegations that withholding the military aid—which happened for a short time at his orders—was part of a pressure campaign. Sondland, meanwhile, told Congress that the administration was explicit that it refused to arrange a White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky until Kyiv announced the two investigations.

After weeks of closed-door depositions and hearings, Pelosi announced the introduction of two articles of impeachment based on Trump’s pressure on Ukraine. House Democrats are expected to vote on those articles as soon as next week. If they pass—which is extremely likely—then they will be referred to the Senate for a trial.

Think about this for a moment:

Ideally the US President would not be susceptible to blackmail by anyone. Having a president who’s cross-pressured by potential blackmail from Ukraine, Russia, his ex-wives, his employees, Epstein’s estate, and the parent company of the National Enquirer…is less than ideal.

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) December 12, 2019

God only knows what’s motivating him. But the fact that he’s got this many potential blackmail pressure points — that we know of – leads me to believe that he’s probably responding to some of them. He’s very dim. But he knows his own vulnerabilities better than anyone.

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More frightening foreign policy idiocy 

by digby

I guess we can’t impeach a president for being a brain dead idiot. Too bad. We really need to:

Trump called for Seoul evacuation at height of North Korea tensions, new book says

Donald Trump called for the population of Seoul to be moved during an Oval Office meeting when tensions between the US and North Korea were at their height, according to a new book about the president’s relations with the US military.

In Trump and his Generals: The Cost of Chaos, the national security and counter-terrorism expert Peter Bergen also gives new details of Trump’s demands that the families of US service members in South Korea be evacuated, which the North Korean regime would have interpreted as a clear move towards war. In both cases, Trump’s impetuous diktats were ignored by his top officials.

Bergen’s book, the latest in a string of accounts of the president’s erratic leadership on national security issues, is being published on Tuesday at a time when friction between Washington and Pyongyang is once more on the rise, after more than 18 months of detente and summitry. The North Korean leadership is threatening a resumption of missile tests, and a war of words between Trump and Kim Jong-un is simmering once more.

Trump has resurrected his nickname for Kim, “Rocket Man”. North Korea conducted a missile engine test at a site that it had previously mothballed, and on Monday a senior regime official called the US president a “heedless and erratic old man”.

The level of mutual hostility is still some way off from the worst period in 2017 when a conflict looked a real possibility.

In his book, Bergen – a vice-president of the New America thinktank – describes an Oval Office meeting on North Korea in mid-April 2017, after a string of North Korean missile tests. Trump’s top national security officials were present and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had made a model of a secret North Korean facility the size of coffee table, to illustrate the regime’s covert programmes.

According to Bergen, Trump was also shown a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night, showing the lights of China and South Korea and the blackness of North Korea in between. Trump initially mistook the void for an ocean. When he was shown the bright lights of Seoul just 30 miles south of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, the president asked: “Why is Seoul so close to the North Korean border?”

FacebookTwitterPinterest Trump reportedly asked why Seoul, the capital of South Korea, was so close to the North Korean border. Photograph: Alamy

Trump had been repeatedly told that US freedom of action against North Korea was constrained by the fact that the regime’s artillery could demolish the South Korean capital in retaliation for any attack, inflicting mass casualties on its population of 25 million.

“They have to move,” Trump said, according to Bergen, who adds that his officials were initially unsure if the president was joking. But Trump then repeated the line. “They have to move!”

No action was taken in response to Trump’s bizarre remark, but the situation grew steadily worse, with a series of North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile tests and a hydrogen bomb test in September 2017.

After watching a retired four-star general, Jack Keane, interviewed on Fox News in late January 2018, saying that US troops deployed to South Korea should not take their families with them, Bergen reports that Trump told his national security team: “I want an evacuation of American civilians from South Korea.”

A senior official warned that such an evacuation would be interpreted as a signal that the US was ready to go to war, and would crash the South Korean stock market, but Trump is reported to have ignored the warning, telling his team: “Go do it!”

Alarmed Pentagon officials ignored the order, and – according to Bergen – Trump eventually dropped the idea. It was one of a number of occasions that the defense secretary at the time, James Mattis, ignored direction from the White House. He also refused to send defense department officials to a planned Korea war game at Camp David in the autumn of 2017, or to provide military options for intercepting North Korean ships suspected of sanctions busting.

I don’t think his replacement will ignore Trump’s orders. He is obviously a toady.

I wonder when there is going to be a foreign policy debate for the Democratic candidates. It’s a fundamentally important aspect of any presidential campaign and we have hardly heard a word about it. I know it isn’t something that directly affects our pocketbooks but if Trump (and Bush before him) has shown anything it’s that presidential power in this respect should be much more closely scrutinized in election campaigns than Democrats tend to do.

I know that health care is vitally important as are jobs and college debt, etc. But climate change and foreign policy are closely related and mistakes in this area will end up killing vast numbers of human beings. We are lucky that we have escaped (so far) the catastrophic consequences of electing an unfit moron to make these decisions, largely thanks to people who ignored his demented, idiocy.

 Those people are now gone which is scary. We need to fervently hope that we can get through another year without something terrible happening. But if we do and the Democrats win, the chaos and carnage he will have left in his wake will continue to pose a threat for a long time to come.

The Democrats must have a plan in place to deal with this and it can’t be “oh don’t worry, once Trump is gone everything will go back to normal.” One, it won’t. And two, it shouldn’t. The world order that Trump inherited was already on its last legs. We need a new one.

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QOTD: A GOP Thug

by digby

Right wing talker and Fox News personality Mark Levin:

MARK LEVIN: What the Democrats have done here will only be stopped and the precedent that is so damning to this country will only be stopped if it is unleashed on them. The next president who’s a Democrat must be impeached. They must be investigated over and over again, follow exactly the Schiff-Nadler procedures, the Nancy Pelosi process. It must be done. I know it sounds painful. I had a caller say to me the other day when I said that it was disingenuous, that it shows that we’re no better than them. No, that’s wrong. It shows we must defeat this internal Fifth Column enemy. And they must understand that we have the willingness to do it so they don’t pull this again because otherwise, this is the precedent set in place now. Republicans will be rollovers for the rest of their time and Democrats will be bulldogs. We can’t allow that.

They did that already. They impeached Bill Clinton in retribution for Richard Nixon. Some of them even said so at the time.

It’s true that they were unable to enact their revenge on Carter, the first president to come after their martyred wingnut, but if he had won a second term, especially by beating their Dear Leader Ronald Reagan, they would have gone for it. And, in the end it worked out fine for them. They acted like a bunch of fools, the American people rejected them but they managed to steal the next presidential election anyway, despite losing the popular vote, and had 8 years of uninterrupted power to start war and destroy the economy as is their wont. They left Obama more or less alone because they needed the Democrats to take the burden of trying to restore the economy. But that was

So yeah, it is a good game plan for them when they lose an election but they tend to save for a time when the clean up on aisle one is finished.

A pathetic, jealous little president


by digby

His team obviously mocked up that cover to make him feel better. None of that was about her cause, although they don’t believe in climate change, of course. It was because Trump believes he should be person of the year, every year. It’s so important to him that he mocked up TIME covers and put them on the wall in his golf courses.

The president of the United States has the worst case of arrested development I’ve ever seen. To use his words, he is a sick puppy.

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Give credit where credit is due to those who are speaking out

by digby

I know he’s a Democrat and had an imperfect record himself, yadda, yadda, yadda. But this op-ed by Eric Holder is still important. He is speaking the truth while knowing that he’ll be assailed by Villagers (eventual and Republicans alike for being a “partisan”(perhaps also being smart enough to know that Republicans will do it anyway.)

As a former U.S. attorney general, I am reluctant to publicly criticize my successors. I respect the office and understand just how tough the job can be.

But recently, Attorney General William P. Barr has made a series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official that they demand a response from someone who held the same office.

Last month, at a Federalist Society event, the attorney general delivered an ode to essentially unbridled executive power, dismissing the authority of the legislative and judicial branches — and the checks and balances at the heart of America’s constitutional order. As others have pointed out, Barr’s argument rests on a flawed view of U.S. history. To me, his attempts to vilify the president’s critics sounded more like the tactics of an unscrupulous criminal defense lawyer than a U.S. attorney general.

When, in the same speech, Barr accused “the other side” of “the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law,” he exposed himself as a partisan actor, not an impartial law enforcement official. Even more troubling — and telling — was a later (and little-noticed) section of his remarks, in which Barr made the outlandish suggestion that Congress cannot entrust anyone but the president himself to execute the law.

In Barr’s view, sharing executive power with anyone “beyond the control of the president” (emphasis mine), presumably including a semi-independent Cabinet member, “contravenes the Framers’ clear intent to vest that power in a single person.” This is a stunning declaration not merely of ideology but of loyalty: to the president and his interests. It is also revealing of Barr’s own intent: to serve not at a careful remove from politics, as his office demands, but as an instrument of politics — under the direct “control” of President Trump.

Not long after Barr made that speech, he issued what seemed to be a bizarre threat to anyone who expresses insufficient respect for law enforcement, suggesting that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.” No one who understands — let alone truly respects — the impartial administration of justice or the role of law enforcement could ever say such a thing. It is antithetical to the most basic tenets of equality and justice, and it undermines the need for understanding between law enforcement and certain communities and flies in the face of everything the Justice Department stands for.

It’s also particularly ironic in light of the attorney general’s comments this week, in which he attacked the FBI and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General — two vital components of his own department. Having spent the majority of my career in public service, I found it extraordinary to watch the nation’s chief law enforcement official claim — without offering any evidence — that the FBI acted in “bad faith” when it opened an inquiry into then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. As a former line prosecutor, U.S. attorney and judge, I found it alarming to hear Barr comment on an ongoing investigation, led by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, into the origins of the Russia probe. And as someone who spent six years in the office Barr now occupies, it was infuriating to watch him publicly undermine an independent inspector general report — based on an exhaustive review of the FBI’s conduct — using partisan talking points bearing no resemblance to the facts his own department has uncovered.

When appropriate and justified, it is the attorney general’s duty to support Justice Department components, ensure their integrity and insulate them from political pressures. His or her ultimate loyalty is not to the president personally, nor even to the executive branch, but to the people — and the Constitution — of the United States.

Career public servants at every level of the Justice Department understand this — as do leaders such as FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Their fidelity to the law and their conduct under pressure are a credit to them and the institutions they serve.

Others, like Durham, are being tested by this moment. I’ve been proud to know John for at least a decade, but I was troubled by his unusual statement disputing the inspector general’s findings. Good reputations are hard-won in the legal profession, but they are fragile; anyone in Durham’s shoes would do well to remember that, in dealing with this administration, many reputations have been irrevocably lost.

This is certainly true of Barr, who was until recently a widely respected lawyer. I and many other Justice veterans were hopeful that he would serve as a responsible steward of the department and a protector of the rule of law.

Virtually since the moment he took office, though, Barr’s words and actions have been fundamentally inconsistent with his duty to the Constitution. Which is why I now fear that his conduct — running political interference for an increasingly lawless president — will wreak lasting damage.

The American people deserve an attorney general who serves their interests, leads the Justice Department with integrity and can be entrusted to pursue the facts and the law, even — and especially — when they are politically inconvenient and inconsistent with the personal interests of the president who appointed him. William Barr has proved he is incapable of serving as such an attorney general. He is unfit to lead the Justice Department.

Barr is unfit and I think his interference in the coming election is going to put Jim Comey to shame. He has signaled that he expects the Durham report to drop next June just before the conventions. This can only be seen as a deliberate attempt to involve the DOJ in the 2020 election. He’s not even trying t hide it.

Indeed, doing it as he bemoans the FBI investigation into 2016, when Russians were hacking away at Democratic computers and crawling all over the Trump campaign, is one of the most historic acts of chutzpah in American history.

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