Brilliant!

Trump-Appointed Federal Prosecutor Launches Extraordinary Attack On Philly DA Larry Krasner
William McSwain issued the inflammatory statement hours after a drug suspect shot and wounded six Philadelphia police officers.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/larry-krasner-william-mcswain-philadelphia_n_5d55afffe4b056fafd08e07a

Roy Austin, a former Obama administration official, said Barr’s speech was “an interesting attack coming from a Republican whose party once seemed to believe in local rule and autonomy.”

“If the people elect prosecutors to change the way things have always been done, who is Barr to criticize?” he asked.

Bill Barr’s concepts of law and justice are punitive, contradictory, and weighted on the side of the state, not the individual citizen. According to Barr, citizens are supposed to submit to the law even when they disagree with it. Yet as quoted in an August 8th Talking Points Memo story, Barr also expresses support for fictional law enforcement figures (e.g., “Dirty Harry” Callaghan as played by Clint Eastwood) who break the law and dispense vigilante justice when they believe the law is not serving the inherent sense of justice that Barr thinks is “hardwired” into every person. So citizens are to be bound by the law but agents of the law are not.

It would be good to hear AG Barr express whatever sentiments of inherent justice he may feel on behalf of Crystal Mason of Texas, the black mother of three children facing five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election, unaware that her name had been removed from the voter rolls because of a previous conviction for tax fraud.

It’s now official. Barr has become Trump’s go-to right hand legal man, his trusty, back-pocket Roy Cohn. And his department has assumed this mantle of direction with the kind of creative Trump legal defense consideration that got Barr the AG job in the first place.

He left no doubt about this after DoJ filed an Aug. 6 amicus brief defending Trump’s position attempting to shield him from answering subpoenas seeking his cooperation with ongoing House Oversight Committee reviews of his office.

The committee filed a subpoena in April seeking eight years of financial records from Mazars USA, Trump’s accounting service. Trump’s personal lawyers, not from the DoJ — which traditionally has played no role and taken an independent position on legal matters of this kind — have been fighting the records demand since it was issued.

Under the constitution, Congress has broad authority to investigate the president. And the Supreme Court has recognized that authority by holding that the judiciary must honor any subpoena with a “legitimate legislative purpose.”

Trump’s lawyers argue that the subpoena lacks such purpose and is essentially an attempt to legally harass Trump. In its brief, DoJ makes a similar claim insisting the subpoena is designed to torment the president by examining his finances for political gain.

That issue was overruled in May, when US District Judge Amit Mehta noted that the committee had submitted a memorandum detailing a variety of legitimate reasons for the subpoena including efforts to consider possible legal, ethics and policy reforms in addition to House passage of a resolution aimed directly at the president. After the ruling, Trump’s legal team then immediately appealed to US District Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, which has already taken oral arguments in the case.

So, why did the DoJ bother to step in now? Other than to back Trump and help prolong committee efforts to investigate him, there is no legitimate legal mission for getting involved in the case. The arguments it raises are psuedo-constitutional questions at best with no real foundation.

Basically it wants the court to overturn legal precedent by having judiciary determine whether individual committee members are properly motivated in their subpoena effort not “impermissably attempting to interfere with or harass the “Head of the Executive Branch.” Toward that end, the brief calls for a “searching evaluation” of their motives.

While offering no legal backing for joining the case and not questioning one aspect of federal law it might challenge, DoJ’s brief strangely argues that Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings memorandum is somehow insufficient because it failed to gain ratification by a vote of the full House.

However, the Supreme Court has never required such a bar or made such a determination. It has never held that a committee’s subpoena is invalid until ratified by a full chamber. And even if that were true, the full House approved the Mazars subpoena that the memorandum supports.

Ignoring that, DoJ makes the claim that that vote didn’t count because it wasn’t specific enough; that the vote itself was only part of general authorization for pending or future investigation, not specifically for the Maza
Yet, there’s more. The DoJ contends that the House cannot investigate the president under its impeachment authority. What? Or, more to the point, Why, you might wonder increduously?

Because, the brief insists, you can’t assert impeachment authority until you actually invoke its name to unwrap its intent. In other words, the House’s constitutional power to impeach lies dormant until somebody declares the intention to actually use the word to make it happen.

You might wonder who has to utter this impactful word to grant this authority, whether it can come from any House member, only the House speaker or maybe a gaggle of lawmakers or a committee chairman, perhaps a committee of the whole shouting in unison. The brief doesn’t offer an answer on this, because there is no legal finding available justifying the contention.

Beyond this, it gets stranger, because in addition, the brief contends that even if the committee had a legitimate legislative intent in writing new legal reforms for the presidency in terms of ethical conflict of interest and/or emolument questions about policy intent (already acted on with passage of HR 1 this session), such proposals don’t deserve legitimacy because they are probably illegal on their face.

That is so, the brief claims, because the Constitution bars Congress from forcing the president to divest from conflicts of interest. Meaning, Congress can’t investigate Trump to force him to abide by ethical reforms because the reforms themselves would be legislatively unconstitutional.

Pretty neat circular argument. But it sort of raises the question, what role does congress really play in executive branch oversight?

I mean if it can’t get cooperation from the White House and can’t then can’t issue a subpoena without legislative intent, and it is barred from looking into a president’s actions in connection with potential ethical and policy reforms for his his office — short of impeachment unless you clearly invoke impeachment’s name– then those actions are preemptively deemed unconstitutional? Is this what Barr and DoJ are ultimately suggesting here?

And why is the department involved in this legal cat fight anyway? Trump has an army of legal help. Barr like he has since becoming AG, has inserted himself whenever and however possible as Trump’s legal pickpocket. And like Trump he needs to go.

I say impeach him for abuse of power and see how DoJ responds to that.

i will leave it to others to argue about the details of impeachment in the house. whatever those, the process wends its way forward.

as for the true grounds for both impeachment and removing the president, fundamentally they are these:

1. the president lies continuously and thereby misinforms the citizens of the nation.

2. the president routinely engages in the rhetoric of fascism. i am being literal/historical here, not figurative. our president’s rhetoric routinely features:

– violence (directly or by implication) speaking covertly to those numerous outlaw white male “brotherhoods” who glorify violence in the name of national salvation or racial purity;

– racial purity (directly or by implication) in the form of the threat immigrants present (‘nativism’ these days), thereby triggering the deep-seated emotional response all humans have to threats to their culture;

– national greatness, particularly as a return from a prior state of national weakness;

– the betrayal of the nation by any individual or group who criticizes the president or his policies;

– the extensive use of propaganda in speaking and communiques, enhanced by use of digital technology to infect citizens individually, independent of traditional print or electronic media communications that have been propagandized;

3. this president lacks the emotional competence and balance required of a president, an individual who is perforce in an extremely stressful position of power. the president’s emotional instability is a serious danger to the nation.

4. the president has repeatedly refused to accept the balance-of-power structure that is the basis of our american government (as clearly established in the constitution). he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge and accept the powers of the judiciary when they thwart his wishes; he refuses to accept the powers of the Congress when its laws thwart his wishes, or when it engages in its right to evaluate his performance. in these ways, the president seeks to make himself the only, or the master, political power in the nation – that is, its dictator.

5. the president does not accept personal responsibility for a decision he has made or a failure for which he is responsible. he continuously points attention to scapegoats.

the problem would be to turn these unacceptable behaviors of president trump into specific useable, investigatable charges in an impeachment document.

What I’m most worried about Barr is his defiance of law. It only works for him when he can twist it. Add the willingness of the GOP to now to Trump and thus my ultimate fear….Tump makes himself a dictator! Who’s to STOP him? Impeachment won’t work with the GOP votes. Who’s going to physically remove him when all of his admin. protect and agree with him completely get rid of the Dems? We are at a scary point. Its happened elsewhere and Trump has cheered them on in envy. If he does relinquish the seat or changes the rules to stay…then what. Barr will defend him as will the GOP. It’s very scary to think of.