How Garland-Whinger Ankush Khardori’s Willful Impotence Helps Trump Evade Accountability
There’s a telling quote from Greg Sargent in his description of Kamala Harris’ difficulties in convincing voters that Trump was a bad president.
Some Democrats believe that the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough of its enormous budget on advertising early on that might have reminded voters of the horrors of the Trump presidency. That perhaps allowed him to slowly rehabilitate himself and edge up his favorable numbers while Democrats weren’t looking.
“There was a calculation among Democrats after 2020 that Trump was disqualified and wouldn’t be back,” Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier told me. “That evolved into a calculation that he would be disqualified by his legal troubles and could end up in jail. Democrats undeniably failed to disqualify him. The result was that by the time the Harris campaign started, it was too late.”
“Was disqualified … would be disqualified … failed to disqualify.”
Bonier is just one person. But the passivity he describes on the part of Democrats expecting and hoping that some magic unicorn would just make the problem of Donald Trump go away is telling. As described, Democrats as a party apparently abdicated all agency for making that case themselves until it was far too late.
It is precisely the reason I’m so impatient with the Merrick Garland whinger industry, which has flourished again since Trump’s win: because they replicate precisely the impotence that got us here. They always asked that Garland do the work, singlehandedly, of making Trump go away, without considering the political groundwork that was necessary to any successful legal case.
Take Ankush Khardori’s description of Trump’s legal impunity. After laying out that, with his election, Trump’s legal troubles will now go away, with which I mostly agree, Khardori then lays out his three culprits: Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell, SCOTUS.
His culprits are not in temporal order; if McConnell — who had an immediate way to disqualify Trump from further office — had engaged in an impeachment effort, DOJ would have had more time to prosecute.
They’re not in order of culpability. He addresses SCOTUS’ actions in four paragraphs close to the end of his rant. He ignores how their interventions on the Colorado case and Fischer also affected DOJ’s options, and never mentions precisely how long they stalled the case: eight months, with a guarantee of more on the back end. Once you address SCOTUS’ delays and rewriting of the Constitution, it’s not clear a case could ever have been brought before an election, even ignoring how COVID stalled everything for a year, to say nothing of bringing an insurrection charge that would be (per the Colorado decision) the only thing that could disqualify Trump from office. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t matter whether Garland or a gun-toting Adam Schiff, as prosecutor, were in charge. SCOTUS’ intervention, assuming it would have been the same whether it happened in 2021 or 2022 or 2023, was decisive. Trump’s judges made a prosecution of him before the election impossible and further ruled that the only thing that could disqualify him was an insurrection charge.
Instead of focusing primarily on the main culprits, Khardori prioritizes what he imagines was Garland’s role over that of McConnell and — astonishingly — SCOTUS.
And as is typical with Garland whingers, his indictment of Garland is riddled with problems (and, as the red typeface I used to mark links to his own past pieces shows, his own bellybutton lint).
It is now clearer than ever that Garland was a highly questionable choice to serve as attorney general from the start. From the outset of the Biden presidency, it was readily apparent that Garland had little desire to investigate and potentially prosecute Trump.
The most comprehensive accounts on the matter, from investigative reporting at The Washington Post and The New York Times, strongly indicate that the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation and public hearings in 2022 effectively forced Garland to investigate Trump and eventually to appoint Smith in November of that year — nearly two years after Trump incited the riot at the Capitol.
There are many people — including many Democratic legal pundits — who have continued to defend this delay and may continue to do so, so let me be very clear: Those people are wrong.
It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.
It was also clear — on Jan. 6 itself — that Trump may have committed criminal misconduct after his loss in 2020 that required immediate and serious attention from the Justice Department.
The formation of the Jan. 6 committee in early 2021 did nothing to change the calculus. There too, it was clear from the start that there would still need to be a criminal investigation to deliver any meaningful legal accountability for Trump.
In fact, the warning signs for where this could all end up — where the country finds itself now — were clear by late 2021, less than a year into Biden’s term. The public reporting at the time indicated (correctly, we now know) that there was no real Justice Department investigation into Trump and his inner circle at that point, even though the outlines of a criminal case against Trump — including some of the charges themselves that were eventually brought nearly two years later — were already apparent.
As a result, the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department were running an extremely obvious risk — namely, that Trump would run for reelection and win, and that any meaningful criminal accountability for his misconduct after 2020 would literally become impossible. That, of course, has now happened. It was all eminently predictable.
Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.
This never made any sense.
It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.
The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.
As for Garland, his legacy is now out of his control, and the early returns are not looking good.
Garland is a serious, well-intentioned and complex figure. But given all this, he may go down as one of the worst and most broadly unpopular attorney generals in American history — hated by the anti-Trump part of the country for failing to bring Trump to justice, and hated by the pro-Trump part of the country for pursuing Trump at all. I sincerely hope he provides a first-hand accounting of what happened after he too leaves office next year.
The only sources of information on the investigation Khardori cites (aside from his own posts about what he could see without looking) are a WaPo and a NYT article. From both, only Glenn Thrush, a political journalist rehabilitated to the DOJ beat, covered the Trump case closely; none covered the larger investigation.
The WaPo article, which fairly obviously relies heavily on sources from the January 6 Committee members and people who left DOJ when Garland came in, has a number of problems I’ve laid out before (one, two, three).
- It missed the significance of Brandon Straka, whose “cooperation” I believe was mishandled, but had it not been, might have gotten you into the Willard in March 2021.
- It focused on the Oath Keepers and almost entirely ignores the Proud Boys, and in the process misunderstands the specific role they played, the ways DOJ under Bill Barr had made their prosecution far harder, and their importance to any hypothetical insurrection charge (because they kicked off the insurrection before Trump did, a problem impeachment prosecutors faced).
- It ignored the decisions DOJ made with Rudy Giuliani’s phone — which was seized with a warrant obtained on Lisa Monaco’s first day on the job — which made that content, including content J6C never got, available to DOJ starting in November 2021.
- It ignored the way DOJ, in August 2021, opportunistically used the prior Deferred Prosecution Agreement of Alex Jones sidekick Owen Shroyer to arrest and exploit the phone of someone who otherwise would likely be protected under media guidelines.
- It ignored the overt investigative steps against Sidney Powell taken no later than September 2021.
- It ignored a subpoena that was overt in May 2022, which included people who were not immediately a focus of J6C (and so not derivative of that investigation), as well as warrants dating no later than May 2022 targeting (among others) John Eastman. Since then, thanks to Khardori’s colleagues at Politico who do cover these investigations, we’ve learned the exact date that kicked off over ten months of Executive Privilege fights to get the testimony of 14 of Trump’s closest aides: June 15, 2022, one day before J6C interviewed those same witnesses: Marc Short and Greg Jacob. Which is to say, WaPo’s timeline even of known investigative steps is off in a way that suggests DOJ was entirely derivative of J6C, which it could not have been.
- Perhaps predictably, given the obvious reliance on J6C sources, it didn’t talk about how their decision to delay sharing transcripts from April until December 2022 withheld information both helpful and crucial from criminal investigators.
More importantly, WaPo focused on Steve D’Antuono’s hesitancy to turn to the fake electors, even as DOJ was pushing to do so. Which is to say that D’Antuono — someone no longer at DOJ — was the key cause for delay, not Garland.
So there are a lot of problems with the WaPo story that Khardori, if he had actually tracked the investigation or followed those of us (including Politico’s own reporters) who do, should have known.
But Khardori didn’t even need to do that to understand that the WaPo had blind spots. That’s because the NYT story describes two prongs of the investigation, started in 2021, that don’t make the WaPo. It describes that,
- Garland encouraged investigators to follow the money in his first meeting with them, though that turned out to be largely a dead end (note: Garland publicly implied that investigators were following the money in October 2021).
- By summer of 2021, Lisa Monaco convened a team focusing on John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudy, and Roger Stone.
The NYT story missed a lot of what I included above, too (though not the Proud Boys), but it tells a very different story about efforts to focus on people close to Trump in 2021 than the WaPo did.
In spite of the NYT description of two prongs of the investigation that started in March and summer 2021 that attempted to get directly to those in Trump’s orbit, Khardori spent four paragraphs of his complaint claiming that DOJ had exclusively tried to work their way up from rioters. That’s not what the public record shows, it’s not what NYT says happened, it’s not what public reports on the Powell subpoenas say, it’s not what Garland said in October 2021 testimony. And yet that is the basis Khardori uses to condemn Garland. Further, the NYT describes that, in his first meeting with investigators, Garland, “said he would place no restrictions on their work, even if the ‘evidence leads to Trump,'” That statement is inconsistent with most of Khardori’s first two paragraphs on Garland. The Attorney General told investigators from the start he had no problem investigating Trump. Yet Khardori still links his own past work and claims vindication, rather than confessing that, if the NYT piece he relies on is accurate, he was wrong.
Which is to say, Khardori doesn’t claim to (and shows no signs of) having reviewed how the investigation actually happened. That’s not his job, I guess, as a legal journalist. Instead, he relies on two sources, one of which partly debunks the other, as well as countering his own claim about Garland’s unwillingness to investigate and his four-paragraph argument that Garland should have pursued multiple routes to Trump but did not.
There are facts. And Khardori chooses to ignore them, clinging instead to past assertions that he falsely claims have been vindicated.
It’s the most irresponsible kind of laziness. Without having learned what really happened, Khardori concocts out of his uncertainty and frustration broad judgements that support his priors but are inconsistent with the public record. Via that invented theory to explain the scary unknown, Merrick Garland remains his primary villain, not John Roberts, not Mitch McConnell.
Poof! Thousands of clicks, each time misleading another despondent reader, encouraging helplessness.
Having made Garland his villain, he proclaims defeat.
I am, if anything, more furious than Khardori that Trump will not face legal accountability for his alleged crimes, because I know the kind of insurrectionists whose likely pardons will effectively flip patriotism on its head, valorizing Trump over country. This is a potentially irreparable blow to rule of law in the US.
But I’m not ready, as Khardori seems to be, to concede defeat. That’s because legal accountability is not the only recourse; indeed, we were never going to get legal accountability without first demanding political accountability. That’s the mistake many made: by looking passively at Merrick Garland and begging for a sparkle unicorn to make Trump go away, many failed to take steps, themselves, to hold Republicans to account for abandoning rule of law.
Consider how Khardori disempowers himself elsewhere in his column. Here’s how he describes Jack Smith’s closure of the case.
Already there is reporting suggesting that special counsel Jack Smith will leave his post and dismiss the pending cases, which is not that surprising considering that Trump pledged to fire him once back in office anyway.
He describes this as driven by Trump’s threat to fire Jack Smith, not DOJ regulations that prohibit further prosecution. He doesn’t link or consider any of the reports that lay out the obvious: by stepping down rather than waiting to get fired, Smith obliges himself to write a report. He chooses how he will go out. Admittedly, Khardori published his piece before last week’s filing that suggests we’ll have, at least, clarity by early December which, if it were the actual report, would (among other things) be early enough to hold a hearing.
That’s not going to change Trump’s win. But it provides an opportunity to lay a marker in the sand: This is what Republicans have chosen to enable going forward. This is what Republicans have chosen as a party to become.
It lays a marker for the two other villains in Khardori’s column: McConnell and the other Senate Republicans who refused to convict Trump, and John Roberts and his colleagues who vastly expanded his power without even knowing what Jack Smith had discovered.
Fresh off a big electoral victory, I doubt any will much care. But when the obvious repercussions come — when a guy who stored nuclear documents in a coat closet further compromises US security — the report and the hearing provide a marker that those who failed to stop Trump were warned and chose to do nothing (or worse, on the part of SCOTUS, chose to give him more power).
One of the only remaining possible checks on Trump’s power are the people in the Senate and SCOTUS who failed to check him on these alleged crimes before (though SCOTUS did check some of his other initiatives the first time around). We won’t soon persuade any of them to change their minds. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying — or at least laying a record of their complicity. In that path lies capitulation.
All the more so given that Roberts and his colleagues will be the villains in many more stories that have direct impact on people’s lives going forward.
Donald Trump is about to do a great deal of outrageous things at the start of his term to reverse the treatment of January 6 as a crime. The response cannot be to say, ho hum, if only that awful Merrick Garland would have yelled louder, and give up, especially not when no amount of yelling was going to change what SCOTUS did.
The response is to stop hoping for a sparkle unicorn to do this work for us. The response is to take some agency for making the case about Donald Trump. And a first step in that process is to stop blaming Garland for things — the public record shows — he didn’t do, and especially to stop blaming Garland for things that more important villains, like John Roberts, did do.
The first step to effective accountability is to identify the actual villain.
Khardori emphasizes that Jack Smith might resign because Trump promised to fire him, personalizing a complex decision. Horse manure.
If Smith resigns, it would be because Trump has promised to shut down his investigations and, presumably, destroy the evidentiary record he’s compiled. And because DoJ guidelines prohibit prosecution of a sitting president. If he resigns while Garland remains AG, he should get his report published. That alone is reason enough to resign, given the odds against completing his work.
Indeed. It’s an insult to Jack Smith to suggest he would obey in advance (work towards the führer) by resigning because Trump wants to fire him.
Speaking of inaccurate and ho-hum press reactions to Trump’s lies, Project 2025’s authors appear to be gloating that the rubes believed their lie that the core of Trump’s policy agenda would “not” be built on Project 2025. Of course it will. No one believed them, but they’re taking a victory lap anyway, to a yawning, ho-hum press reaction.
The closest analogy I can think of is Lyndon Johnson pretending he would not dramatically expand the war in SE Asia; or Richard Nixon’s promises to end that war, while keeping it going. The press did not react kindly to it, but the truth came out in fits and starts over several years.
But can you imagine an earlier press corps’ reaction to, say, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama admitting within days that the central policies they campaigned on were lies, and that they were going to do the exact opposite?
https://www.rawstory.com/project-25-trump-2669744630/1
Thank you so much again, Marcy. All your hard work on all of this has been amazing. I keep saying, “We have two months.” Keep the pressure on.
Of course there are holidays. Jack Smith seems to keep working every day. I imagine the Biden admin won’t be taking time off either.
While I agreed with the notion that the solution to Trump and Trumpists was political rather than legal, I had hoped that the criminal cases would reveal details about the attempted coup and the documents case that politicians could use.
Biden and Harris were in a difficult position. How do they address Trump’s culpability without jeopardizing the criminal cases and without being vulnerable to Republican attacks that DOJ was partisan? In the week before the election, Biden referred to Trump as a felon and corrected himself. And Republicans had a field day.
Perhaps Harris could have made more use of what the NY state court cases said about Trump’s fraudulent business practices. Or, perhaps hammered Trump for reckless handling of national defense secrets. But Harris only had a limited amount of time to make both the negative and the positive case.
As for alleged delay by the DOJ, it seems clear that Garland and Smith were making haste, but carefully, in order to have the best chance at success. Whether there was adequate and timely cooperation between the Jan. 6th Committee and the DOJ is not yet fully known.
As far as the documents case is concerned, Trump strung National Archives and the FBI along for a year. Maybe that could have been shortened. And, now, in retrospect, it seems that the Republican majority was always going to hamper the prosecution.
All the more reason not to let the release of a report, if there is one, to waste.
I don’t know of any good reason not to publish it all with as few redactions as possible.
Doesn’t a federal judge have to agree to release Grand Jury testimony?
And perhaps there would be some “redaction failures” – after all, accidents happen. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/judicial/publications/judges_journal/2019/spring/embarrassing-redaction-failures/
I appreciate that the substance and thrust of this piece is about
“Democrats expecting and hoping that some magic unicorn would just make the problem of Donald Trump go away” and the revival of the whinge industry around Merrick Garland.
It is also worthy of note that Greg Sargent is decidedly not being wise after the event in the quoted piece from 9 Nov 24
The “Some Democrats” in the opening quote [‘Some Democrats believe that the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough…’]
Contains an embedded link to Sargent’s 11 Oct 24 article
https://newrepublic.com/article/187094/harris-future-forward-2024-election
And it is worthwhile reading both pieces together IMHO, because while he is keen in the earlier piece to present the disputes as reasonable intra-party discussions, it is also fairly clear that the Harris team were frustrated by the foot dragging of the Super PAC on issues that turned out to be crucial particularly in defining Trump, and particularly in targeting male voters of color.
There sure are a lot of Dems being after-the-fact (ATF) armchair quarterbacks/campaign experts.
Most. Progressives I know are very early in the five (or so) stages of grief – denial (and disbelief) and negotiating (looking up immigration policies in Canada). This is not where we do our best thinking.
I’m currently at the third stage + anger. Your mileage may vary.
Writers like Dr. Wheeler are helping me a lot.
Brian Greer, Secrets and Laws:
https://bsky.app/profile/secretsandlaws.bsky.social/post/3lah6pomxzl2a
November 8, 2024 at 11:23 AM
11/8/24 8:04 AM ROSENSTEIN Xeets: CNN article/2020 PHOTO of TRUMP and ROBERTS, writing:
^^^ BWAHAHAHAHA
This is the CNN article:
As Trump grasps unprecedented power, the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity looms large https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/08/politics/trump-grasps-unprecedented-power-supreme-court-immunity/index.html John Fritze, CNN 12:01 AM EST, Fri November 8, 2024
ROSENSTEIN is actually quoting himself [with one major change] in the article:
In the XEET, he writes didn’t prosecute NOT didn’t investigate”
^^^ This is what Republicans have chosen to enable going forward. This is what Republicans have chosen as a party to become. [quoting Marcy above]
Also, just love that “probably”!
“Probably”. Wow.
Whistle, meet graveyard.
There is a step missing between “unknown Democrats believed Trump would be ineligbile or whatever”, and it is not “she didn’t condemn hard enough”. The missing step is the explanation why Trump’s campaign succeded. He did his level best to show what is under the mask, and a majority of voters just didn’t care. His core of what, 35%, clearly revel in the telling it like it is, so the remainder either agree or consider it irrelevant.
And yeah, everybody not on board the train want a magic unicorn to “deal” with Trump, even Republicans, few though they may be. The eventual judgement may be that “institutionalists” put far too much faith in institutions and norms to,at least mitigate or contain the damage. The alternative was not to indict harder, it was to take a carving knife, if not an axe, to those institutions, and I can’t see any evidence that would have worked the way everyone assumes it would.
TFG is a convicted sexual predator and a convicted fraud businessman. It is also quite apparent from his own words that he stole classified documents. It should also be apparent to any one paying even a little attention that he is a compulsive liar, and a racist. The voters that voted for him and those that did not vote for Harris deserve a full share of the responsibility for his re-election and escaping responsibility for his crimes.
Isn’t the problem that many who were paying attention were paying attention to legacy and social media sources that were little better than propaganda sources?
And if they tuned into legacy media that weren’t right wing outlets, like The NY Times and Washington Post, they got a bewildering array of false equivalences and both sides do it mixed in with flattering articles of bad actors in order to maintain access. And, then, for the most part, they covered trials in NY almost as an afterthought and usually only when Trump showed up in court. Those trial showed what a business fraud he was and that he was a morally corrupt man who sexually assaulted women and hung out with a prostitute while Melania was home caring for the baby.
The challenge is to break through the garbage.
Occam’s razor sorts out chaff.
the sex assault case was civil not criminal so not a conviction
Adjudicated. Whatever. He’s a rapist.
Yes. There’s a HUGE difference between “he is not a rapist” and “she had her eyes closed, so couldn’t state that it was not Trump’s finger”.
And that second part is what the judge had to work with, during the trial.
And as the Judge noted, sexual assault by penetration is rape in the law of most states, and is rape in common parlance. So describing Trump as a rapist is true on the jury’s findings of fact and verdicts and thus it is not defamatory to refer to Trump as a rapist.
Well look at this MAGAsite who just bubbled up out of the ooze: Mark PAOLETTA
Trump transition figure warns DOJ lawyers: Get on board or get out Mark Paoletta says the new administration won’t tolerate Justice Department “resistance” to the president-elect’s policy goals. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/11/11/congress/mark-paoletta-justice-department-lawyers-00188772 Josh Gerstein 11/11/2024, 11:00am ET
PAOLETTA is closely connected to Clarence and Ginny THOMAS,
and also a former counsel to PENCE and OMB during TRUMP 1.
An article and infamous photo of PAOLETTA with Harlan CROWE at his mountain getaway, along with Clarence [Insurrectionist Spouse] THOMAS, Leonard LEO and Peter RUTLEDGE:
Antonin Scalia Hunted So Clarence Thomas Could Cruise A Brief History of Apparent Corruption on the Court https://www.nycsouthpaw.com/p/antonin-scalia-hunted-so-clarence LUPPE B. LUPPEN [nycsouthpaw] APR 21, 2023
Described as a hard charging conservative.
At OMB:
1 overruled objections from officials at both the OMB and the Department of Defense to delay U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.
2 helped craft the Trump administration’s legal justifications to restrict billions of dollars worth of disaster aid to Puerto Rico.
3 helped build the Trump administration’s legal reasoning behind its effort to divert funding for the Department of Defense to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Federal employees are statutorily required to swear under oath to “well and faithfully discharge” the duties of their office, which includes the duty to “support and defend the Constitution… against all enemies, foreign and domestic,”
Career DoJ lawyers, for example, are required to offer their best advice about what the law means, how to comply with it, and the consequences for failing to do so. They cannot follow or commit to follow illegal orders of the president or any other person or government officer.
Trump and his courtiers will work hard to pretend that that’s not true. They will try to hide the obligations that actually bind public employees, and remove from the public’s consciousness that their oath of office takes precedence over any illegal order from the president. That is especially true for those in the military.
The requirement for that oath originates in the Constitution, though the exact text originates in a statute (5 USC Sec. 3331).
Good luck to Mike Johnson, who takes the same oath, along with every other congresscritter, when he tries to obey Trump’s demand to put loyalty to him above loyalty to the Constitution. In fact, good luck even trying to revise the oath via legislation. That would out their game.
To be honest, I’d support revising the oath to say “all enemies, whether domestic or foreign, and especially domestic enemies under the thumb of foreign enemies” but that works better as a counteroffer if Johnson DOES try to revise it.
I think you mean good luck to us, finding anyone who will enforce that oath.
Federal civil service workers will be reclassified as political appointees if Trump gets his way.
Trump’s plan to ensure loyalty among the American officer corps is very Roman: appoint a board, to give Trump some bureaucratic deniability, and decimate those unwilling to sign a new oath of loyalty to him, which overrides any other.
Next up will be for political commissars, known as Millers, to be appointed as deputy commandants of the military academies. If that doesn’t work, Elmo will disband them as a cost-saving move.
Jack Smith never got around to indicting elected officials in Congress who aided in the planning and execution of the insurrection. Most of them remain in office and have no desire to face justice. The Department of Justice under Trump will have no interest in applying the rule of law to anyone who supported the insurrection. Who knows what will come of the evidence they have accumulated, but I won’t be surprised if they have a large bonfire that darkens the skies of the DC.
He couldn’t find a good way to get around the Speech and Debate clause, which protects them even in cases of seditious speech.
S&D covers a lot of ground but it is not impossible to beat, look at how many Congresscritters have been busted for various forms of corruption while in office. Then again, Aaron Burr got away with murder by duel because of congressional immunity.
From the Khardori article, as quoted by Marcy:
I think someone who cannot distinguish between what is in prosecutors’ power and what belongs to the courts shouldn’t publish on legal matters. Prosecutors can withdraw their indictments, only courts can dismiss cases.
Even the tweet Khardori cites in his sentence (“there is reporting”) has it right: “… his [Smiths] two federal criminal cases will be withdrawn …”
I should have gone to the original Politico site before writing my comment. Then I would have known that Khardori is a former federal prosecutor and as a lawyer may well write about legal matters. I prefer accuracy of terms nevertheless.
(And I apologize for the missing apostrophe in my post above. The editing minutes seem unavailable at this time. I hope this is the case only temporarily.)
I’m not certain what the problem was with the editing window; you should have had 4 minutes in which to tweak your comment.
Please let me know if you experience this again apart from being the fifth reply in a thread.
Thank you for your friendly reply. I think I found the answer to the problem — it’s on my side. I temporarily used an out-dated browser for getting access to some older files on my PC, which can’t be read by the current browsers. Then I forgot to switch back.
I’m sorry to have bothered you with this, and apologize.
[Thanks for sharing that info, could be helpful in the event other commenters experience a similar problem. /~Rayne]
The editing window worked at 3:16 this afternoon.
Allegory
Don’t let him do your inventory
He can’t keep track of this score, he
can’t follow facts and what’s more, he
pollutes the truth for his own glory
He’s conjured up some fallacious story
He’s lost the thread and category
His logic is so weak and poor, he
produces what’s hallucinatory
Garland bashers assist Putin in his attack on the DOJ and IntSec. Their information pool is polluted and they don’t bother acquainting themselves with public, easy to find facts. It’s reporters like these that are projecting their own failings of weakness and cowardice onto Garland. And they spread that like a virus. And by this they are being complicit with Putin and the Gang Of Pirates. It’s sickening to me.
But last Tuesday’s result was too easily predictable, it seems. Chris Hedges’ 2010 book “Death of the Liberal Class” has, in its final chapter, a prediction of why Democrats are bound to fail, a possibility strengthened by the billionaires’ control of media (especially social media). Jaron Lanier (quoted by Hedges) could see the dangers back in the oughts. If you want to see where the Dems failed when it mattered most, that’s a good one to read. “When we fight, we win” — but did we fight? Not sure we did; male/white voters chose to give Trump unlimited power instead of Kamala. Hers was a beautiful campaign, though. In a rational world, she would have won.
But of course much of this doom was known long before 2010. In 1965’s “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” we read in a letter given in Chapter 1:
Now, as Hedges, suggests, the voices of resistance will be sidelined and sequestered within fiefdoms of the digital realms; opposition will be “cyberbalkanized”. In the meantime, the CO2 ppm in the atmosphere will likely soar past not just 350 but 1000 ppm, as there was no (and will not be any) political will to prevent it.
May all who read this resist, passively and nonviolently, all cruelties of the coming times.
“In the meantime, the CO2 ppm in the atmosphere will likely soar past not just 350 but 1000 ppm, as there was no (and will not be any) political will to prevent it.”
added to by the launching of musk’s and bezo’s rockets, each one of which adds pollutants (soot and water vapor) to the upper atmosphere where they catch and hold heat.
Waiting for the day Musk’s myriad satellites trigger a Kessler syndrome catastrophe and everything reliant on GPS utterly fails along with communications dependent on satellites.
Might actually cause a massive unintended collapse of consumption on earth.
Fun fact: the USN gold standard for navigation is celestial (think sextants and the like) but for a while it was GPS until the Pentagon understood that the GPS links were indeed vulnerable to attack.
Yeah, well, good luck tracking with a sextant the essential medical equipment you ordered shipping via FedEx/UPS/USPS if GPS goes down.
Elmo will have invented a new game: 52,000 card pick-up.
not to worry. Lee Zelden, newly nominated to head the EPA, will take care of it all. Trump says he will “…ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions” favorable to business while “maintaining the highest environmental standards.”
The fascists and toadies are coming out in droves. Sen. Marco Rubio for Sec’y of State.
https://www.rawstory.com/marco-rubio-2669804562/
Originally from the NYT (paywalled):
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/us/politics/trump-rubio-secretary-of-state.html
Richard Grenell, serial violator of the Logan Act on Trump’s behalf, has also been lobbying for Sec of State.
Apparently it is Rubio. While the Rs are +6 in the Senate, it will not take more than a couple of flips to drag them down. As it is, a narrow majority is still a majority and the blame will get heaped upon them when the tariffs trash the supply chain leading to economic wreckage. For me, the fact that Elno kept harping that pain would be necessary to achieve ‘efficiency’ was a tell that this WH will not care.
The other thing about a narrow majority is that the rules package becomes important for the chamber. Will the Senate keep the 60-vote cloture rule? Will the House have the single vote trigger to vacate the chair (not that it matters, the MAGA caucus will be too large for any reasonable limit and will not tolerate being frozen out)? Hakeem Jeffries will know what to do with this, I think and with Stefanik going to the UN the margin gets smaller.
Note for Elise, how did the UN Ambassador job work out for Nikki?.
Grenell should probably have been under investigation for violation of the Logan Act based on the crap he’s been doing particularly in Central America.
And in the Balkans
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/wireStory/serbian-leader-speaks-trump-pointing-serb-support-us-115726312
Vucic decorated Grenell with a high medal of honor in 2023 for “distinguished merit in developing and strengthening peaceful cooperation and friendly relations between Serbia and the U.S.”
He was awarded the Order of the Serbian Flag, 1st Class. The second highest award in Serbian Order of Honors ( the highest Order being Order of the Republic of Serbia) the Order had existed since 2009
Russians Shoygu, Lavrov, and Vitaly Churkin (posthumously after mysterious death in New York Feb 2017) have received the same award 2012,2016, 2017
Of the two regions, Grenell’s bullshit unauthorized diplomacy in Central America may have done more immediate damage.
At some point I should hunt down data on estimated numbers of undocumented persons entering across the southern US border mapped against Grenell’s “diplomacy.”
Marcy mentioned Serbia here:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/01/17/the-disappearing-willard-hotel-and-the-accused-seditionists-other-interlocutors/
And puppy killer Kristi Noem is expected to lead the DHS, which includes the USSS and other armed federal agencies. The pathology is strong with this one, Obi Won.
Apologies to the Force, Obi-Wan.
It just keeps getting better. According to the Daily Beast, Alabama Senator, Katie Britt, is floating the idea of Lara Trump as the perfect replacement for Marco Rubio.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-senator-katie-britt-floats-lara-trump-to-fill-marco-rubios-florida-vacancy/
I thought they were looking for a safe House seat for Lara Trump, so that she could be named Speaker by proclamation, and thus become next in line to the throne behind the JD Vance, the Prince of Dankness.
When JD resigns to spend more time with his family, owing to his not being careful enough in conducting his weekly canvassing of which Cabinet members would follow his lead in using the 25th Amendment, Lara can step into his shoes. She probably has enough eyeliner to look the part. /s
John Ratcliffe for CIA director.
Mostly OT* – but since Savage Librarian commented this p.m. (and I just saw EOH’s) – anyone surprised to see how many of the 2025 brain trust are from NY and FL? Takes me back to when we were waiting for the results of 2000 to be resolved in the latter, the republican candidate’s brother its governor. (*except for the indictment in FLSD)
On topic – I find comfort in the thought that the current administration has more knowledge of what is going on than we can reasonably determine ourselves.
I can’t help but wonder: wasn’t there enough evidence by the time Garland took office that he could have appointed a special counsel immediately? IDK the rules, but were all the stuff you point out needed just to appoint someone to lead and coordinate the investigation?
If Garland had immediately appointed a special counsel, the Republicans – who knew he was guilty because they admitted it during the impeachment – may well have looked into the future and decided they didn’t want to back someone who would be embroiled in a high profile investigation and not welcomed him back. So they wouldn’t have rehabilitated him with the “it was just a peaceful protest” propaganda and not put their weight behind the Stop the Steal big lie.
Mostly OK with this, noting that the docs case had to go through the NARA process to get them returned first. However, the last point made is doubtful to me because the MAGA bloc is too large to risk alienating in a primary, and by 2020 it was clear MAGAts knew how to ditch politicians they did not like (i.e. Liz Cheney). Realistically, what we see is entirely unsurprising if the goal for a politico is to stay in office.
The decision making factors regarding appointment of SC are set out in
Special Counsel Regulations
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/28/600.1
I reproduce the regulation and add in [•] [••][•••], [*] [**] to help delineate the factors in the decision
28 CFR § 600.1 Grounds for appointing a Special Counsel.
The Attorney General, or in cases in which the Attorney General is recused, the Acting Attorney General,
will appoint a Special Counsel when he or she determines
[•] that criminal investigation of
[*] a person or
[**] matter
is warranted
and—
[••] (a) That investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by
[*] a United States Attorney’s Office or
[**] litigating Division of the Department of Justice
would present
[*] a conflict of interest for the Department or
[**] other extraordinary circumstances;
and
[•••] (b) That under the circumstances, it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.
To add:
the decision to appoint a special counsel adds to the historical record of departmental decision making in the area and adds to the body of precedent within departmental practice.
So such decisions affect not only the immediate instance but also helps shape how such decisions are made in future cases.
Whether a set of circumstances represents “a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances” is not to be determined lightly:
it represents to the world, that the circumstances demand an acceptance, the ordinary structures of the DOJ are not sufficiently independent politically (or otherwise) to properly and ethically deal with the matter as it stands; and additional safeguards, I.e. additional inputs of independent judgment and control as provided by a SC, are necessary and appropriate.
I blame our collective ability to memory-hole even the most outrageous events. In my opinion the death of Ashli Babbitt should have been the key event used to disqualify Trump. Instead, we allowed Trump to rally support for himself by painting Babbitt as a murder victim, not a victim of Trump’s depraved indifference that motivated her to “storm” our Capitol and be the first of the mob to breech the Speaker’s lobby.
On one side of the barricaded door was a large mob calling for the deaths of Pence and Pelosi. On the other side was a handful of law enforcement as the last defense. Lives were saved by taking out the first person coming through the broken glass window. You don’t wait to after a bunch of the mob is inside before using force. I think we erred by investigating the use of force by Officer Byrd and keeping his name a secret. It should have been ruled justified immediately based on the video. The focus should have been on Trump’s deliberate push to get people like Babbitt to DC on January 6th based on a criminal web of lies.
How is it that a dead woman’s blood in our Capitol, and a coordinated attack endangering the VP and Speaker, was less a factor of this election than transgender inmates getting medical treatment? And how will Trump handle Babbitt’s death going forward, now that he has succeeded in re-writing the history surrounding her death?
He’ll do the same thing to Babbitt that he did to war dead in the Arlington National Cemetery. Stand on her grave with smile and thumbs up alongside MAGAs.
This is all because the MAGA are substantially better at defining the narrative, because they are completely comfortable with telling LIES.
Looks like the face eating has begun:
Ruth Marcus in WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/11/trump-senate-recess-appointments-powergrab/
Trump already threatened to invoke this constitutional provision, unused for nearly 250 years, in order to get his way. WTF would it surprise anyone that he might start Trump 2.0 with it?
Despite the millions Trump has made claiming otherwise, he’s among the world’s worst negotiators. He will do whatever he can to avoid revealing it by working or negotiating with a tame, GOP-controlled Senate.
Note to Durbin and Schumer. All those nice Senate norms — like blue slips and the filibuster rule — you’ve clung to without getting your jobs done will be out the window as fast as a journalist who’s displeased Vladimir Putin, when the GOP takes over. You have two months. Get to work. Approve those federal judges and other appointees, whose jobs will survive the transition.
I recall trump saying months ago that he could suspend congress & do whatever he wants. At this point in time & actually from the moment trump was considered a viable nominee for president I have had serious doubts that the founding fathers had any good or common sense at all. Too much “freedom” sucks. From what I can remember it was the ACLU advocating free speech for nazis that paved the road we’re on. My personal observation for the democrat’s downfall is it started when Obama gave Wall Street a bailout & trump was making obvious political moves. That bailout was outrageous & the consequences for the citizens was never even addressed. That alone was an earthshaking event of enormous import. Did he choose to bail out the white overlords because a black president bailing out actual real people would be perceived as helping blacks more than whites? My republican husband has for years been harping on that being the motivation of any black with any political power & he’s been a bellwether for the republican agenda. My ‘mileage’ varies considerably, needless to say.
“though SCOTUS did check some of his other initiatives the first time around” —
Given SCOTUS’ immunity ruling, which Roberts authored, I am curious to know how much it can check a Trump initiative. Have Roberts and his conservative fellow travelers rendered themselves irrelevant by preemptively immunizing Trump’s official acts? Can’t he just ignore any decision they issue?
Zirc
I haven’t read this yet from Steve Vladeck…
https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.social/post/3laqvx7j3cs26
November 12, 2024 at 8:13 AM
Will the Supreme Court Stand Up to Trump? Can It?
Steve Vladeck Nov. 12, 2024