Never pass up a chance to sit down or relieve yourself. -old Apache saying

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Joyce Vance

This column is from Joyce Vance, an MSNBC contributor. 

Trump's obstruction of justice criminal referral matters. And prosecutors know it.

People don’t just obstruct justice in a vacuum. They obstruct to conceal other crimes.

After 18 months of work, weeks of anticipation and several days of delays, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrectionfinally released its massive report on Dec. 22. The pages and pages of evidence, exposition and witness statements offer a very in-depth look at the Capitol violence, and former President Donald Trump’s role in it. The report also highlights a major theme of Trump’s tenure in the White House: obstruction of justice.

While not quite as high-end of a crime as inciting insurrection, obstruction of justice is a key pain point for the justice system. It’s no wonder that Trump allies have been trying for years to dismiss obstruction as too insignificant for prosecutors. That perception must change.

As early as 2018, Trump’s buddies began to undermine the idea that obstruction of justice was a crime. As public allegations against Trump became more serious, Rush Limbaugh famously complainedthat obstruction was just a “process crime,” a cry that others subsequently took up as well. Michael Anton, former spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council, complained about special counsel Robert Mueller’s pursuit of  a “process” crime on Fox News that November.

(a Tweet appears here in the Original.)

Lawyers know that getting the process right is important to winning a case, even if process issues themselves are often viewed annoyances. But Limbaugh was not a prosecutor. And to prosecutors, obstruction of justice is serious business, a matter of substance, not process. The range of potential crimes, and different ways justice can be obstructed, are expansive — for good reason.

Even former President Richard Nixon, for all of his sins, did not want to be accused of obstruction justice. In his famous, “I am not a crook” speech, he contended, “in all my years of public life, I’ve never obstructed justice.”

If people who commit crimes take the subsequent step of trying to cover them up, a series of provisions in the federal criminal code permit prosecutors to indict, under the umbrella of obstruction. There are statutes prohibiting people who buy off witnesses, ship them out of town to keep them from testifying, or harm them. These statutes also address people who tamper with or destroy evidence or try to interfere with an investigation being conducted by the legislative or executive branch. Attempting to obstruct, even if unsuccessful, is a crime.208

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So, the notion that obstruction is, merely, an unimportant “process crime” runs contrary to foundational notions in our legal system. And yet dismissing it in that offhand fashion is very Trumpian. If you cannot legitimately deny something, argue it’s not important.

Special counsel Robert Mueller laid out 10 instances of obstruction by Trump in a 2019 report, at least five of which I believe should have been prosecutable, including Trump firing FBI director James Comey, trying to fire Mueller and trying to ensure his White House counsel lied about trying to fire Mueller. We don’t know why Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice did not proceed against Trump for those allegations, as Mueller had made it clear that once out of office, Trump could be prosecuted. Perhaps Garland and others harbored a misplaced hope that after leaving office, Trump would retreat from public life and democracy would be best served by permitting him to do so. But in hindsight, it’s clear that allowing Trump to get away with obstruction only emboldens him.

Now, the House committee has laid out a clear case for indicting Trump on obstruction charges connected to Jan. 6. His alleged crime, obstructing an official proceeding, fits the publicly known evidence in an eerily precise fashion, almost as though the crime was designed for his conduct. Trump wanted to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s electoral college victory and took a series of steps up to and including demanding that his vice president, Mike Pence, interfere with the proceedings before watching and doing nothing for 187 minutes as the mob he had summoned overran the Capitol and prevented the certification of the vote from taking place. It is, as they say, in the heartland of the crime.

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Obstruction is also part of Trump’s conduct that is under investigation at Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors are investigating whether Trump may have violated the Espionage Act and mishandled classified documents. That happened after the former president’s office claimed Trump had previously turned over all documents bearing classification markings. Obstruction seems to be a consistent presence in Trumpworld.

Fifth. Fifth. Fifth. Trump allies answered the Jan. 6 committee questions with the same chorus — at least those who showed up pursuant to their subpoenas. When asked about issues like whether they spoke with Trump in the days ahead of the insurrection (Stone), whether they worked for the Justice Department (Clark) and whether they believed in the peaceful transfer of power (Flynn), their non-answers were the same. Everyone has a constitutional right to decline to testify when a truthful answer might incriminate them. But law enforcement investigations shouldn’t end when a witness invokes this right; if anything, it should spur them on to additional investigation.

And evidence is emerging that at least one Jan. 6 witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, was counseled to have a bad memory, groomed to potentially obstruct in ways that wouldn’t be easily recognizable or prosecutable, had she not had a turn of conscience and decided to cooperate. As the committee releases additional transcripts, it is clear that while Hutchinson ultimately decided to come clean, the same may not be true for all witnesses.

People don’t just obstruct justice in a vacuum. They obstruct to conceal other crimes. Here, the possible crimes include inciting to obstruct a congressional proceeding because Donald Trump wanted to stay in power after the voters told him no. That’s not just a “process crime.” And DOJ would do well to take up the mantle the Jan. 6 committee has handed them and hold Trump (and his friends) accountable. 


Original.

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Nature's Extremes

Dan Rather continues to be a positive, steady voice for science and humanity.  You can subscribe to his occasional writings below.

Nature's Extremes

Learning to live with them

Thursday, December 22, 2022

COP15

Well, it is SOMETHING, but we should be well on our way by now.

7 reasons our planet might not be doomed after all

Surprise! This environmental story is actually not depressing.

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

"Open Borders" myth

It does sure seem coincidental that whenever Democrats are up for re-election or in the midterms, suddenly there is a surge of migrants at our southern border. Turns out it's not just coincidental. Is there no depth too low for the GOP to stoop?

Who on Earth would want to send thousands of desperate people to our Southern border just in time for every midterm facing a Democratic president? Who would be that crass and cynical?


Just a month ago we finished President Biden’s first midterm election and, as predictably as the sun rises in the east, right around election time and for the months afterward a wave of refugees and immigrants have shown up at our southern border.

This happens every two years when a Democratic President is in office. And finally the US news media seems to be getting a clue as to why. More about that in a moment.

Notwithstanding Fox “News” hysteria about a “caravan” of immigrants heading for the border during Obama’s last year as president, in the months leading up to the 2016 election, by that time, as Politico noted:

“In fiscal year 2017, the last year of the Obama administration and the first of Trump’s, 303,916 migrants were arrested by the Border Patrol. This was the lowest level in more than three decades.”

The last big “surge” was two years earlier, five months before President Obama’s second 2014 midterm elections. You may remember when the southern border was suddenly overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of immigrants and refugees and it was all over the news with apprehensions at 220,000, up from just 96,000 the non-election year before.

The crush of people “somebody” had sent to the United States was so intense Obama had to declare it an “urgent humanitarian situation,” thus enabling him to mobilize more resources to block or deal with the seemingly-unending stream of desperate humanity.

The same thing happened, mysteriously, during Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign; the severity of the border crisis during that election year led to President Obama taking executive actions that included creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and an expansion of provisional waivers.

Who sent them and why do they so conveniently and predictably arrive just in time for elections (and echo for a few months afterwards)?

During Obama’s first midterm election, the fall and winter of 2010, another “sudden wave” of immigrants provoked Arizona to put into law the notorious “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.” 

It famously allowed Arizona police to stop and even arrest people they suspected may look like “illegal immigrants,” and required police to investigate the immigration status of all persons detained. It was so odious that four of its major provisions were declared unconstitutional two years later by fellow Republicans on the US Supreme Court.

The wave of immigrants who hit our border in 1998, Bill Clinton’s last midterm election, was so severe that he initiated the Border Safety Initiative (BSI) and cut a joint-cooperation deal with Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo. 

Four years earlier, the surge that showed up for the 1994 midterm election caused Clinton to produce and implement the first Border Patrol Strategic Plan.

Who on Earth would want to send desperate thousands of people to our Southern border just in time for every midterm facing a Democratic president? Who would be that crass and cynical?

ABC host and reporter Martha Raddatz interviewed Texas Governor Greg Abbott last weekend. As if on cue, he insisted the sudden tsunami of immigrants and refugees on his state’s southern border was all Biden’s fault. 

But — finally, after decades! — a reporter had heard enough Republican bullshit about immigration and the border.

(video at link below)

“You talk about the border wall, you talk about open borders,” Raddatz said to Abbott, “but I don’t think I've ever heard President Biden say, ‘we have an open border, come on over.’

“But people I have heard say it are you, are former President Trump, Ron DeSantis; that message reverberates in Mexico and beyond. So they doget the message that it is an ‘open border,’ and smugglers use all those kinds of statements.”

Bingo.

Whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House, literally hundreds of Republican politicians step up to the microphone or tell their local newspapers and radio stations about how the president has suddenly “opened up America’s southern border!!!”

It’s a lie, but they amplify it as hard as they can. 

Those news stories and press releases make their way via social media and the internet to desperate people in Venezuela, Central America, and Mexico. Impoverished people there aren’t knowledgeable enough about American politics to see the message for the cynical political ploy it is, so they abandon home and family to begin the dangerous and often deadly trek to the US.

Democrats don’t say our borders are open, and, as far as I can tell, never have. In March of 2021 the rightwing Washington Examiner newspaper went on a search for Democrats proclaiming that we’d “opened!” the southern border in the first months of Joe Biden’s presidency.

They found nothing. Well, they found that both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had called the situation on our southern border “a crisis,” as well as a Democratic congresswoman from Michigan who was merely acknowledging the surge of immigrants. And a single Democratic mayor in Texas who also said it was a crisis. That’s it.

But literally hundreds of Republican politicians, just like they do every two years, have spent the past few months proclaiming to every despairing potential refugee south of our border that the door is wide open. Just google “open border” and “congressman,” “congresswoman,” or “senator” and you’ll get a list too long to print.

At the top of that list just from the past few months, of course, you’ll find the most contemptible Republican demagogues:

— Ted Cruz wants everybody south of our border to know that the “Biden Open Border Policy [is] A Very Craven Political Decision”;
— Rick Scott wants everybody to know that “Americans Don’t Want [Biden’s] Open Borders”;
— Marco Rubio says there’s “Nothing Compassionate About Biden’s Open Border Policies”;
— Rand Paul is so extreme he tells us Senator Rubio “is the one for an open border”;
— Josh Hawley says “Biden’s Open Border Policy Has Created a Moral Crisis”;
— Tom Cotton “Insists the Border is Wide Open”;
— Ron Johnson wants the world to know that “Our National Security is at Risk Because Democrats have Turned Border Security into a Partisan Issue”;
— Marjorie Taylor Greene “BLASTS Open Border Hypocrites”;
— Mo Brooks opposes “Socialist Democrats’ Open Border Policies for Helping Kill Americans”;
— Lauren Boebert says the “Root Cause” of the open border crisis “is in the White House”;
— Matt Gaetz “revealed a complex and deceitful agenda by Joe Biden’s Democrat administration to evade our Southern Border law enforcement”;
— Gym Jordan says “Biden’s Deliberate Support of Illegal Immigration Could Lead to Impeachment”;
— Kevin McCarthy says the Biden Administration has “Utterly Failed” to secure the “open border”;
— Elise Stefanik proclaims “Biden’s Open Border Policies have been a Complete Disaster.”
— Tom Cole’s website features “Biden’s Open Border America”;  
— Bob Goode brags about introducing legislation named the “Close Biden’s Open Border Act”;
— John Rose “Calls Out Biden’s Open Border Policies”;
— Paul Gosar claims Biden is “Destroying America with His Open Border Policies”;

— Roger Williams complains about the “Democrats’ Open Border Problem”;

— Tom Cole wants the world to know that Biden’s “open border policies have given the green light to migrants and bad actors from around the world…”;
— Gus Bilirakis “Denounces Dangerous Open Border Policies on the House Floor”;

The list goes on and on. 

Democrats, on the other hand, only want people coming into the country legally and have tried to deal with the issue responsibly. That’s why they don’t shout so loud it can be heard in Venezuela that the US border is “open.” Most, in fact, refuse to even use the phrase, because it’s a naked political lie.

Every two years, this misanthropic Republican crew provokes a crisis on America’s southern border because it plays into their narrative that Democrats are encouraging more Brown people — “soon-to-be Democrat voters” they call them on rightwing hate radio — to come to the USA to “replace” good upstanding white people.

Lest you think this biennial Republican rhetoric isn’t a cynical political ploy but is, instead, a good-faith effort to identify and fix a problem, look at the vote recently on legislation that would update our immigration system and fund a more effective border patrol. Only five Republicans could bring themselves to say “yes” to doing something about this situation.

Republicans are playing a dirty game with people’s lives. Somebody needs to ask these degenerate political SOBs:

“What it would take for you to leave your home with all your possessions in a small bag and travel a thousand miles on foot risking rape, robbery, kidnapping, torture, and the murder of yourself and your family members?”

There’s not a single Republican in Congress with half the courage of these men, women, and children who have risked everything — including their own lives — to answer the “Open Borders!!!” call the GOP puts out every two years just to score political points against Democratic presidents. 

Thank G-d for Martha Raddatz. Hopefully more reporters will start asking Republicans why they hang out the welcome sign every two years and then blame Democrats when desperate people answer their call.


He's always watching

He's always watching