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The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump

The buck did stop there…with Congress. And flagrant misuse of power by T.

Former U.S. attorney Chuck Rosenberg, who has served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, said, “This president is not going to change. We need adults to step up and check his behavior. There was a demonstrated lack of spine recently in the United States Senate. Maybe they have a breaking point and maybe they don’t. One of the things that people said about this Congress is that they’ve lost their authority. That’s not true. They’ve just chosen not to exercise it.”

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Susan Glasser* 's newest column: “The constraints are gone. The leverage is lost. One ABC News interview with a single Cabinet official is not going to restore it. Trump, unhinged and unleashed, may actually turn out to be everything we feared.”

(New Yorker)

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Barr’s ABC News interview is deeply damning. Here’s what must come next.

Greg Sargent

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/14/barrs-abc-interview-is-deeply-damning-heres-what-must-come-next/#click=https://t.co/RpwdzHnu7j

Numerous House Democrats are now advocating for the House to solicit testimony from the four prosecutors involved in the initial recommendation for Stone, aides tell me. Four have withdrawn from the case, and one quit his job.

Two senior Democratic aides told me many House members want to see these hearings well in advance of Barr’s planned testimony to the Judiciary Committee on March 31.

“Time is of the essence, since this scandal gets worse by the hour,” one senior aide to a member of Judiciary told me, adding that hearing from the four prosecutors could help create “a record of what happened before Barr gets to set the narrative.”

Another senior House aide told me there’s a “pretty widespread sentiment” among members that the four prosecutors must be heard from, “to get the full story of what’s happening under Barr’s tenure.”

“Career prosecutors are quitting, and Congress needs to understand why,” this aide continued, adding that there’s an expectation that members might soon grow more public in this demand.

It’s not clear which committee might do this — it could be Judiciary or Oversight, which also played a role in the impeachment inquiry. It’s also not clear how open House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to it. A senior Democratic leadership aide told me this has been discussed "at the staff level,” but no decisions have been made.

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Yes, the story is murky…and a stitched together (plausible) explanation as to what might have happened, but made especially clear that Barr NEVER heard anything from T, and was NEVER aligning himself with T’s wishes. Baloney.

Here’s the thing…Barr is setting the story line…and waiting 6 weeks to give an explanation. But his allegiances to T are clear. Barr is his toadie. :exploding_head:

ABC News’s Pierre Thomas pressed Barr on a question we’ve often asked here, which is how that could even happen? How could the attorney general be caught so off-guard by a recommendation he had been involved in?

“I’m afraid it’s one of those situations,” Barr said. “I’m confused, too. And I think it really was a situation of miscommunication.”

Okay, fair enough. Let’s take that at face value for now.

So what happened after that supposed miscommunication and after Barr overruled the prosecutors? All four of them withdrew from the case, one resigned from a temporary position in Shea’s office, and another resigned from the government entirely. It is obvious these withdrawals and resignations were in protest.

Given the resignations and the supposed miscommunication, it would seem like a situation that the attorney general would want to get to the bottom of. How did the miscommunication happen, after all, and why did the prosecutors see fit to lodge such a protest?

But Barr apparently isn’t terribly curious about it. He said not only that he hadn’t spoken to the prosecutors, but that he also hadn’t learned why they resigned:

THOMAS: And you know, people have pride, though, and you could see how they would see as a public rebuke. You think that’s part of why they resigned in protest from the case?

BARR: I don’t know why they resigned.

THOMAS: So you’ve not had a chance to talk to them?

BARR: No.

To be clear, three of these prosecutors remain in Barr’s employ, which would make it rather easy for him to demand answers of them. At the time of his interview, it had also been two days since they had withdrawn and resigned. Barr is puzzled by how all of this went down, but he hasn’t sought information from them about how this all might have gone haywire and why they quit?

At best, that seems like a real lack of curiosity from the man in charge of the Justice Department. Even from strictly a management perspective, figuring out what happened would seem to be Job No. 1 for Barr right now.

And that’s if you accept that this was indeed just a miscommunication. The fact that they lodged such protests suggests there might be something more to it. Barr either couldn’t or wouldn’t shed any light on that on Thursday. Someone probably should.

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More and more this all seems to come down to fear and greed.

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Trump Offered Assange Pardon if He Covered Up Russian Hack, WikiLeaks Founder’s Lawyer Claims

Lawyers acting for the WikiLeaks founder said Dana Rohrabacher, a former Republican congressman, had brought the message to London from Trump.









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Rohrabacher openly stated at the time that he was working out a “deal” which included Assange and the White House. He said that the “deal” would be contingent on Assange providing information that would “prove” Trump did not collude with Russia during the campaign, but he did not provide specifics on what the White House was offering Assange in exchange – IMO, it seems likely a pardon would be on the table. Rohrabacher lays it out at 2:30 during this interview on Sept. 15, 2017.

So this was another case of Trump obstructing justice in plain sight. We need to subpoena Kelly and Rohrabacher and get to the bottom of what was in this “deal.” We know Kelly knew about this so Trump had to know about it as well, or was even directing it.

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The only reason so far that Trump’s rabid base hasn’t managed to carry out any of the death plots they’ve cooked up thanks to his stochastic terrorism is they’re so blatant they keep getting caught. I worry about when we get one who can keep quiet until it’s too late.


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The cloud of Russian collusion has hung over Trump since he was elected. Some have laughed it off, but all roads have always lead to Putin. With new revelations about a pardon offer to Julian Assange to cover up the Russia hack of the DNC, here’s a reminder of who Dana Rohrabacher is, and why Congress MUST subpoena him:



https://twitter.com/windthin/status/1230472734041309185
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/house-majority-leader-to-colleagues-in-2016-i-think-putin-pays-trump/2017/05/17/515f6f8a-3aff-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html



https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/19/white-house-denies-julian-assanges-pardon-claim-heres-what-we-know-about-it/




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzVZXFrxGW0&feature=emb_logo

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https://twitter.com/MorriganResists/status/1232326704573476864

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Press Release: Pelosi Statement on House Brief in Congressional Oversight Supreme Court Cases

Washington, D.C.– Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued this statement as the U.S. House of Representatives filed a brief today with the Supreme Court in the consolidated cases of Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank, urging the Court to affirm previous court rulings that hold that Congress has the constitutional right to conduct oversight and issue subpoenas on behalf of the American people:

“The Constitution and the Courts agree: Congress clearly has the authority to conduct oversight and consider legislation on behalf of the American people, including by issuing subpoenas.

“As the House brief states, ‘Contrary to what President Trump and the Solicitor General contend, there is nothing unprecedented about Congressional subpoenas for documents that may shed light on Presidential affairs. What is unprecedented is the extraordinary breadth of the arguments that President Trump and the Solicitor General make about the supposed power of a President to thwart investigations in furtherance of Congress’s Article I legislative and oversight functions. Nothing in the text of the Constitution or this Court’s rulings supports the arguments of President Trump or the Solicitor General.’

“As the House brief makes clear, to carry out its constitutional work on behalf of the public, Congress has a rich history of routinely securing information related to Congress’s need for legislation and oversight. In response to Congressional requests and subpoenas, Presidents, their families, Executive Branch officials, and third parties have provided testimony and documents concerning Presidents’ personal and official actions. ‘For the Oversight Committee to understand whether existing financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest legislation is adequate to the challenges posed by this President’s unique financial arrangements, it must understand those arrangements. The Intelligence Committee must make similar inquiries to determine whether the President is subject to foreign financial leverage. And it is hard to imagine a more thorough and specific demonstration of need than exists for the Financial Services Committee’s investigation. Given the ocean of independent, investigative reporting connecting President Trump’s entities with possible illicit funding, it would be irresponsible for any Congressional investigation into those subjects not to examine those businesses.’

“The President’s ‘extraordinary’ insistence that he is above the law and that ‘Article II means I can do whatever I want’ – including trample over Congress’s constitutional oversight powers – is a threat to our Constitution, the rule of law and our republic. When oral argument is held on March 31, the House urges the Court to simply follow the Constitution and years of precedent dating from the earliest days of our nation’s history.”

House Supreme Court Brief Document

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Documents revealed that there was no oversight relating to the way funds were moved from the Pentagon over to Ukraine, and this says, the ultimate decider was
T.

Just another charade brought to you by the WH who carefully covered their tracks during the impeachment trial.

When confronted by House lawmakers angered about President Donald Trump’s halt in aid to Ukraine last summer, Trump administration officials repeatedly said the hiatus was meant to allow them to conduct a policy review about the aid program.

But the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel — in an email kept secret by the administration during the House and Senate impeachment proceedings in December and January — told his colleagues during the aid halt there was, in fact, no such policy review under way inside the administration.

The email from Pentagon lawyer Edwin S. Castle to the Defense Department’s top spending officer is the latest revelation about how Trump withheld aid to Ukraine — an issue at the core of congressional Democrats’ efforts to impeach and remove the president from office.

Castle sent his email on Aug. 26, a month after the White House began declaring in a series of eight weekly notices to the Pentagon that military assistance to Ukraine had been suspended “to allow for an interagency process to determine the best use of such funds.”

Castle said in the email he wrote to Acting Defense Department Comptroller Elaine McCusker: “Ma’am, I’ve learned that there is no ongoing interagency review process with respect to USAI,” the administration’s acronym for the $250 million aid program.

Castle’s email further noted that a group of senior government policymakers had “unanimously agreed that USAI should continue as planned” and that Trump’s then-National Security Adviser John Bolton, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had concurred.

The final decision, Castle said, “rests with POTUS,” meaning Trump.

And more reason for T to withdraw McCusker’s nomination

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:eyes:

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Cross-posting :pray:

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Christopher Steele Whacks Mueller Report and ‘Bad Faith’ Team Trump

The former head of MI6’s Russia desk was speaking publicly for the first time since his dossier on Trump’s relationship with Russia was published in 2017.

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For nearly 3 years Trump and his propaganda machine have pushed #Spygate, the lie that Trump was spied upon by the U.S. government.

It turns out he was once again projecting his own crimes, as Erik Prince recruited ex-spies to help infiltrate liberal groups.



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This is where the rubber meets the road…will T lose his cases.

On March 31, the court will hear oral arguments in the cases of Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank . The decision will be rendered sometime between then and the court’s summer break.

Although Trump is suing his accountants and his bankers as a private citizen, his case has been joined by the Department of Justice. Solicitor General Noel Francisco has signed an amicus brief on behalf of the United States. It is an astonishing document. It invites the Supreme Court to junk two centuries of precedent—and to substitute an entirely new system of judicial review of congressional subpoenas that involve a president.

A legislative subpoena must therefore satisfy heightened requirements when it seeks information from the President. At the threshold, the full chamber should unequivocally authorize a subpoena against the President. Moreover, the legislative purpose should be set forth with specificity. Courts should not presume that the purpose is legitimate, but instead should scrutinize it with care. And as with information protected by executive privilege, information sought from the President should be demonstrably critical to the legislative purpose. A congressional committee cannot evade these heightened requirements merely by directing the subpoena to third-party custodians, for such agents generally assume the rights and privileges of their principal, as this Court has recognized in analogous cases.

All the requirements in that above paragraph were devised for purposes of this litigation. None of them has ever been enforced—none of them has ever been imagined —in the previous 230 years of skirmishing between Congresses and presidents. Every must and should and cannot was invented in this very brief, for the immediate legal purposes of this president in this dilemma. The solicitor general might as well have said that subpoenas must be delivered by a sled pulled by flying reindeer, for all the connection between these demands and the previous constitutional history of the United States.

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The GOP in the Senate had to know things like this would happen and the truth would slip out drip by drip when they acquitted Trump. They just don’t care.
https://twitter.com/KatiePhang/status/1236100204388114434

Another judge orders review of Russia-probe related document

Court wants to see memo on March 2017 conversation in which Trump complained to NSA about Russia probe

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We’re seeing so many developments in MARCH regarding the various cases up against T which the Supreme Court will be reviwing. His financial records are carefully being sought out in 2 separate cases - The Mazars case - where T’s taxes could be released as well as his Deutsche bank records, as well as the Vance case = coming from the Manhattan DA asking for more financial records relating to campaign finance (Stormy) and more.

Found this through the legal wiz Uncle Blazer (Blake Anderson) @blakesmustache and something he’s been tracking very closely…and read this blog about what to expect from Scotus.

Brianne Gorod and Ashwin Phatak

Posted Tue, March 10th, 2020 10:01 am

Symposium: Mazars and Vance may be political blockbusters, but they aren’t legal ones

Brianne Gorod is chief counsel and Ashwin Phatak is appellate counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, which filed an amicus brief in support of the respondents in Trump v. Mazars , as well as an amicus brief on behalf of former Department of Justice officials in support of the respondents in Trump v. Vance.

In three weeks, the Supreme Court will hear two oral arguments in cases involving subpoenas for the president’s financial records. These cases may be political blockbusters, but they shouldn’t be legal ones. Although these cases are different in important ways, at bottom, both are about the simple question of whether investigating bodies—congressional committees in one and state grand juries in another—can access the information they need to make critical decisions about, respectively, the wisdom of proposed legislation and whether and against whom to issue indictments. The answers to the questions presented in both cases are clear: The investigating bodies have a right to the information they seek.

The consolidated cases Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank concern a set of congressional subpoenas for various financial records concerning President Donald Trump, his family and his businesses. There’s nothing novel about Congress’ engaging in an investigation or issuing subpoenas. Indeed, legislative oversight predates the nation’s birth, and Congress has been exercising its oversight authority since the earliest days of the Republic.

Consistent with that history, the Supreme Court has long held that the scope of Congress’ investigatory power is coextensive with the scope of its power to legislate. As the court has explained, Congress’ power to investigate encompasses “inquiries concerning the administration of existing laws, as well as proposed or possibly needed statutes,” and it includes “surveys of defects in our social, economic or political system for the purpose of enabling the Congress to remedy them.”

Congress’ power to investigate is broad because it needs a wide array of information before it chooses whether and how to exercise one of its most significant powers: the power to legislate. As the court has observed, “[a] legislative body cannot legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information respecting the conditions which the legislation is intended to affect or change.” And, explaining how investigative bodies do their work, the court has noted that “[t]he very nature of the investigative function—like any research—is that it takes the searchers up some ‘blind alleys’ and into nonproductive enterprises. To be a valid legislative inquiry there need be no predictable end result.” In short, Congress is empowered to search far and wide for all relevant information as it considers whether to legislate in a particular area.

Here, the House committees that issued the relevant subpoenas have plainly shown a valid legislative purpose. First, after hearing substantial evidence that Trump may not have complied with certain financial disclosure requirements, and that he may have conflicts of interest that could affect his ability to make impartial decisions as president, the Oversight Committee subpoenaed Mazars, Trump’s accounting firm, for financial records and other documents relating to Trump and his businesses. This information would help Congress decide whether to pass legislation related to a president’s conflicts of interest or financial disclosures, including whether the president is complying with disclosure requirements in the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, and whether that law or other laws should be strengthened. Similarly, the Financial Services Committee subpoenaed financial records from Deutsche Bank and Capital One, two of Trump’s creditors, following reports of questionable financing provided to Trump and his businesses as part of the committee’s investigation into whether and how to strengthen federal banking laws, particularly with respect to lending practices and the prevention of money laundering and loan fraud. Finally, the Intelligence Committee subpoenaed financial records from Deutsche Bank to further the committee’s investigation of Trump’s entanglements with foreign entities following reports of decades of intersection between Trump’s business interests and Russia-linked entities, and whether and how to legislate to prevent future foreign interference.

Trump has argued to the court that the real purpose of these investigations is to conduct what he sees as law enforcement—that is, determining whether Trump or others have broken the law. But the Supreme Court’s precedents foreclose that argument. As the court has said, “surely a congressional committee which is engaged in a legitimate legislative investigation need not grind to a halt … when crime or wrongdoing is disclosed.” Holding otherwise would mean that Congress couldn’t even investigate illegal conduct before it passes criminal laws—a notion that defies all common sense. In short, a congressional committee is entitled to all relevant information before choosing to legislate, even if the information it uncovers may also reveal illegal conduct.

In the same breath that Trump is arguing that these congressional subpoenas are invalid because they might reveal illegal conduct, he is arguing in a different case that a state grand jury cannot obtain his financial records as part of a legitimate criminal investigation. In Trump v. Vance , the president maintains that he enjoys an absolute immunity from all criminal process—an immunity so sweeping that it not only prevents him from being indicted or criminally prosecuted while in office, but also prevents a third party like Mazars from complying with a pre-indictment grand-jury subpoena simply because the matters under investigation pertain to the president.

The Supreme Court’s precedents do not support so broad a theory of presidential immunity. Rather, the court has explained that any claim of presidential immunity must be subject to a balancing test that weighs the importance of the judicial process at issue against any effect on the president’s ability to fulfill his constitutional functions. Thus, for instance, in United States v. Nixon , the Court understood “the importance of … confidentiality of Presidential communications in performance of the President’s responsibilities” when it considered the disclosure of the Watergate tapes. But in the end, the court believed that the judicial “need to develop all relevant facts in the adversary system” outweighed that consideration, and it ordered President Richard Nixon to deliver the tapes to a federal district court. Similarly, in Clinton v. Jones , the court understood that there would be some distraction if a president could be civilly sued for unofficial conduct while in office, but decided that the importance of courts’ “exercis[ing] their core Article III jurisdiction to decide cases and controversies” outweighed that interest, and permitted a civil trial to go forward against President Bill Clinton.

In Vance , Trump has failed to show that Mazars’ compliance with the state grand-jury subpoena would impair his ability to fulfill his constitutional duties. After all, it is Mazars that must comply, not the president, and the president is not required to do anything. Moreover, Mazars’ compliance with the subpoena will not require the same energy and attention—if it requires any attention of the president at all—as would defending oneself in a civil trial. Further, the stigma associated with complying with a grand-jury subpoena is far less than the stigma of criminal indictment, and less even than being named as an unindicted coconspirator—something that happened to Nixon in the Watergate tapes case.

On the other side of the equation, there are strong reasons to ensure that grand juries can fulfill their investigative function by gathering all the evidence they need before determining weighty issues like whether and whom to indict. As the Supreme Court has explained, because the grand jury’s “task is to inquire into the existence of possible criminal conduct and to return only well founded indictments, its investigative powers are necessarily broad.” Said another way, the grand jury “is a grand inquest, a body with powers of investigation and inquisition, the scope of whose inquiries is not to be limited narrowly by questions of propriety or forecasts of the probable result of the investigation, or by doubts whether any particular individual will be found properly subject to an accusation of crime.” Constraining the ability of the grand jury to subpoena all relevant documents would thus hamper its important constitutional role.

The president argues that the Department of Justice’s past memoranda and briefs support his position, but DOJ has at most taken the position that the president is immune from indictment and prosecution, not pre-indictment grand-jury subpoenas, especially when those subpoenas target a third-party accounting firm. In fact, DOJ has acknowledged the importance of allowing a grand jury to continue to fulfill its investigative function while a president is in office. As the Office of Legal Counsel noted in a 2000 memorandum, although a president may be immune from indictment, “[a] grand jury could continue to gather evidence throughout the period of immunity,” and so postponing indictment would not lead to “a prejudicial loss of evidence in the criminal context.” Thus, even DOJ has acknowledged the important goals served by ensuring that a grand jury can continue to exercise broad investigative powers.

In short, the court’s precedents make clear that the powers of Congress and grand juries to investigate are broad, and the court should uphold the subpoenas in these cases. And that would be a good thing—the court’s answer in each of these cases not only will determine whether these congressional committees and this grand jury can access these financial documents, but also could affect the ability of all future congressional committees and grand juries to properly carry out their important investigative functions.

Posted in Trump v. Vance , Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP , Trump v. Deutsche Bank AG , Symposium before oral argument in Trump v. Vance and Trump v. Mazars, Featured

Recommended Citation: Ashwin Phatak and Brianne Gorod, Symposium: Mazars and Vance may be political blockbusters, but they aren’t legal ones , SCOTUSblog (Mar. 10, 2020, 10:01 AM), Symposium: Mazars and Vance may be political blockbusters, but they aren’t legal ones - SCOTUSblog

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