Swamp Watch News

[_moksha]

What excellent publicity for Bolton's new book: "The book that the evil President and his White House toadies do not want you to read".

[_MeDotOrg]

From Slate:

Trump also once asked if Finland was part of Russia.

Geez, anyone who's traveled would know the answer to that. Russian forests are a mess. No one vacuums their forests like the Finns.

[_Jersey Girl]

So with this Bolton book, can some of these guys be brought in to testify before Congress and can Trump be impeached again for the same offenses with extended charges? Is there some kind of double jeopardy clause with regard to impeachment that would prevent this from happening?

ETA: Can Bolton be charged with something for knowing these things and not testifying to them?

[_Res Ipsa]

Impeachment is not a criminal conviction, so no double jeopardy protection.

[_EAllusion]

There's another purge at the Justice department going on. If Trump is defeated in November, it's going to require a counter-purge of the entire upper tier of the civil service to root out the hack operatives that have been installed all over the place. If he isn't defeated, the profoundly wounded state of rule of law is only going to get worse.

The craziest part of this Barr announced the the SDNY US atty has resigned his position and the SDNY issued a counter-statement stating no he did not and he will not be leaving his post until replaced by a Senate confirmed appointment while obliquely referring to his investigations going on unmolested until that time happens. That's one of those moments where if the news were covering this in another country, it'd be communicated with a wink that this is a sign the government order is collapsing.

[_Icarus]

There's another purge at the Justice department going on. If Trump is defeated in November, it's going to require a counter-purge of the entire upper tier of the civil service to root out the hack operatives that have been installed all over the place. If he isn't defeated, the profoundly wounded state of rule of law is only going to get worse.

The craziest part of this Barr announced the the SDNY US atty has resigned his position and the SDNY issued a counter-statement stating no he did not and he will not be leaving his post until replaced by a Senate confirmed appointment while obliquely referring to his investigations going on unmolested until that time happens. That's one of those moments where if the news were covering this in another country, it'd be communicated with a wink that this is a sign the government order is collapsing.

You beat me to it. I've been watching the coverage of this but I've heard no one answer the simple question as to whether or not Barr has the authority to fire him. The SDNY has been investigating Trump since the beginning and Trump heading to jail after he leaves office because of investigations by the SDNY has been the the biggest story not discussed in the media. This should be an obvious case of blatant corruption.

Banana Republic here we come!

November can't get here soon enough.

[_Icarus]

The most troubling thing for me about Trump's attempt to sack Berman yesterday was that he wants to replace him with Jay Clayton, head of the SEC. What does it say about the integrity of US financial markets that their chief regulator is the guy Trump dispatches to do cover-up?

I already had reason to suspect Clayton, because a year ago the SEC told reporters it was investigating Wirecard, and now no documentation of an investigation exists. So this morning I did a little research.

When Clayton took office, Matt Taibbi called him "the most financially conflicted SEC chief in history." Clayton recused himself from 176 companies in order to take the post.

"The SEC closed investigations of companies in 2017 that are named in Clayton’s ethics agreement, a recusal list, and also closed many not on his recusal list but widely reported to have been significant prior clients. Those closures occurred in some cases right before and in many cases right after Jay Clayton started his job on May 4, according to the FOIA data. In the case of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase, the SEC closed investigations shortly after Clayton started work but took no enforcement actions."

Financial Twitter speculates that the reason the administration wants Clayton to replace Berman is to prevent Morgan Stanley from having to enter a guilty plea in the ongoing "1 Malaysia Development" money laundering case.

[_Icarus]

June 19, 2020 (Friday) - Heather Cox Richardson

Tonight saw a Friday night news dump that will go into the history books.

Trump tried to fire the US Attorney from the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey S. Berman, who has managed a series of cases against Trump and his allies, including Trump fixer Michael Cohen, Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, and Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were indicted for funneling Russian money to Republican candidates for office. Berman is reported to be investigating Trump’s finances, among many other things.

It happened like this: Attorney General William Barr issued a statement announcing that Berman would be stepping down and that Trump would nominate Jay Clayton to replace him. Clayton has never been a prosecutor. He is currently the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but before he took that position he was a lawyer who, among other things, represented Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank is the only bank that would work with Trump after his bankruptcies. It might have given him loans he did not repay, and the Russian money-laundering that landed the bank in legal trouble might have helped Trump.

Legal analyst and Congressional staffer Daniel Goldman noted that this whole scenario was unusual. Normally, when a US Attorney leaves, that person’s deputy takes over. Bringing in a replacement from elsewhere meant that “Trump/Barr did not want anyone at SDNY running the office—likely because there was a serious disagreement.”

But then things got crazier. Berman issued his own statement, saying “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney. I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate. Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption. I cherish every day that I work with the men and women of this Office to pursue justice without fear or favor—and intend to ensure that this Office’s important cases continue unimpeded.”

What’s Berman saying? Well, it might be that Trump’s preference for “acting,” rather than Senate-confirmed, officials has come back to bite him. Berman was not Senate-confirmed; he is an interim U.S. Attorney. By law, the Attorney General can appoint an interim U.S. Attorney for 120 days. At the end of that time, the court can appoint that person indefinitely.

Berman was one of those interim appointees, put in place by Trump’s first Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.

Berman’s appointment raised an outcry because he was handpicked by Trump. The U.S. Attorney for the SDNY oversees Manhattan and thus the president’s businesses and at least nine Trump properties. Trump went out of his way to take the unusual step of personally interviewing Berman, who donated $2,700 to the Trump campaign, served on the presidential transition team, and was a partner at the law firm where Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani is a member. Democrats vowed to block Berman’s nomination, but never got the chance because Sessions used the workaround so Berman would not come before the Senate.

Now, this means that because Berman was appointed by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, not the president, he apparently cannot be removed except by the court, or, possibly, by the president… but not by Barr. Lawyers are fighting over who, exactly, can remove Berman, but that itself says that any challenge he files will land in the courts for months… likely until after the election.

And that’s another notable thing about Berman’s statement. He suggests he is being fired because the administration wants to delay or interrupt an investigation, and his language suggests that both he and the administration know exactly what that investigation is. There are a number of reasons the SDNY might be examining the finances of the president or his family, but former National Security Advisor John Bolton suggested another reason in his forthcoming book: he apparently claims Trump assured Turkey’s autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan he would fill the SDNY with his own loyalists, which would enable him to do Erdogan a political favor.

As Berman’s predecessor in the job, Preet Bharara tweeted, “Why does a president get rid of his own hand-picked US Attorney in SDNY on a Friday night, less than 5 months before the election?” President of the Center for American Progress Neera Tanden noted: “To attempt a Friday night massacre 5 months before an election means there’s a pretty big investigation they are trying to kill.”

It seems worth noting that the Supreme Court is about to hand down a decision on whether Deutsche Bank and Trump’s accountants have to hand Trump’s financial records over to Congress and to the Manhattan district attorney, which might well spark legal trouble for the president in New York.

Law professor Stephen Vladeck also asked us to keep in mind that Barr “out-and-out * lied * in a written statement—and in a context in which there could have been little question to him that Berman would publicly call him out for doing so… And he did it anyway.” “Something * really * stinks,” Vladeck concluded.

Something else stinks about this crisis, too, and that is the Tulsa rally the president originally scheduled for tonight. Widespread objection to holding a Trump rally on Juneteenth—the historic celebration of Black freedom-- in Tulsa, where a race massacre destroyed the Black community of Greenwood in 1921, forced him to reschedule for tomorrow. But had the rally been held, with media focus on disturbances at it and on the spread of coronavirus there, it seems likely that Berman’s firing would not have gotten much attention.

Indeed, it has seemed all day as if Trump was deliberately stoking trouble in Tulsa. He began today by tweeting a threat: “Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!” (Americans have a constitutional right to protest.)

Then he made sure his supporters would be in the streets. In consultation with the Secret Service, the Tulsa police chief had asked Tulsa’s mayor to declare a curfew around the BOK Center where the rally will be held. He did so. But Trump pressured the mayor to rescind the curfew, which the mayor did. Trump tweeted "I just spoke to the highly respected Mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, who informed me there will be no curfew tonight or tomorrow for our many supporters attending the # MAGA Rally…. Enjoy yourselves - thank you to Mayor Bynum!”

This crisis feels big. Trump and Barr know an investigation is out there barreling toward the president, and they are willing to take extraordinary steps, steps that undermine our democracy and threaten our citizenry, to stop it.

[_EAllusion]

There's another purge at the Justice department going on. If Trump is defeated in November, it's going to require a counter-purge of the entire upper tier of the civil service to root out the hack operatives that have been installed all over the place. If he isn't defeated, the profoundly wounded state of rule of law is only going to get worse.

The craziest part of this Barr announced the the SDNY US atty has resigned his position and the SDNY issued a counter-statement stating no he did not and he will not be leaving his post until replaced by a Senate confirmed appointment while obliquely referring to his investigations going on unmolested until that time happens. That's one of those moments where if the news were covering this in another country, it'd be communicated with a wink that this is a sign the government order is collapsing.

You beat me to it. I've been watching the coverage of this but I've heard no one answer the simple question as to whether or not Barr has the authority to fire him. The SDNY has been investigating Trump since the beginning and Trump heading to jail after he leaves office because of investigations by the SDNY has been the the biggest story not discussed in the media. This should be an obvious case of blatant corruption.

Banana Republic here we come!

November can't get here soon enough.

The legal analysis I've seen that I find persuasive is that Barr lacks the authority to fire him, and there are directly conflicting statutes over whether Trump has that authority.

The sequence of events as best I can tell is that Barr attempted to promote him out of the position, Berman refused, so Barr called on his resignation and issued a statement stating he stepped down. Berman, contrary to standard behavior, refused to resign and issued a statement in essence calling Barr a liar, stating he will not leave until forced out, and implying they are trying to remove him to interfere into investigations into Trumpworld.

[_Icarus]

You beat me to it. I've been watching the coverage of this but I've heard no one answer the simple question as to whether or not Barr has the authority to fire him. The SDNY has been investigating Trump since the beginning and Trump heading to jail after he leaves office because of investigations by the SDNY has been the the biggest story not discussed in the media. This should be an obvious case of blatant corruption.

Banana Republic here we come!

November can't get here soon enough.

The legal analysis I've seen that I find persuasive is that Barr lacks the authority to fire him, and there are directly conflicting statutes over whether Trump has that authority.

The sequence of events as best I can tell is that Barr attempted to promote him out of the position, Berman refused, so Barr called on his resignation and issued a statement stating he stepped down. Berman, contrary to standard behavior, refused to resign and issued a statement in essence calling Barr a liar, stating he will not leave until forced out, and implying they are trying to remove him to interfere into investigations into Trumpworld.

Interesting, because I know little about this but lately I've been binging on the show called Billions with Paul Giamati who was a district attorney for SDNY and was fired by the US District Attorney but then elected to be the Attorney General over the State and seemed to be immune from being fired by anyone other than the Governor.