Tag Archives: 2016 election

legal news

Barr joins the cabal of disagrace

I had harbored some hope that William Barr would bring some integrity to the Donald Trump administration when he accepted the president’s nomination to lead the Department of Justice.

After all, he had served as attorney general in the early 1990s near the end of President George H.W. Bush’s term in office. He served then with honor and dignity.

I was terribly and tragically wrong. The attorney general’s latest recommendation that former national security adviser Michael Flynn avoid prosecution for lying to the FBI and to Vice President Mike Pence about the Russia attack on our electoral system in 2016.

Flynn has pleaded guilty twice to committing perjury. Now we hear Barr suggest that his lying wasn’t “material” to the investigation into whether Russia interfered in our election.

Here, though, comes a stunner: Nearly 2,000 former DOJ staffers have demanded Barr’s resignation. It reminds me of something a former editor of mine used to say: If someone calls you an ass, blow it off; if others call you an ass, then you need to shop for a saddle.

So now the AG has a couple thousand former DOJ lawyers and others calling him an ass.

As NBC News reports: The letter urges the judge who is in charge of the Flynn case, Emmet Sullivan, to “take a long, hard look at the government’s explanation and the evidence.” Barr is using the Justice Department to further President Donald Trump’s personal and political interests, it says, and “has undermined any claim to the deference that courts usually apply to the department’s decisions about whether or not to prosecute a case.”

The good news is that the judge to whom Flynn entered the guilty pleas must sign off on Barr’s request. Judge Sullivan is known to be an independent thinker, which of course gets to the beauty of the federal judicial system; these judges are appointed for life and, thus, are ostensibly removed from partisan considerations.

As for Barr, the letter signed by those thousands of DOJ staffers asks Congress to censure the AG. Just think, too, that many of those who signed the letter worked in Justice Departments under Democratic and Republican administrations.

Lastly, take a good look at the picture attached to this blog post. Barr is standing in front of a bust of the man after whom the Justice Department building is named: Robert F. Kennedy, the AG from 1961 to 1964. I can say with absolute certainty that RFK would be aghast and appalled at where William Barr has taken the Department of Justice.

national news, political news

Report confirms it: Russians attacked our election in 2016

(Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

As if we didn’t know it already.

KHOU-TV in Houston reports that a Senate committee has determined that Russia attacked our electoral system in 2016, a notion that Donald John Trump has disputed, siding with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and denigrating our intelligence community’s analysis.

KHOU said: A bipartisan Senate report released Tuesday confirms the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to sow chaos. Senators warned that it could happen again this presidential election year.

What do you know about that?

This whole story became served as the starting point for the lengthy investigation into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump fought it like crazy. He disparaged special counsel Robert Mueller III’s work to get at the truth. Trump kept insisting it was “fake news,” and a “hoax.”

It was nothing of the sort.

Then he stood before the world in Helsinki and said he believed Putin’s denial and dismissed the consensus developed by the nation’s intelligence network.

This investigation effectively closes the book on that terrible chapter in our electoral history. However, the warning from senators should not be ignored, that the Russians are doing it again this year. They are seeking to sow chaos once more.

Are we going to impose security measures that build impenetrable walls around our voting process? Isn’t this a matter of national security?

Donald Trump took an oath to protect our way of life, to be on guard against hostile actions from foreign nations and to take action to defend us.

This prediction is an easy one to make: Donald Trump is going to violate his oath of office once again by doing nothing to stop this likely attack from a hostile power.

national news

Stars are aligning for a Trump election defeat, however …

As I look ahead to the upcoming presidential election, I am tempted to fill myself with hope that we well might change presidents when all the ballots are counted.

Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee. He has to win a few more primary elections to corral enough convention delegates to win the nomination when the party convenes its convention, be it a virtual event or one with actual delegates meeting in Milwaukee.

Biden has garnered the endorsements of virtually all his former rivals in what once was a huge and diverse field of contenders. He also has scored the endorsement of the most popular Democrat in America, former President Barack Obama.

The economy has collapsed. Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been pathetic, feckless, confused, chaotic. He once downplayed the threat and then has been caught flat-footed as it has killed more than 20,000 Americans; the number is going up.

However, let’s remember that the stars aligned in 2016 for a Trump defeat. Then he won. He captured enough Electoral College votes to defeat a supremely more qualified candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Trump defeat shocked virtually every political observer on Earth.

That result gives me pause to suggest that former Vice President Biden is a shoo-in to defeat the former reality TV celebrity/carnival barker/con man/charlatan/conspiracy theorist/habitual liar.

My sincere hope is that Biden’s campaign brain trust learns from the fluke that produced a Trump election in 2016, studies how this travesty occurred and attacks with full force the record that Donald Trump has produced.

Trump’s team already knows what it has to do to win re-election. It has to retain its base and energize it. They’ll turn Trump loose and allow him to rail and rant in that incoherent fashion that seems to play well in front of those campaign rallies.

At this moment, the stars are lining up to defeat this fraudulent president. Oh, how I hope they remain aligned … and how I hope that Joe Biden can deliver on his pledge to “restore the nation’s soul.”

International news

You mean the Russians are interfering again? Wow! Who’da thunk it?

It can’t be. The Russians cannot possibly attack our electoral system yet again after what they did in 2016. Can they?

I guess they can! The New York Times is reporting that the Russians are at it once more. Indeed, now we hear that Donald John Trump, the nation’s current president, was so angry over the news that he fired the acting director of national intelligence and installed a loyalist into the job as the latest acting  DNI.

Actually, it is being reported that Trump got mad because the former acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, consented to a congressional briefing. That’s reportedly why he replaced him with U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grennell, a guy with zero experience at any level of intelligence, let alone at the director of national intelligence level.

Let’s remember that Trump dismissed the 2016 election attack, most infamously in 2018 at the Helsinki press event in which he stood next to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and backed Putin’s denial over the U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia had interfered in the previous presidential election.

Now we hear that the Russians have done it again!

This is scary in the extreme. Trump already is known to have solicited another foreign government, Ukraine, for a political favor. It got him impeached by the House of Representatives.

Here come the Russians once more, working to re-elect the president. They want to ensure that Trump gets a second term as POTUS, a move that is sure to sow as many seeds of anger and mistrust in our electoral system that the 2016 attack managed to accomplish.

Think of it. That’s precisely what the Russians want to do.

Didn’t the president take an oath to protect this nation against its enemies? Didn’t he vow to keep us and our institutions safe from this kind of attack?

What the … whatever?

national news

Are we heading for a repeat of the great electoral fluke of 2016?

It pains me to the depths of my gut to acknowledge this, but my fear is growing that Americans are going to get Donald John Trump for another four years as president of the United States.

Yes, it looks to me at this moment that the Democratic Party is quite capable of squandering a golden opportunity to restore the presidency, to return it to a level of respectability and reverence that has been dismantled during the Trump Era.

That once-monstrous field of contenders has been culled to a more reasonable size. Who, though, is left standing? Who are the top contenders?

A zillionaire. A couple of “progressives,” including a “democratic socialist.” A former vice president who cannot stop tripping over his own tongue. A one-time mayor of a smallish Midwest city. A sitting U.S. senator who is trying to appeal to the center-left of her party. Another zillionaire who rose to prominence by funding an effort to impeach Donald Trump.

Joe Biden once was thought to be the unstoppable Democrat. At this moment his campaign is imploding. His so-called “firewall” in South Carolina is showing severe fracturing as African-American voters are now looking for an alternative to Barack Obama’s wing man.

Nominating a far-left socialist is the death knell for sure, in my view.

What is most maddening is that Donald Trump has spoon-fed the opposition all kinds of electoral grist to use against him. The House of Representatives impeached him; the Senate acquitted him, but the impeachment still stands.

Trump has angered millions of Americans with his hideous pronouncements, his foul mouth, his trashing of allies, his incoherent campaign-rally riffs, his pandering to religious groups with whom he has no actual alliance, his disparaging of the nation’s top military minds, his standing with hostile strongmen, his denigration of our intelligence analysts.

Oh, and then there’s the lying. It’s incessant. He cannot tell the truth about anything at any level. He gets caught lying and his political base blows it off.

On and on it goes.

Still, this most astonishing politician — the president — very well might win re-election because he is somehow, amazingly able to claim credit for an economic recovery that he inherited from his immediate predecessor.

This clown never should have gotten elected in the first place. He squeaked in by the narrowest of margins, losing the actual vote by nearly 3 million ballots but winning just enough Electoral College votes to win the election. I do not dismiss that he won according to the rules spelled out by the U.S. Constitution, a document of which he has zero understanding.

The 2016 election stands in my mind as the greatest political fluke in U.S. history. If he wins again in November, then we will have committed the next greatest fluke in history.

political news

We desperately need to shore up faith in our electoral system

I make this statement with considerable pain in my heart.

Our nation’s electoral system is in potentially dire peril. The Russians sought to sow seeds of mistrust when they interfered in — or attacked, if you prefer that verb — our electoral process in the 2016 presidential campaign.

They have succeeded. Maybe beyond their expectations.

They hacked into Hillary Clinton’s campaign system, apparently heeding the request of Clinton’s Republican opponent, Donald Trump. The mistrust began, seemingly at that moment.

It’s gotten worse.

The Iowa caucus just this past week and the “app” glitch that fouled up the vote-counting and the delegate-apportioning process has made it all the more troublesome.

As Ross Ramsey writes in the Texas Tribune, when you trifle with our electoral process, you are messing with democracy itself. Read Ramsey’s analysis here.

One gets the sense that everyone is going to suspect hanky-panky at damn near every electoral level. Legislative races? Statewide contests? Presidential primary contest? How about the 2020 presidential election itself this coming November?

If the Russians sought to spark discontent among Americans, they can declare victory. They were able to do so during the 2016 election.

The Russians aren’t the only villains. American politicians are looking for ways to suppress voter turnout. They scheme and conspire to make voting among minority Americans more difficult. Their aim is to elect non-minority candidates to public office, thus depriving minority Americans a voice in the halls of power among those who look like the voters they represent.

Yes, democracy is under attack. As we move more deeply into this election year, I believe we need to more vigilant against enemies — foreign and, yes, domestic — who seek to undermine all Americans’ right to vote their conscience.

national news

Election security becomes a highly critical ‘back story’

An essential element of the impeachment and Senate trial of Donald John Trump, the current president of the United States, is being pushed toward the back of the proverbial shelf.

I refer to election security. Specifically, the security of our sacred rite of citizenship against foreign interference.

You know the story. Russia attacked our electoral system in 2016, the same day that Donald Trump invited the Russians to look for the “missing emails” produced by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was Trump’s presidential campaign foe that year.

Then the president, immediately after Robert Mueller III released his findings into a two-year-long investigation into the Russia hack and interference, placed a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodyrmyr Zellenskiy. He asked Zellenskiy for a “favor,” which was to launch an investigation into Joe Biden, a potential foe for Trump in 2020. Yes, the president asked a foreign government for political help. He wants to “cheat” his way to re-election.

How in the name of cybersecurity can we stand by and let this happen?

I am acutely aware that government cyber geeks are hard at work trying to provide fool-proof locks against this kind of intrusion. What troubles me in the extreme is that the individuals at the highest levels of our government are stone-cold silent on this matter.

Donald Trump, the intended beneficiary of the 2016 Russian election attack, continues to dismiss the interference. He disparages intelligence analyses that says, “Yes, the Russians did it!” He calls that phone call to Zellenskiy “perfect.”

It was “perfect” only insofar as he delivered a clearly defined message to a foreign head of state. He wanted a “favor” and asked that government to attack our electoral system — again! 

What measures are we taking to protect our election system throughout its massive network?

political news

Impeachment about overturning election? No-o-o-o-o! Really?

Can we dispense with the tired — and patently ridiculous — notion that Donald John Trump’s impeachment is meant to “overturn” the results of the last election?

That goofy argument is part of the White House response to the articles of impeachment that the House of Representatives delivered to the Senate, which on Tuesday will commence the trial that will determine whether the current president of the United States keep his job.

I believe I shall remind everyone of a couple of historical facts.

The House Judiciary Committee voted for articles of impeachment against President Nixon in 1974. Nixon quit the presidency on Aug. 9 of that year. He had won re-election in 1972 in a smashing landslide: 49 states, 520 electoral votes, 60 percent of the ballots cast. That impeachment effort would have reversed the outcome of that election, too.

The House impeached President Clinton in 1998. He stood trial in 1999 and was acquitted. Clinton won re-election in 1996 with a handsome margin: 379 electoral votes and a healthy plurality of actual votes. And, yes, that impeachment was intended to overturn an election result, too.

Presidential impeachment by definition are intended to do the very thing that the White House is now accusing the House of doing. I know that House members who voted to impeach the president stand behind high-minded rhetoric about “defending the Constitution.” I believe that is the case here.

However, this act also carries with it a necessary political component, which is that it seeks to correct a ballot-box mistake. Let’s not be coy about this point as well: Trump did not win in anything approaching a landslide. He pulled in nearly 3 million fewer votes than his opponent in 2016 and won because of an adroit end-of-campaign tactic that saw him win three key Rust Belt states that put him over the top in the Electoral College count.

Impeachment is meant to overturn an election? Well, as we used to say in high school: No sh**, Sherlock!

national news

How does Bernie keep raking in all that cash?

I want to stipulate a political truism, which is that lots of money doesn’t always translate to lots of votes.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had tons of cash when he launched his 2016 bid for the Republican Party presidential nomination. He, um, didn’t make the grade.

Four years later, we have Sen. Bernie Sanders out there raking in huge sums of money. They’re from small donors, he keeps telling us. Sanders, who’s actually an independent senator from Vermont, is running for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

I am baffled how so many voters keep “feeling the Bern.” They keep pumping all that cash into his coffers. He finished 2019 with a huge haul of $34.5 million in the final quarter of the year. He’s loaded, man!

You may color me amazed, along with baffled. The man sings off a single song sheet page. Wealthy people are bad for the country, he keeps saying. Every single answer to every question seems to turn on “wealth inequality.” He wants to redistribute the wealth, you know … take from the rich and give to the not-so-rich. I guess it has its appeal, but I am not sure why.

I hate to bring age into this argument, but he is 77 years old. He would be the oldest man ever inaugurated president were he to win. I mention this with some trepidation as I just turned 70 myself this past month.

Sanders has yet to demonstrate a broad swath of knowledge on matters far from the income inequality theme he keeps preaching.

The war on terror? Climate change? U.S.-Russia relations? Middle East policy? We know what he believes about taxation.

Plenty of my friends are supporters of Bernie Sanders. I just won’t sign on until I get a sense of a more well-rounded, comprehensive platform on which he intends to run. So far, I am not seeing it.

But … he still is awash in campaign cash.

Go figure.

national news, political news

Welcome to the ‘most consequential election’ year; really … it is!

Welcome to 2020. We’re going to elect a president near the end of the year.

I know what you might be thinking. We go through this every four years and every single time some pundit or politician calls it the “most consequential election” in, take your pick: our lifetime, U.S. history, all of human history.

You know what? The 2020 presidential election might fall into all of those categories. This is the real thing, ladies and gentlemen.

America exhibited some amazingly bad form — and this is just my humble view — in 2016 when it elected Donald John Trump as our 45th president. He won a majority in the Electoral College, while losing the “actual” vote by nearly 3 million ballots.

He snookered just enough people in the appropriate states to edge out an infinitely more qualified opponent to win the presidency.

In my mind, Trump has made an absolute mess of the high office he occupies. The task awaiting voters in 2020 is to make amends for the mistake they made four years earlier.

Donald Trump promised to make history as president. He’s done it! He is the third president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. He is likely to be the first president to run for re-election as an impeached president.

Yes, the economy is going strong. The labor force has added millions of jobs during Trump’s tenure as president; joblessness is at historic lows. The president is taking all the credit for it. Fine! Let him take whatever credit he wants to scarf up.

However, a lot of other matters need our attention.

Trump has trashed our alliances; he has cozied up to strongmen abroad; he has thrown bouquets at the feet of North Korean killer/despot Kim Jong Un and Russian spymaster/strongman Vladimir Putin; he has denigrated our intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia attacked our electoral system; he has disparaged an American war hero.

Trump promised to stay off the golf course, only to spend more time on the links than any president in history; he runs an executive government branch that only is about two-thirds full, with key offices lacking anyone in charge; he relies on his unqualified son-in-law to look for Middle East peace.

Trump conducts public policy via Twitter; he fired the FBI director because he was doing his job; he fired an attorney general because the AG determined he could expose himself to conflict of interest.

Trump solicited a foreign government for personal political favors and blocked all key aides from testifying before Congress … two actions that led to his impeachment.

The president likely will survive a Senate trial. Then he’ll run for re-election. The task awaiting voters is to determine whether the president — who has set an unofficial record for lying — deserves another four years as our head of state and commander in chief.

We need to elect a president who understands the limitations of his office, who recognizes tradition and decorum, who can rebuild the alliances that have been tattered and torn, who puts the public interest ahead of his or her personal interest.

By golly, this upcoming election looks to me to be the most consequential in my lifetime. We might even be able to expand the superlative before it’s over.