IF WE ONLY KNEW THEN

Trump’s actions since his impeachment may have had a different result if we only knew then what we have suffered through since January. Trump’s impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors was greeted with the admonition of his peers and the republicans thought that he had learned his lesson. Let us go through a litany of actions that each on there own are troubling, if not additive to articles of impeachment.

Susan Collins Senator (R) said, “The President has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.” I wonder how she feels today? Unfortunately, Gross incompetence and negligence in planning and response to the pandemic, unfortunately, does not qualify as a high crime.

His decision to initially downplay the virus looks to be a play to keep up the markets since he was totally focused on the optics of the robust economy for the elections. He has ignored and with wishful thinking and total disinformation, convinced himself the virus was no big deal for 6 weeks. Until the markets crashed in mid-March, he had paid no attention to the virus. He wanted the virus to go away, so he offloaded the virus to the states. 

When the virus did not go away he urged the public to liberate themselves and politicized the efforts. The Southern Republican states complied, even though they did not meet the CD guidelines for opening.  The result is 25% of the world deaths and only 4.5% of the world’s population. 

Trump and Barr have combined not only to roll over norms but have set precedent that will obviously turn into laws forbidden their actions. They overruled career prosecutors in the Michael Flynn case and caused federal prosecutors to resign in order to free someone who lied and had a plea bargain. They overlooked multiple other felonies including not registering as an agent for Turkey, the involvement in a kidnapping plot on a Turkish cleric, lying to Congress and lying to the FBI. 

The Roger Stone commutation was the most egregious act from Trump amounting to an abuse of power. Attorney General William Barr had a negative reaction and advised against it.  Of course Trump did it anyway. When Barr was being questioned by the Senate for his confirmation, he was asked specifically if someone had incrementing criminal evidence against the President, would he pardon that individual? Barr replied, “That would be a criminal act”.  Will Barr say a commutation is not a pardon? It is. It’s a pardon lite. The difference is, you need not admit guilt.  It’s sad for the rule of law to nit-pick these semantics, but that is probably the excuse he’ll give when he testifies later in the month?

Barr’s replacement of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York has stymied the prosecution of a Turkish Bank.  John Bolton’s book indicates Trump had promised a Turkish strongman “explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people but were Obama’s people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people.”

Trump and his sycophants ordered Federal law enforcement and military against peaceful protesters violating their first amendment rights. He has eliminated and replaced Inspectors General, with no good rationale and some of these terminations appear to be retribution for investigations in the case of the firing by Mike Pompeo.