Tag Archives: Miller

Who Will Punish Trump Administration Crimes Against Humanity?

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The Nazis did this. Now it’s us. The great and glorious United States of America. Separating families and, in violation of court orders, failing to properly keep track of them or take adequate steps to reunite them. When will it end? What effects will it have on the lives of those directly affected? How will they think of the United States when they grow up and are fully aware as adults of what was done to them?

I wrote about the issue of climate change and its relation to crimes against humanity in March 2017. See https://bit.ly/32a122e

The troublesome history of humanity’s efforts to come to grips with the worst conduct of which we are thus far capable is set out reasonably well and at length in Wikipedia at https://bit.ly/2T2wGdD The summary there states that crimes against humanity can occur in wartime or peacetime:

They are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part either of a government policy (although the perpetrators need not identify themselves with this policy) or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority. War crimes, murder, massacres, dehumanization, genocide, ethnic cleansing, deportations,  unethical human experimentation, extrajudicial punishments, including summary executions, use of weapons of mass destruction, state terrorism or state sponsoring of terrorism, death squads, kidnappings and forced disappearances, use of child soldiers, unjust imprisonment, enslavement, torture, rape, political repression, racial discrimination, religious persecution and other human rights abuses may reach the threshold of crimes against humanity if they are part of a widespread or systematic practice. [Emphasis added]

I will not engage in legalistic analysis of all those terms. You can decide for yourself whether a reasonable person could think that separating children from parents at the U.S. border because the parents were illegally entering the United States fairly falls within the bolded terms above.

The inescapable facts are that punishments, in the form of loss of freedom, among others, are being meted out without meaningful judicial process in the name of the United States against children and that those children are being punished for the conduct of their parents. The parents are, of course, also being punished and because they are not U.S. citizens, their entitlement to many forms of legal protection is, in practice, limited or non-existent.

Your patriotic conservative Republican will argue that this situation is the fault of the parents who decided to bring their children into the United States knowing that doing so was illegal and might be met with severe consequences. Thus, their argument goes, the sins of the parents are rightfully visited upon the children; it’s their fault, not ours so who the hell cares what happens to them? If the parents obeyed the law, none of this would have happened. The point of the punitive action against the children is to deter future parents from seeking to enter the United States illegally (or any other way as it later turned out under increasingly stringent anti-immigration policies of the Trump administration). End of story.

Except it’s not the end of the story. It’s the beginning. If the government is going to forcibly separate children from their parents because the parents broke the immigration laws, a morally just society would, while engaging in self-praise for upholding the law, be certain that sufficient resources were committed to keep track of the separated children and to assure that, as soon as humanly possible, they were reunited with their parents. This, however, has not happened.

The Trump administration knows this and is indifferent to the problem it has created. Or, if you insist, indifferent to the problem that the illegal immigrant parents have created. In the end, it doesn’t matter who “created” the situation. The U.S. government took actions that separated the children, locked many of them in cages, failed to provide adequately for their physical and mental well-being, and then failed, and continues to fail, to re-connect many of the children with their parents. Trump, his chief immigration advisor Stephen Miller and all the rest of Trump’s “nothing but the best people” don’t give a damn about the harm they have caused.

This, I suggest, is the functional equivalent of a crime against humanity for which the individuals responsible for the execution of the policy should be held accountable. They should be arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned for what they have done.

Let’s look closer. First, you should be aware that one of the earliest (July 2017) of the separated children has yet to be reunited with her mother some two and a half years later. This Washington Post article tells the story. https://wapo.st/2SHHiQh

The child is now nine years old and hasn’t seen her mother since the mother was deported to Guatemala. As reported,

The children have now spent enough time in the United States to narrate their stories of separation in fluent English. Their parents are back in Central America, watching sons and daughters grow up over grainy video calls….

Some days, Adelaida gets angry. When other kids in class talk about their mothers. When her aunt kisses her cousin Angel good night, but not her. María can see her daughter’s eyes getting big and glassy, her face turning red.

“I need you by my side,” Adelaida exclaims.

“I’m trying,” María responds. She hangs up and cries.

The government of the United States, led by Donald J. Trump, did this. No one else.

 The administration put out false information in 2018 about the number of separated children, claiming almost 3,000 when the real number was over 4,500, many of whom remain separated to this day.

Lawyers traversed Central America with only scraps of information: misspelled names and phone numbers no longer in use. Some parents have disappeared. Others have gone into hiding to avoid the threats they once tried to escape. The lawyers found Maria [Adelaida’s mother] in December.

Other separated parents — the ones initially recognized by the administration — have joined a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU. Some asked to be reunited with their children in the United States. A federal judge ruled in favor of 11 of them. Nine of them landed in Los Angeles last month. Twenty-nine others, aided by American lawyers, crossed the border last year. But María wasn’t a part of the ACLU lawsuit, or any other petition, because her case hadn’t been recorded.

“This is a group who the government kept hidden from us, the court, Congress and the public,” said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney. “And these children were even younger than the original group, hundreds just babies and toddlers.” ….

Once María was in custody, she said, an immigration agent approached. “He said, ‘I’m taking your daughter with me,’ and he took her arm. I started screaming. He wouldn’t say where she was going or for how long.” Adelaida started wailing. “I didn’t want to leave my mom,” she said. “When I was almost going to say goodbye, they took me, so I couldn’t.”

Patricia Reynoso, Adelaida’s aunt, tried to reason with the agent. She wasn’t sure why María was separated from Adelaida, but she was allowed to stay with her daughter.

“The agent looked at me and said, ‘I’m a father. I don’t want to be doing this, but it’s my job,’ ” Patricia said. [emphasis mine]

Just following orders. Where have we heard that before?

You can read the rest of the story in the Washington Post article cited above, if you have the stomach for it. Here is an example:

Officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which facilitated the family separation policy, gave Patricia a pamphlet in Spanish on how to support Adelaida. It was called “How to Help My Child.”

“Spend time together as a family,” it suggested. “Make time for your family to eat together and play and take trips.”

The Trump-led government at work.

The American Bar Association reports that the Trump administration zero tolerance separation policy began in April 2018, subjecting illegal entrants to criminal prosecution. https://bit.ly/39MaFqq That time frame cannot be reconciled with what is reported in the above story from the Washington Post and elsewhere. See the Wikipedia report cited below in which it is reported that the child separation policy actually began a year before then-Attorney General Sessions announced it. And while Trump, by Executive Order, allegedly ended the separation policy, “there is no procedure currently in place to reunite the thousands of families already separated.” It appears that no procedure to reunite the families was ever in place or perhaps even seriously considered by the administration. In 2018 statements, the ABA described the Trump administration policy as “inhumane and untenable” and “unnecessarily cruel action [that] violates basic standards of human decency.” [emphasis mine]

In June 2018, the then-Republican-controlled House of Representatives rejected passage of legislation that would have ended the separation-of families-policy.  A lawsuit against the policy was filed by the ACLU, resulting in a nationwide injunction temporarily stopping the separation of children from their parents at the border and ordered that all families already separated be reunited within 30 days, an order the Trump administration appears to have ignored. Other suits have been lodged by a coalition of 17 states, the American Immigration Council, and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. There may be others pending and no doubt others will be filed.

You may view photos of the children detailed in cages resembling a dog kennel at https://bit.ly/39Z7Fa6

The Trump administration’s failure to speak truthfully about its policy, combined with its utter indifference to the suffering of the separated families, speaks volumes about this administration’s attachment to American values. The daily, sometimes hourly, lying about its conduct of the nation’s business has spilled over into immigration policy. This is beyond incompetence – it is evidently deliberate:

Since June 2018, despite the official end of the separation policy, hundreds of additional children have been separated from their parents. In March 2019, the government reported that since that time, 245 children had been removed from their families, in some cases without clear documentation undertaken to track them in order to reunite them with their parents. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform reported in July 2019 that over 700 children have been separated from their parents after the policy’s official end. In July, it was reported that as many as five children per day were being separated, and by October, the total had reached 1,090.

In January 2019, the administration acknowledged that thousands more children may have been separated from their families than the previously reported figure of 2,737, with officials uncertain of the exact number. Investigation showed that the child separation policy had actually begun in the summer of 2017, prior to the zero tolerance policy announced in April 2018.

Federal officials said there were no plans to attempt to reunite these children because “it would destabilize the permanency of their existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children.” In May 2019, the administration acknowledged that at least an additional 1,712 migrant children may have been separated from their parents even before the “zero tolerance” policy was implemented.

In June 2019, a group of attorneys … visited a Border Patrol center in Clint, Texas. The children told the lawyers that meals consisted of instant oatmeal, a cookie and sweetened drink for breakfast, instant noodles for lunch, and a heated frozen burrito and a cookie for dinner. They said they had not had a clean change of clothing or a bath for weeks. There were no adult caretakers, ten- and fourteen-year-old girls were taking care of the younger ones. A 14-year-old girl from Guatemala who had been holding two little girls in her lap told them: “I need comfort, too. I am bigger than they are, but I am a child, too.” [extensive footnotes omitted]

The Trump administration tried to deflect responsibility for its treatment of children at the border by claiming it was just following the policy adopted by the Obama administration. That claim is a lie. The Obama policy did not mass-separate children from parents. This Trump claim flies in the face of Trump’s on-going obsession with undoing everything Obama did. It is unimaginable Trump would have knowingly adopted an Obama policy – this claim is just another attempt to deflect attention from the venality and criminality of the Trump leadership.

Administration officials repeatedly lied in interviews, in testimony to Congress and in court filings about the child separation policy and practice. The Trump policy reflects a calculated indifference to the suffering created by the child separation policy throughout the entire period of its implementation:

Speaking on NPR in May 2018, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly described the policy as “a tough deterrent [and] a much faster turnaround on asylum seekers”. When questioned if it might be considered “cruel and heartless” to remove children from their mothers, Kelly replied, “I wouldn’t put it quite that way. The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.”

In June 2018, Attorney General Sessions said, “If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them. We’ve got to get this message out. You’re not given immunity.” White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said: “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.” [footnotes omitted]

“Foster care or whatever.” Kelly’s words, but Donald Trump is ultimately responsible for this policy.

Children’s mental health has had a strong correlation with forced parent–child separation and parental loss which has led to potential traumatic events (PTEs). Research has found that “forced parent–child separation and parental loss are PTEs with adverse effects on child mental health and academic functioning” …. “emerging research has indicated that parental detention and deportation increase risk for mental health problems such as severe psychological distress, anxiety, and depression”.  Due to these mental stressors, many of these children have reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from traumatic parent separations….

A 2018 study looked at the impact of parent-child separation and child detention on the mental health and development of children. The author interviewed parents and children who had experienced separation and reported that the separation of the children from their parents together with a background of chronic and acute adversity has created a “perfect storm for attachment damage, toxic stress and trauma”. The author noted that a child under prolonged stress “may develop complex patterns of protective responses that can include hyperarousal—hypervigilance, agitation, flashbacks and emotional reactivity, or hypoarousal—dissociative responses, emotional numbing (self-harm may be used as a tool to ‘feel alive’), passive compliance and poor access to cognitive functioning”. The study’s findings also suggested that enforcement of immigration laws poses “serious health challenges and risks for lifelong mental illness in children”. [footnotes omitted]

The litany goes on … and on. The record is irrefutable. By any reasonable standard, the child separation policy, whatever its intent may have been or is now, represents abuse of human rights on a scale not seen in this country in many decades.

The policy and its implementation differ in substance from, say, the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during the hysteria following the Pearl Harbor attack. While those practices were also unjustifiable, they occurred in the presence of an unprecedented perceived threat to the United States from an armed adversary, not remotely comparable to the situation at the southern U.S. border.

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) both reported that DHS and HHS were unprepared to take on the extra responsibilities required by the zero-tolerance policy. https://bit.ly/2V8AP2x

The Trump administration knew or should have known this was true but chose to ignore it.

The recently concluded farce of an impeachment trial in the Senate makes clear that Trump will not be held accountable while he holds office. Therefore, the only way to hold Trump accountable is by rejecting his re-election effort. It is now up to the people at large to decide what kind of country we’re going to have. If re-elected, you can expect Trump, who already fancies himself a kind of monarch, to run rampant over the rights and interests not only of children at the border but of everyone.

Additional information about this subject can be found in an articles entitled “The Ethics of Separating Families at the Border,” in the Lawfare blog, https://bit.ly/39UDCjS and “Legal Considerations for Separating Families at the Border,” https://bit.ly/32nAVoE  See also “U.S. Continues to Separate Migrant Families Despite Rollback of Policy,” in the New York Times, https://nyti.ms/2HGzLee and “Does a Specific Law Mandate Family Separation and Detention of Minors?,” in Snopes.com at https://bit.ly/3bVMaJa [the answer is ‘no.’] and ACLU’s “Family Separation By the Numbers,”  https://bit.ly/39ZYJ4B from which the following graphic is copied:

See also the AP story “More than 5,400 children split at border, according to new count,” dated October 25, 2019, at https://nbcnews.to/2VbQDla

Know Her Name

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I readily confess that on multiple occasions reading Chanel Miller’s memoir, Know My Name, I alternated between fury and choking up. It is not an easy read, but a story that needed telling. Miller tells it brilliantly. While there are passages that I thought were a bit overwritten, it is not hard to understand why her way of expressing her pain, and resilience in the face of so much power stacked against her, was necessary to get the whole story out. Not just the story of what happened to her, which was hard enough to take, but the story of the struggle to escape the emotional binding that the sexual assault, the rape, imposed on her and her family. Spoiler Alert: I am going to tell you some key things about the plot, but you should read on. The eventual outcome has been widely reported. Miller leaves everything in the open, so proceed with empathy and compassion.

This is a book that every young male should read. Word for painful word. The world we live in has many and diverse perils, especially for young women. The source of many of those perils, though surely not all of them (see, e.g., Weinstein, Epstein, Nassar, etc. etc.), are young men.

As Miller so compellingly writes, the young man who raped her while she was unconscious should have known better. Everything about his privileged life, except perhaps the core privilege itself, should have made clear to him that what he was doing was wrong. There can be no argument about this, no way of seeing this otherwise.

But, of course, there was an argument. Faced with the consequences of conduct that he apparently had not thought about, the perpetrator, with the help/prodding/direction of his well-to-do parents, decided to fight Miller’s claim that she had not consented to his assault. He was ultimately convicted on all three felony counts and ultimately his appeal was denied. Her statement to the court, directed at the perpetrator, quickly went viral, bringing unprecedented attention to her case. The judge whose minimal sentence of six months plus three years’ probation for the rapist (he was released three months early) led to his eventual recall, the loss of his job as directed by the voters, by the community expressing its collective rejection of victim-blaming and of unbalanced visions of who was responsible for what behavior. I don’t have words for what was wrong with the sentence, but Miller does.

As I said, this was a hard read. It’s hard even to write this brief recommendation that you read the book. Not hard in any way comparable or equivalent to what Miller went through. Her book provides a deep and passionate picture of the toll that sexual assault takes of its victim and of the victim’s friends and family. It makes clear there is only one victim. The perpetrator is not a victim of anything but his own self-regard and indifference to the physical and emotional integrity of others. Miller shows remarkable, almost super-human capacity for empathy toward her attacker, but in the end, he denies her even the comfort of knowing that she reached him, that he finally understood what he had done to her.

Read this book. Everyone, man, woman, young, old, can learn from it.

Mueller Report Part II – Trump Guilty of Obstruction of Justice-E

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E. Mueller’s Inexplicably Generous Treatment of Trump’s Knowledge of Events

Another of the remarkable and unexplained conclusions reached by Mueller was that the evidence of Trump’s knowledge about Flynn’s lies about Kislyak was inconclusive. II MR-46. This conclusion seems flatly inconsistent with Trump’s statement to Christie that firing Flynn ended the Russia collusion issue.  II MR-38. We are asked to believe that Flynn told McFarland that his contacts with Kislyak had averted a major policy conflict with Russia but she did not pass that on to Trump! And that neither she nor Bannon could remember this major development! This is yet another example of Mueller’s lack of aggressive approach to Trump. WHY didn’t the SCO interview Trump to get at answers to these critical questions instead of saying they had enough evidence and it was late in the investigation? It is also unclear why it mattered so much whether Trump knew about Flynn’s deception close to the time the Kislyak talks occurred.

Even more puzzling is Mueller’s conclusion that Trump’s effort to get K.T. McFarland to write an internal email saying that Trump did not direct Flynn to talk to Kislyak was not an attempt to have McFarland lie. II MR-48. What then was Trump trying to get McFarland to do?  What is the alternative explanation for Trump’s request of her? This is another example where evidence of corrupt intent is simply written off as “insufficient” without explanation. IF SCO had interviewed Trump, questions like this could have been resolved instead of being left open and then construed as exonerating Trump.

A similar problem arises regarding Trump’s campaign to have Attorney General Jeff Sessions un-recuse himself regarding the Russia investigation. In a footnote Mueller says it was unclear that Trump was aware of White House counsel’s admonition not to contact Sessions. II MR-50, n. 289. Why isn’t Trump chargeable with constructive knowledge of WH counsel’s directive? Trump declined to read documents — does that relieve him of responsibility for knowing what was official White House policy that had been put in writing?  Moreover, if the SCO had interviewed Trump, it could have gotten answers to these questions left open and ultimately construed in Trump’s favor on grounds that the evidence did not show he knew something that, on a common sense view, he almost certainly did know.

Mueller’s generous treatment of Trump continued in the discussion of Comey’s briefing of the Gang of Eight legislators in March, 2017, about the Russia investigation. Mueller said it’s “unclear” whether Trump knew about the briefing at the time, but notes taken by McGahn’s chief of staff say that “POTUS in panic/chaos.” II MR-52. How/why would Trump be in a panic if he didn’t know about Comey’s briefing of Congressional leaders? How could the president be ignorant of such developments that might have such huge impacts on his presidency and to which he had devoted so much attention in the past few months?

 The Comey briefing led to one of the clearest cases of obstruction of justice, in that Trump demanded, and McGahn complied, that McGahn contact Dana Boente, then acting assistant attorney general at Justice, to publicly correct the “misperception” that Trump was under investigation. II MR-54,55. Once again, Trump insiders had failed memories of demands Trump made for intervention with the Department of Justice. II MR-5. And, there is no attempt to explain inconsistencies in other testimony from some of the same insiders, claiming Trump never ordered them to do anything wrong. These statements from NSA Director Rogers are inconsistent with the contemporaneous memo of the President’s call and of NSA Deputy Director Ledgett’s characterization of the extraordinary nature of the call. II MR-56. Why is there no consideration of these inconsistencies?

When Trump then reached out directly to Comey to ask him to relieve the impression Trump was under investigation, the Report, unbelievably, turns to McGahn’s asserted recall of what Dana Boente told him Comey had told Boente about Trump’s contacts with him. II MR-59.  As usual, Boente claimed not to recall this discussion. II MR-60.

Then, in one of the most remarkable moments in the Report, Mueller drops into a footnote (II MR-59, n. 376) the reminder that White House counsel had advised Trump not to contact DOJ about the investigation. Mueller seemingly attached no significance to the extraordinary & undisputed fact that Trump on multiple occasions ignored the advice of his White House attorneys by reaching out directly to Comey to discuss relieving the pressure of the Russia investigation. WHY? This was not the conduct of an innocent man.

Mueller seemed to be impressed with the fact that the people involved claimed that they did not interpret Trump’s repeated importunings as “directives” to interfere in the investigation. II MR-60. These people were all Trump appointees and true believers in his politics, who would naturally seek to maintain favor with him by declining to interpret his repeated requests as “directives.” In any case, the real question is not what they thought, but what Trump intended and the only way to get to the bottom of that ultimately was to interrogate him, which SCO, curiously, declined to demand. Trump’s attempts to secure a champion at DOJ included personal contacts with Coates, Pompeo, Rogers and Comey. Despite that, Mueller, with his usual reticence to accept the obvious, concludes that “the evidence does not establish that the President asked or directed intelligence agency leaders to stop or interfere with the FBI’s Russia investigation.” II MR-60.

The same question arises in connection with Trump’s multiple attempts to prevent AG Sessions from recusing himself from oversight of the Russia investigation. A couple of things are clear. Trump thought the AG worked for him personally and therefore that Sessions should remain in place to do Trump’s bidding regarding the investigation. And, White House counsel tried to cut off communications with Sessions about recusal to avoid the appearance of attempted interference with the investigation. Yet, once again, Mueller states it was “not clear” that the “no contact” directive was conveyed to Trump. II MR-61. HOW is it remotely plausible that White House counsel, in a matter of seminal importance, would not have conveyed this information to the one person whose knowledge of it and compliance was the most important? Why didn’t the SCO demand Trump answer this question? He refused to do so even in writing and the SCO let him get away with it!

Mueller repeatedly and uncritically refers to Trump’s asserted belief that the Russia investigation was somehow interfering with, Miller his ability to conduct foreign policy but never discussed how that interference worked or what real impact it had on a president who, by all accounts, spent most of his time watching television and playing golf. II MR-61.

Another point of clarity in the Report is the finding that Trump lied about the basis for firing Comey. II MR-62. Why would he do that except to cover up his corrupt motive to which he shortly confessed? Trump’s lies about his conduct, in the context of his other actions, were a clear case of cover-up that could have been treated as a separate offense by Mueller if he had the aggressive instincts of a prosecutor rather than the timidity of an equivocator.

A related question – why was Stephen Miller not indicted for his role in preparing a phony letter to cover Trump’s tracks regarding the firing of Comey? II MR-64. Another related question: the final stated reason for firing Comey was pretextual. All Trump cared about was establishing that he was not under FBI investigation and that he was firing Comey because Comey refused to say that publicly. The Rosenstein/Sessions memo was constructed as an alternate explanation that Trump then adopted while still insisting, against advice, that the point about his not being under investigation be prominently included in the firing letter. II MR-67. Yet, again, no indictments were brought against any of the president’s men for conspiring and lying to cover the tracks of a discharge action plainly intended to obstruct the FBI investigation. See, e.g., II MR-70 regarding lies told by Sean Spicer, then Press Secretary about the motivation for the Comey firing.

Mueller basically gave a pass to all Trump’s enablers who accepted and acted on his directions. Michael Cohen, in later testimony before Congress, spoke specifically about how Trump rarely gave specific directions for anything. He spoke in “code,” that Cohen claimed he understood. It is beyond credibility that, by the time of Comey’s firing, the president’s men did not also understand how he “directed” what he wanted done, what he insisted upon, without ever explicitly saying so. Mueller appears to have completely overlooked this aspect of Trump’s directorial style, crediting him with innocence because there was no overt statement by him that amounted to a confession. In the future, then, Trump’s enablers have no reason to fear repercussions when they willingly follow his non-order orders.

Further evidence of Mueller’s timidity may be found in his ultimate conclusion that “the anticipated effect of removing the FBI director … would not necessarily be to prevent or impede the FBI from continuing its investigation.” II MR-74. That astonishing statement shows Mueller going out of his way to avoid the overt implications of evidence regarding Trump’s actions that were, by Trump’s own admission, intended to interfere with the Russia investigation. Why else would he have fired Comey and handled the firing as he did, including conspiring to give the impression that Rosenstein/Sessions were responsible for the firing? A seasoned prosecutor like Mueller surely knew better, but falls all over himself in avoiding the plain implications of Trump’s conduct. Moreover, even if the investigation would have been unfazed by Comey’s firing (and thus completely ignored by the surviving DOJ attorneys), the clear intent of the discharge was proven and, as Mueller’s own statement of the governing legal tests showed, an attempt to obstruct does not have to be successful to violate the criminal law.

Curiously, the Report takes a somewhat different approach to assessing evidence of Trump’s intentions when it addresses Trump’s attempts to have the Special Counsel removed. II MR-84 thru MR-90. This may be the result of superior clarity of the evidence but this is not apparent from the Report language. One explanation may be that the “committee” of lawyers that drafted the Report were assigned different sections and that each one had a different approach. The analysis highlights the fact that Trump lied publicly about whether he had tried to have Mueller removed, an approach Trump had taken to other issues but which led to Mueller equivocating about the strength of the evidence. II MR-90.

It is a fair question as to why Mueller did not indict Cory Lewandowski whom Trump chose as the go-between to direct AG Jeff Sessions to publicly speak about the unfairness of the SCO investigation and to limit its authority to future elections only. The recited evidence clearly shows that both Chief of Staff Kelly and Lewandowski himself were well aware of the impropriety of Trump’s demands and took actions to conceal his conduct from exposure. II MR 91-93 & n. 604.

Regarding the infamous Trump Tower meeting, the evidence is clear that Trump took overt actions to cover up the situation. II MR-98 to MR-107. Yes, Mueller concludes that Trump’s actions were merely part of a press strategy and not an effort to affect the SCO investigation or the related work of Congressional investigations. This is an astonishing judgment when the SCO allowed Trump to avoid testifying and be examined about this subject. It is therefore impossible to conclude that these obstructive acts did not occur. Moreover, Trump clearly acted dishonestly regarding disclosure of the information and created a misleading paper trail that could have affected decisions at SCO about what to do regarding the Trump Tower meeting. Mueller resolved all doubts in favor of Trump even in face of evidence of his lies and duplicity regarding the issue at hand.

Other instances of Mueller’s resolving doubts in favor of Trump or his people involved Trump’s effort, using his personal counsel, to have McGahn publish a statement denying that Trump had asked him to fire Mueller. Mueller resigns to a footnote and fails to explain the conflict between Hope Hicks & Gen. Kelly regarding whether the McGahn resistance story was correct. II MR-114, n. 788. Kelly, Sarah Sanders and Rob Porter all experienced memory failure regarding aspects of Trump’s demands and denials about trying to get McGahn to fire Mueller. Trump, of course, remorselessly lied to his own staff about what he had said. II MR-115. He continued to press McGahn to “correct” stories that ” McGahn repeatedly told Trump, and others, was accurate as written. II MR 116-117. Mueller resorts to the gentlest possible language when describing these activities, using phrases such as “runs counter to the evidence” as opposed to the more precise “he lied.” II MR-118.

Rob Porter played a direct role in delivering Trump’s demands to McGahn (II MR-116) but, without explanation, was not indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Keystone Kops Meet Three Stooges – Three Weeks of Trump Administration

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Those of you old enough to have seen the old film clips know that the Keystone Kops and Three Stooges comedy shtick involved a lot of bumping into each other, falling down, bopping on the head and nose pulling to what, in the case of the Stooges, were regarded as amusing sounds. In those days such things were indeed considered very funny by millions of fans.

Now we have a modern day version of the same thing playing out in the administration of Donald Trump. But it’s not funny.

The sheer incompetence of Trump’s management style is playing out for the world to see. The latest episodes have him and members of his inner circle huddled over a dinner table in the main dining room at Mar-a-Lago discussing national security and military issues arising from North Korea’s latest missile test. There are photos taken by another guest, not part of the government, showing papers, presumably highly confidential, being lit up by cell phones. The Prime Minister of Japan is at the table and part of the conversation.

While the issue certainly affects Japan and our relations with it, you would think our top government people would first want to discuss the situation among themselves before talking it over with the leader of a foreign power. Press Secretary Sean Spicer said today that all that activity just related to organizing a press conference and that Trump had been advised before the dinner about the missile launch in secure quarters. Maybe. Hard to know what to believe when everyone in Trump’s house has a different version of events, as in, for example, the conflict between Spicer and Kellyanne Conway over whether Michael Flynn was fired or resigned. More alternative facts, I suppose. Take your pick.

Trump has been in power less than one month and chaos reigns around him. The great business leader appears to be thrashing around trying to look like a tough guy who’s on top of his agenda, while the work product is mostly a bunch of Executive Orders that accomplish very little actual change and were mostly unnecessary, including, of course, that masterwork on immigration that has been soundly repudiated by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The travel ban EO appears to have been written by people with no legal degrees. One of the chief authors, Stephen Miller (Senior Advisor to the President), just finished a round of weekend interviews in which he decreed that the authority of the president may not be questioned. Mr. Miller was smart enough to graduate from Duke University, no easy feat if you’re not an athlete, but went to work in politics for the likes of Michelle Bachman. Now, at age 31, he is one of Trump’s closest advisors. With all due respect, Mr. Miller probably should have gone to law school first, or at least a graduate program involving constitutional learning.

Trump’s reliance on Miller, Stephen Bannon (Chief Strategist), Reince Preibus (Chief of Staff) and Kellyanne Conway (Counselor to the President) has produced constant chaos and gaffes at every level, an embarrassment to the United States here and abroad. In case you missed the interview, here is the exact Miller statement:

“Well, I think that it’s been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government. One unelected judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean this is just crazy, John, the idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is — is — is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.

The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Is there something about judges in Seattle we don’t know? Miller smirked when he mentioned Seattle, as if a judge from Seattle was somehow a ridiculous idea that merited no respect? The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sits in four Western cities, covering nine states plus Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. It rejected the government’s attempt to overturn the District Court’s injunction pending further litigation. That apparently is not good enough to satisfy Mr. Miller’s concept of judicial authority either.

What exactly does Miller mean that as a result of “further actions,” the powers of the president to protect our country will not be questioned?” It sounds like a direct threat to the role of the judiciary in our tripartite system of checks and balances established by the Constitution. Maybe all he meant to say was that next time the Executive Order will be competently and narrowly written so that there is no real question of its legitimacy. Maybe. Mr. Miller should choose his words carefully. Threats to reject the authority of the judiciary as the third co-equal branch of government are more serious than Mr. Miller appears to understand. Oh, and the judge in Seattle did not say that “a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States.”

At the time of the weekend interviews Mr. Miller had ample time to read the 9th Circuit opinion rejecting the government’s request to overturn the decision of the “unelected judge in Seattle.” The court’s opinion eviscerates the government’s arguments one by one, including these findings:

“… although courts owe considerable deference to the President’s policy determinations with respect to immigration and national security, it is beyond question that the federal judiciary retains the authority to adjudicate constitutional challenges to executive action.” [Opinion Part IV]

and

“The procedural protections provided by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause are not limited to citizens. Rather, they “appl[y] to all ‘persons’ within the United States, including aliens,” regardless of “whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.” Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 693 (2001). These rights also apply to certain aliens attempting to reenter the United States after travelling abroad. Landon v. Plasencia, 459 U.S. 21, 33-34 (1982).”  [Opinion Part VI]

Again, a few years in law school would have helped Mr. Miller grasp these Constitutional fundamentals. Why is the President of the United States relying on this person to speak for his administration in matters of this nature?

Just today a USA Today reported that

“review of presidential documents shows at least five cases where the version of an executive order posted on the White House website doesn’t match the official version sent to the Federal Register. The discrepancies raise further questions about how thorough the Trump administration has been in drafting some of the president’s most controversial actions.”

I won’t belabor this further. The Trump administration is led by a man who claims to be a master business leader, disciplined organizer and super-decisive “very smart” person. In today’s press briefing, Sean Spicer went out of his way to emphasize how “decisive” the President has been in all things. Yet everywhere one looks through the first three weeks of his administration, we see people bumping into each other, heads being bopped and noses yanked. This made for good comedy way back when, but it’s no way to lead a government. Despite months to prepare, all the President’s men seem to have little idea of what they are doing.

#RESIST