OK, Vindman and Sondland were fired almost as soon as possible after the Senate vote. This was predictable from the moment the two opened their mouths in the House committee. I hope no one was surprised at this.
So will the person-who-cannot-be-named try to do more to retaliate against them? Have Barr sic investigators on Sondland? Try to get Vindman court martialed? Have Giuliani bite them (turn into vampires/contract rabies)? From everything I’ve heard about Trump, he’s vindictive enough to do this.
Soundland is a private citizen. Outside of investigations and revealing secrets, not much.
The Vindmans (plural). Serving military officers. Trump is the CinC. No illegal orders, but even legal orders give him huge leeway to make their lives miserable.
This is what the Senate Republicans have unleashed. Trump really CAN do whatever he damn well pleases at this point, with no fear of repercussions, and they are the ones who enabled it. The Republican Party is beyond redemption.
They’re a cult, or something not far different from it. I listened to a Joe Walsh interview with Slate last night, and he said that Trump doesn’t have supporters, but followers. I think in that environment, he can do what he wants.
I’ve already seen one of his supporters on Facebook call for just this, claiming that he’s guilty of everything under the sun. He also wants the brother court martialed, but was somewhat less clear on the “justification” for that.
Bill Barr could start a criminal investigation. Sure, it would be baseless, but that’s not the point – the subjects of a criminal investigation would have that hanging over their heads. They’d have to pay lawyers potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep up with the investigation and defend them, depending on how far it goes.
Look at the example of Andrew McCabe. Have they even indicted him? No, but that’s not the point.
The DoJ was even ordered by a district judge in DC to make a decision on whether to indictment, and to date they haven’t. And yet AFAIK, the case is still pending.
Not only is Barr concocting a bullshit investigation, but he’s done all that he can to legitimize keeping the facts of the case secret. In other words, he’s not just trying to put McCabe in jail, he’s also trying to keep his reasons for doing so shielded from public view.
In short, Bill Barr is lying; we’re just fortunate that we have a judicial system that is still nonpartisan enough and capable enough to hold him accountable, but that won’t last forever, considering how Mitch McConnell has turned the Senate into a pro-oligarch, pro-kleptocratic judicial nomination factory. That leaves Barr free to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after Trump’s enemies.
Bear in mind that Bill Barr himself is in the vortex of whatever corrupt, criminal shenanigans Trump is involved in. Criminal activity is something that future presidents who succeed Trump would surely consider investigating, and Trump’s henchmen know that - just as Vladimir Putin knew that he was going to be prosecuted by justice officials in St. Petersburg unless he found a way to permanently fix that problem, which he did. Anyone who tried to hold Putin legally and ethically accountable was jailed, killed, or chased out of the country, and in some cases even exiles were killed. Given the proximity between Trump’s GOP and the Kremlin, it’s not at all a stretch to suggest that a similar thing could happen here as well.
The message is clear: Bill Barr is using the Department of Justice to terrorize career officials who cross Trump. He’s already demonstrated a willingness to use federal resources to go after Trump’s investigators, and there’s no reason to believe he won’t do this to others who testify against him or otherwise threaten his legitimacy.
It’s not enough to win; they have to keep winning. They’re in a position where they can’t afford to lose even once. And that’s what makes them extremely dangerous.
The first step an authoritarian regime takes in destroying democracy is convincing people that there’s no such thing as truth, that all people are equally bad, that nobody has good motives, so fuck worrying about whose intentions are good and whose aren’t. This approach explains Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Trump right down to the final full stop. All politicians are bad, they’re going to act out of self-interest, they’ll sometimes do unethical and illegal things in doing so, and that’s what you accept in a democracy. It’s bullshit, but it’s what a lot of know-nothing voters assume having been bombarded with Oliver Stone and Alex Jones conspiracy theories for decades.
But it’s the next step when the death of democracy becomes more obvious, and here it is: the authoritarians are going not after the threats below them (voters, concerned citizens, activists, etc); they’re taking out their opposition and their challengers toward the top. The first way they do that is to take control of the machinery of government - the bureaucracy - and to weaponize it, to use it as a cudgel, as a sledgehammer against enemies. They’re right now fighting to take control of that machinery. That explains the bullshit investigation of McCabe. The threatened investigation of Comey. The massive inter-agency investigation into how the Trump probe even started. They’re taking over the machinery, either by purging them, by forcing them to retire, by firing them outright in humiliating “perp walk” like exits from the White House, or by threatening to prosecute them and making them pay a fair chunk of their life savings to stay out of prison. Shit, they could be murdered in prison “altercations” and they know it.
And when that process of taking over the government’s machinery comes into clearer focus, well, that is when they start getting more aggressive. That’s when they building apparatuses that ensure they win elections. That’s also when they start prosecuting political rivals for “crimes” against the state. These things take time, but this is ultimately how it unfolds. It will become more and more obvious, and chances are, people will be standing around, looking at each other, wondering what in the hell to do, knowing that something is terribly wrong but clueless as to how to stop it, and fearful of trying.
Would this be legal? I mean wouldn’t there have to be some reason (one extant before 2019) to justify the cost to the government? Or, is there nothing in the US legal system to prevent such retributive action?
You’re still acting like what was normal four years ago still is normal. Trump’s acquittal in the Senate has finally put paid to that.
Barr has said he won’t investigate Trump, and the Senate has said that they’re okay with everything Trump has done so far. So who remains to enforce the law against Trump?
Is some low-level IRS guy going to oppose the President of the United States, when every legal authority above him has shown that they not only won’t stop Trump from engaging in reprisals, they’ll actually enable him in reprisals?
The Checks and Balances are gone. Now we’re down to raw power and noble sacrifices.
It’s not whether there is legal protection against harassment - there clearly are such legal protections.
But they’re accountable to no one now. They don’t have to comply with subpoenas. They can refuse to turn over documents. They can claim executive privilege. They can prosecute former career officials and keep their reasons for doing so in private. Eventually, they might relent and some judge, somewhere might hold them accountable, but not before making individuals spend tons of money defending themselves.
What happens when the day comes that Trump says “SCOTUS has issued its decision. Let THEM enforce it.”?
Let us remember rule-of-law and “checks and balances” themselves are predicated, as is Smithian capitalism, on that all parties to the system are *rationally *self-interested in playing by fair rules and that when they detect some player trying to abuse it the rest of them will realize they have to gang up on him to stop it before he takes *them *down. This of course fails when enough of the other players are fine with it because it profits them too “and maybe I’ll be one of the privileged survivors”.
A lot of the instruments of abuse we now see Trump applying used to be instruments of “executive discretion” that were allowed to be established so that the legislature would not need to write a statute to cover every single case, or so that the authorities could “do the right thing” in the face of a Congress or state governments who would not, or to go after gangsters/druglords/terrorists/subversives, through whatever “not pretty, but necessary” backdoor or workaround they could think of.
Let us remember that right form the start Trump brought to our attention how a lot of the supposed “rules” of how a President acts or does not act (tax disclosures, profit from office, etc.) were just longstanding “gentlemen’s agreements” that were written up nowhere and that he felt it was stupid to submit to if there was noone who could force him to.
In the specific case of ambassadorships and the NSC, these institutions were made direct dependencies of whoever’s the sitting POTUS because of the “unitary executive” model which conceptually is sensible enough, POTUS being the elected head of the Government AND of the State , and making them in any way independent would be seen as institutionalizing the Deep State for real. But the office’s evolution into the modern-age “imperial presidency” makes it so that when we get a POTUS who believes he is personally the ruler of the country, there is no way to put the brakes on him/her unless Congress is willing to.
So Barr says he’s set up a pipeline to get what I’m sure will be completely legitimate evidence regarding the Bidens directly from Rudy Guliani, a man who holds no government position and is not a part of either Ukrainian or American intelligence network; he’s just a guy. Who is, or was, Trump’s personal lawyer. And has been hobnobbing in the Ukraine with, presumably, a guy he knows. When it comes to Trump the US Justice Department will effectively consist of Guliani, Barr, and Trump. And whoever’s feeding Guiliani, of course.
And I see that Lindsay Graham went on TV to proclaim that those who investigated Trump will be going to jail even though they broke no laws. This might succeed or it might fail, but either way the Republicans have slipped further into prerogative rather than normative governance, and that’s fascism.
The “Gentleman’s Agreement” would accept that Trump had good reasons to fire Col Vindman. But it would also require him to enter something like "while political compulsions oblige this removal, I trust I do not need to impress the point that the officer’s future prospects should be decided on the basis of his own merits rather than being governed by the fact of the present unfortunate decision into his file.