June 23, 2020: The President Wants Another Critic Locked Up

6/23/20: The bad news keeps piling up. GNC, the health and wellness retailer, announces it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and close 800 to 1,200 stores. There are estimates that 25,000 U.S. stores will close this year. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the global economy will contract by 4.9% in 2020. The estimated recover in 2021 is expected to be weaker than predicted as recently as April. If there’s a major new outbreak of the coronavirus, the recovery will shrivel to nothing.

 

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A typical day in Trumpistan. Bend the rule of law. Silence the critics. Protect the felons.

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Meanwhile, in a speech to a group called “Students for Trump,” at the packed Dream City megachurch in Phoenix, Arizona, the 3,000 young people in attendance were clearly counting on God to protect them from the virus. Masks were conspicuous by their near-total absence. Social distancing was impossible. 

Trump was happy because people were cheering him again. He told listeners they were the defenders of our culture. He said they would never “kneel to the radical left.” He warned, without citing proof, that Democrats wanted to let everyone vote, “even if they’re not citizens.” The way the virus is spreading lately – with Trump getting a large, well-earned share of the blame – and the way the polls are running, the Democrats won’t need help from non-citizen voters, even if they did want it. 

(They don’t.)

 

With five months until the election, you never know what will happen. Still, GOP leaders must be sweating. A poll of Montana voters last month showed Trump favored over Biden by five points (45%-40%), in a state he won by 20 four years ago. Even more ominously, if your name is Milksop Mitch McConnell, former Democratic Governor Steve Bullock had a seven-point lead in the same poll, over incumbent U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, 46%-39%.

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AND WHAT DAY in Trumpistan is ever complete without fresh evidence that there is no rule of law Trump won’t bend to protect himself and those he loves. Namely: he loves those who protect him. 

Tomorrow, Aaron Zelinsky, one of four prosecutors who quit the Roger Stone case in protest, will tell the House Judiciary Committee that they were pressured to give Stone a break because he was a pal of the president. “What I heard – repeatedly – was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the President,” the former DOJ lawyer will say in prepared testimony. 

“Zelinsky will appear alongside antitrust prosecutor John Elias, who plans to testify that Attorney General William Barr personally ordered the Justice Department's Antitrust Division to launch politically motivated reviews of 10 cannabis mergers,” Politico reports. Zelinsky’s testimony will be “a stunning – and stunningly rare – public rebuke of Justice Department leadership by a sitting official.” 

Zelinsky will also say that prosecutors were prepared in February to hit Stone with a steep sentencing recommendation. This, they believed, would be merited, due to Stone’s “long-term lying to impede an investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, a grave national security matter.”  

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee will shrug their shoulders, and Rep. Jim Jordan will start yelling about Hunter Biden again. (See: 6/24/20.) Because let’s be honest. They don’t want to know what Stone might really know about the law-breaking efforts of President Trump. 

And Trump supporters won’t have a hint of a clue – that you don’t really want to have a president who cuts people who break the law breaks, so long as they help him break the law too.

 

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“Bending the criminal justice system to benefit” the president. 

IT’S NOT JUST Zelinsky and Elias who are deeply worried and fear Attorney General Barr is up to no good. 

Sixty-five law professors and faculty members at George Washington University Law School, Barr’s alma mater, have issued a statement of protest. Barr’s actions as attorney general, they write, “have undermined the rule of law, breached constitutional norms, and damaged the integrity and traditional independence of his office and of the Department of Justice.” 

Among the Attorney General’s sins, they note that he 

obfuscated and misled the American public about the results of the Mueller investigation. He wrongfully interfered in the day-to-day activities of career prosecutors, and continues to do so, bending the criminal justice system to benefit the President’s friends and target those perceived to be his enemies.

 

Finally, they add, “We include members of both major political parties, and of none. We have different legal specialties and represent a broad spectrum of approaches to the law.” 

And in this blogger’s words: They smell a skunk, who works for a bigger skunk. In the White House.

 

The New York City Bar Association chimed in in a letter sent to House and Senate leaders, stating emphatically that Barr is unfit for the “high position he occupies in our federal government” and should step aside.

 

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LAST, BUT NOT LEAST, we learn again that Donald J. Dictator has no idea how the First Amendment works. In an interview with Brian Kilmeade, on Fox News (free press working), he calls John Bolton a “stupid guy,” and a guy “with no heart (still the free press working). 

“I fired him. And I didn’t think it was a big deal. And I wasn’t around him very much,” the president said. 

Kilmeade does not bother to ask, “He was your National Security Advisor. Do you mean you didn’t spend any time with the man?” (Kilmeade is the free press not working.) 

“But what he did do is he took classified information, and he published it during a presidency,” Trump insisted, adding: “I believe that he’s a criminal, and I believe, frankly, he should go to jail for that.” 

(Note to Trump fans: Your president really wants to see a lot of critics go to jail.)

 

Later, he vented his spleen in another unhinged tweet. “Washed up Creepster John Bolton is a lowlife who should be in jail,” the President of the United States insisted, “money seized, for disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information.” (Free press dying – if Trump has his way.) 

Practitioners of the free press in this country have every reason to defend themselves and the whole “freedom” concept. 

So it didn’t help when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo backed Trump in his call to jail a critic. 

Pompeo said he had seen “young soldiers” prosecuted for the release of classified information “at a much lower level, who were much more junior” than Bolton. “This is something that has real criminal risk associated with it,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “And for the life of me, I can’t figure out how it’s the case that this can be permitted to stand without a real response.”

 

Oddly enough, during a State Department briefing highlighting the importance of the free press, held via Zoom today, the spokesperson for State takes offense to a reporter’s question about Bolton’s book. 

“AT&T, we can mute that line,” the spokesperson says. 

And they did. 

Later, the spokesperson defended her decision, calling the reporter’s question about the book “offensive.” 

You know. Free press (the reporter) asking about Bolton’s book (more free press involved).

 

Shaun Tandon, the president of the State Department Correspondents’ Association, described the muting of the reporter as “richly ironic” considering the subject matter of the briefing itself. 

“We obviously do not draw any comparison between the conduct on this call and the tactics of the People’s Republic of China,” Tandon wrote in a letter of protest to the spokesperson. “But we believe that muting a reporter’s phone line, and describing a question as ‘offensive’ at the end of a briefing, run counter to the spirit of press freedom and to the professional atmosphere that we have both sought at the Department of State.” 

Yeah. Not in Trumpistan. Sorry. Silence the critics. 

Protect the felons.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/16/21) I missed this story at the time, but on June 23, 2020, top White House aide Larry Kudlow makes it clear, as for the virus, we have nothing to fear but wearing masks.

 

“There is no second wave coming.” 

He says he’s not worried about a surge of COVID-19 cases. We shouldn’t be either. “There is no second wave coming. It’s just hot spots. They send in CDC teams, we’ve got the testing procedures, we’ve got the diagnostics, we’ve got the PPE. And so I really think it’s a pretty good situation,” he says. 

“There are some hot spots,” he adds. “We’re on it. We know how to deal with this stuff now, we’ve come a long way from last winter.” 

As we now know, this was a truly terrible prediction.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE #2: The Department of Justice opens a case against Bolton, but in the seven months remaining before Joe Biden takes over, no evidence is ever produced that Bolton revealed classified information in his book. In fact, a review found just the opposite. (See: 9/23/20.) 

The criminal investigation against Bolton is finally closed in June 2021, with no charges lodged against him.