Bill Barr Refuses to be questioned by Congressional Councel

From the four-page “Barr letter” and its fatuous conclusion that Trump did not obstruct justice to the pre-release press conference in which Barr attempted to spin the report in the president’s favor, the attorney general has been doing damage control. Over the last week, as Trump has said he will fight every request and every subpoena, Barr is now running interference between the Justice Department and the Congress.  He is refusing to appear before the House Judiciary Committee unless chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., shelves his plan to have part of the session run by committee counsel and hold a part of the hearing in closed session. Apparently Barr does not like the idea that the legal staff could follow up closely with a line of inquiry. He prefers the disjointed five-minute questioning format that never gets anywhere, which is a sad statement coming from the attorney general of the United States.

If Barr can’t face a committee lawyer, perhaps he’s not really fit to be the top law enforcement officer in the federal government. The Judiciary Committee lawyers interviewed many of the other participants in the Russia investigation, including former FBI director James Comey, in closed session. The only difference with Barr is that this will be a public hearing, which one might expect the self-described most transparent government in history to be happy to accommodate.

Barr has been around long enough to remember all the times that congressional committees had counsel question witnesses, including cabinet members. It most famously happened during the Watergate hearings when lawyers like Sam Dash and Richard Ben-Veniste became national figures, holding the president’s men’s feet to the fire. Chief counsel to the Senate’s Iran-Contra committee, Arthur Liman, led the questioning in that inquiry. And considering that just a few months ago, the Republicans hired an outside attorney to question Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, it’s entirely absurd that Barr is balking.

Nadler refused to change his plans, explaining patiently that witnesses aren’t allowed to dictate procedure to congressional committees, nor is the attorney general allowed to dictate to the legislative branch. (The Trump administration remains very confused about the separation of powers in general.) Nadler says he’ll issue a subpoena if Barr refuses to show up. There is some talk about holding the hearings with an empty chair which would be very silly and unproductive.

Robert Costa of the Washington Post reported on MSNBC on Monday that Republican sources tell him the Democrats are being “political” and have no right to hold hearings that are impeachment inquiries in all but name. I think we know how to solve that problem, don’t we?

Trump Asserts Executive Privilege Over Mueller Report Material Sought by House Democrats

Move comes as House panel considers holding Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress

President Trump has asserted executive privilege on all the material in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that House Democrats have demanded in a major escalation of the continuing fight over access to the documents.

The move came as Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee planned a vote on holding Attorney General William Barr in contempt for his refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by the committee for the unredacted Mueller report and its underlying evidence.

The White House accused the House panel of acting only to damage Mr. Trump politically—calling Mr. Nadler’s actions “unlawful and reckless” and saying they would invoke executive privilege over the papers.

“Faced with Chairman Nadler’s blatant abuse of power, and at the Attorney General’s request, the President has no other option than to make a protective assertion of executive privilege,” said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders in a statement.

The dispute centers around the unredacted version of the Mueller report and the underlying evidence—some of which the Justice Department says by law it cannot provide because, in part, it involves grand-jury testimony that is secret. Democrats subpoenaed the material last month—saying that it was necessary for Congress to independently examine the material and the basis for Mr. Mueller’s findings.

.. The Justice Department, in its recommendation to Mr. Trump on executive privilege, said it was necessary to preemptively invoke the privilege to protect the administration’s prerogatives.

In response to the department’s ongoing refusal to provide the documents, the House Judiciary Committee is considering a contempt resolution against Mr. Barr

.. Contempt resolutions against cabinet secretaries are rare, but not unprecedented. A Republican-led House held former Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt in 2012.

However, the Trump administration’s broad refusal to cooperate with any oversight requests from Democratic committees has elevated tensions between the two branches to levels unseen since events the magnitude of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Iran-Contra arms scandal and Watergate.

A move to invoke executive privilege—a doctrine that some executive branch materials can be shielded from disclosure to preserve candid advice to the president—is all but certain to provoke a constitutional challenge in the courts.

A similar challenge was heard 45 years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case United States v. Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal. Then, a unanimous high court sharply limited the ability of a president to claim executive privilege.

 In the Nixon litigation, however, the issue was whether the president had to obey a grand-jury subpoena in the context of a criminal inquiry by a special prosecutor. Now, it is Congress seeking access to a different type of material. How modern courts, including the current group of Supreme Court justices, would weigh a congressional demand for such information remains far from certain.

Any executive-privilege ruling by the Supreme Court on a document like the Mueller report and its underlying evidence is fraught with peril for both Congress and the executive branch, which have traditionally tried to compromise in such matters. A legal fight could reshape the relationship between the two branches of government for decades to come.

The Presidency or Prison

What happens if re-election is Trump’s best hope of avoiding an indictment?

Donald Trump — or, as he’s known to federal prosecutors, Individual-1 — might well be a criminal. That’s no longer just my opinion, or that of Democratic activists. It is the finding of Trump’s own Justice Department.

.. . The prosecutors argued that, in arranging payoffs to two women who said they’d had affairs with Trump, Cohen broke campaign finance laws, and in the process “deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election.”

.. “While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows,” prosecutors wrote.

.. In other words, lawyers from the Justice Department have concluded that Trump may have committed a felony that went to the heart of the process that put him in office.

.. Trump’s potential criminality in this case, which raises questions about his legitimacy as president, creates a dilemma for Democrats. Assuming prosecutors are right about Trump’s conduct, it certainly seems impeachable; a situation in which a candidate cheats his way into the presidency is one the founders foresaw when they were designing the impeachment process. As George Mason argued at the Constitutional Convention, “Shall the man who has practiced corruption, and by that means procured his appointment in the first instance, be suffered to escape punishment by repeating his guilt?”

.. But in our current moment, removing the president through impeachment is essentially impossible, given that at least 20 Senate Republicans would have to join Democrats. Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who will soon lead the House Judiciary Committee, told me he wouldn’t consider impeachment proceedings without at least some Republican support. 

.. Experts on both the left and the right believe that if Trump is voted out of office in 2020, before the five-year statute of limitations on campaign finance violations runs out, he could find himself in serious legal jeopardy.

.. The 2020 presidential election was always going to be extraordinarily ugly, but one can only imagine what Trump will do if the alternative to the White House is the big house. “It’s dangerous,” said Swalwell, who worries that Trump could become even more erratic, making decisions to save himself that involve “our troops or internal domestic security.”

.. Ordinarily, you know that a democracy is failing when electoral losers are threatened with prison. But Trump’s lawlessness is so blatant that impunity — say, a pardon, or a politically motivated decision not to prosecute — would also be deeply corrosive, unless it was offered in return for his resignation.
.. as long as Individual-1 is on the ticket, the 2020 election is set to be a banana republic-style death match. Trump will almost certainly try to criminalize his opponent — crowds at his rallies have taken to chanting “Lock her up” at the mention of virtually any Democratic woman’s name. And Democrats won’t be able to uphold the general principle that in American elections, losing doesn’t mean personal ruination, because for Trump it will and it should.
.. There are ways to lower the stakes somewhat. Nadler told me he plans to introduce legislation that would freeze the statute of limitations for crimes committed by presidents, so they could be charged when their terms end. Such a law would at least mean that Trump couldn’t evade justice forever just by winning re-election.
.. That would mitigate the peril to our democracy, but it wouldn’t come close to eliminating it. Our best hope may lie in the emergence of irrefutable evidence of further presidential crimes, enough to finally test the tolerance of at least some fraction of Republicans.
.. After two years of hearing people say we were all trigger-happy on impeachment, now I’m hearing we’re all constitutional fraidy-cats. Give us a chance to do the fact investigation and figure out what happened.”
.. But if the president has committed felonies, we also have to figure out how Republicans might be induced to care.

Cohen’s guilty plea suggests Russia has ‘leverage’ over Trump, top Democrat says

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in an appearance on NBC’ News’s “Meet the Press” that Thursday’s guilty plea by Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, raises the question of whether Russia continues to have leverage over Trump.

.. “Does the Kremlin have a hold on him over other things?” Nadler said. “There certainly was leverage during the campaign period and until recently because they knew he was lying, they knew he had major business dealings or that Cohen on his behalf had major business dealings.”

.. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said Sunday that “most Republicans who were about to nominate Donald Trump in the summer of ’16 would probably have thought it was a relevant fact” that Trump was still trying to do business with Russia at the time.

.. “What I find particularly interesting with the revelation of Cohen’s plea is that he’s saying he lied to protect then-candidate Trump’s stories that he had nothing to do with Russia,”

.. “So, the president seemed to already be changing his story a little bit and say, ‘well, it was all legal.’ ”