So who is the “nut job” here? On today’s BradCast, Trump appears to have dug himself even deeper into the Obstruction of Justice mire and, speaking of “justice”, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rolls back bi-partisan gains on criminal justice reform made during the Obama Era. [Audio link for show follows below.]
A new report today from the New York Times alleges that, during his Oval Office meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador last week, the day after he’d fired James Comey, President Trump described the former FBI Director as “crazy” and a “real nut job”. He reportedly explained that he’d been under “great pressure because of Russia,” but that pressure had been lifted due to his firing. If accurate, the new report, said to have been based on documentation of the meeting from the White House itself, could serve as more evidence of Obstruction of Justice by the President, who has now departed for a nine day overseas trip.
Foreign diplomats are reportedly making special preparations to deal with Trump in the Middle East and Europe, including plans to compliment him on his Electoral College win, and by keeping presentations short enough for his, um, limited attention span.
But lost among the sturm und drang over the Comey firing and related dramas over the past week or more is the fact that Trump’s executive agencies, such as the EPA, the Department of Interior and Department of Justice, are all moving ahead with some pretty troubling policies. Among them, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ harsh new guidelines requiring federal prosecutors to charge defendants with the “most serious” crimes possible in order to, among other things, force judges to impose mandatory minimum sentencing. This comes even while the U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population, but nearly one quarter of its prisoners.
The new Trump Administration policies, rolling back progressive Obama Era reforms, are being enacted despite decades of plummeting crime rates and broad bi-partisan efforts for criminal justice reform, both at the state and federal levels, according to my guest today, former New York Asst. District Attorney Ames Grawert, now counsel at the Justice Program for NYU’s Brennan Center.
Grawert, co-author of the new report, A Federal Agenda to Reduce Mass Incarceration, speaks to the Trump/Sessions claims that crime is rampant and ravaging the nation, despite all evidence to the contrary. “Fear sells,” he tells me. “He [Trump] and Sessions need something to convince people that there’s a need to embrace these draconian blast-from-the-past policies on mandatory minimums.”
About those policies, Grawert laments, “Whether you come to it as a conservative from a moral angle, a religious angle, or simply a budgetary common sense angle, there’s a lot of Republicans who are willing to say that criminal justice reform is an imperative for the country. It’s shocking that Sessions [when he served as U.S. Senator, blocking a bi-partisan reform bill] was not one of them.”
Obama’s Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates (yes, that Sally Yates), had issued a memorandum last year instructing federal prisons to end contracts with private prison corporations for a number of reasons supported by both Republicans and Democrats. “Sessions rescinded that very early in his tenure,” Grawert notes, “with an ominous declaration that it was needed to meet the quote ‘future needs of the federal correctional system.'”
“The problem is that when you have mandatory minimums like these, and when you have an order like the one Sessions just put out last week preventing prosecutors from deciding how they are going to charge a case, it takes a lot of the discretion out of the hands of prosecutors. So, rather than making sure that they, who know the case best of all, are able to help the judge fit the punishment to the crime, you have prosecutors with their hands tied, required to seek a draconian sentence that they, themselves, and that judges also may not feel is actually called for.”
“The one thing we learned from the last thirty years or so, is that the federal government’s power of the purse, and the tone set in Washington, they carry a lot of weight at the state level,” he tells me. “So if you have an attorney general saying, look, we need to send more people to jail for longer, you shouldn’t think for a minute that people in states, people running for D.A., people running for governor’s house, won’t listen to that and take their cues from that.”
Please listen to the full show with much more on all of the above right here…
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[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_ComeyNutJob_AmesGrawert_SessionsSentencingReform_TrumpForeignTrip_051917.mp3]
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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Should this song be America’s new National Anthem?
http://thesuspicionist.blogspot.com/2017/05/is-this-classic-song-real-national.html
In his letter firing Comey, Trump had made a point of asserting that Comey had three times assured him he wasn’t a subject of investigation.
But now we learn that Trump told the Russians in his office that with Comey fired, the pressure of the investigation had been lifted from Trump.
Hey, wait, something doesn’t match between those two stories he just told….
Raven @2:
I’m no Trump fan. But to be fair (which he does not deserve), the Times quotes the exchange thusly:
Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.â€
So, as I read that, he’s saying the investigation itself (presumably of his campaign associates) was causing him “pressure”, but that he, himself, was not under investigation.
That would make his “two stories” match up. At least in this instance.
Alas, Brad, Trump all too precisely and accurately used the present tense when saying, “I’m not under investigation.†(after firing Comey)
Had his first story (in the firing letter) been truthful, he could have said to the Russians, “I wasn’t under investigation.†(even before firing Comey)
(* … under investigation by Comey, that is.)
Re: Raven @1 and 2 & Brad @3:
In the final analysis, the special counsel will have to examine the entirety of the evidence: (a) multiple interactions between Trump and/or his subordinates and Comey; (b) context, e.g. Trump asking Sessions to leave the oval office so he could speak privately with Comey, (c) firing Comey; (d) multiple inconsistent accounts about why Comey was fired, including the cited remarks made to Russia’s ambassador; (e) conflicts between Trump’s claims and Comey’s contemporaneous memoranda of conversations.
The fact that Trump insists that he was told he was not under investigation or that he said in present tense that he is not under investigation after firing Comey are but small pieces within a much larger puzzle.
Proof of criminal intent is one of the elements a prosecutor must establish in order to convict an individual of the crime of Obstruction of Justice. The evidence publicly revealed to date is enough to suggest a prima facia case for alleging an obstruction of justice.
Also, so long as he remains in office, the most that Mueller can do is to name Trump as an un-indicted co-conspirator. Even if Mueller came up with hard-and-fast evidence of collusion, Trump could not be charged with a crime until he either leaves office or is forced to leave office via trial and conviction for impeachment in the U.S. Senate or via the 25th Amendment.
Mueller’s role as an investigator would be to track the truth wherever it leads, and build the cases for either setting — Congress for impeachment, or court for indictment — wherein, being “special counsel†he might also assist the Congressional efforts, as well as actually prosecuting the non-impeachment cases, e.g. staff like Flynn or Manafort.