The weird thing is, Berman is not a career civil servant as noted by HCR. That’s what makes this so crazy… a guy who worked with Giuliani, donated to Trump and was personally interviewed by Trump for the position has investigations running on Trump’s business dealings and now Trump wants him out? Something must really stink.
7 Likes
True, but Berman is surrounded by career DOJ prosecutors and investigators at SDNY, and it looks like some of that rubbed off on him.
5 Likes
I think it’s not so much that Trump wants Berman out, he wants Clay in.
Clay knows where the bodies are; he probably helped to bury them when Deutsche Bank was his client.
4 Likes
it’s equally probable he just wanted the job. a lot of people have worked with giuliani. that particular law firm had 1558 846 partners in 2014. ( apparently, it is known for it’s large size. )
https://www.gtlaw.com/en/news/2014/3/greenberg-traurig-says-secret-is-more-partners-not-fewer
and pretty much trump wanted to meet every notable appointee at the start of his disaster of a presidency. ( presumably so that he could later claim to never have met them. )
my read is, democrats complained when sessions appointed berman mainly because he was completely bypassing the normal senate confirmation process. ( edit: and not because he seemed to be in trump’s pocket. )
5 Likes
Seems plausible. Having “I worked for for Rudy Giuliani once” in one’s CV used to be a selling point.
3 Likes
June 20, 2020 (Saturday)
Yesterday’s standoff between Attorney General William Barr and the interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman, whom Barr was trying to fire, was only one of today’s significant stories.
Last night, Barr announced Berman was “stepping down.” Berman retorted he was doing nothing of the sort and that Barr had no authority to fire him. This morning, Berman showed up for work. Then Barr wrote Berman a letter saying he was “surprised and disappointed by the press statement you released last night…. Because you have declared that you have no intention of resigning, I have asked the President to remove you as of today, and he has done so.” Barr gave no reason for the firing.
Because Berman was an interim U.S. Attorney, appointed by the court rather than confirmed by the Senate, it was not clear if Trump had the authority to fire him (although it was clear Barr did not). But that point became moot quickly, when Trump told reporters: “That’s his department, not my department…. I’m not involved.” The president’s disavowal of Barr’s declaration means Barr, the Attorney General, has lied in writing twice in the past two days.
And Berman had gained his point. Barr’s letter said he would not replace Berman with an outside candidate—which was highly irregular—but would follow normal procedure and permit Berman’s deputy, Audrey Strauss, to become acting U.S. Attorney in his place. With this win for the Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s office, Berman said he would leave his post. A former SDNY prosecutor said: “After all this what did they gain by getting rid of Berman? Nothing.”
Berman’s office has been handling a number of cases involving Trump and his allies, including one involving Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and political operatives Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who are charged with funneling Russian money to Republican candidates for office. The three have also been involved in the attempt to smear Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden by digging up witnesses in Ukraine who are willing to testify against the Bidens, although after repeated investigations there is no evidence either Biden committed any wrongdoing.
It may be these cases, or others, that the Trump administration is eager to quash. My guess is that we have not heard the end of its attempt to stifle the SDNY, but there is yet another roadblock in their way. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and usually a staunch Trump supporter, said he had not been consulted on the proposed replacement for Berman. He added that he would follow Senate tradition, and permit the Senators from New York, where the office is based, to veto the nomination if they wished. Nominee Jay Clayton has never been a prosecutor, and New York’s Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrats both, will almost certainly not accept his candidacy.
There was another loss for the administration today. A federal judge decided against Trump’s attempt to stop the release of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s memoir of his days in the Trump administration. U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said it would be impossible to stop the distribution of the book, which has already begun to circulate.
The judge also blasted Bolton for moving ahead with publication without an official government sign-off on the book certifying that it did not reveal classified information. He warned that Bolton might face prosecution if he has exposed national security secrets in the book. Bolton’s lawyer welcomed the decision and said “we respectfully take issue… with the Court’s preliminary conclusion at this early stage of the case that Ambassador Bolton did not comply fully with his contractual prepublication obligation to the Government…. The full story of these events has yet to be told—but it will be.”
The other big story today was, of course, Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, designed to jumpstart his campaign and reunite him with the crowds that energize him. His campaign manager, Brad Parscale, along with the president himself, has spent days crowing that almost a million tickets had been reserved, and the campaign had built an outside stage for overflow crowds.
But far fewer than the 19,000 people Tulsa’s BOK Center could hold showed up: the local fire marshal said the number was just under 6,200. Young TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music (so-called “K-Pop stans”), along with Instagram and Snapchat users, had quietly ordered tickets to prank the campaign. The technological savvy of their generation has turned political: they knew that the Trump campaign harvests information from ticket reservations, bombarding applicants with texts and requests for donations. So they set up fake accounts and phone numbers to order the tickets, then deleted the fake accounts. They also deleted their social media posts organizing the plan to keep it from the attention of the Trump campaign.
The poor turnout after such hype was deeply embarrassing for the campaign. Trump’s people took down the outside stage and Trump blamed “protesters” who had kept supporters out of the venue for the small size of the rally, but there were few reports of any interactions between Trump supporters and protesters and no one was turned away.
The rally itself did not deliver the punch Trump’s people had hoped. The speech was disjointed as the president rambled from one topic to another, rehashing old topics that no longer charged up the crowd, many of whom were caught on camera yawning or checking their phones. It was clear that The Lincoln Project’s needling of his difficulty raising a glass to his mouth and walking down a ramp at last week’s West Point graduation has gotten under Trump’s skin: he spent more than ten minutes pushing back on those stories—the ramp was “like an ice skating rink,” he claimed-- which, of course, only reinforced them.
Much more damning, when discussing coronavirus, he told the audience falsely that the recent spikes in infections are because there has been more testing: “When you do more testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases. I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”
This is an astonishing admission. More than 120,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 so far, and while in some states hard hit early on numbers of cases are declining, cases are right now spiking in a number of other states in far higher numbers than increased testing would show. Experts agree that the administration’s odd reluctance to test for coronavirus cost American lives. Within hours of his statement, it was being used in a political ad against the president.
Far from energizing Trump’s 2020 campaign, the rally made Trump look like a washed-up performer who has lost his audience and become a punchline for the new kids in town. According to White House reporter Andrew Feinberg, a Trump campaign staffer told him that Biden “should have to report our costs to the [Federal Election Commission] as a contribution to his campaign.”
11 Likes
Honest question: is that the case? As far as I am aware, each US president replaces a far higher percentage of gouvernmental employees than other heads of government are able to do. And would be willing to do.
4 Likes
The US federal government is much, much bigger than most people realize, especially from outside the US. Over 2 million people work for the federal government, and that’s excluding the Post Office, which is another 600,000.
Only a few thousand people are political appointees. Then there are federal judges who are only replaced as needed.
Even with the purges of the “non-loyal;” even with McConnell’s rapid pace of nominating conservative judges; the number of people the administration has placed in the government is small. It sometimes seems much higher than it is, because he’s gone through many people in the same jobs, and roles that people would normally not even pay attention to have been newsworthy because of the corruption in the administration and their tendency to place people who work directly against the purview of their department.
So, yeah, a couple million career civil servants vs. a few thousand political appointees (most of whom don’t know jack about their departments).
BTW, historically, this is the setup for the transition between a government run by an emperor to one run by bureaucrats, such as in China and Japan. Trump’s just skipping the “emperor” part, despite his best efforts.
7 Likes
I am so glad for this explanation. It sounded like Berman held all the cards, why would he step down? But this makes sense. He made his point; he forced the transition to the deputy prosecutor, and he did so while also removing the focal point for Trump and Barr’s ire. They didn’t get what they wanted, and now they don’t have a target at SDNY for their rage To politicize, either.
9 Likes
Yet the White House tests everyone who come in contact with any of the executive administrration daily if not multiple times a day for the virus.
3 Likes
June 22, 2020 (Monday)
Last Wednesday, the new CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, Michael Pack, purged four top officials from the media organizations the U.S. government funds to provide factual, unbiased news to world populations that do not have access to a free and independent press.
The US Agency for Global Media oversees Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Open Technology Fund. These organizations have a budget of almost a billion dollars, and make up one of the world’s largest media networks. The two women in charge of the fifth organization—Voice of America—had resigned in anticipation of Pack’s arrival.
By law, the news agencies are independent of political influence, with editors calling the shots of what to cover and how to cover it. The law “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news.” The idea is that the US media stations will exhibit the democratic value of a free press in form as well as in function. Listeners will not only hear a wide range of stories, but also see a nation where politicians keep their hands off the information that goes to the people.
Since at least 2014, Republicans have sought to rein in the independence of the US network to make it reflect official policy more closely. After Trump was elected, Republicans consolidated control of the VOA by replacing a bipartisan executive board with a CEO appointed by the president. In 2018, Trump nominated for the position Michael Pack, a documentary filmmaker with close ties to Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Bannon took over Breitbart News after its founder, Andrew Breitbart, died of a sudden heart attack at age 43. Bannon gave what was already a right-wing outlet a hard-right turn.
Senators were in no hurry to confirm Pack, both because of his ties to Bannon and because his film company is under investigation by the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office for financial improprieties. But VOA has been critical of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and he got angry enough at the organization that he called VOA the “voice of the Soviet Union” and “communists” at a private lunch with Senate Republicans. The administration ordered staff at the Centers for Disease Control not to speak with any VOA reporters.
Under pressure from Trump, the Senate approved Pack on June 4. On June 15, before his anticipated arrival, the heads of VOA resigned. The day after his arrival, he fired the heads of the other four agencies and replaced them with Trump loyalists. The firing drew criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, for one of the heads had been an aide to Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). There is deep concern that, with Pack’s help, Trump plans to turn the US Agency for Global Media into the sort of state media he admires in countries run by autocrats.
But, so far, reporters at VOA say nothing much has changed in their daily routine. If it does, and American overseas media outlets become the US version of a Ministry of Information, the USAGM will no longer be a powerful tool of American soft diplomatic power; it will be the opposite. As Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) said, the agency might never recover from such a political transformation. “Once the credibility is gone, no one will ever trust a report from Radio Free Europe, Radio Marti, nor trust the tools of the Open Technology Fund.”
Trump’s packing of positions at USAGM, and the FBI, and the DOJ, and the State Department—crucial positions all—threatens to destroy our non-partisan civil service, made up of smart, experienced people whose loyalty is to the Constitution and the country rather than to any individual. The administration’s actions recall the worst days of the 1890s, when party loyalty was paramount and corrupt party cronies had the skills to pocket money but not to govern.
But the American people turned against that government, and it increasingly looks as if that sort of rejection is happening now.
Today, in an interview, Trump accused former President Barack Obama of treason, based in the debunked story that the president had illegally spied on Trump’s campaign. Although Trump had previously declined to cite the crime he repeatedly attributes to his predecessor, today he spoke up: “Treason. Treason. It’s treason,” he said. This claim is so utterly preposterous it feels desperate.
And Trump has reason to worry that his power is waning. News broke tonight that shortly before Attorney General William Barr fired interim U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, Berman refused to endorse a Department of Justice letter attacking New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for imposing restrictions on religious gatherings but not protests. “The message to the public from New York City’s government appears to favor certain secular gatherings and disfavor religious gatherings,” the letter said. Berman dismissed it as a political stunt.
What role Berman’s refusal played in the weekend’s standoff is unclear, but it is clear that Barr and Trump did not gain their point—Berman’s replacement with a more pliable official—and instead heightened scrutiny of any future interference in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. It is only the latest in a string of losses: the disappointing turn out for Trump’s Tulsa rally, the distribution of John Bolton’s book, criticism from U.S. military and national security officials.
There was another sign tonight that the popular mood in America is turning from Trump’s divisive vision of the nation. Over the weekend, a member of Black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s team found a noose in Wallace’s garage stall, and Sunday night, as the Talledega [Alabama] Superspeedway track reopened, a plane flew overhead dragging a Confederate flag banner that read “Defund NASCAR.”
Monday, 82-year-old racing legend Richard Petty, who is the co-owner of the company which runs Wallace’s car, said: “I’m enraged by the act of someone placing a noose in the garage stall of my race team. There is absolutely no place in our sport or our society for racism…. This filthy act serves as a reminder of how far we still have to go to eradicate racial prejudice and it galvanizes my resolve to use the resources of Richard Petty Motorsports to create change…. The sick person who perpetrated this act must be found, exposed, and swiftly and immediately expelled from NASCAR. I believe in my heart this despicable act is not representative of the competitors I see each day in the NASCAR garage area. I stand shoulder to shoulder with Bubba, yesterday, today, tomorrow and every day forward.”
Tonight, Petty returned to the track for the first time since the pandemic broke out, and stood beside Wallace for the National Anthem. A long parade of NASCAR drivers and crews pushed Wallace’s car to the front of the grid before the night’s race, in front of fans wearing T-shirts that said “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe.” Wallace, NASCAR’s only Black full-time driver, had recently gotten NASCAR to prohibit Confederate flags. Tonight he said, “the sport is changing.”
Back in Washington, Secret Service asked reporters to leave the White House grounds tonight. They gave no reason for the unusual request. Lots of speculation about what prompted it, but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out more.
8 Likes
June 23, 2020 (Tuesday)
Over all the other stories swirling around us these days looms the terrible toll the novel coronavirus pandemic is taking on America.
Today four doctors, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the pandemic. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said the coronavirus has “brought this nation to its knees.” So far, the United States has had more than 2.3 million confirmed cases and more than 121,000 deaths. With about 4% of the world’s population, the United States has had about 25% of the world’s deaths from Covid-19.
States that reopened before they met the government’s criteria for safely doing so are now seeing spikes in infections. For the past two weeks, at least 18 states have seen increasing numbers of hospitalizations for coronavirus. Texas today hit an all-time high for new Covid-19 cases: 5,489. Governor Greg Abbott asked Texans to stay home if at all possible, and to wear a mask, maintain safe distances from other people, and sanitize hands. Florida has more than 100,000 cases, and scientists from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania who are modeling the spread of the disease say Florida has “all the markings of the next large epicenter of coronavirus transmission.” Arizona, too, is running short of hospital beds.
Trump, who pushed states to reopen out of a desire to restart the faltering economy, has tried to explain away the rising numbers by attributing them to improved testing. At Saturday night’s rally in Tulsa, he said: “Here’s the bad part… when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people; you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please.”
White House officials dismissed the statement as a joke, but Trump later stood by it. This morning, he tweeted: “Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!” The administration has declined to extend support for local Covid-19 testing sites around the country. Federal funding for the programs will end on June 30.
In fact, the rising numbers are not attributable simply to more tests. They are attributable to the continuing spread of the virus. While countries in Europe and Asia are on track to contain Covid-19, America has failed to control it so spectacularly that the European Union is considering barring Americans out of fear they will spread the infection to countries that have contained it. Despite talk of a “second wave,” our first wave never ended. The pandemic simply moved from early hot spots like New York City to other regions. To isolate and slow the disease, the U.S. needs increased testing and contact tracing, both of which are still insufficient.
Before Congress today, Fauci warned that “the virus is not going to disappear.” He was responding in part to Trump’s statement to Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity last week that the coronavirus is “fading away,” as the states reopen. “We are starting up and it’s going to be very, very strong,” the president said. “We’re very close to a vaccine and we’re very close to therapeutics, really good therapeutics. But even without that, I don’t like to talk about that because it’s fading away. It’s going to fade away, but having a vaccine would be really nice and that’s going to happen.”
Trump is eager to move on from the pandemic to reopening the country, downplaying the seriousness of the virus and urging Americans to go back to normal life. That America is suffering so badly with this disease reflects poorly on him and his administration, which lost precious weeks in January and February downplaying the crisis, then got caught short of supplies, then refused to help hard-hit states, then dragged its feet on the testing and contact tracing that will allow us to reopen safely. His popularity dropped during the crisis, especially among the vulnerable elderly voters he needs to hold key states.
The president considers it unfair that people blame him for the nation’s poor response to the pandemic. This morning, he tweeted: “We did a great job on CoronaVirus, including the very early ban on China, Ventilator production, and Testing, which is by far the most, and best, in the World. We saved millions of U.S. lives.! Yet the Fake News refuses to acknowledge this in a positive way. But they do give…. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is with us in all ways, a very high 72% Approval Rating. So, if he is in charge along with V.P. etc., and with us doing all of these really good things, why doesn’t the Lamestream Media treat us as they should? Answer: Because they are Fake News!”
Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican strategist and now a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project disagreed. He said in an interview this weekend on MSNBC that Trump has “brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And let’s be clear. This isn’t happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you’re the most likely to die from this disease. We’re the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk."
After the embarrassing rally in Tulsa on Saturday, Trump spoke tonight to an audience of about 3000 students in Phoenix, Arizona, a state where his support is wavering as coronavirus spreads and the economy suffers. The pandemic was a backdrop for the president’s speech.
Phoenix’s Democratic mayor pleaded with attendees to protect public health, but like Trump, most of the attendees ignored her and the new local ordinance requiring masks. They stood crowded together at the Dream City megachurch.
Trump made it clear that he is going to campaign for reelection on the idea that he and his supporters are fighting a cultural war for the soul of America. “We’re here today to declare that we will never cave to the left wing and the left-wing intolerance,” he said. He cheered on those “who stand up for America and refuse to kneel to the radical left.”
“They hate our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans,” he said. “Our country didn’t grow great with them. It grew great with you and your thought process and your ideology. The left-wing mob is trying to demolish our heritage, so they can replace it with a new oppressive regime that they alone control."
Trump told the crowd that “someday” his work on coronavirus testing would “be recognized by history. Someday.” Referring to Covid-19 as “the plague” and the “China flu,” he told the crowd in Arizona, a state experiencing a deadly spike: “It’s going away.”
11 Likes
9 Likes
Seriously, anyone who fails to recognize this fascist rhetoric for what it is, just fails. Straight outta 1932.
16 Likes
the projection of that bit of his is so strong and so transparent, it’s painful.
9 Likes
Combination of projection and other-ing that leaves no with that all of his actual meaning. He will not be satisfied until he is reelected with at least 110% of the vote.
7 Likes
Hey, if it works for Donnie’s pal Vlad, then Donnie wants in on that action.
4 Likes
By Numbnutz With Attitude?
5 Likes
Oh, it will, you motherfucker. As either incompetence or a straight-up genocide attempt.
15 Likes
