One Million Former Prosecutors Agree Trump Is A F*cking Criminal
OK, maybe the letter doesn't have 'one million' signatories yet. Check back at lunch.
So many crimes are being committed right in front of our faces right now, it's hard to keep track. (Sort of an evergreen way to begin literally any article written since November 8, 2016, isn't it?)
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal to get fucked yesterday and refused to release Donald Trump's taxes, so that's Mnuchin doing crimes right out here in public. Attorney General Bill Barr is pretending to negotiate with House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler's people about giving Congress the full version of the Mueller Report, ahead of a vote to hold Barr in contempt for refusing to cooperate and doing cover-ups right in front of all our faces.
Oh, and this one's not a "crime," but we'll get a better sense of whether or not former White House counsel Don McGahn is going to play ball, depending on whether he complies with a document subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee, the due date for which is today.
And there's been a fun ("fun") development this week related to the gigantic series of crimes that underpins all the other crimes, those laid out in the Mueller Report. As of this writing, more than 500 former federal prosecutors have signed a letter saying that if Donald Trump wasn't president and thus protected by some dumb memo at the Department of Justice saying sitting presidents can't be indicted, he would already have been given a one-way-ticket to a little town called LOCK HER UP, population Donald Trump. (There are 636 signatories at this moment. Just kidding, 637. Wait, it's 638 now. Fuck! Also, one of them is a guy named Allan Garten of Portland, who used to run the White Collar Crimes Unit at DOJ. It's funny because ALAN Garten, a different guy with almost the same exact name, is counsel for the Trump Organization. Just something we noticed in scrolling through the very long list. And in the time it took to write this graf, the letter now has 657 names. Wait, 658.)
Here's how it begins:
We are former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels of the federal system: as line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. The offices in which we served were small, medium, and large; urban, suburban, and rural; and located in all parts of our country.
Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.
MULTIPLE FELONY CHARGES. Know why they said that? Because special counsel Robert Mueller laid out extensive evidence for MULTIPLE FELONIES. And in case you didn't have time to read the 448-page Mueller Report yourself -- or didn't have a chance to read the 20,000 words Wonkette liveblogged as we read it -- they go ahead and list out the things Trump ought to be indicted for, and explain why they all satisfy the legal requirements for obstruction indictments.
And surprise, the aforementioned Don McGahn's name comes up a lot, since so much of Trump's campaign to have Mueller fired, and to interfere with the conduct and scope of the investigation, involves all the stuff Trump specifically tried to force McGahn to do. Trump tried to get McGahn to have Mueller fired. McGahn refused and was ready to resign over it. Trump tried to get McGahn to lie and create a false record when it became public that Trump had tried to force McGahn to have Mueller fired. And then there was all the obstruction related to former AG Jeff Sessions's recusal, including Trump's attempts to have Corey Lewandowski (a private citizen) inveigh upon the attorney general to limit Mueller's investigation, and also to try to get Lewandowski (a private citizen) to fire Sessions.
And then there's the witness tampering and the dangling of pardons and all the lying, and just ... so many crimes, we're officially sick of crimes.
There are names on the list you might recognize, like Mimi Rocah, the former SDNY prosecutor who these days sits on MSNBC and helps us understand WTF is going on each and every day, and Daniel Goldman, who did sit on MSNBC and do that, until Adam Schiff snatched him up to work for the House Intelligence Committee. But the other LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF NAMES, you probably aren't familiar with.
Here are a couple more signatories from the long and growing list:
Several prominent attorneys signed onto the letter, including Elkan Abramowitz, who is representing American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker. Pecker has in the past supported Trump and AMI has been implicated in a scheme to buy controversial stories involving Trump with the intent of making sure they were not published.
It also includes the signature of Jeffrey Harris, who worked for Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani when he was the then-associate attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. Bill Weld, a former assistant U.S. attorney during the Reagan administration running as a Republican against Trump in 2020, also signed the letter.
If Robert Mueller low-key signs this thing, we are going to LOL and give him the Wonkette Lifetime Achievement Award for quiet shade, a longstanding honor we just invented. (DO IT, BOBBY.)
Anyway, read the whole letter for yourself. It's not like you needed to be told the president is a two-bit criminal, but it's nice when literally everybody who was ever born and grew up to get a law degree agrees with your assessment.
LOCK HER UP.
[ USA Today / NBC News / letter ]
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his right foot's bigger than his other foot is, it's a reg'lar Zombie Hoof
Or a vote of no confidence, like some civilized countries do.