In her new book, former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says she “took one for the team” when Kim Jong-Un “winked” at her in Singapore. In her gushing praise for her former boss, it is clear that she “took one for the team” every time she stepped up to podium, misinforming and outright lying to reporters and the country to protect her Fuhrer. Sanders apparently has political aspirations, which is another reason why it is essential that Trump not only be defeated in November, but that it be an unmistakable rejection of his presidency and his “vision” of America.
There are other reasons we need to make unmistakable the rejection of Trump and those in Congress who have aided and abetted his criminal administration, like preventing federal benches from being completely filled with unqualified, far-right political extremists. In the three-member panel in the DC Court of Appeals, in which the two Republican appointees—the same ones who claimed that the House of Representatives lacked “standing” to sue the Executive Branch to honor its subpoenas, and were the only two to vote so before the full court—again provided the 2-1 margin denying that the House could go to the courts to enforce its subpoenas.
This is likely to be overturned by the full court, but perhaps by delaying testimony from the likes of the fanatically libertarian Don McGahn—who is evidently not a patriot who loves this country, since he still refuses to go public with testimony as to his collusion with Trump to damage the judicial system in this country with a wave of appointments of political extremists to the courts, and his knowledge of Trump’s efforts to obstruct or end the Mueller investigation. McGahn admitted to Michael Schmidt, author of the recent book, Donald Trump vs. The United States, that his colluding with Trump had damaged the office of the presidency, although Schmidt didn’t get the impression that McGahn actually realized just how much damage he caused by aiding and abetting what he admitted was "crazy shit" coming from Trump.
Those right-wing judicial appointees are apparently gambling that Trump will win and the Democrats will lose the House before any more damaging testimony is heard, since Trump must remain in office for McGahn and the rest of Trump’s gang to continue to legally claim executive privilege. The “majority” on the appeals court panel claimed that the House could still enforce its subpoenas through the courts, but only if Congress passed a law allowing the courts that power. Of course, this should be overturned too, since the courts do have the authority to “interpret” laws and their reach.
We should also remember that we live in a country where public officials are supposed to be answerable to the American people, not just to a congressional committee. For example, Americans depend on the proper functioning of the U.S. Postal Service, and Louis DeJoy, who still refuses to turn over documents used to “justify” gutting the operating capacity of the Post Office, owes the American people a real explanation for what he is doing, which his smug non-answers before Congress failed to provide, and that justified the subpoenas he was served today for refusing to provide the requested documents. But given the Court of Appeal panel’s recent decision, he will likely not honor it before the election—which, of course, is to the political benefit of Trump.
But the corruption of the federal justice system and the rule of law in this country goes even deeper, which Trump hypocritically applying the “rule of law” to others but not to himself or others in his administration. Two officials, Ken Cuccinelli and Chad Wolf, were illegally installed in their positions because Trump and Stephen Miller were desperate to get anti-immigrant fanatics with utter contempt for rules and procedures into positions of authority. Both Cuccinelli and Wolf are technically making unlawful policy decisions that no one is supposed to be following, yet the lawlessness of the Trump administration is such that even the judiciary system seems to lack the will to stop this.
And of course under William Barr, the Department of Justice has become nothing less than a toadying political organ of the administration, whose sole purpose is to conceal or justify Trump’s crimes, and to criminalize his critics. The Durham “probe,” which after all this time has resulted in just one guilty plea by an FBI lawyer for omitting a word from a FISA request, is nothing more than a “tit-for-tat” exercise that is little more than a mole hill compared to the mountain of crimes committed by Trump and his familiars.
And the corruption of the Justice Department goes even further that; its recent announcement that it is launching an “investigation” into four states which may have “issued orders that may have resulted” in nursing home deaths from the COVID-19. Barr’s so-called Civil Rights Division is seeking to “determine if the state orders requiring admission of COVID-19 patients to nursing homes is responsible for the deaths of nursing home residents." Naturally, the four states are those with Democratic governors, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan. This is pure politics to cover Trump’s failure to take the COVID-19 seriously even now.
These four states were among a dozen that were following federal guidelines in March that stated “Nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present." This rule was instituted for fear that elderly people who had tested positive would be discriminated against, left out on the street homeless—thus the political cynicism of this investigation. New York would later issue orders that elderly people who had tested positive in a hospital could not be released until they had been “cured.” If anyone should be “investigated,” it is the Trump political stooges who decided on a “guideline” which threaten legal action against states for “discriminating” against elderly people because the COVID-19 was still mostly “fake news.”
It also should be noted that states like New York and New Jersey had a more expansive definition of what constituted a COVID-19 death, unlike most states controlled by Republican governors which deliberately excluded from their tallies “probable” deaths by the virus, meaning that “underlying” conditions either became worse because of the virus, or worsened the effects of the virus in causing death. If any states should be “investigated,” it is those which deliberately downplayed the virus and failed to take the necessary actions early on to keep the pandemic under control, and thus costing lives. Furthermore, the DOJ should be investigating whether some states have been emulating China and North Korea, and deliberately concealing data for political purposes.
The DOJ would also be better off investigating why when 2,000 or more people a day were dying, an average of only 172,000 tests a day nationally were being performed, less than a quarter of the daily tally in July. It should be investigating why Trump and the Republicans in the Senate continue to refuse to allocate adequate funding for testing, with the New York Times reporting a “troubling trend” in reductions in testing in August, especially in states like Florida which had been seeing national daily highs in positive tests in July. Or why states like Mississippi, Nevada and South Carolina have double-digit positivity rates, yet have seen a declining number of tests. Or Texas, which has been performing half as many tests as before, despite recently seeing positivity rates of as high as one-quarter. Is it because so close to the election, they—like Trump—thinks that “testing too much” makes Trump “look bad”?
But the DOJ is just one equation of how the law, law enforcement and the federal court system has been perverted by Trump. It is just one more reason why we need to make the right choice in November, particularly with the aging pair of “liberals” in the Supreme Court, who should give Joe Biden, if he is elected, time to put fresh blood on the bench before the Republicans turn it into another Taney court.
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