Institutional decay

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President Trump reportedly ordered his former White House chief of staff John Kelly last year to grant a security clearance to his son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner. The New York Times reports that Trump ordered Kelly in May to override the security concerns of top U.S. officials and grant a top-secret clearance to Kushner, whose clearance had been downgraded from that level earlier in the year. The report of Trump's order, which the Times said was documented at the time by Kelly in a memo, contradicts statements the president made to the newspaper last month in which he claimed he had no role in the reinstatement of his son-in-law's security clearance.

Trump ordered Kelly to grant Kushner security clearance: NY Times | TheHill

And then they rail ("Lock her up!") against Hillary's email server..

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George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, said Monday that it would "unquestionably be grounds for impeachment" if President Trump ordered former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn to pressure the Department of Justice to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger. "If proven, such an attempt to use presidential authority to seek retribution for the exercise of First Amendment rights would unquestionably be grounds for impeachment," Conway tweeted.

Conway's husband: 'Grounds for impeachment' if Trump directed Cohn to block AT&T-Time Warner merger | TheHill

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Now even attacking friendly media..

Some of the crowd booed, a sort of Pavlovian response to Trump criticizing something or someone. But others looked confused. Could Trump really be attacking Fox News? He was. Specifically it was the appearance of Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on the channel that had upset Trump. “They’re putting more Democrats on than you have Republicans. Something strange is going on at Fox. Something very strange,” Trump said. “Did you see this guy last night? I didn’t want to watch it. You always have to watch the competition, if you call it that. And he was knocking the hell out of Fox.” It was jarring to anyone who has witnessed the obsequiousness that is Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show where the hosts seem to wake up each morning amazed anew that it was possible for such a glorious man as Trump to exist. (Even the recent revelation that Trump’s business empire had managed to lose more than $1bn over a 10-year period from 1985, as revealed by the New York Times, was described as “pretty impressive” by one host.)

Trump turns on Fox News over 2020 coverage: 'What's going on there?' | US news | The Guardian

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Atkinson ultimately alerted Congress to the existence of the complaint, which prompted the White House to release a summary of Trump’s now-infamous July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And here’s the important point: As I’ve previously explained, that call summary corroborated the whistleblower complaint both in its broad outlines and with regard to specific details. It illustrated why Atkinson likely felt he had little choice but to determine the complaint was credible. Throughout the ensuing impeachment process, however, Trump has tried to turn reality on its head by insisting that his move to release the call summary somehow refuted the whistleblower complaint and exonerated him.

As he did with the Russia investigation, Trump’s tweet about Atkinson indicates that instead of defending his conduct on the merits, he’d like to discredit the entire impeachment process as the result of “deep state” machinations to take him down — even when he has nobody to blame but himself. Atkinson is the latest Trump-appointed official the president has turned on Trump promised on the campaign trail to only “hire the best people,” but Atkinson is now the latest official he’s appointed to be on the receiving end of one of his salty tweets (or worse).

Just last month, Trump tweeted a hint that he was considering moving on from FBI Director Christopher Wray because Wray did a TV interview about the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation that didn’t indulge Trump’s absurd conspiracy theories about the bureau —namely, that the FBI is biased against him and is wrong about Russia (not Ukraine) being the main culprit of election interference in 2016.

And, of course, Trump spent much of 2018 trashing then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions over his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation — a move that was undoubtedly justified given Sessions’s misleading sworn statements about his contacts with Russians during the campaign, but also one that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. (Sessions resigned that November.)

The common thread in all these cases is that Trump thinks the officials he appoints should do his bidding, and under no circumstances do or say anything that undermines his position. Along those lines, the New York Times reported in November that Trump was considering firing Atkinson because Atkinson had “been disloyal” by not doing more to suppress the whistleblower complaint. That reporting suggests Trump’s concept of government as a protection racket for him hasn’t evolved much since early 2017, when he infamously demanded then-FBI Director James Comey pledge loyalty to him in the weeks leading up to his firing.

• The President fulminating against Atkinson (who was appointed by Trump himself) for not protecting him against the whistleblower complaint, despite the fact that Atkinson clearly had no choice.
  
• The institutions of the state should work for Trump, protect him at all times, no matter what crimes he commits..
  

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Trump has snubbed justice to do favors for allies in the past with casual pardons of figures such as the race-baiting conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to campaign finance charges, and former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court in 2017 for defying a judge’s order to stop racially profiling Latinos. But the willingness of Barr to intervene in specific cases to protect Trump allies while separately constructing special channels to investigate and potentially prosecute Trump’s perceived political enemies constitutes a major erosion in the basic structures of independent justice still in place, the president’s critics from both parties say. The conduct also appears to be part of a pattern. Last month, the justice department softened its sentencing recommendations in a case involving Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. The alarm sounded by four prosecutors who removed themselves en masse from the Stone case has been heard throughout the network of career justice deparment officials, including a former attorney general:

New Hampshire primary: Bernie Sanders beats Pete Buttigieg in tight race – live | US news | The Guardian

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Attorney General Bill Barr and his allies are centralizing control over the Justice Department and acting in increasingly blatant ways to protect President Donald Trump’s interests and allies. This became evident in dramatic fashion Tuesday when the entire team prosecuting longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone withdrew from that case after Justice Department higher-ups made clear they planned to override their sentencing recommendation. But the Stone controversy was just the latest in a series of recent moves by Barr to “take control of legal matters of personal interest to President Donald Trump,” as Carol Lee, Ken Dilanian, and Peter Alexander of NBC News reported.

Senior Justice Department officials also intervened to change the sentencing recommendation for another Trump ally, Michael Flynn, last month. Barr put in a close ally in the politically sensitive US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia job (in a procedurally unusual way). And Barr instituted new rules requiring his personal approval for any new investigations into presidential campaigns, staff, or foreign contributions — something that naturally would help the investigation-plagued Trump campaign. All this has unfolded as Trump has separately taken revenge on witnesses in the impeachment inquiry: dismissing Alex and Yevgeny Vindman from the National Security Council staff and firing EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland. The president also pulled a Treasury Department nomination for the former US Attorney for DC, who had supervised Stone’s prosecution.

It’s not clear whether Barr is acting in response to explicit private instructions from Trump, but it’s largely irrelevant. Trump has made it unmistakably clear that these are the sorts of things he wants Barr to do — he tweeted before the change to Stone’s sentencing recommendation that it should be changed, and he praised Barr personally for doing so afterward.

The Roger Stone case and the fiasco at Bill Barr’s Justice Department, explained - Vox

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Difficult to keep track, we'll keep updating, but the DoJ is weaponized:

• The intervention in the Michael Flynn case
  
• Roger Stone's sentence recommendation drastically reduced
  
• The special channel for Rudi Giuliani to bring 'evidence' from Ukraine. It's highly unlikely for a private citizen, especially one that is under investigation, to have a special channel opened up for him.
  
• Andrew McCabe's case dragging on for two years, unprecedented, as it was quite simple.
  
• Bill Barr's handling of the Mueller investigation.
  
• Bill Barr instituting new rules requiring his personal approval for any new investigations into presidential campaigns, staff, or foreign contributions.
  
• The special prosecutor John Durham appointed by Bill Barr to inquire into the origins of the Mueller investigation while there is already a report from the DoJ arguing there was no political motive behind the Russia investigation.
  
• Trump trying to bribe the Governor of New York in order to drop the investigation into his tax returns
  

Additional sources

• The Roger Stone case and the fiasco at Bill Barr’s Justice Department, explained - Vox
  

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Later that day, The New York Times reported that Barr had taken the unusual step of asking outside prosecutors to review the criminal case against Flynn, a close ally of the president. The reexamination of Flynn’s case is sure to spark criticism from Democrats, who just days earlier had accused Barr of political interference after the DOJ recommended a lesser sentence against longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. That revised recommendation came a day after Trump tweeted that the initial sentence of seven to nine years was “ridiculous.”

Barr back on the hot seat | TheHill

In assessing Bill Barr's actions, one might keep the following in mind:

William Barr, the attorney general, says that progressives are “militant secularists” out to “destroy the traditional moral order.” If that’s how you see the world, you’ll support anything — up to and including soliciting and/or extorting intervention by foreign powers in U.S. elections — that helps defeat those progressives.

Opinion | Trump and His Corrupt Old Party - The New York Times

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The president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reportedly shot and killed an endangered sheep in Mongolia before receiving a permit from the Mongolian government. A ProPublica report published Wednesday found that Trump Jr.'s recent hunting trip to Mongolia in August resulted in the president's son shooting and killing an argali, a species of sheep listed as endangered and which requires a permit to be hunted legally. Trump Jr. was not offered a permit for shooting the animal until after he left the region, according to ProPublica, raising questions about whether he received special treatment.

Mongolian officials retroactively granted Trump Jr. permit after he killed endangered sheep: report | TheHill

• What arm did they twist this time?
  
• The rot is transcending borders, where is that border wall when you need one?
  

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Beginning in March with his public whitewashing of Robert Mueller’s report, which included powerful evidence of repeated obstruction of justice by the president, Barr has appeared to function much more as the president’s personal advocate than as an attorney general serving the people and government of the United States. Among the most widely reported and disturbing events have been Barr’s statements that a judicially authorized FBI investigation amounted to “spying” on the Trump campaign, and his public rejection in December of the inspector general’s considered conclusion that the Russia probe was properly initiated and overseen in an unbiased manner. Also quite unsettling was Trump’s explicit mention of Barr and Rudy Giuliani in the same breath in his July 25 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, as individuals the Ukrainian president should speak with regarding the phony investigation that Ukraine was expected to publicly announce.

Still more troubling has been Barr’s intrusion, apparently for political reasons, into the area of Justice Department action that most demands scrupulous integrity and strict separation from politics and other bias—invocation of the criminal sanction. When Barr initiated a second, largely redundant investigation of the FBI Russia probe in May, denominated it criminal, and made clear that he is personally involved in carrying it out, many eyebrows were raised. But worst of all have been the events of the past week. The evenhanded conduct of the prosecutions of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn by experienced Department of Justice attorneys have been disrupted at the 11th hour by the attorney general’s efforts to soften the consequences for the president’s associates.

More generally, it appears that Barr has recently identified a group of lawyers whom he trusts and put them in place to oversee and second-guess the work of the department’s career attorneys on a broader range of cases. And there is no comfort from any of this in Barr’s recent protests about the president’s tweeting. He in no way suggested he was changing course, only that it is hard to appear independent when the president is publicly calling for him to follow the path he is on. Bad as they are, these examples are more symptoms than causes of Barr’s unfitness for office. The fundamental problem is that he does not believe in the central tenet of our system of government—that no person is above the law. In chilling terms, Barr’s own words make clear his long-held belief in the need for a virtually autocratic executive who is not constrained by countervailing powers within our government under the constitutional system of checks and balances.

Donald Ayer: Bill Barr Must Resign - The Atlantic

• Libertarians should be particularly alarmed at this vision of unconstrained executive power, but where is the Freedom Caucus? They never seem to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity..