Finally, someone says it.
Representative Eric Swalwell says there must be a Presidential Crimes Commission when Trump leaves office, in order to investigate the crimes of his administration.
I don’t say this lightly: when we escape this Trump hell, America needs a Presidential Crimes Commission. It should be made up of independent prosecutors who look at those who enabled a corrupt president. Example 1: Sabotaging the mail to win an election. #SaveThePostOffice
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) August 14, 2020
https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/1294412030267588609
Back in January, former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner advocated for the same thing. Although it appears Swalwell is the first member of Congress to advocate this.
KIRSCHNER: And, I think what the founders envisioned is potentially a corrupt and criminal President. So, we have impeachment. Potentially, a corrupt and criminal Attorney General. There would be ways to deal with that if we had a law-abiding President. I don't think they ever envisioned a corrupt, criminal, abusive President supported by a corrupt, criminal, and abusive Attorney General. And that's why come January 2020, we need to wrestle this thing to the ground. We need to form a commission that is equal parts Nuremberg Trials and Truth and Reconciliation commission, and we need to hold all of these people accountable. I think "Trump Crime Commissions" has a nice ring to it. That needs to be done, because these corrupt men have exposed the flaws in our system.
https://crooksandliars.com/2020/01/glenn-kirschner-calls-trump-crimes
This needs to be THE NUMBER ONE talking point of the current Democrat party platform. In both the immediate short term and the long term, this is more important than any other issue or any other policy. More important than fixing healthcare, more important than solving climate change, more important than creating living-wage jobs, more important than immigration reform and anti-racism--because without cleaning house to get rid of the unprecedented corruption and foreign and far-right infiltration of our government, none of these other goals will ever be accomplished.
The practical reason behind this is very simple: if they can get away with it now, it means they will try again in the future and get away with it again, because if the next President does not establish the Presidential Crimes Commission, they will de facto legalize everything the Trump administration and the Republican party has done.
If we thought the government was plagued by inefficiency, gridlock, and brazen self-enrichment now, it will only get worse if the current administration is forgiven for destroying our nation and Constitution. These people are "the swamp". The stranglehold of these corrupt elitists is the reason why nothing ever seems to change for the better in this nation.
Even Trump voters wanted to "drain the swamp" and rid our nation of corrupt politicians and corporate elitism. So let's do it for real.
***
The past 50 years have set a disgusting precedent that political administrations are not punished for the most heinous of crimes. This needs to change. Those guilty of destroying our nation must be punished to the fullest extent of the law and not merely let off with minor violations. Let's take a brief look at the cancer that has been growing over the past 50 years:
Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, after it became apparent he would almost certainly face impeachment and removal from office due to the Watergate scandal. A month later, President Gerald Ford fully pardoned all of Nixon's crimes.
In a 1977 interview, while attempting to justify himself, Nixon infamously said "Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
From the earliest days in school, we are taught that one of the things that has always made the US government 'special' is that the President is not above the law. However, when Presidents always get away with their crimes, that does, in fact, mean that the President is above the law.
In the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was involved in the Iran–Contra affair. In short, the administration illegally sold weapons to Iran and planned to use the money to illegally fund the Contra insurgents in a civil war against the Nicaraguan government. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush (who had been Vice President under Reagan!) pardoned 5 key figures who had been found guilty for their roles in the affair and pardoned one more who was indicted but had not yet reached trial. Bush's Attorney General Bill Barr helped engineer these pardons, and was especially adamant about pardoning Reagan's former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, before he went to trial.
(In June 2018, the same Bill Barr sent an unsolicited document to the Trump administration Justice Department in essence arguing the Mueller investigation should not be taking place because Trump was acting completely lawfully. Trump accepted Barr's job application and Barr was named Attorney General in February 2019 to cover up the Mueller investigation into Trump.)
Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, who was tasked with investigating the Iran-Contra affair, discovered documents held by Weinberger which may very well have implicated Bush and other high ranking officials who thus far had claimed "plausible deniability" of their role in criminal activity.
"In late 1992, Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, who had been chosen to investigate the Iran–Contra affair, found documents in the possession of Reagan's former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, which Walsh said was "evidence of a conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public."[52][53] Weinberger was set to stand trial on felony charges on January 5, 1993.[52][54] His "indictment said Mr. Weinberger's notes contradicted Mr. Bush's assertions that he had only a fragmentary knowledge of the arms secretly sold to Iran in 1985 and 1986 in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon."[54][53][55] According to Walsh, then-president Bush might have been called as a witness.[56]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr#Iran-Contra
"In response to these Bush pardons, Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who headed the investigation of Reagan Administration officials' criminal conduct in the Iran–Contra scandal, stated that "the Iran–Contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair#Pardons
**
During the Bush administration, Nancy Pelosi was firmly against pursuing impeachment, despite his administration leading us into our most morally-corrupt and financially-draining war since Vietnam. Even Donald Trump, in an interview on October 15, 2008, criticized Pelosi for not pursuing impeachment again Bush.
In a 2008 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, which went viral online on Wednesday, Trump said he was "surprised" Pelosi "didn't do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush."
"It just seemed like she was really going to look to impeach Bush and get him out of office. Which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing," Trump said.
Blitzer responded, "To impeach him?"
"For the war," Trump said. "For the war! Well, he lied! He got us into the war with lies!"
Trump then contrasted Bush with former President Bill Clinton, who was impeached.
"I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant," Trump said. "And they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying. By saying they had WMDs, by saying all sorts of things that happened not to be true."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/live-blog/live-updates-house-votes-impeachment-president-trump-n1103576/ncrd1104381#liveBlogHeader
https://twitter.com/wolfblitzer/status/1207375509698596867
Biden, Clinton, Schumer, and other prominent Democrats voted in favor of the Iraq war. To be fair to Trump, he had lukewarm support for the war in the beginning, then seems to have turned against it once it was apparent it was just a disaster. His biggest regret seems to be that we didn't plunder their oil, so he's just as morally bankrupt as the rest.
During the Obama administration, Obama declined from pursuing any investigations into the crimes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other Bush administration officials.
Q: The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, ‘Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.’
OBAMA: We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. … My orientation is going to be moving forward.
[...]
Dawn Johnsen, Obama’s choice to lead the Office of Legal Counsel, rejects Obama’s “look forward” approach. In March 2008, she told “the next president” to avoid “any temptation to simply move on”:
We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation’s past transgressions and reject Bush’s corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation’s honor be restored without full disclosure.
Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder also completely covered up the Bush administration's illegal acts of torture:
The Obama administration's aggressive, full-scale whitewashing of the "war on terror" crimes committed by Bush officials is now complete. Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the US torture program
[...]
As a result, in August 2009, Holder announced a formal investigation to determine whether criminal charges should be brought in over 100 cases of severe detainee abuse involving "off-the-books methods" such as "mock execution and threatening a prisoner with a gun and a power drill", as well as threats that "prisoners [would be] made to witness the sexual abuse of their relatives." But less than two years later, on 30 June 2011, Holder announced that of the more than 100 cases the justice department had reviewed, there would be no charges brought in any of them – except two.
[...]
On 16 April 2009, Obama himself took the first step in formalizing the full-scale immunity he intended to bestow on all government officials involved even in the most heinous and lethal torture. On that date, he decreed absolute immunity for any official involved in torture provided that it comported with the permission slips produced by Bush department of justice (DOJ) lawyers which authorized certain techniques. "This is a time for reflection, not retribution," the new president so movingly observed in his statement announcing this immunity. Obama added:
"[N]othing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past … we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future."
(And here we are, more divided than ever and on a route towards the bleakest future imaginable... All because no one stepped up to cut out the cancer that was destroying our society.)
Also, guess what, Obama's refusal (and hence implicit endorsement of the Bush administration's conduct), led Trump to promote one of the individuals involved in Bush-era torture:
"Much has been made of President Trump’s disregard for rules and norms—boundaries delineated by ethics and morality if not written laws themselves. But transgressing laws, rules, and norms isn’t the only way to destroy them. Another way is simply not to enforce them.
In that regard, the 44th president, Barack Obama, bears a measure of responsibility for the recklessness of his successor, in particular Trump’s decision to appoint Gina Haspel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy director, to run the agency itself. Haspel oversaw a black site during the Bush era where at least one detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was tortured*.
Despite that, al-Nashiri provided “essentially no actionable information,” according to a CIA interrogator cited in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report. Haspel also then played a role in a decision to destroy recordings of CIA detainees being tortured.
Before Obama even took office, he announced his belief that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” on torture. That set the standard for Obama’s tenure, as all avenues of accountability for Bush-era torture were curtailed. A Justice Department inquiry into interrogators who broke even the “acceptable torture” guidelines ended with no charges. Civil lawsuits from former detainees were blocked when the Obama-era Justice Department invoked the state secrets doctrine. An internal Justice Department review of the torture memo’s authors concluded they had not committed professional misconduct when they worked backwards to justify the Bush administration’s use of torture in defiance of laws against it. Even a proposal for a South African-style “truth and reconciliation” commission was rejected. All avenues for any form of accountability for torture—criminal, civil, even professional—were blocked by Obama-era officials. Even an episode in which the CIA spied on Senate staff in an effort to stonewall an inquiry that ultimately found CIA torture ineffective, and then lied about having done so, ended with little more than an apology.
[...]
There is no reason for powerful people to follow the rules if they know they cannot and will not suffer any consequences for breaking them. A system in which only the weak are punished is not a two-tiered system of justice, but one in which justice cannot be said to meaningfully exist.
In a country where a CIA official like Haspel can destroy evidence in order to obstruct a federal investigation, and not only escape prosecution but rise to become the head of the agency, it is no wonder that the president and his allies behave as though the possibility of the law catching up to them is not merely remote, but a kind of absurdity."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/obamas-legacy-of-impunity-for-torture/555578/
**
I will avoid giving too detailed of an analysis of Barr, the Mueller report, and other current events. But, in summary, in June 2018 Barr sent a memo to the Justice Department arguing his opinion of how the Mueller investigation was flawed. Trump clearly took notice of this and Barr was brought in to become the Attorney General in February 2019. Despite the obvious ethical conflict, Barr did not recuse himself and was allowed to formally oversee the Mueller investigation in his role as Attorney General. One month later it was announced the Mueller report was "complete". Soon after, Barr wrote a 3.5 page opinion that Trump was innocent of collusion and other crimes. Mueller contradicted Barr's characterization of the report.
In short: the man who had successfully helped George H. W. Bush cover up his and Reagan's crimes was brought in to cover up Trump's crimes. By May 2019, Barr had even launched an "investigation into the investigation" to pursue retribution against individuals who had provided enough evidence for the Mueller investigation to be warranted in the first place. (This "investigation" is still ongoing, and may be used as an "October surprise" before the 2020 election, trying to repeat Comey's infamous conduct during the 2016 election).
"On March 25, Mueller reportedly wrote a letter to Barr, as described in the New York Times as "expressing his and his team's concerns that the attorney general had inadequately portrayed their conclusions".[140] In USA Today it was described that Mueller "expressed his differences with Barr".[141]
On March 27, Mueller sent Barr another letter describing his concerns of Barr's letter to Congress and the public on March 24. In it, Mueller complained that the summary "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the Special Counsel's probe, adding, "There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations".[142] Both before and after the release of Barr's summary, Mueller repeatedly tried to get Barr to release the report's introductions and executive summaries. Mueller's March 27 letter also stated that he had earlier sent a March 25 letter to Barr.[143]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr#Mueller_investigation_and_report
The full report, with many redactions, was released in April 2019. Mueller, falling victim to conservative indecisiveness in the most critical and historic moment of his life, refused to indict Trump because of a Justice Department policy (not even a law) that a sitting President could not be indicted.
In May, Mueller essentially hinted to Congress that the ball was now in their court to take action and impeach Trump:
"The Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing." - Robert Mueller
https://www.thedailybeast.com/robert-mueller-announces-resignation-from-justice-department
Despite the Mueller report detailing all the ways Trump and his associates obstructed justice and committed collusion, Congress called Mueller to testify in July in order for him to spell it out for them on more time.
Lieu recounted the three elements needed for the crime of obstruction of justice.
"I believe a reasonable person looking at these facts could conclude that all three elements of the crime of obstruction of justice have been met, and I'd like to ask you the reason, again, you did not indict Donald Trump is because of the OLC (the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel) opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?" Lieu asked.
"That is correct,"
[...]
"Did you actually totally exonerate the president?" Nadler asked.
"No," Mueller replied.
Congress failed their duty to immediately pursue impeachment while the Mueller report was fresh and public indignation against Trump was at its fiercest.
Instead, the House waited until December, when most of the momentum from the Mueller report's revelation of Trump's crimes had wore off. Blatantly tearing up the Constitution, multiple Senators declared they would not be "impartial jurors" during the Senate impeachment trial and would basically acquit Trump no matter the evidence.
...Thus proving the President is indeed above the law so long as the Attorney General and 51 Senators are on his side.
***
***
On May 14, 2020, Joe Biden said he would not pardon Trump, and he would allow the Justice Department to pursue criminal investigations into Trump after he leaves office.
The pledge from the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee came during a virtual town hall on MSNBC, when Biden was asked by a voter whether he would be willing to commit “to not pulling a President Ford” and pardoning Trump “under the pretense of healing the nation.”
“Absolutely, yes. I commit,” Biden responded, adding: “It’s hands-off completely. Look, the attorney general of the United States is not the president’s lawyer. It’s the people’s lawyer.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/15/joe-biden-pledges-not-to-pardon-trump-260147
Biden has attempted to be diplomatic so rabid Trump supporters cannot claim he is biased or looking for revenge. He said he will not pressure his Attorney General to pursue investigations into Trump, but allow them to investigate if they see the merit. Therefore, if Biden becomes President, we must put maximum pressure on his Attorney General to uphold the law.
Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he would not order his administration to investigate Donald Trump if the former vice president is elected in 2020.
“Look, I would not direct my Justice Department like this president does. I would let them make their independent judgment,” Biden said during the fifth Democratic debate in Atlanta.
“I would not dictate who should be prosecuted or who should be exonerated. That’s not the role of the president of the United States,” Biden said.
Biden said he would do “whatever is determined by the attorney general.”
“If that was the judgment, that he violated the law and he should be in fact criminally prosecuted, then so be it, but I would not direct it,” Biden said.
But, truly, that is not enough.
If Biden's Attorney General does not wish to pursue the fullest extent of the law against Trump and all the cronies who aided and abetted his crimes, we cannot merely let Biden be passive about the whole situation either. If he allows their crimes to go unpunished he is not being impartial--he will be actively covering up their crimes by allowing them to get away with everything.
The worst case scenario will be that Biden (knowingly) appoints an Attorney General who will refuse to do anything, Biden pretends that his hands are tied, and then the public gives up hope of ever achieving justice and runs out of steam. ...And then the cycle of corruption will deepen and we will see a repeat of everything Trump has done in the near future.
What has happened to our nation over the past 4 years is unprecedented. There needs to be a thorough and systematic investigation with enough resources to turn over every single stone and hold every individual involved accountable. It must be in a format accessible to the general public so they can see all the injustices that have been covered up and occurring behind closed doors, and so they can transparently see that justice is finally being done. This is the only thing that can reverse the precedent of the past 50 years that a presidential administration can get away with the most heinous of crimes.
What will happen if the Crimes Commission is not carried out? Well, historically when corruption in an outgoing administration is this extreme, courts order summary executions to clean house and citizens take the old leaders out into the streets and lynch them. Luxury and the stability of the power structures maintaining order make this kind of upheaval unlikely to take place in the US. That leaves one other option: subsequent administrations will copy every tactic in the Trump administration playbook, because it will all be legal.
Instead, let's heal our nation by cutting out the cancerous corruption once and for all. We must constantly demand every politician to come out in support of the Trump Crimes Commission.
