Tag: Trump Pardons

Post-Primary Thoughts

The Daily Escape:

Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, CA – photo by valledweller33. The canyon floor is 4,500ft below its rim.

Everything is BS until the people vote. Unlike in Iowa, New Hampshire (NH) declared a primary winner on the same day. One way to look at the results is:

  • The three main moderate candidates took 52.6% of the NH vote: (Buttigieg, 24.4% + Klobachar, 19.8% + Biden, 8.4%)
  • Two main lefty candidates took 35.2 % of the vote (Sanders, 25.9% + Warren, 9.3%)

Bernie was the winner, followed closely by Mayor Pete. Amy Klobuchar, who finished third, was to Wrongo’s thinking, overpraised by the pundits. She finished 5th in Iowa, a state next door to hers. Now she has both 5th and 3rd place finishes, and the media says she’s got a real chance.

Contrast that with Elizabeth Warren, who finished 4th in her neighboring state of New Hampshire, and 3rd in Iowa. So why are the media saying Klobuchar is a serious candidate, and Warren is a loser?

Biden, though, is toast. He’s nearly out of money and if he can’t finish better than 5th, he should go to the sidelines. The parade has passed him by. He looked like a man running on empty, a fine fellow, a good man, but a man of the past, who often seemed to be wondering what was going on.

Despite all of the above, there are two winners coming out of NH: Klobachar and Bloomberg. For Klobachar, she has an upside. She’s raised her profile, but she has virtually no support in Nevada and South Carolina; she may have trouble reaching the 15% threshold for delegates in both.

OTOH, Super Tuesday includes her home state of Minnesota which may be an opportunity for a win.

Klobuchar could easily make a strong vice president with her strength in the Midwest and in the suburbs. Alternatively, she could become the first female majority or minority leader in the history of the US Senate.

Bloomberg is the other NH winner. No one coming out of the NH primary looks to be able to build beyond their narrow base of support. Ron Brownstein concludes in The Atlantic:

“So far, none of the candidates has built a coalition that reaches broadly across the party. Instead, each is confined to a distinct niche of support that is too narrow to establish a commanding advantage in the race.”

The NH primary exit polls said 63% of voters were motivated to vote because of anger at Trump. The scariest statistic in the exit polls was that 15% said they will not vote for the Democratic presidential nominee unless it’s their candidate. This demonstrates the schism between the left and moderate wings of the party.

Many Dems think that Bloomberg would be the best center-left candidate, due to his resume and his money. But he isn’t for the purist lefties, and he’s spending tons of money on the Super Tuesday contests.

The problem with Bloomberg’s spending is that getting to 15% in the polling (with no votes yet cast for him) has already cost him $300 million. How much will it cost to get to 50.1% of Democratic delegates? Beyond that, can he buy the all-important turnout?

Let’s move on to this week’s reason for anger at Trump: His undermining of the federal judicial process.

The DOJ’s prosecutors in convicted Trump buddy Roger Stone’s case filed sentencing recommendations for his guilt in witness tampering. They asked for seven to nine years in prison. Trump tweeted that “This is a horrible and very unfair situation. “ And Attorney General Barr reacted by overriding his prosecutors and changing that recommendation to three to four years.

Of course the whole case was unfair to Stone — the judge actually allowed witnesses to testify at his trial! That’s a huge no-no in Trumpworld.

All four prosecutors on the case have now left the case over the DOJ’s overriding their recommendations, and one resigned from the DoJ.

This isn’t simply about sparing a Trump crony a long prison sentence, Trump has the power to pardon him at any time. Stone’s judge is Amy Berman Jackson, who also has the Paul Manafort case. Manafort, like Stone, withheld evidence, and decided to face a jury that then convicted him.

Stone’s sentence will now be decided by Judge Jackson, who may have some thoughts about these shenanigans. She may also have some thoughts about Stone having posted her picture on social media with a crosshair over it.

This is a bad look: Trump weighs in, and all of a sudden, the DOJ says “let’s change the deal”.

Most Americans would look at that and say ”it just doesn’t look right”. The DOJ is just Barr’s cover Trump’s butt department now.

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Trump Short Cuts Military Justice

The Daily Escape:

Autumn at Hagaromo Falls, Hokkaido, Japan – 2019 photo by theandylaurel

From the Military Times:

“President Trump has granted a full pardon to two soldiers who faced murder charges in war zone deaths, and reinstated the chief petty officer rank of a Navy SEAL convicted of posing with a dead detainee.”

Last Friday, Trump announced that former Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and Maj. Matt Golsteyn would receive presidential pardons.

Wrongo sat on a few military trials during his time in the military, and decisions about guilty or not guilty are tough decisions. While Wrongo was lucky not to have seen combat, we all know that war is inherently violent, and violence means killing people and destroying property.

So, where do we draw the line?

We’ve all heard about the fog of war, and some of us still clearly remember the May Lai massacre, 50 years later. An active battlefield situation is often ambiguous, and the troops’ blood is up during the heat of battle.

Enemy wounded are often killed in the midst of an ongoing action. Wrongo’s father, who fought in WWII, told him that he had participated with others in just such a killing. He wasn’t proud of it. In fact, through the years, it made him feel very guilty. Nothing was made of it then, and certainly, it still happens today.

Is it wrong? Yes, but soldiers exist to kill people in pursuit of their country’s political goals. To moderate the savagery of war, the West developed rules, customs and laws that attempt to impose limits on the conduct of war. These have often been violated.

The war crimes of the Imperial Japanese Army in WWII are infamous, despite Japan promising in 1942 to abide by the Geneva Convention and observe the Hague Convention of 1907. Air power kills indiscriminately. Its rules of engagement include bombing civilian populations until their governments surrender.

For ground forces, the basic law of war is that you do not kill or injure prisoners of war if they have accepted their status, and you don’t deliberately harm civilians as long as they do not take up arms against you. Do our soldiers indiscriminately shell towns, even though the towns may contain civilians? Of course they do.

All soldiers are expected to comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Military members know what the law is, and how the law will be applied. In these three Trump cases, each individual was in charge, and/or did the deed themselves. They committed straight-forward violations of the UCMJ.

Broadening our view, we need to remember that if we allow soldiers to kill or maim unarmed people, we will soon have an unmanageable gang of armed individuals, not a fighting unit. Here’s a take on Trump’s pardons by Matt Bohrs:

Presidents have the right to pardon and commute sentences. But just because they have the right to do something, doesn’t mean it is the right thing to do.

Trump is touted by his supporters as a law and order president. But these decisions again show that he does not really respect either civilian or military justice. He’s continually blocked government employees from testifying at legitimate Congressional hearings. He’s pardoned 18 people since taking office.

Those that support Trump’s decision don’t live in the real US. Like Trump, they live in some imaginary country were each individual interprets the Constitution and our laws in his/her own way.

Friday was a sad day for the military, and for nation.

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Oliver North, Role Model

The Daily Escape:

Denver Botanical Gardens – 2018 photo by J3DImindTRIP

On Monday, the NRA named Oliver North as its next president. North is a retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel best known for his central role in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair. He was found to have played a key role in the secret sale of arms to Iran, which was under an arms embargo at the time. Proceeds from the secret weapons sales were funneled to help support the Contra’s armed resistance to Nicaragua’s dictatorship led by the Somoza family. Under the Boland Amendment, funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

North admitted during congressional testimony in 1987 to having lied to the House Intelligence Committee about Iran-Contra, and to having destroyed evidence of the scheme’s existence. He was subsequently convicted of related felonies, but they were vacated because of the finding that a witness against North had been influenced by his congressional testimony, which North had given in exchange for a grant of immunity from prosecution.

In summary, a guy who lied to Congress about illegal weapons sales to Iran is now the president of an organization whose central belief is that legal gun ownership is the key to maintaining a safe country.

Here is Charlie Pierce: (emphasis by Wrongo)

A trade association for the arms industry now will be headed by the most famous arms-trafficker in American history. An organization that wears patriotism as though it were the masque of the Red Death will be headed by a guy who sold missiles to one of the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism.

Wait a minute. North sold weapons to Iran. And the NRA loves Trump. And Trump is the guy who yesterday tore up the Nuclear Arms Deal with Iran, claiming that a lie was truth:

Last week Israel published intelligence documents, long concealed by Iran, conclusively showing the Iranians’ regime and its history of pursuing nuclear weapons.

With news like this, how does the Onion stay in business?

Jon Chait argues that the Republicans’ defense of Oliver North begat Donald Trump:

Three decades ago, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North took the Fifth Amendment in a private Senate hearing on the Iran-Contra scandal….Conservatives rallied to North’s defense, insisting the law barely mattered in comparison to the noble intentions North was following. “It is not whether some technical laws were broken, but whether we stop communism in Central America,” argued White House communications director Pat Buchanan.

So in the 1980s, Republicans were willing to overlook illegal actions if their own political priorities were supported. The story evolved, as a reading of the National Security Archive makes clear. The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who had been Reagan’s Vice President at the time.

By doing that, Bush went further than any other president with the pardon power. His pardons made it impossible to pursue already-developed plans to investigate Bush himself in greater detail. At the time, the Iran-Contra Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh, told Newsweek:

It’s hard to find an adjective strong enough to characterize a president who has such contempt for honesty.

Until today, The North/Iran-Contra paved the way for our present political predicament where progressives are fighting to find truth hidden by actions in Washington, while Conservative lies distort current American policy. More from Jon Chait:

The North saga prefigured many things…about conservative politics in the present moment. It reveals the naĂŻvetĂ© of the common belief that President Trump would never dare to take the Fifth Amendment in the Russia investigation, or that doing so would carry an unbearable political price.

Of course Trump’s base would tolerate Trump taking the Fifth in questioning by Mueller. Or pardoning people even before they were tried. After all, Pappy Bush got away with did it. More about the straight line from North to Trump:

Conservatives rallied to North’s defense because he was on their side, next to which the breaking of “technical laws” was a trifling concern. Trump can count on the same reflexive defense.

A convicted felon is now head of the NRA, a convicted felon leading the Republican Senate primary in West Virginia.

So, with all his Republican support, why would Trump ever worry about Mueller?

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