Dare I say it? After a freefall into authoritarianism, USA Today offers a light breeze to ease our fall. There may be justice yet.
You probably saw yesterday’s headlines, first 1,100 former DOJ officials demanded Attorney General (not an actual General) Bill Barr step down. A few hours later the number spiked to 2,000 former DOJ officials who were demanding Barr uckfay offday. 👈🏻 *Pig Latin. (Yet another language I can claim, as not quite conversational.)
Barr overruled a recommendation to sentence Trump’s creepy Nixon back tattooed thong-wearing friend because Trump didn’t like it. Barr’s interference impelled four career prosecutors to resign.
So what? Another petition. woot, woot 👈🏼 *Note the lower case level of excitement.
Well, it made a difference, or perhaps it was the media’s focus on the real danger Barr’s intervention in Roger Stone’s sentencing would have on our democracy.
Stone is one of Trump’s criminal cohorts. In November, Stone was convicted of perjury and obstruction in regards to an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. His goal was to protect the prize pig, Trump.
Prosecutors recommended a sentence of nine years, for Stone who was scheduled to be sentenced by the same judge who ordered Paul Manafort into solitary confinement. Manafort had been witness tampering from prison and warned several times to stop.
Don’t expect much, but today:
“A national association of federal judges has called an emergency meeting Tuesday to address growing concerns about the intervention of Justice Department officials and President Donald Trump in politically sensitive cases…” ~Kevin Johnson, USA Today
One thousand federal judges, perhaps in capes, swoop in to save our democracy.
And now a short literary break, relating to our present predicament, courtesy of the Bard:
“In the corrupted currents of this word offence’s gilded hand may solve by justice, and oft, tis seen the wicked prize itself buys out the law but ’tis not so above There is no shuffling, there the action lies in his true nature And we ourselves.” ~William Shakespeare
Back to present day tragedy:
“Although there are times when political leadership appropriately weighs in on individual prosecutions, it is unheard of for the department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the president, as Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case,” ~Philadelphia U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, appointed by POTUS 43, Dubya
This sounds promising! Okay, it’s just a crumb, but I’m starved.
https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/4788155002?__twitter_impression=true
A lot from Lydia 