Contempt for Congress, Trump's Taxes, & Pictures with the Pool Boy, Oh My!
The window of opportunity for ending the standoff between Congress and the White House got a lot small today, as the administration asserted executive privilege over all of the materials related to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation sought by the House Judiciary Committee.
By a 22 to 12 vote, the Congressional committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt. They vote again later in the day--the early vote being a procedural matter-- and will send it to the full House.
Republicans on the committee used the occasion to speak to the CSPAN audience on a garden variety of conspiracy theories. The White House decided to revoke all media access to a meeting of the President's Cabinet as a way of putting an exclamation point of their position. (Take that!, you enemies of the people.)
Here’s House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler:
"The [Justice] Department has come nowhere close to satisfying its obligations under [our] subpoena. The Department has never cited a legal basis for withholding the underlying evidence."
“This decision represents a clear escalation in the Trump administration’s blanket defiance of Congress’s constitutionally mandated duties... ...As a co-equal branch of government, we must have access to the materials that we need to fulfill our constitutional responsibilities in a manner consistent with past precedent.”
The contempt resolution will have to be approved by the full House — and is likely to pass now that an increasing number of Democrats (including Speaker Pelosi) are speaking up against Barr.
There are three paths Democrats in Congress can take going forward:
Following the vote of the full House, Speaker Pelosi will issue a citation for Barr to be held in contempt, which will get sent to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia or the DOJ. It will die there.
Democrats can pass a separate resolution to authorize going to court with Barr and the Trump administration over the Mueller report, asking the judiciary to decide their subpoena request and contempt citation. Win or lose, the case will be appealed. Ultimately a decision will decide just how much power Congress has.
The third option, which hasn’t been used since 1934, is called the power of inherent contempt. Either chamber can direct the Sergeant-at-Arms to take the individual alleged to have engaged in contemptuous conduct into custody. A hearing or “trial” follows in which allegations are heard and defenses raised; a guilty vote would result in imprisonment until such time as the obstruction to the exercise of legislative power is removed. Since the Congress doesn’t operate a jail, the likely destination for the obstructor would be the DC jail, by virtue of their jurisdiction over the District of Columbia.
Via Vox.com:
Democrats are feeling confident because the Trump administration has moved to block or deny every single subpoena request of theirs, not just the one for the Mueller report. At least one former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration thinks Trump’s broad refusal could potentially hurt his legal argument.
“The thing that’s unusual is the blanket refusal,” John Yoo, the former deputy assistant US attorney general in the Bush DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, told the New York Times. “It would be extraordinary if the president actually were to try to stop all congressional testimony on subpoenaed issues. That would actually be unprecedented if it were a complete ban.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s position on impeachment appears to be evolving as this quote from earlier today indicates:
"Every single day the president is making a case — he's becoming self-impeachable."
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There are two other news items I’m gonna lump into today’s column...
The hashtag #BillionDollarLoser is trending on Twitter this morning, following the New York Times revelations about Trump’s tax returns over a ten year period during the 80s and 90s.
Based on printouts from Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, rather than the actual tax returns themselves, the now-president lost $1.17 billion from 1985 to 1994—more money than “nearly any other individual American taxpayer.”
From the Hive blog at Vanity Fair:
... While Trump's 1985-1994 tax returns don't necessarily answer the questions about the Trump Organization's modern-day dealings that investigators are hoping for from the current tax returns, their debunking of Trump's wealth and business acumen suggests there could be much more dirt left to find.
The 1985-1994 returns “show that in fact Donald Trump is not the modern Midas who turns everything to gold. He is the Wizard, and Toto in the form of the New York Times has pulled back the curtain and revealed the con man,” David Cay Johnston, a tax policy expert and author of The Making of Donald Trump, told MSNBC Tuesday. When it comes to Trump, Johnston added, “Money . . . flows out faster than it flows in. And one of the reasons we should be concerned about that is someone who is constantly, desperately in search for money to maintain the appearance that they're wealthy, is likely to commit crimes and be open to various actions.”
https://twitter.com/sparksjls/status/1126105851117363200
Oh, ye of little faith… A key element of Trump’s base are evangelical voters, and lots of folks have wonder how this was possible, given the man’s less than stellar personal history.
The first breakthrough with this group for the Trump campaign came in the run up to the Iowa primary, when the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Jr endorsed the candidate.
I’ll let Reuters, which broke the story, tell the next part:
Months before evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr.’s game-changing presidential endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016, Falwell asked Trump fixer Michael Cohen for a personal favor, Cohen said in a recorded conversation reviewed by Reuters.
Falwell, president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian universities, said someone had come into possession of what Cohen described as racy “personal” photographs — the sort that would typically be kept “between husband and wife,” Cohen said in the taped conversation.
According to a source familiar with Cohen’s thinking, the person who possessed the photos destroyed them after Cohen intervened on the Falwells’ behalf.
For those you curious about just what kind of ‘personal photographs’ these might be, I suggest reading this story from Buzzfeed, published in May, 2018. Following are the first couple of paragraphs:
Influential evangelical leader and Donald Trump backer Jerry Falwell Jr. went into business with a young pool attendant he and his wife met while staying at a luxury hotel in Miami Beach, according to a lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade County.
The suit, which has not been previously reported, was brought by a father and son who claim that after they helped conceive of the business, the pool attendant and Falwell wrongly cut them out of it. The suit says that while Falwell Jr. and his wife were guests at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach in 2012, they developed a “friendly relationship” with the pool attendant, Giancarlo Granda; flew Granda in a private jet; and eventually backed him in a business venture, setting up a hostel that offers low-cost dorm-style nightly accommodations to visitors. The pool attendant, according to public records databases, was 21 when he met the Falwells.
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https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1126124007324045313
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Lead image credit: Max Pixel