Tag: Jeff Sessions

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Opinion Viewpoint

Enter the Prosecutor

In 40 years of covering Washington politics, I have never seen anything like President Trump’s amazing rise to power. I have seen presidents laid low by botched Congressional investigations that lead to special prosecutors. That’s why I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen this movie before.

Spoiler Alert: This political thriller ends with the president’s top aides striking plea bargains with federal prosecutors to reduce prison sentences.

Juan Williams

The U.S. has a rich recent history of special prosecutors. The odds are rising that one more is coming to look into alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The dwindling trust in the GOP majority in Congress to conduct such a probe is due to the fading credibility of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Republican chairman of that panel, Senator Richard Burr, is widely perceived as a Trump acolyte. 

When FBI director James Comey announced shortly before last year’s election that his agents had reopened their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Burr bragged there is “not a separation between me and Donald Trump.”

Senator Charles Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, was slow to bury Burr with a call for a special prosecutor, perhaps seeking to avoid charges that he was politicizing the probe. But on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Schumer made that call. A special prosecutor was necessary, he asserted, to probe “whether the Trump campaign was complicit in working with the Russians to influence the election.”

Now Republicans, including Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Susan Collins, are starting to peel away. Graham has said that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russian diplomats, “then, for sure, you need a special prosecutor.”

On cue, last week Sessions had to recuse himself from the FBI’s probes into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia after The Washington Post revealed he met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. twice last year. Those details seemed to contradict sworn testimony he gave during his Senate confirmation hearing. 

If trust in the Senate probe is weak, then the credibility of any House investigation is even weaker. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) served with Sessions on Trump’s presidential transition team. Nunes was also one of the lawmakers actively recruited by Reince Priebus to counter stories about Trump’s ties to Russia. In a rambling press conference last week, he said he did not want the committee’s investigation to turn into a “witch hunt” and warned of “McCarthyism,” where innocent Americans were “haul[ed] before Congress.”

Representative Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the committee, further diminished trust in any House probe when he said last week that the FBI director refused to share with the committee more than “a fraction of what the FBI knows.”

Last week, we learned that the Trump White House Counsel’s office issued a memo to all White House staff instructing them to preserve all documents related to Russia. If history is a guide, all that is left now is for public pressure to build on the GOP and the special prosecutor to be named.

Here’s a quick look at that history: During the Iran-Contra affair, President Reagan tried to put the scandal behind him by agreeing to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh. Walsh indicted several of Reagan’s top aides, including Defense Secretary Caspar “Cap” Weinberger.

During President Clinton’s first term, shady controversies from his time as governor of Arkansas led to the appointment of the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and set the stage for the Monica Lewinsky sex story that resulted in Clinton’s impeachment.

President George W. Bush’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, recused himself from a White House probe. His deputy then appointed an independent special counsel to find out who leaked the name of a CIA agent. That special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, won the conviction of the Vice President’s chief of staff,  Lewis “Scooter” Libby. 

Senator John McCain said that he has “more hope than belief” that the GOP Congress will properly investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. “Have no doubt, what the Russians tried to do to our election could have destroyed democracy,” McCain said.

Julius Caesar feared the Ides of March with good reason. As the middle of the month approaches, President Trump and his GOP supporters will be under fearsome pressure to go along with the naming of a special prosecutor.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Geniune Vetting of Trump Cabinet Nominees Needed

CREDIT: Senator Jeff Sessions

At his annual “issues meeting” with constituents from his 9th Congressional District on Monday, Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen called the roll of what he saw as unsatisfactory or outright dangerous cabinet officer-designates named by Donald Trump, and Cohen’s list was fairly inclusive of the President-elect’s entire list.

Those singled out by the Congressman included Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions, who, he said, had been wrong on civil rights and civil liberties issues when the Senate rejected him as a potential federal judge in the 1980s and was “no better” now; climate-change rejector Scott Pruitt as director of the Environmental Protection Agency; Betsy DeVos, an advocate of for-profit charter schools, as Secretary of Education; and former Texas Governor Rick “Oops” Perry, who has extensive ties to the oil and gas industries, for Secretary of Energy.

Senator Jeff Sessions

Not mentioned specifically by Cohen but equally suspect, surely, are Secretary of the Treasury-designate Steven Mnuchin, a banker with close ties to financial-industry members who advocate loosening government restrictions on Wall Street; Secretary of Labor-designate Andy Puzder, a disbeliever in the minimum wage; Secretary of Commerce-designate Wilbur Ross, an investor best known as a “turnaround artist”;  Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, who publicly confesses knowing nothing about his subject; Secretary of Health and Human Services-designate Tom Price, a former congressman known for his opposition to the Affordable Care Act and public health measures; and Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson, the Exxon Mobil oil mogul whose ties with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin are notorious.

Most ominous of all is probably Trump’s choice for National Security Advisory, former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, whose erratic views caused him to be forced out as Defense Intelligence Agency head and whose son, with apparent paternal approval, has been a public advocate of some of the more monstrous examples of “fake news,” like the canard that Bill and Hillary Clinton were running a child-kidnapping ring out of a Washington D.C., pizza joint.

Unfortunately, the senior Flynn is not subject to Senate confirmation. The other mentioned Trump appointees are, however, and can in theory be rejected in the formal hearings that begin this week. The chances of that happening in a body dominated by Republicans is not great, but Cohen raised at least a modicum of hope when he suggested the names of several Republican senators who might be moderate or open-minded enough to join Senate Democrats in holding up some of the more noxious Trump nominations.

The names were those of Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona. Cohen added, with what sounded like genuine wistfulness, the names of Tennessee’s own Republican Senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander.

Though it is axiomatic these days that no Republican will admit to being “moderate” or anything quite so sissified-sounding to GOP ears, Corker and Alexander do, like Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, enjoy a reputation for relatively fair-mindedness. We join Cohen in hoping that our two senators can rise to the occasion in applying a genuine acid test to the nominees of President-elect Trump.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Dark Ages Coming?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen‘s cell phone rings in telephone calls to the theme song of the old Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson? Who knew?

Whatever the answer was before, the updated answer is: Everyone who attended the 9th District U.S. Representative’s annual public issues meeting for constituents, held on Monday in his third-floor office at the Federal Building downtown.

The bouncy chords of the Paul Anka-composed tune that used to signal “Here’s Johnny” rang out once during the nearly two hours of Q-and-A between Cohen and his overflow crowd, and that sound lasted just long enough for the congressman to put the phone on hold and stash it away.

Cohen himself was as accessible and upbeat as the tune suggested, and both were ironically at odds with the basic message the congressman had for his constituents. That was summed up in his statement: “We’re going into a new Dark Ages that will make Dwight Eisenhower look like a progressive.”

That’s understating the case a bit. Eisenhower, a tough but genial presence known to his generation as “Ike,” was the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe during World War II, and his popularity never sagged very much during the two terms he served as president from 1953 to 1961.

Historians, in fact, have already begun to locate Eisenhower on the moderate end of the political spectrum. In Cohen’s forecast of things to come, the administration of President-elect Donald Trump might well make such past Republican conservative figures as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan look like progressives.

Reviewing Trump’s cabinet appointments, for example, Cohen called Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions “the wrong person to be attorney general.” He regarded the president-elect’s designates for such agencies as the EPA, Energy, and Education as uniformly “awful,” enemies to the legitimate aims of their departments and cases of “the fox in the henhouse.” And, said Cohen, all the other appointees are “just billionaires.”

Said the congressman: “He’s cut out the middlemen; he’s put the billionaires in charge, which is called oligarchy. That happened in Russia, and it’s happening here.”

Cohen eased up only a bit for Elaine Chao, Trump’s Transportation Secretary designate. The congressman, a member of the Transportation Committee, said “I’ve met her; I know her. I’m going to try to get projects from her. Let’s leave it at that.”

The essence of Cohen’s forebodings was that the combination of a Republican Congress and President Trump would mean less money for desirable public programs, more privatization for the gratification of special interests, and an erratic foreign policy.

Cohen expressed some hope that a minority of relatively moderate Republican senators might be open-minded in forthcoming Senate hearings on the cabinet nominees. He named them as Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, and John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona. “And, hopefully, Corker and Lamar” (Tennessee Senators Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander.) 

Asked if he had hopes of being able to have a useful conversation with Trump himself, Cohen said, “Dr. Shea has passed away,” a reference to the late Dr. John Shea of Memphis, famous for his work in improving or restoring faulty hearing.

“What Trump has done is unleashed people so they feel it’s a cool thing to be mean and that it’s okay, and it’s not a cool thing to do at all.”

The congressman noted the occasional strains that have occurred between Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. “He could get Paul Ryan upset. … He’s the guy who can bring an impeachment.”

Cohen had opened his meeting with constituents with a tease: “There’s an announcement coming.” He said that “in about three weeks, I’m going to be receiving a leadership position.” When that moment comes, Cohen said, it would mark the first time in 30 years that a Tennessean would be in the Democratic leadership.  

Jackson Baker

State Senator Randy McNally (R-Chattanooga) (center) was sworn in Monday as Tennessee’s new Senate Speaker and Lieutenant Governor.

• By a 7-4 vote on Monday, the Shelby County Commission approved another year’s appointment of former Commissioner Julian Bolton as special legal advisor to the Commission at a stipend of $65,000 a year. There were four nay notes — from David Reaves, Mark Billingsley, George Chism, and Steve Basar. The commission also approved a legislative package to present to the current session of the General Assembly.

• Deidre Malone, founder and CEO of the Carter Malone Group, a public affairs, advertising, and consulting firm, has been named chairperson of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP and will be installed as such in a ceremony on January 22nd. Malone is a two-time candidate for Shelby County mayor, a former Shelby County Commissioner, and a long-time eminence in civic and Democratic Party affairs, having served the last extant version of the local party as a vice chair. She also logged several years at WLOK-AM as a news reporter and anchor and at WMC-TV, Action News 5, as a producer.