Dis-Barr by @BloggersRUs

Dis-Barr

by Tom Sullivan


Al Pacino. Still image from "...And Justice for All" (1979)

It is too early to know what the fallout could be for the attorney-enablers involved in the Trump-Ukraine affair. Former Donald Trump fixer Michael Cohen has a fair idea. He sits in jail, disbarred, for his actions taken to protect Donald Trump from himself, as well as for corrupt actions of his own. Attorneys now surrounding Donald Trump may face similar fates. Temptation is like that.

The whistleblower complaint released this week tracks closely with the call summary the White House released of the July 25 conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump appears to extort dirt on political rival Joe Biden in exchange for releasing U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

White House lawyers who facilitated burying records of that call have, at the very least, put their law licenses at risk. Ask Michael Cohen.

Michelle Goldberg writes:

According to Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law, any lawyers involved in hiding these transcripts might have done something illegal. “The rule is it is both unethical and a crime for a lawyer to participate in altering, destroying or concealing a document, and here the allegation is that the word-for-word transcript was moved from the place where people ordinarily would think to look for it, to a place where it would not likely be found,” said Gillers. “That’s concealing.”
Attorney General Bill Barr, neck deep in Trump, is named multiple times in both the complaint and the call summary. Trump repeatedly informs Zelensky he'll have Bill Barr and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, contact Ukrainian officials about investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. Barr’s Justice Department examined the whistleblower complaint and his Office of Legal Counsel determined it need not be turned over to Congress as the whistle-blower statute requires. Just weeks after intelligence officials asked the Justice Department and FBI to investigate the call, the department's criminal division decided there was insufficient cause to open an investigation:
Department officials and career public integrity prosecutors reviewed a rough transcript of the call and verified its authenticity, but — because a case was not opened — took no other steps, such as conducting interviews, the officials said. They looked only at whether Trump might have violated campaign finance laws, not federal corruption statutes, even though some legal analysts said there seemed to be evidence of both.
"Under any conceivable ethical standard, Barr should have recused himself," Goldberg writes. Trump's newest fixer did not.

The massive White House coverup of Trump’s abuse of power vis-a-vis Ukraine & Biden, including evidence concealment, is now clearly documented. Bill Barr is up to his eyebrows in the criminal conspiracy. He’s Trump’s John Mitchell. Mitchell ended up in prison. It’s all unraveling

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 26, 2019
Goldberg continues:
But Barr’s refusal to recuse creates a sort of legal cul-de-sac. It’s only the Justice Department, ultimately, that can prosecute potential federal crimes arising from this scandal. Barr’s ethical nihilism, his utter indifference to ordinary norms of professional behavior, means that he’s retaining the authority to stop investigations into crimes he may have participated in.
Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, took a starring role in the Ukraine affair as well. Murray Waas reports that floating stories about Biden's son being involved in questionable business in Ukraine began in the early days of the Trump administration. Giuliani and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort launched a scheme to formulate "a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation." Another goal was to promote the narrative that "the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had 'colluded' to defeat Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid."

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), former attorney general in California, told MSNBC's Chris Matthews she wants to know "who in the State Department was in cahoots, or was facilitating, Giuliani’s interactions with Ukrainian officials." Furthermore, "the New York Bar Association needs to investigate Giuliani, and probably disbar him” for his actions.

And Bill Barr and who knows who else. The president is out of order, the Department of Justice is out of order, the whole executive branch is out of order.

Donald J. Trump is an ethical black hole. He eats the souls of anyone with enough moral flexibility to venture near his event horizon. Once that's crossed there is no escape. For Barr, for Giuliani, for Trump's enablers in Congress and in the White House. What's left is to find out is whether what remains of American justice can reach them there.