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Newsweek
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Newsweek
Sky-High Corruption From Our Government of Gangsters
Corruption in the Trump administration is so pervasive that its hard to keep track of whether President Donald Trump's dash for dictatorship or his dash for cash is moving faster. Since the news broke that Trump is arranging for Qatar to give him a $400 million Boeing 747 to fly around in, Trump's limitless greed is in plain sight—or should we say "plane" sight? We can all see it, but so can the FBI, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, along with White House counsel. Their leaders were all chosen to be lickspittles, but they are truly going above and beyond the call of duty. Some of them are ignoring Trump's predations—listen to the crickets at the FBI—but most of them are actively enabling the president to use his public position to enrich himself. Let's talk about the airplane for a moment. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution specifically prohibits presidents from accepting "any any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State." So, what does Attorney General Pam Bondi do? According to sources, the Justice Department justifies the gift by creating a sham show. The plane will nominally belong to the Defense Department. It will go to Trump's library after he leaves office—and get a load of this—he promises not to ride in it once he stops being president. Therefore, Bondi will apparently bloviate, it's not a gift to Trump. In this Feb. 15 photo, a Qatari Boeing 747 sits on the tarmac of Palm Beach International airport after President Donald Trump toured the aircraft. In this Feb. 15 photo, a Qatari Boeing 747 sits on the tarmac of Palm Beach International airport after President Donald Trump toured the aircraft. ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images My head is already black and blue from banging it on the desk these last 100 days, but this one takes the cake. "Just give the gold bars to my wife" Sen. Bob Menendez (formerly D-NJ) might have said, that way I'll still get rich, but it won't be illegal. As he reports to federal prison next month ask him how he feels about it now. For Bondi to bless this Qatari sheikh's big bad Boeing baksheesh is another not so funny joke in a long line this year. Who is the plane going to benefit? Donald Trump. And only Donald Trump. The idea that putting the gift in someone else's name makes it legal would leave a class of fifth graders rolling on the ground with laughter. As would the claim that he promises not to ride in it after he leaves office. HA! So, what's happened to our organs of justice? Our ethics police? Our sense of honor? It's been bought and paid for, that's what. Don't forget who Pam Bondi worked for before Trump. You guessed it—as a lobbyist for the Qatari government! You can't make this stuff up. Nor can you ignore that Bondi has turned a blind eye to a boat-load of other bad things. Trump's bogus law firm binge against ABC, Meta, and CBS has raked into his pockets some $40 million—so far. Meanwhile, all the rest of this grifting, grafting, grotesquery is dwarfed by the hundreds of millions Trump is raking in from his crypto meme and the naked way he is going about soliciting it. He has literally put himself up for auction. Profits from the meme coin benefit Trump. He has publicly said he will not refuse personal profit from the endeavor, and he is directly using his office to promote the coin. It's not even subtle. He is personally hosting a dinner for the biggest coin buyers. The promotion for the occasion roars it out: "Let the President know how many $TRUMP coins YOU own!" What else would any honest law enforcement organization need to know? We know why nothing is being done. Corruption. Public officials in the Justice Department, the Office of Legal Counsel, the FBI, and the Office of White House Legal Counsel, have traded in their duty to the law for fealty to a felon. They act as enablers to a criminal who knows no limits. They violate their oaths of offices. And one day, if honest law enforcement is ever restored to this country, they expose themselves to criminal liability for conspiring to accomplish the bribery of the president of the United States. Remember lawyers, the statute of limitations is five years. And Trump can't pardon them out of losing their licenses to practice law. Let his co-conspiring lawyers think about that one extra hard. Thomas G. Moukawsher is a former Connecticut complex litigation judge and a former co-chair of the American Bar Association Committee on Employee Benefits. He is the author of the new book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Jamal Greene: I'm a legal scholar. We're in a constitutional crisis — and this is the moment it began.
This is an adapted excerpt from MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin's YouTube series 'Can They Do That? With Lisa Rubin.' A constitutional crisis is a moment where there is some kind of paralysis, or possibly abuse, of the Constitution that has no obvious solution. There's no question that, under the leadership of Donald Trump, that's exactly the moment America is in right now. Some will argue that this country entered into a constitutional crisis only recently, when the administration was accused of disobeying a Supreme Court order regarding the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but it came before that. If the administration can't constrain itself from violating the Constitution or statutes so flagrantly and frequently, then the country is already in a place where a constitutional crisis has occurred. The truth is, we've been in a constitutional crisis since the executive branch decided it wouldn't pay attention to any internal legal constraints. As someone who served in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, I spent a lot of time during Joe Biden's administration advising what the president could and couldn't do. So much of what the executive branch does is things that will never get to a court. It's up to the White House to constrain itself. The moment I realized we were in a constitutional crisis was Jan. 20. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. It's an order that is flagrantly unconstitutional. It doesn't have any real legal defense. The Trump administration knows that, but they issued it anyway. That kind of behavior — 'I'm going to do it unless and until someone tells me not to, and that someone is a court that's going to act slowly' — shows me that we've got an executive branch that doesn't see itself constrained by law. That's incredibly dangerous. Trump's actions are breaking a long tradition of the executive branch policing itself. Across administrations, executive branch officials, including career employees, have held up this tradition. One of the very first moves of this administration was to try to get rid of as many of those people as possible. That's a pretty good sign that they're not trying to constrain themselves. Now, I'm not saying they're completely unconstrained. There are political constraints on the president's behavior. He can't just do whatever he wants. But there is so much that the executive branch does that will never see a courtroom. Or if it does see a courtroom, the way in which the court is able to intervene is very narrow. That's what we're seeing right now with the Supreme Court and the deportation of Abrego Garcia. The White House is playing with what the court has told it, knowing that it holds a lot of the cards. The court doesn't have an army. It can't march into El Salvador, and the Trump administration is taking advantage of that. This situation has taken this constitutional crisis even further into the red. At some point, people might stop paying attention because there's so much lawlessness happening. But right now, we have an administration that is unconstrained by any internal legal constraints and flirting with ignoring the Supreme Court. This is really unprecedented territory. This article was originally published on
Time of India
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Why does Trump feel he can ignore the law without consequences? A deep dive
Donald Trump 's disregard for the rule of law is as clear as it could be. Consider that the three justices he appointed to the Supreme Court all joined a middle-of-the-night emergency decision blocking the unlawful deportation of more Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador — after the court had already ruled 9-0 that no one should be deported without a hearing first. But you can't cure a disease without a diagnosis. To fight back against Trump, the country and the courts need to understand why he's waging war on law, not just that he is. Tempting though it may be to think so, the best diagnosis isn't that Trump is simply crazy or wants to be a dictator. His actions can be explained rationally in terms of his incentives and his past behavior. Put simply, Trump learned during the last eight years — featuring two failed impeachments, three fizzled criminal cases, and one toothless New York conviction — that he pays essentially zero personal cost when he violates the law. Like any child who faces no consequences for his actions, he concluded that the rules don't apply to him. He will keep on breaking the law until he pays a price for it. And although acting unlawfully interferes with putting his preferred policies into place, Trump has repeatedly shown he cares much less about what happens than the messages his conduct sends. Unlawful actions frighten and enrage his opponents, who then contribute to extensive news coverage that tells his supporters he's taking on the elites they don't like. Live Events ALSO READ: 'Already seen Donald Duck': Colombian President brutally mocks Trump, says US revoked his visa When a president doesn't want to follow the law himself, there are supposed to be internal institutional checks to make him do so. One is the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice . OLC, as it's called, has for decades functioned as a kind of independent-minded law firm within the executive branch. Before a president does anything that potentially pushes the legal envelope, he is supposed to get a formal memorandum from OLC that analyzes the legal issues and concludes that the action can or cannot be undertaken, and how. In a normal administration, OLC memos are often treated almost as having the force of law themselves. The system is admittedly imperfect: under the presidency of George W. Bush, a lawyer in the office, John Yoo, authored the so-called torture memos that mistakenly (not to mention immorally) concluded that various methods of 'enhanced interrogation' were not prohibited by federal statutes that banned the use of torture. But the OLC system could also be self-correcting. When he took over OLC, Jack Goldsmith (now a colleague of mine at Harvard Law School) immediately noticed the legal errors in the memos and retracted them. That was an act of personal courage, ending Goldsmith's rapid and well-deserved rise in conservative legal circles. At the same time, it was an act of institutional recovery. The repudiation of the earlier memos cemented OLC's reputation as genuinely independent and as a brake on unlawful executive action. ALSO READ: Pete Hegseth was called "abuser of women" by his mother: He admitted to having five affairs during first marriage Trump has sidelined OLC to the point of ignoring it, as Goldsmith himself has pointed out. Executive orders come out of the White House that are plainly unlawful without even the formality of consulting OLC. Once lost, the OLC check will be extremely difficult to resuscitate in a future administration. Building a credible OLC team that is not simply subordinate to a given president's legal theory takes time. And getting top-flight lawyers to staff the team requires them to believe that what they will say matters. Then there's the attorney general, the nation's top law enforcement official. That person can also function as a check on the president by insisting that the chief executive's actions are lawful. Pam Bondi seems to have no interest in playing that role, preferring to post support for the president's policies on social media, even when they are plainly illegal. In comparison, William Barr, who served as attorney general in the first Trump administration, looks practically like a paragon of legal restraint — even though he did an enormous amount to facilitate Trump's interests, including undermining Robert Mueller's investigation. Barr was a master at deploying subtle reading of legal rules to maximize presidential power. But at least he bothered to pay lip service to the rule of law. Bondi doesn't even do that. ALSO READ: Pete Hegseth doing "tremendous job": Why is Trump not firing US defense secretary despite massive controversy? The upshot is that Trump is acting rationally, having removed institutional bars to his conduct. He not only loses nothing from lawless action, he gains by it — even when the courts stop him. The solution is therefore to find ways to make Trump pay a meaningful price for violating the law. That's unlikely to come from the Supreme Court, which has taken criminal sanctions off the table, or from Congress, where impeachment doesn't seem like a realistic possibility. It's going to have to come from the people directly, expressing themselves through elections, protests, and poll numbers. In our democracy, the people gave us Donald Trump. Now the same people have to protect themselves from his assault on the law. If we don't, our democracy won't survive.
New York Times
04-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump Sidelines Justice Dept. Legal Office, Eroding Another Check on His Power
The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has traditionally been a powerful guardrail in American government. It has issued interpretations of the law that bind agencies across the executive branch, decided which proposed policies were legally permissible or out of bounds and approved draft executive orders before they went to presidents to be signed. But in President Trump's second term so far, the office has largely been sidelined. As Mr. Trump issues policy after policy pushing legal limits and asserting an expansive view of his power, the White House has undercut its role as a gatekeeper — delaying giving it senior leadership and weakening its ability to impose quality control over executive orders. Its diminished voice is shifting the balance of legal power in the executive branch toward the White House, speeding up Mr. Trump's ability to act but creating mounting difficulties for the Justice Department lawyers who must defend the government in court. 'The Trump administration has cut out the traditional check the Justice Department has played,' said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who led the office under the George W. Bush administration. 'O.L.C. being cut out is a piece of a larger strategy designed to ensure that the president can do whatever he wants, without any internal executive branch legal constraints on his will.' Two and a half months into his administration, Mr. Trump has neither submitted a nominee to be the office's Senate-confirmed leader nor named an acting assistant attorney general. This week, after being asked to comment for this article, the department announced that he intended to nominate T. Elliot Gaiser, 35, the Ohio solicitor general, for the position. Breaking with tradition, the Trump transition team did not have the dozens of executive orders he signed in his first days in office vetted by the office, according to current and former officials. Many have contributed to what is now more than four dozen restraining orders and injunctions by courts blocking administration actions. And while the administration has since started allowing the office to review draft executive orders, that consultation is far more limited than in the past, according to people familiar with the process. Traditionally, the office traded versions back and forth until it was satisfied with a draft's form and legality, then issued a memo approving the final text. Now, they said, it typically has an opportunity to see a version and provide comments for the White House to consider, but it does not remain involved to the end and decide that an order is ready for the president. In another sign of O.L.C.'s reduced clout, Mr. Trump has taken a series of actions and made claims that contradict or raise tensions with the office's opinions. The topics involve birthright citizenship, blocking spending authorized by Congress, migrants' right to seek asylum, Supreme Court approval for the existence of independent agencies, a president's use of an autopen to sign documents and White House jurisdiction over the Smithsonian Institution. Critics of executive overreach have long criticized the Office of Legal Counsel as too permissive. But Professor Goldsmith said it had nevertheless served as an important internal check. He cited its culture of serious legal analysis and, in contrast to lawyers based in the White House, its literal distance from the political and policymaking vortex of the Oval Office. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment. The Justice Department provided a statement from Emil Bove III, a former criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who is now a top official at the department. 'The Office of Legal Counsel plays a crucial role in the D.O.J.'s day-to-day functions, engages with the White House and other administration partners on a regular basis and routinely reviews President Trump's executive orders,' he said. 'Any suggestion to the contrary is false.' Most of the office consists of career lawyers who stayed on after its previous leader stepped down at the end of the Biden administration. The Trump team has been slow to fill that vacuum. On Jan. 27, it installed Lanora C. Pettit, a 2010 graduate of the University of Virginia law school who had worked for the Texas solicitor general, as a politically appointed deputy. The next month, it added a second deputy, M. Scott Proctor, a 2017 graduate of Harvard Law and a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. Neither was given the higher-ranking title of principal deputy, but Ms. Pettit is the office's supervising official in the absence of anyone more senior. After Ms. Pettit's arrival, the White House began letting O.L.C. review draft executive orders, the department said, while emphasizing that the office was not legally required to issue approval memos and insisting that the absence of those memos did not mean drafts were not being reviewed. But the people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal process, noted that 'reviewed' is very different from 'approved.' Several Office of Legal Counsel veterans from both parties expressed doubts that it could have approved several recent directives — like vituperative orders seeking to damage law firms that have employed or represented people Mr. Trump dislikes. Judges have partly blocked three of those. When past administrations have taken legally controversial actions, the White House has sometimes made public O.L.C. memos that approved the steps. Such moves aim to explain the legal rationales and show that they were not concocted after the fact in an attempt to justify a decision that was actually based on a president's mere whim and raw will to exercise power. But the Office of Legal Counsel has been strikingly missing in public debates over aggressive administration efforts to revoke the visas of foreign students; fire officials in defiance of job protections against arbitrary removal; refuse to spend funds appropriated by Congress; dismantle agencies; and deport people without due process, among others. To date, the administration has published one memo from the current Office of Legal Counsel, an opinion by Ms. Pettit in mid-March saying that Mr. Trump could designate acting members of two foreign-assistance foundations after he fired their boards. In the past, the office has also performed another quality-control function: Checking factual statements in draft orders and insisting upon solid evidence supporting any material claims before approving them, veterans of the office say. Last month, Mr. Trump issued an order invoking the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport accused members of a Venezuelan gang. That law requires a link to a foreign state, and Mr. Trump said Venezuela's government controls the gang. But U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in February that Venezuela's government does not, in fact, control the gang. Martin Lederman, a Georgetown law professor who worked at the Office of Legal Counsel during Democratic administrations, said Mr. Trump's directives do not appear to have gone through its approval process. 'When the system is working as it should, any fact or legal justification upon which an order depends is flyspecked by the office, and the president does not sign it until O.L.C. is satisfied that it is well grounded,' he said. 'It's unimaginable that O.L.C. would have approved many of these executive orders for form and legality. It's obvious they didn't.' The office traces its origins to the Judiciary Act of 1789, which empowers attorneys general to render legal opinions to the president and department heads, and a 1962 directive from President John F. Kennedy, which requires them to review draft executive orders. In the modern era, attorneys general have delegated those functions to the Office of Legal Counsel. On paper, attorneys general can overrule its conclusions and presidents are not bound to follow its advice. In practice, overriding or disregarding the office's judgments is rare and has been considered politically and legally risky. The office gained notoriety after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when it issued secret memos blessing policies that violated torture and surveillance laws. In 2003, Professor Goldsmith, then the new chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, revoked them. The White House decided to keep a surveillance program going regardless, but backed down after top law enforcement officials threatened to resign. In 2010, the office issued a 'best practices' memo declaring that its ethos must be to serve the rule of law, not to be a rubber stamp for the White House. To be sure, Mr. Trump took contentious actions in his first term with the office's approval, like the killing of a top Iranian official and withholding Mr. Trump's tax returns from Congress. But the head of the office that term, Steven Engel, played a central role among a team of lawyers who did not always sign off on what Mr. Trump or top aides like Stephen Miller, now the top domestic policy official in the White House, wanted to do. For example, the White House clashed with the Homeland Security Department's top lawyer, John Mitnick, over legal risks from proposals like separating migrant children from parents and transporting migrants to so-called sanctuary cities. He was fired in 2019 and replaced by Chad Mizelle, an ally of Mr. Miller who is now Attorney General Pam Bondi's chief of staff. And Mr. Trump announced in 2018 that he would issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship for babies born to undocumented parents — but never did. An Office of Legal Counsel opinion from 1995, which remained in place under Mr. Engel, says that would be unconstitutional. But Mr. Trump issued such an order upon returning to office. While Mr. Trump was out of power, his allies decided that lawyers, even conservative political appointees, had too often raised legal roadblocks. They made plans to screen out such lawyers in any second term in favor of hiring more permissive, MAGA-style loyalists. Mr. Miller, who is not a lawyer, ran a legal foundation that recruited lawyers loyal to Mr. Trump's worldview and helped staff the administration. Those include Reed Rubinstein, Mr. Trump's nominee to be the State Department's top lawyer, and Gene P. Hamilton, who works for the White House counsel and former Trump campaign lawyer David Warrington. In an executive order instructing independent agencies to submit to White House supervision in February, Mr. Trump declared, 'The president and the attorney general's opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.' That sounded like a standard description of the Office of Legal Counsel, but the office went unmentioned.
New York Times
04-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
How Trump Has Tuned Out a Key Justice Dept. Legal Office
The Trump administration has taken steps and made claims that clash with legal opinions issued by a traditionally powerful agency that is part of the Justice Department, the Office of Legal Counsel. The office has typically had an influential role in shaping internal government legal deliberations, and its court-like opinions are supposed to bind the executive branch unless the attorney general or the president overrides them or the office itself revokes them. The disregard for its precedents is part of a broader pattern in which the clout and influence of the agency have eroded in the opening months of the administration. Here are some examples that show that disconnect. Spending What the Trump administration has done The Trump administration has frozen large amounts of spending authorized by Congress. It has justified those blocks with shifting legal rationales in court. But both President Trump and his White House budget chief, Russell T. Vought, have said that they believe the president has constitutional authority to refuse to spend taxpayer money that Congress appropriated for things the president does not like. That tactic is called impoundment, and Mr. Trump and Mr. Vought have said that they intend to re-establish that power despite a 1974 law that largely banned it. What the Office of Legal Counsel has said An opinion from 1969, written by William H. Rehnquist before he became chief justice, says the 'existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.' The office reinforced that conclusion in a 1988 opinion that says 'the weight of authority is against such a broad power in the face of an express congressional directive to spend.' Birthright Citizenship What the Trump administration has done Mr. Trump signed an executive order declaring that babies born on domestic soil to undocumented parents are no longer eligible for birthright citizenship and instructing government agencies not to issue them citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
