(Burning fossil fuels pollutes the atmosphere with carbon dioxide gas. Much of the sun's heat is reflected back into space, but the extra carbon gas traps some of that heat on the Earth. This extra heat warms the ocean, causing more powerful hurricanes, melting ice caps, and rising seas. The fossil fuel industry -- which depends on consumers burning fossil fuels to stay in business -- has been claiming for decades that none of this is happening. A "climate change denier" is someone who believes the fossil fuel industry's propaganda instead of scientific facts.)
Someone who wants to torture people has no place in government. Shockingly, the Senate confirmed Bradbury in November, 2017. If your Senator voted for him, vote that Senator out of office next time they're up for re-election.
Our astronauts depend on proven science and technology to keep them safe in the freezing vacuum of space. Someone who looks at scientific evidence and then says that evidence isn't real doesn't belong in charge of NASA. Nevertheless, the Senate confirmed him in April 2018.
If Obama had nominated Carson, he would have been laughed out of the Senate, no matter which party controlled Congress. Nevertheless, the Senate confirmed Carson in March, 2017. The government official now in charge of preventing housing discrimination doesn't think the government should fight discrimination.
As Secretary, Carson tried to spend over $31,000 replacing his office's furniture and then proposed tripling the rent on people in poverty.
59% of Americans want abortion to remain legal. 37% want abortion outlawed. (Source: Pew Research.)
Of the 37% that want abortion outlawed, 59% agree that there should be exceptions made in cases of rape. (Source: Gallup.) In other words, if a teenage girl is brutally attacked by a violent sex offender she's never seen before, beaten within an inch of her life, and forced to conceive an embryo against her will when she's unconscious, most people agree she should be allowed to end the pregnancy. Those with the opposite point of view -- that the government should force a rape survivor to carry an attacker's embryo to term -- are a tiny minority. It's less than 15% of the population. However, this group currently wields considerable political power. It includes Ben Carson, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Sonny Perdue, Vice President Mike Pence, and Mike Pompeo. (Pence also wants to cancel the girl's maternity care.)
Of the 37% that want abortion outlawed, 69% agree that if the pregnancy endangers a woman's life, she should be allowed to end it. (Source: Gallup.) For instance: an ectopic pregnancy is a fatal disease where it is medically impossible to save the terminally ill embryo. Unless the pregnancy is terminated, the mother will die as well. A tiny minority believes that if the embryo cannot be saved, the government should make it illegal for a doctor to save the mother. Though less than 11% of the population agrees with this position, this fringe group currently has enormous political power. It includes Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo. Of course, the belief that doctors should let innocent mothers die because it's impossible to save a dying embryo isn't pro-life -- it's pro-death.
89% of Americans want legal contraception. (Source: Gallup.) Only 11% of the population disagree -- but that 11% includes Brett Kavanaugh, Mike Pence, and Mike Pompeo.
Every American has the right to free speech and freedom of religion. Everyone -- pro-choice, pro-life, even pro-death -- has a right to their beliefs. However: no one has the right to use the government's power to force those who don't share their religious beliefs to abide by them anyway. The pro-choice majority has no right to force abortions on those who don't want them, any more than the anti-abortion minority has the right to deny abortions to those who need them.
The "let women die" position is unconstitutional. The Fifth Amendment reads: "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Neither Congress nor any State government can outlaw a medical operation necessary to save an innocent person's life.
Note that Mike Pence, champion of the anti-abortion movement, wants to take away health insurance from pregnant women and 24 million other Americans. If he succeeds, 43,000 innocent Americans will die from treatable diseases every year.
DeVos is a career lobbyist. According to the Huffington Post, "She is a hardened anti-LGBTQ crusader, a member of a family that devoted itself - by donating tens of millions of dollars - to fighting the rights of queer people." She lobbied to legalize unlimited political spending by corporations and millionaires, and lobbied to exempt rich people from having to pay taxes. The Detroit Metro Times reports that her husband, Dick DeVos, wants to outlaw abortion in nearly all circumstances and force rape survivors to bear their attackers' children. The DeVoses gave millions of dollars to organizations that promote those goals.
The Senate confirmed DeVos in February, 2017. She subsequently told Axios that she wouldn't have a problem with abolishing the Education Department entirely.
DeVos lied under oath at her confirmation hearing. DeVos later violated a court order was held in contempt of court, and violated the Hatch Act. In any other administration, she would have been fired.
For Director of Central Intelligence: Trump nominated Deputy Director Gina Haspel. According to the New York Times, "As a clandestine officer at the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002, Gina Haspel oversaw the torture of two terrorism suspects and later took part in an order to destroy videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand... She played a direct role in the C.I.A.'s 'extraordinary rendition program,' under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel." The Atlantic details exactly how the suspected terrorists were tortured. (Torturing suspects is illegal, even when the victims are themselves the worst kind of criminals.)
Torturing someone until they will tell any lie to make the pain stop cannot produce reliable intelligence. Moreover, torture violates the Eighth Amendment, the War Crimes Act, the Torture Victim Prevention Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, and the Geneva Conventions. Someone who broke the law and then destroyed the evidence shouldn't be working in government, let alone running the Central Intelligence Agency.
In May 2018, Haspel wrote that she "noted the valuable intelligence collected" by the Bush-era torture program. Haspel is dead wrong. According to Scientific American, Psychology Today, Politico, and the U.S. Senate, torture is not an interrogation tool. It's a coercion tool. The only reason to torture someone is to force them to confess to something they didn't do. That's what torture is for. Using torture in interrogation has only one purpose: to force the victim to lie. Lies don't produce intelligence, valuable or otherwise. On the contrary: according to the New York Times and Frontline, the Bush Administration's obsession with Iraq, coupled with their use of torture, led to their phony "intelligence" that then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was an ally of al-Qaeda. That's what Haspel calls "the valuable intelligence collected." Bush's war in Iraq -- justified by bogus information obtained by torture -- killed almost 4,500 American soldiers in a country that had not attacked us. Furthermore, the invasion created a power vacuum that led to the rise of DAESH, a terrorist group that poses a greater threat to America than Saddam Hussein did.
As columnist Adam Serwer wrote: "There is no reason for powerful people to follow the rules if they know they cannot and will not suffer any consequences for breaking them. A system in which only the weak are punished is not a two-tiered system of justice, but one in which justice cannot be said to meaningfully exist.
"In a country where a CIA official like Haspel can destroy evidence in order to obstruct a federal investigation, and not only escape prosecution but rise to become the head of the agency, it is no wonder that [Trump] and his allies behave as though the possibility of the law catching up to them is not merely remote, but a kind of absurdity."
If Haspel is above the law, there is nothing to prevent the CIA from torturing any of us. Nevertheless, the Senate confirmed Haspel in May 2018. If your Senator went along with this atrocity, vote them out of office in the next election.
Despite catching him in a lie, the Senate confirmed Mnuchin in February, 2017. This doesn't change the fact that Mnuchin lied under oath, and he must be impeached and removed from office. If your Senator voted to confirm Mnuchin, vote that Senator out of office in the next election.
Furthermore: Every Presidential candidate since 1945 released their tax returns to demonstrate they would have no financial conflict of interest. When Trump ran for President, he claimed he would release his tax returns before the 2016 election, then changed his story and claimed he would release them after the election. Once he was sworn in, Trump refused to release them at all. In May 2019, Congress requested the returns -- only for Secretary Mnuchin to break the law by refusing to release them.
If an Obama Administration official had lied under oath at his confirmation hearing, he would never have been confirmed, no matter which party had a Senate majority. If an Obama Administration official had refused to follow his legal obligations under the Internal Revenue Code to provide documents to Congress, he would have been impeached within the week.
Climage change causes more extremes -- hotter summers and colder winters -- and this might be important for the Secretary of Agriculture to understand. On other issues, while Governor of Georgia, Perdue led the fight to reinstate a statewide gay marriage ban that had been ruled unconstitutional. According to Rewire and Christian news website WorldNetDaily, Perdue also believes the government should ban abortion, even in cases of rape.
The Senate confirmed Perdue in April 2017. The Secretary of Agriculture doesn't believe pollution threatens agriculture.
Pompeo also wants to outlaw abortion. He wants the government to force rape survivors to bear sex offenders' children and outlaw abortion even when it's the only way to save a dying woman's life. He also wants to outlaw contraception, in vitro fertilization, and stem cell research.
After the Supreme Court confirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry, Pompeo called gay marriage a "perversion." Though Pompeo has the right to his beliefs, he does not have the right to discriminate against innocent people. Ironically, Pompeo does not consider rape or torture perversions.
According to Slate Magazine, Pompeo wants the government to spy on innocent Americans without search warrants and says National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden deserves the death penalty.
According to The Intercept, Pompeo has falsely accused Muslim leaders of failing to condemn terrorist attacks and believes that all Muslims are at war with all Christians. As Afghan-American author Tamim Ansari wrote in 2001, "that's bin Laden's program. That’s exactly what he wants... He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that’s even better from bin Laden’s point of view." Terrorists threaten peaceful mainstream Muslims as much as they threaten us, and we need Muslims' help to fight them. One of the State Department's responsibilities is to cultivate allies against terrorists, and Pompeo wants to do the opposite. If we blame innocent people for terrorism, they won't help us catch the real terrorists.
Throughout Pompeo's career, his primary campaign contributor has been Koch Industries. Koch is the #1 producer of toxic waste in the United States and the nation's fifth-largest polluter. Unsurprisingly, Pompeo is strongly pro-pollution and refuses to believe in climate change.
The person in charge of the State Department should uphold American law and American values. Nevertheless, the Senate confirmed Pompeo in April 2018. (Presumably, as a climate change denier, he will tell other countries that the crises they face aren't really happening.) If your Senator voted for him, vote that Senator out of office in the next election.
According to the Washington Post, Pompeo believes Putin's ludicrous propaganda that the Ukrainians, not Putin himself, were behind the cyberattack on the 2016 presidential election. Putin is the sworn enemy of democracy, and the American Secretary of State is making foreign policy decisions based on Putin's propaganda.
In May 2020, Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo fired State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, the person in charge of making sure State Department officials are following with the law. According to the Washington Post, Linick was investigating Pompeo for unethical arms sales and for ordering a subordinate to run personal errands for him, including walking his dog and picking up his dry cleaning. This is illegal - a misuse of taxpayer money. Pompeo and Trump both confirmed Trump fired Linick because Pompeo asked him to, but Pompeo claims he had no idea Linick was investigating him. That obviously wasn't true. Pompeo had refused to let Linick interview him in person for the investigation and submitted written answers instead.
This is classic corruption from Trump and Pompeo. Instead of firing the official who was breaking the law, they fired the official who was trying to stop it. Congressman Eliot Engel said "Mr Linick's firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation."
According to Gizmodo, in March 2020 Trump and Wheeler announced that, for the duration of the coronavirus crisis, the EPA would stop enforcing environmental protection laws and leave it up to polluters to determine whether their pollution is harmful or not. As Gizmodo points out, air pollution causes respiratory problems -- and since the COVID-19-causing coronavirus also causes respiratory problems, Trump and Wheeler's decision to stop enforcing public health laws in the middle of a pandemic will lead to the deaths of innocent Americans. No one knows when the coronavirus pandemic will end -- so Wheeler's refusal to enforce the law could continue for months.
Trump and Wheeler are using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to do what they've wanted to do all along -- turn the Environmental Protection Agency into the Enable Polluters Agency.
By allowing companies to poison the air we breathe and the water we drink in the middle of a public health crisis, Wheeler is guilty of negligence.
Several months after the Trump Administration left office in January 2021, an inspector general report revealed that Wehrum ordered an Illinois official to cover up cancer-causing air pollution there.
To lead the Commerce Department, Trump nominated Wilbur Ross -- a billionaire with ties to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The Senate confirmed him in February, 2017.
According to SplinterNews, Ross stole millions of dollars from his partners and lied under oath about divesting from his business and stock holdings. Later, a judge determined that Ross had acted in bad faith and broken the law by adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
In 2019, Trump mistakenly said that hurricane Dorian was heading to Alabama -- and NOAA officials had to correct him. The officials were obeying the law -- it's illegal to counterfeit a government weather forecast. Ross was angry the NOAA officials didn't cover for Trump when he made an obvious mistake -- and threatened to fire those NOAA officials for upholding the law.
Ross must be impeached and removed from office.
After the Trump Administration was voted out of office, an Inspector General's report revealed that Ross had lied to Congress and had been referred to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. The Justice Department -- then led by William Barr -- decided not to prosecute him.
The next month, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent Barr a 400-page report of his two-year investigation into the 2016 Russian cyberattack. In under two days, Barr sent Congress a misleading four-page letter summarizing the report and informing them of his decision not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice. Barr, of course, had already decided not to charge Trump nine months before he saw Mueller's evidence, and later admitted he hadn't even looked at that evidence when he wrote the letter. (The New York Times compares the discrepancies between what Barr said about the report and what the report really says.)
After Barr released his letter, Mueller wrote Barr objecting to his failure to "capture the context, nature, and substance" of the report. Two weeks later, Barr testified before Congress that he didn't know whether Mueller supported his conclusions or not. Barr committed perjury - either intentionally or because he is completely incompetent. Either way, he should be impeached and removed from office.
A month later, Barr released a censored version of Mueller's Report to the public. As The Atlantic and the Huffington Post point out, Barr's comments to the press at the time were not those of a law enforcement official -- they were those of Trump's defense attorney. The Attorney General's job is to uphold the law, not protect government officials who obstruct justice, and Barr has made a mockery of his position.
The New Republic reported that "The attorney general's take on the Mueller report goes through contortions to avoid charging the president with a crime" and that "Barr performed a remarkable gimmick that allowed him to not only break promises he made during his confirmation process, but also gloss over the crimes that Trump is suspected of committing... In giving Trump the all-clear on obstruction charges, Barr appears not to have considered whether Trump obstructed the actual crime in question. He instead considered whether the president obstructed a different crime. This is the legal sleight of hand that has allowed Barr to proclaim that Trump will not be charged."
"It is clear that Richard Nixon would not have been forced to resign his office if Barr had been Attorney General," wrote John Dean, an attorney who worked in Nixon's White House.
Barr would never argue that the Republicans' Whitewater and Benghazi investigations of Bill and Hillary Clinton were "undermining the rule of law." Moreover, if President Obama had done what Trump did, Barr would lead the charge to have him impeached and removed from office. So why didn't he? The answer came later in his speech.
"Whatever means they [progressives] use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides... conservatives tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means."
Like a schoolyard bully, Barr is projecting -- assigning qualities to others that he hates in himself. Barr's partisanship blinds him to the fact that he himself is doing what he falsely accuses House Democrats of doing. He thinks House Democrats are trying to subvert the rule of law to empower their political party -- because that's what Barr would do if he if he were in their position, and that's what he has done as Attorney General.
The belief that the ends justify the means is exactly what got Trump into this mess in the first place. Trump sees no problem with extortion, bribery, breaking campaign finance laws, threatening witnesses, receiving emoluments, undermining our national security, abusing his power, or obstructing justice -- so long it gets him re-elected. Since Trump's a fellow Republican, though, Barr thinks Trump's above the law and does not see a problem with Trump's lawlessness.
"Some of you may recall when I was up for confirmation, all these Democratic senators saying how concerned they were about my adherence to the unitary executive theory," Barr said later. "This is not new and it's not a theory."
The Constitution establishes the Presidency, Congress, and the courts as equal branches of government. Barr, however, is a proponent of the so-called Unitary Executive theory. This nonsense holds that the Constitution "really" says the President is a king; Congress and the courts are subordinate; the President cannot be impeached; and if the President commits crimes or abuses his power, there's nothing anyone can do about it. As anyone who has read the Constitution can tell you, this is hogwash.
The Unitary Executive theory is a hoax. Even Barr and the other Unitary Executive Republicans don't really believe it. If they did, they would have blocked the impeachment of President Bill Clinton out of respect for the office. They would have argued that it's illegal to impeach any President, no matter what he does. Moreover, for eight years, Senate Republicans filibustered everything President Obama proposed just to make him look bad, and cried "dictator" whenever Obama signed an executive order. If Unitary Executive Republicans really believed that Congress is supposed to be subordinate to the President, they would have rushed to Obama's defense and claimed that filibustering his proposals was illegitimate. Obviously, this did not happen. Unitary Executive Republicans think Republican Presidents should have dictatorial powers -- and Democratic Presidents should not.
Obviously, no Republican would ever suggest that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama should have had dictatorial powers. The President is not a king. He must obey the law regardless of what political party he belongs to.
America stands for equal justice under the law, and the Attorney General is the nation's top law enforcement official. Someone who does not put the rule of law above partisan politics is unfit for the job. Barr believes that Attorney General's job is to protect those who agree with his politics regardless of whether or not they break the law -- and those who disagree with his politics do not deserve the law's protection. If any previous Attorney General had made such comments, they would have been fired immediately. Since Barr does not believe in equal justice, he must be impeached and removed from office.
Barr later ordered the Justice Department's Inspector General to investigate why the FBI even investigated Putin's 2016 cyberattacks in the first place. As journalist David Corn wrote in Mother Jones, the Inspector General concluded "the FBI had been right to open an investigation of interactions between Trump associates and Russia in 2016, as Moscow was attacking the US election [at the time] to help Trump win the White House."
Barr then refused to believe the Inspector General's report and denounced it. He told NBC News that the FBI investigation was "a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press."
Mother Jones' analysis concluded:
"Barr depicted the [FBI] probe as a 'danger' to civil liberties and the American political system. He was twisting up into down.
"...As the United States was undergoing a Russian attack designed to undermine the election and boost Trump, should the FBI have done nothing about the possible contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia or its cut-outs? The clandestine assault on American democracy posed the most profound danger. But Barr, in service of Trump, resists recognizing this reality, the one in which Trump aided and abetted the Russian attack and was elected with assistance from Putin. To remove this stain, which is indeed a challenge to Trump’s legitimacy, Barr must delegitimize the FBI's investigation. There can be no other Russia narrative other than the one in which [his] supreme leader is the the unfair target of history's worst witch hunt, the victim of a terrible hoax.
"With his NBC interview, Barr demonstrated how far he will go to cast the FBI and its investigation in a nefarious light—and to dismiss the Russia scandal. He claimed that 'in today’s world, presidential campaigns are frequently in contact with foreign persons.' [This is not true at all, and certainly] Not in the way that the Trump campaign was. Most presidential campaigns are not led by money launderers who are in contact with Putin-friendly oligarchs and who are meeting secretly with former business partners suspected of working with Russian intelligence. Most campaigns do not seek to set up private communications with foreign adversaries while these countries are attacking the United States. Barr also claimed 'in most campaigns there are signs of illegal foreign money coming in.' No, that's not true, either. But if it were, why is Barr's Justice Department not on a crusade to root out this criminal activity?"
According to Barr, it wasn't a Russian cyberattack meant to manipulate the 2016 election that threatened our civil liberties. The real threat was the FBI's investigation into that cyberattack. As Mother Jones observed, "Consider the implications of all of this for any FBI agent or federal investigator who now wants to look into clandestine Russian efforts to assist Trump in the 2020 election. You would have to be crazy to seek or take on such an assignment. Trump and his supporters have shown that they will decry any such investigation as a 'hoax' and target the investigators as Deep State plotters who ought to be publicly denounced and punished. Barr has signaled he is willing to sic his own investigators on anyone within the FBI or Justice Department who dares dig into Russian intervention in a US election. The message to an FBI agent who might want to pursue such a matter is clear: This is career suicide. Barr has disincentivized the entire FBI from probing any possible repeat of 2016. This is great news for Putin and his operatives."
In February 2020, Barr intervened in the sentencing of convicted Trump aide Michael Flynn to reduce his prison time. Trump and Barr then intervened in the sentencing of convicted Trump associate Roger Stone, urging the four prosecutors on the case to shorten Stone's recommended sentence. The four Justice Department lawyers resigned rather than comply. (After Trump and Barr intervened, Stone was sentenced to three years in prison; the original prosecutors had recommended nine. Trump later commuted Stone's sentence so his friend wouldn't have to go to prison at all.) Barr also set up a procedure where the Justice Department would examine leads sent over by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani and Trump have spent months promoting bogus conspiracy theories about presidential candidate Joe Biden. Barr, Trump, and Giuliani are intent on using the Justice Department to protect Trump's friends and punish his opponents, regardless of what the law says.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote: "If a president can punish enemies and reward friends through the administration of justice, there can be no justice. Justice requires impartial and equal treatment under the law. Partiality or inequality in deciding whom to prosecute and how to punish invites tyranny."
Over 2,000 former Justice Department officials have called on Barr to resign. They wrote:
"...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. It is even more outrageous for the Attorney General to intervene as he did here after the President publicly condemned the sentencing recommendation that line prosecutors had already filed in court.
"Such behavior is a grave threat to the fair administration of justice. In this nation, we are all equal before the law. A person should not be given special treatment in a criminal prosecution because they are a close political ally of the President. Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies.
"Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice’s reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign."
In May 2020, Barr intervened again in the perjury case against Michael Flynn. In an shocking move, Barr dropped the charges against a defendant who had already pleaded guilty. The Atlantic wrote: "The whole process is stunning: Flynn was accused of committing several crimes, admitted to one to try to get himself off easy, agreed to cooperate, reneged on the deal, and is now free, having escaped punishment for both the crime to which he confessed and those on which he avoided prosecution."
As noted above, Barr has been using his position as head of American law enforcement to protect Trump and his friends from prosecution. Dropping the case against Flynn was blatantly corrupt even for Barr. If Barr had served in the Obama Administration and had dropped criminal charges against a friend of Obama's -- charges that the friend had confessed to -- Congress would have impeached Barr immediately. As The Atlantic wrote, "under Barr, there are two separate systems of justice, one for the president's friends, and one for everyone else." As a result of Barr's action, "the lead prosecutor has quit the case, and the government's filing was so unpersuasive that no career prosecutor was willing to sign it." (Trump was voted out of office six months later, and pardoned Flynn as one of his last official acts.)
In June 2020, Barr fired Geoffrey S. Berman, a federal attorney in New York. According to the Christian Science Monitor, Berman was investigating Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's failure to register as a lobbyist for a foreign government. This was another blatantly corrupt move: Barr personally and publically intervened to fire the attorney investigating possible wrongdoing by a friend of Trump's.
Later that June, Buzzfeed obtained an uncensored version of the Mueller Report through the Freedom of Information Act. The Washington Monthly pointed out that Barr's redactions had nothing to do with national security. They were meant to cover-up Trump's obstruction of justice and prevent Trump from being indicted. That meant Barr himself obstructed justice.
According to Mother Jones, Barr committed perjury again in his July 2020 testimony before Congress. Barr claimed he had no idea Trump had said publically (on several occasions) that he would reward Stone for keeping quiet. That couldn't possibly be true, though. Some of Trump's statments were in the Mueller Report, including the parts Barr personally redacted.
(House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler told CNN in June 2020 that impeaching Barr was "a waste of time" because the Republican-controlled Senate would never convict him "no matter what the evidence." Nadler is right that the Republicans probably won't convict Barr, but he's wrong to say it would be a waste of time. Even if Barr is not convicted for using his power to protect Trump's friends from criminal prosecution, an impeachment trial would force every Republican Senator to tell their constituents that they have no problem with Barr's corruption.)
After Trump was voted out of office, CNN reported that the Barr-led Justice Department subpoenaed Apple, ordering the company to produce the electronic records of Congressmen, their staff members, and their families -- including at least one child. Apple was forbidden from telling the Congressmen their records had been seized, though the company did so as soon as the gag order expired. Though the Justice Department lawyers claimed to be looking for leaks regarding Congress' Russia investigation, they subpoenaed the records of family members and staff members who had nothing to do with that. "I believe they were targeted punitively," said Congressman Eric Swalwell, "not for any reason in law but because Donald Trump identified [the Congressmen] as an enemy of his."
To run the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) -- a bureau then tasked with investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Putin -- Trump nominated millionaire Christopher Wray. According to USA Today, Wray is a partner at the King & Spalding law firm. King & Spalding's clients include Rozneft and Gasprom, two oil companies controlled by the Russian government. The Russian government is controlled by dictator Vladimir Putin. USA Today reported: "Rosneft is also the company that had a $500 billion oil drilling joint-venture with Exxon in 2012, when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was Exxon’s CEO. However, the deal was nixed by President Obama in 2014, when he imposed the sanctions that crippled Russia’s ability to do business with U.S. companies. The lifting of sanctions by the Trump administration would enable Exxon to renew its joint venture agreement with Rosneft, and the law firm of King & Spalding could end up in the middle of the contract negotiations between those two companies. The law firm’s representation of Gazprom raises even more serious conflict issues for Wray. Gazprom was a partner in RosUkrEnergo AG, which is controlled by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash. He is under Federal indictment in Chicago for racketeering charges, has had numerous financial dealings with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and is generally considered to be a member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle."
(Manafort was later indicted for conspiracy against the United States, money laundering, tax evasion, and illegal lobbying. Who had Manafort lobbied for? Putin ally Victor Yanukovich, who was then dictator of Ukraine. Manafort was later convicted of fraud. Trump pardoned Manafort after losing the 2020 election.)
The Senate confirmed Wray in August, 2017.
In mid-2021, Wray told Congress that FBI had no idea that armed Trump supporters were planning to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He said this despite an earlier FBI report that confirmed Trump supporters had discussed all this on social media, and that the social media companies had made over 50 attempts to warn the FBI in advance. Wray didn't take the threat from the violent extremists seriously -- either because he sympathized with them or because he's too incompetent to lead the FBI. Either way, he lied to Congress.
According to the New York Times, in April 2018, Mulvaney told a conference of banking executives that, when he served in Congress, he would only meet with lobbyists who had given money to his campaign. "If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you," he said. Although this kind of corruption is probably commonplace, it's surprising to hear a former Congressman blatantly admit it. The Times also reported that, under Mulvaney's leadership, the Bureau has not investigated a single consumer complaint.
"We are thankful that we had such good associations built with Sen. McConnell and the U.S. Department of Transportation because without them it wouldn't have happened," Owensboro Mayor Tom Watson told the press. Politico reported: "as McConnell prepared to launch his reelection campaign, he called Mayor Watson and asked him to pull together a group of political and business leaders at the riverport to tout his role in getting Owensboro the grant award... within days of officially launching his 2020 campaign, [McConnell] stood inside a riverport building and celebrated his achievements."
If Obama's Transportation Secretary had used their cabinet position to help their spouse get re-elected to the Senate, Senator McConnell would have been the first to demand the Secretary's resignation. Chao must be impeached and removed from office for ethics violations, and McConnell must be expelled from the Senate.
According to Newsweek, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chao's family's business received $300,000 in federal loans -- triple the average amount. The loans were designed to help small businesses, which Chao's family's business is not. Newsweek reported: "the [loan] program ran out of money less than two weeks after it launched, frustrating small business owners who were unable to receive loan approval before the funds dried up."
According to Mother Jones and the Washington Post, Chao illegally directed her Transportation Department staff to do favors for her family, including using government resources to promote her father's biography. She also had her taxpayer-paid staff do her Christmas shopping.
- helped implement Trump's policy of detaining all refugees seeing asylum in the United States, taking their children away, and confining said children in freezing cages with no blankets, soap, toothpaste, or clean clothes;
- ordered the Border Patrol to engage in domestic crowd control in Portland, Oregon, without properly training them;
- ordered officers to drive around at night in unmarked vans and kidnap innocent American citizens without identifying themselves or telling the detainees they were under arrest; and
- ordered his staff to ignore ongoing Russian cyberattacks.