Senate minority leader warns president would turn US into ‘banana republic’ after justice department’s interference
Donald Trump
has triggered “a crisis in the rule of law in America” and would turn
the country into a “banana republic” if left unchallenged, senior Democrats warned on Wednesday as they demanded an investigation into political interference at the justice department.
Washington is reeling from aftershocks of the department’s highly unusual decision to overrule career prosecutors and seek a lighter prison sentence for political operative Roger Stone, a longtime friend of the US president. The entire prosecution team resigned in protest on Tuesday.
While Trump brazenly praised his attorney general, William Barr, for “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought”, Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, sounded the alarm about an unprecedented threat to the independence of the legal system.
“We are witnessing a crisis in the rule of law in America – unlike one we have ever seen before,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor. “It is a crisis of President Trump’s making. But it was enabled and emboldened by every Senate Republican who was too afraid to stand up to him and say the simple word ‘no’, when the vast majority of them knew that that was the right thing to do.”
Trump was acquitted by the Republican majority in the Senate in his impeachment trial last week and immediately began a purge of officials who testified against him – fuelling Democrats’ fears that he would feel further emboldened, unleashed and able to act with impunity.
Stone, 67, a political operative and self-described dirty trickster, was convicted last November
of lying to Congress, witness tampering and impeding the investigation
into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Prosecutors requested
that he serve seven to nine years behind bars. But Trump issued a
late-night objection via Twitter, stating: “Cannot allow this
miscarriage of justice!”Washington is reeling from aftershocks of the department’s highly unusual decision to overrule career prosecutors and seek a lighter prison sentence for political operative Roger Stone, a longtime friend of the US president. The entire prosecution team resigned in protest on Tuesday.
While Trump brazenly praised his attorney general, William Barr, for “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought”, Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, sounded the alarm about an unprecedented threat to the independence of the legal system.
“We are witnessing a crisis in the rule of law in America – unlike one we have ever seen before,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor. “It is a crisis of President Trump’s making. But it was enabled and emboldened by every Senate Republican who was too afraid to stand up to him and say the simple word ‘no’, when the vast majority of them knew that that was the right thing to do.”
Trump was acquitted by the Republican majority in the Senate in his impeachment trial last week and immediately began a purge of officials who testified against him – fuelling Democrats’ fears that he would feel further emboldened, unleashed and able to act with impunity.
Hours later, a new memo from the justice department cut the proposed sentence, offering Stone’s “advanced age, health, personal circumstances and lack of criminal history” as mitigating circumstances. Media reports suggested that Barr had personally intervened.
All four lawyers that prosecuted Stone abruptly quit the case, with one leaving the justice department altogether. On Wednesday, the White House insisted that Trump had not interfered in the case. A spokesman, Hogan Gidley, told the Fox News network: “He’s the chief law enforcement officer. He has the right to do it – he just didn’t.”
But Democrats accused Barr of political interference and said the actions made a mockery of Republican claims that Trump had learned his “lesson” from the impeachment charges stemming from his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate a political rival.
Two days after his acquittal, Schumer noted, Trump retaliated by firing members of his administration who testified in the impeachment inquiry, including Lt Col Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland. He even dismissed Vindman’s brother. “How vindictive, how petty, how nasty,” Schumer said.
On Tuesday Trump withdrew the nomination of Jessie Liu, a former US attorney in Washington whose office prosecuted Stone, for a new post in the treasury department. But it was the Stone case that prompted Schumer to call for an emergency Senate judiciary committee hearing, where Barr would potentially be obliged to testify, and an investigation by the department’s inspector general, an external watchdog.
“The president is claiming that rigging the rules is perfectly legitimate – he claims an ‘absolute right’ to order the justice department to do anything he wants,” he said. “And the president has as his attorney general an enabler – and that’s a kind word – who actually supports this view.”
Schumer added: “We are seeing the behavior of a man who has contempt for the rule of law beginning to try out the new, unrestrained power conferred on him by 52 Republican senators … Left to his own devices, President Trump would turn America into a banana republic, where the dictator can do whatever he wants and the justice department is the president’s law firm, not a defender of the rule of law.”
Eric Holder, who served as Barack Obama’s attorney general, wrote on Twitter: “Do not underestimate the danger of this situation. This affects the rule of law and respect for it. Unprecedented.”
Yet Senate Republicans, all but one of whom voted in Trump’s favour in the impeachment trial, again held the line. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told reporters: “I’m not disturbed about it at all. If you read the reports, this action began on Monday night before the president’s tweets, so I’ve got to take them at their word.”
Stone is scheduled to be sentenced by the US district judge Amy Berman Jackson on 20 February. Barr last year cleared the president of obstruction of justice even when the special counsel Robert Mueller had pointedly declined to do so after the Russia investigation.
No comments:
Post a Comment