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With the Attempt at Impeaching Rosenstein, We're Witnessing a Coordinated Attack on the Mueller Investigation |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Friday, 27 July 2018 08:27 |
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Reich writes: "While Trump rails against the Mueller investigation on Twitter, his enablers in Congress are adding fuel to the fire by calling for Rosenstein's impeachment."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
With the Attempt at Impeaching Rosenstein, We're Witnessing a Coordinated Attack on the Mueller Investigation
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
27 July 18
 e are witnessing a coordinated attack on the Mueller investigation. House Republicans today introduced articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. These ludicrous charges are clearly an attempt to force out Rosenstein, which would then allow Trump to replace him with someone who would fire Mueller.
While Trump rails against the Mueller investigation on Twitter, his enablers in Congress are adding fuel to the fire by calling for Rosenstein's impeachment. They are further dividing the country between Trump supporters who believe the investigation to be part of a conspiracy to undermine the Trump presidency, and the vast majority of Americans who want to know the truth. Nothing could be more damaging for the rule of law. What do you think?
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Cameroon Is a Close US Ally - and Its Soldiers Carried Out a Shocking Execution of Women and Children |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36655"><span class="small">Nick Turse, The Intercept</span></a>
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Thursday, 26 July 2018 13:53 |
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Turse writes: "A soldier walks alone down a dirt road with an automatic rifle strapped to his back. It's an innocuous beginning to a disturbing video."
Cameroon soldiers. (photo: AFP)
Cameroon Is a Close US Ally - and Its Soldiers Carried Out a Shocking Execution of Women and Children
By Nick Turse, The Intercept
26 July 18
 soldier walks alone down a dirt road with an automatic rifle strapped to his back. It’s an innocuous beginning to a disturbing video. [To view the video, click here.]
Moments later, a group of soldiers and civilians follows. Another man – dressed in military fatigues and wearing aviator sunglasses — repeatedly strikes a woman who clutches the hand of a young girl, perhaps 7 or 8 years old. “You are going to die,” says the soldier, who refers to the woman as “BH,” an apparent reference to Boko Haram. He steers her off the road, and the young girl, likely her daughter, follows. Another soldier does the same to a second woman who has a toddler strapped to her back, guiding her into a dirt expanse.
Videos of executions have become commonplace in our news culture, with the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and other terror groups filming atrocities and sharing them on social media. But this video from Cameroon is particularly cold-blooded. The soldiers make the women kneel on the ground. One of the soldiers gestures to the young girl and says, “Yes. Little girl, come here,” directing her to stand next to her mother. He then pulls the girl’s shirt over her head, blindfolding her.
Gunshots follow in fast succession.
The violence seems to have ended until a soldier goes to inspect the bodies. “The child is still alive,” he says, standing over the young girl, who has collapsed to the ground and lies on her back, with no perceptible movement. Another shot is fired at her. A few feet away, the toddler strapped to the other woman’s back lies motionless. All of them – the two women and two children — have been executed.
“I had to watch the video many times in order to analyze it,” said Ilaria Allegrozzi, Amnesty International’s Lake Chad researcher and no stranger to atrocity videos associated with the Boko Haram conflict in the region. “It haunted me for days afterward. It’s one of the most disturbing videos I have ever seen in my career.”
The atrocity in this video was not carried out by Boko Haram or ISIS or Al Qaeda. It appears to have been committed by members of Cameroon’s armed forces – a military that receives substantial aid from the United States, whose troops operate from secretive drone bases in the north of the country. It is one of America’s closest military allies on the continent.
“Cameroon is a vital partner in the fight against Boko Haram, ISIS-West Africa, and other violent extremist organizations in the Lake Chad Basin region,” Maj. Sheryll Klinkel, a Pentagon spokesperson, told The Intercept. “Our relationship with Cameroon is designed to promote stability and security within the region.”
Snippets of the video have been published by a variety of news outlets, but none have shown the executions. The Intercept has obtained the full video and is publishing it with subtitles (the dialogue is in French). With the U.S. government offering no indication that it is reconsidering its aid to Cameroon’s military — the State Department and the Pentagon have merely called on Cameroon to investigate what happened — it is in the public interest for an authenticated and translated version of the entire video to be made available.
The video first came to public attention earlier this month, when it began to circulate online. Government spokesperson Issa Tchiroma Bakary quickly branded it as “fake news” and said it was “an unfortunate attempt to distort actual facts and intoxicate the public.”
Amnesty International soon issued a detailed analysis of the footage in a report that accused Cameroon’s armed forces of responsibility. “The Cameroonian authorities’ initial claim that this shocking video is fake simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We can provide credible evidence to the contrary,” said Samira Daoud, deputy director of Amnesty International’s West Africa office. “Given the gravity of these horrific acts — the cold-blooded and calculated slaughter of women and young children — these hasty and dismissive denials cast serious doubt over whether any investigation will be genuine.”
After Amnesty released its report, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert issued a statement expressing concern about the executions. “International media, Amnesty International, and Cameroonian human rights organizations attribute the actions portrayed in the video to the Cameroonian military,” the statement read. “We call on the Government of Cameroon to investigate thoroughly and transparently the events depicted in the video, make its findings public, and if Cameroonian military personnel were involved in this atrocity, hold them accountable.”
The Pentagon echoed the State Department’s position. “We are aware of the video. At this time, we cannot confirm the authenticity of the video, nor can we confirm any possible military affiliation of those shown in this troubling video,” Klinkel told The Intercept by email. “We echo the State Department’s call for the Government of Cameroon to investigate thoroughly and transparently the events depicted in the video, make its findings public, and if Cameroonian military personnel were involved in this atrocity, hold them accountable.”
Allegrozzi says more is necessary. “This should be part of a broader effort by the government to put an end to grave human rights violations by Cameroon’s security forces fighting Boko Haram,” she told The Intercept.
With media and political pressure mounting, Cameroon’s government seemed to backtrack and reportedly arrested four soldiers, three of them directly implicated in the killings, according to a July 19 article from Agence France-Presse. But the minister of defense, Joseph Beti Assomo, has also accused the writer and activist Patrice Nganang of creating the video in order to “overwhelm” Cameroon’s armed forces.
According to Amnesty, the executions of the two women and two young children were likely carried out by members of Cameroon’s armed forces in the Far North region of the country. “Both the weapons and uniforms of the soldiers in the video are indicative of the Cameroon army, and display patterns consistent with a number of possible units, including regular infantry and the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), the special forces of the Cameroonian army,” reads a statement issued by the human rights group.
It’s unclear when the executions of the four unarmed civilians occurred, but emergence of the video comes roughly one year after Amnesty, the London-based research firm Forensic Architecture, and The Intercept exposed illegal imprisonment, torture, and killings by Cameroonian troops – specifically the BIR — at a remote military base that is also used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for drone surveillance and training missions. As the U.S. military fortified the Cameroonian site, known as Salak, and supported the elite local troops based there, Amnesty found that suspects held at the outpost were subjected to water torture, beaten with electric cables and boards, or tied and suspended with ropes, among other abuses.
The United States has a long tradition of working with unsavory regimes — from Chile’s brutal military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet to Indonesia’s brutal military dictatorship under Suharto — and training with “partner-nation” security forces that have been implicated in serious criminal acts. A 2016 joint investigation by The Intercept and 100Reporters, analyzing 6,176 leaked diplomatic cables, found that the process to weed out human rights abusers from U.S. training programs relied on highly questionable vetting procedures.
If the response of the U.S. military to the Salak disclosures is any indication, the latest controversy over the videotaped executions in Cameroon will not fundamentally alter America’s relationship with the West African nation.
After the Salak revelations, U.S. Africa Command launched an investigation, but never publicly announced details about its aims. According to a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, AFRICOM’s investigation “did not consider Cameroonian human rights violations but focused on whether DoD [Department of Defense] personnel had knowledge of abuses by Cameroonian military forces.”
It appears, in other words, that the U.S. military was less concerned with what the Cameroonians were doing, than whether any Americans knew about it. According to Klinkel, the Pentagon spokesperson, the investigation “looked into the involvement, knowledge, reporting, and training of U.S. forces deployed to Cameroon as they relate to allegations in the Amnesty International report” and “whether U.S. forces were aware of any actual or alleged human rights abuses committed by Cameroonian forces prior to the Amnesty International report.”
While the investigation, headed by Brig. Gen. Timothy McAteer, concluded last November, the report was never made public. For nearly one year, AFRICOM has ignored periodic requests from The Intercept seeking comment about the parameters, scope, and findings of its probe. “I do not have a timeline on when the investigation results will be publicly released,” Klinkel told The Intercept.
“The results of the investigation have yet to be publicly released and this must be rectified,” Amnesty’s Ilaria Allegrozzi, said. “The report must be publicly released, not only to find out if any U.S. military personnel were aware of incommunicado detention and torture, but also to convey to the Cameroonian authorities how seriously the United States takes this issue.”
Following the 2017 torture revelations, U.S. military assistance to some, if not all, military units in Cameroon was reportedly suspended. The Pentagon claimed not to “have anything” on the subject, but the State Department official told The Intercept that “the suspension was based on the [U.S. government] analysis of all sources of credible information, including the 2017 Amnesty International report.” The official said assistance was suspended “to all Cameroonian security force units where there is credible information implicating those units in the commission of gross violations of human rights,” also known as GVHR. The official did not, however, specify which Cameroonian units had been cited and whether they had any connection to the 2017 allegations. “The suspension of assistance to these units will remain in effect until the allegations of GVHR are resolved, and the Government of Cameroon has taken effective steps to hold perpetrators accountable, as appropriate,” the official told The Intercept.
In April, the State Department released its annual human rights assessment of Cameroon and cited Amnesty’s 2017 findings, detailing a raft of abuses, including
Arbitrary and unlawful killings through excessive use of force by security forces; disappearances by security forces and Boko Haram; torture and abuse by security forces including in military and unofficial detention facilities; prolonged arbitrary detentions including of suspected Boko Haram supporters and individuals in the Anglophone regions; harsh and life- threatening prison conditions. … In the Far North region, security forces also were reported responsible for holding incommunicado, torturing, and in at least 10 cases killing suspected Boko Haram and Islamic State (ISIS)-West Africa supporters in detention facilities run by the military and intelligence services.
Klinkel said that the State Department report did not result in any changes to the assistance provided to Cameroon. “DoD provides assistance ONLY to Cameroonian units who have NOT been credibly implicated in gross violations of human rights after a thorough vetting process,” she wrote in an email. “U.S. law prohibits DoD from providing any training, equipment, or other assistance to a unit of a foreign security force if DoD has credible information that the unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.”
Just 10 days before the State Department took Cameroon to task in print, Peter Barlerin, the U.S. ambassador there, presided over a ceremony celebrating the transfer of two American-made surveillance aircraft to the Cameroon Air Force. He seemingly contradicted key findings of the human rights report. “Cameroon is a model of effective cooperation between the army and the inhabitants of the Far North to ensure their safety,” Barlerin told the audience. “Cameroon’s efforts to collaborate with the United States and credible international organizations in the provision of training on human rights, respect for the law of armed conflict, and the control of the army by civilians deserve special mention.”
In May, at an event marking the start of a two-year State Department-funded counterterrorism initiative, Barlerin called attention to the fact that the United States “advises and assists Cameroonian forces, trains its forces, and provides intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support.” Days later, in prepared remarks, he noted that Cameroon’s military was, indeed, guilty of “targeted killings, detentions without access to legal support, family, or the Red Cross, and burning and looting of villages.” He nonetheless “congratulated” Cameroonian President Paul Biya – who has now held power for 35 years — on “joint efforts to fight Boko Haram and the Islamic State in the Far North.”
On July 3, in remarks at a U.S. Independence Day celebration at the Hilton hotel in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, Barlerin seemed to suggest an agree-to-disagree mindset. “It is good to see an opening in Cameroon with regard to national and international organizations working in the field of human rights — we do not have to agree on everything to discuss around a table,” he said.
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Three Failing Experiments: Mine, America's, and Humanity's |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396"><span class="small">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Thursday, 26 July 2018 13:52 |
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Engelhardt writes: "There was a period in my later life when I used to say that, from the age of 20 to my late sixties, I was always 40 years old; I was, that is, an old young man and a young old one. Tell that to my legs now."
U.S. soldier waves an American flag. (photo: Getty)
Three Failing Experiments: Mine, America's, and Humanity's
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
26 July 18
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: There’s no way I can thank you enough for your remarkable response to my recent summer appeal for funds to keep TomDispatch rolling along. You're the best! If any of you meant to send in a few dollars but forgot, check out our donation page. As my piece today indicates, I've just turned 74 and it seems you've ensured that I'll spend the next year doing TomDispatch. That is, I suppose, a small miracle of sorts. Tom]
 here was a period in my later life when I used to say that, from the age of 20 to my late sixties, I was always 40 years old; I was, that is, an old young man and a young old one. Tell that to my legs now. Of course, there’s nothing faintly strange in such a development. It’s the most ordinary experience in life: to face your own failing self, those muscles that no longer work the way they used to, those brain cells jumping ship with abandon and taking with them so many memories, so much knowledge you’d rather keep aboard. If you’re of a certain age -- I just turned 74 -- you know exactly what I mean.
And that, as they say, is life. In a sense, each of us might, sooner or later, be thought of as a kind of failed experiment that ends in the ultimate failure: death.
And in some ways, the same thing might be said of states and empires. Sooner or later, there comes a moment in the history of the experiment when those muscles start to falter, those brain cells begin jumping ship, and in some fashion, spectacular or not, it all comes tumbling down. And that, as they say (or should say), is history. Human history, at least.
In a sense, it may hardly be more out of the ordinary to face a failing experiment in what, earlier in this century, top officials in Washington called “nation building” than in our individual lives. In this case, the nation I’m thinking about, the one that seems in the process of being unbuilt, is my own. You know, the one that its leaders -- until Donald Trump hit the Oval Office -- were in the habit of eternally praising as the most exceptional, the most indispensable country on the planet, the global policeman, the last or sole superpower. Essentially, it. Who could forget that extravagant drumbeat of seemingly obligatory self-praise for what, admittedly, is still a country with wealth and financial clout beyond compare and more firepower than the next significant set of competitors combined?
Still, tell me you can’t feel it? Tell me you couldn’t sense it when those election results started coming in that November night in 2016? Tell me you can’t sense it in the venomous version of gridlock that now grips Washington? Tell me it's not there in the feeling in this country that we are somehow besieged (no matter our specific politics), demobilized, and no longer have any real say in a political system of, by, and for the billionaires, in a Washington in which the fourth branch of government, the national security state, gets all the dough, all the tender loving care (except, at this moment, from our president), all the attention for keeping us “safe” from not much (and certainly not itself)? In the meantime, most Americans get ever less and have ever less say about what they’re not getting. No wonder in the last election the country’s despairing heartland gave a hearty orange finger to the Washington elite.
States of Failure
“Populist” is the term of the moment for the growing crew of Donald Trumps around the planet. It may mean “popular,” but it doesn’t mean “population”; it doesn’t mean “We, the People.” No matter what that band of Trumps might say, it’s increasingly not “we” but “them,” or in the case of Donald J. Trump in particular, “him.”
No, the United States is not yet a failed or failing state, not by a long shot, not in the sense of countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen that have been driven to near-collapse by America’s twenty-first-century wars and accompanying events. And yet, doesn’t it seem ever easier to think of this country as, in some sense at least, a failing (and flailing) experiment?
And don’t just blame it on Donald Trump. That’s the easy path to an explanation. Something had to go terribly wrong to produce such a president and his tweet-stormed version of America. That should seem self-evident enough, even to -- though they would mean it in a different way -- The Donald’s much-discussed base. After all, if they hadn’t felt that, for them, the American experiment was failing, why would they have voted for an obvious all-American con man? Why would they have sent into the White House someone whose Apprentice-like urge is to fire us all?
It’s hard to look back on the last decades and not think that democracy has been sinking under the imperial waves. I first noticed the term “the imperial presidency” in the long-gone age of Richard Nixon, when his White House began to fill with uniformed flunkies and started to look like something out of an American fantasy of royalty. The actual power of that presidency, no matter who was in office, has been growing ever since. Whatever the Constitution might say, war, for instance, is now a presidential, not a congressional, prerogative (as is, to take a recent example, the imposition of tariffs on the products of allies on “national security” grounds).
As Chalmers Johnson used to point out, in the Cold War years the president gained his own private army. Johnson meant the CIA, but in this century you would have to add America’s ever vaster, still expanding Special Operations forces (SOF), now regularly sent on missions of every sort around the globe. He’s also gained his own private air force: the CIA’s Hellfire-missile armed drones that he can dispatch across much of the planet to kill those he’s personally deemed his country’s enemies. In that way, in this century -- despite a ban on presidential assassinations, now long ignored -- the president has become an actual judge, jury, and executioner. The term I’ve used in the past has been assassin-in-chief.
All of this preceded President Trump. In fact, if presidential wars hadn’t become the order of the day, I doubt his presidency would have been conceivable. Without the rise of the national security state to such a position of prominence; without much of government operations descending into a penumbra of secrecy on the grounds that “We, the People” needed to be “safe,” not knowledgeable; without the pouring of taxpayer dollars into America’s intelligence agencies and the U.S. military; without the creation of a war-time Washington engaged in conflicts without end; without the destabilization of significant parts of the planet; without the war on terror -- it should really be called the war for terror -- spreading terrorism; without the displacement of vast populations (including something close to half of Syria’s by now) and the rise of the populist right on both sides of the Atlantic on the basis of the resulting anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiments, it’s hard to imagine him. In other words, before he ever descended that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in 2015, empire had, politically speaking, trumped democracy and a flawed but noble experiment that began in 1776 was failing.
Had that imperial power not been exercised in such a wholesale way in this century, Donald Trump would have been unimaginable. Had President George W. Bush and his cronies not decided to invade Iraq, The Donald probably would have been inconceivable as anything but the proprietor of a series of failed casinos in Atlantic City, the owner of what he loves to call “property” (adorned with those giant golden letters), and a TV reality host. And the American people would not today be his apprentices.
When that “very stable genius” (as he reminded us again recently) inherited such powers long in the making, he also inherited the power to use them in ways that would have been unavailable to the president of a country that had genuine “checks and balances,” one in which the people knew what was going on and in some sense directed it. Consider it a sign of the times that he’s the second president to lose the popular vote in this 18-year-old century -- the first, of course, being George W. "Hanging Chad" Bush. So perhaps it’s only proper that President Trump has now nominated to the Supreme Court a judge who was once a Republican operative for the very legal team focused on stopping the recount of those contested Florida ballots in 2000 -- a recount the Supreme Court did indeed halt, throwing the election to Bush. Note that Brett Kavanaugh is also the perfect justice for America’s new imperial age of decline, one who genuinely believes that the law should read: the president, while in office, is above it. Think of him as Caligula’s future enabler.
In other words, in the twenty-first century, Donald Trump is proof indeed that the American experiment in democracy may be coming to an unseemly end in a president with all the urges of an autocrat (and so many other urges as well). Or think of it this way: the contest -- from early on an essential part of American life -- between democracy and empire seems to be ending with empire the victor. However -- and here may be Donald Trump’s particular significance -- empire, too, looks to be heading toward some kind of ultimate failure. He himself is visibly a force for imperial demolition. He seems intent -- as in the recent abusive NATO meeting and the chaotic get-together with Russian President Vladimir Putin -- on dismantling the very world that imperial America built for itself in the wake of World War II. You know, the one in which it was to be the ultimate and eternal victor in a rivalry between imperial powers that had begun in perhaps the fifteenth century, reached its peak when only two “super” rivals were left to face each other in the Cold War, and ended with a single power seemingly triumphant and alone on planet Earth.
How quickly those historically unique dreams of global dominion fell apart in the “ infinite wars” of this century. Think of Donald Trump as the overly ripe fruit of that failure, that endless imperial moment that never quite was. Think of him as the daemon in the (malfunctioning) global machinery of a world that is itself -- as in Brexiting “Europe” -- evidently beginning to come apart at the seams amid war, a flood of global refugees, and one factor never experienced before (on which more below). Think of America as being caught up in some only half-recognized United Stexit moment, though what exactly we are withdrawing from may be less than clear.
Still, bad as any moment might be, you can always hope for, dream about, and work for so much better, as so many have over the centuries. After all, everything I’ve described remains the norm of history. What empire hasn’t had its Caligulas, its Trumps? What empire hasn’t, in the end, gone down? What democratic experiment hasn’t sooner or later faltered? Even the best of experiments come up short as autocrats take power and hand their rule on to their sons, only to be overthrown by some revolt, some new attempt to make better sense of this world, which itself falters sooner or later. And so it goes.
Again, that, as they say, is history, a series of failed experiments, but ones that always end, in their own fashion, with hope still alive for a better, fairer, juster world. Yes, a particular failure might be terrible for you, your community, even several generations of yous, but it, too, will pass and you can expect our better angels to reappear someday, even if not in your lifetime -- or at least until recently you could do so.
The Ultimate Experiment
There is, however, another experiment, a planet-wide one that seems to be failing as well. You could think of it as humanity’s experiment with industrial civilization, which is disastrously altering the environment of this previously welcoming world of ours. I’m referring, of course, to what the greenhouse gases from the fossil fuels we’ve been burning in such profusion since the eighteenth century are doing to our planet.
Whether you call it climate change or global warming, the one thing it isn’t -- despite the fact that we’ve done it -- is history. Not human history anyway. After all, its effects will exist on a time scale that dwarfs our own. If allowed to play out to its fullest, it could destroy civilization. And ironically enough, unlike so many of our experiments, this was one we didn’t even know we were conducting for something like a century and a half. So consider it an irony that it’s the one likely to endanger every other imaginable experiment. If not somehow halted in a reasonably decisive fashion, it could not only inundate coastal cities, turn verdant lands into parched landscapes, and create weather extremes presently hard to imagine, but produce heat that will be devastating.
And yet don’t give us any kind of a free pass on this one. Despite those endless years of not knowing what we were doing, ignorance can’t be pled. Increasing numbers of us (including the giant oil companies who did everything humanly possible to keep the news from the rest of us) have known about this since at least the 1960s. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sent him a report that highlighted a human-caused warming of the planet from the carbon dioxide burned off by fossil fuels. It included remarkably accurate projections of the increased heat to come in the twenty-first century and of other effects of climate change, including sea level rise and the warming of sea waters. So don’t say that no one was warned. As time went on, we’ve been warned again and again.
And for this, too, Donald Trump can’t be blamed, but his presence in the White House is now a powerful symbol of a human failure to grasp the dangers involved. Talk about a symbolic act of self-destruction: the American people put a fierce climate denier in the White House. He, in turn, has brought his passionate 1950s-style fantasies of an even more oil-fueled global future with him. He has, among other things, appointed a remarkable set of Republican climate-change doubters and deniers to crucial positions throughout his administration. He’s moved to withdraw this country from the Paris climate accord, while powering up fossil-fuel and greenhouse-gas-producing projects of every sort and weakening the drive to develop alternative energy sources; he has, that is, done everything in his power to stoke global warming.
Along with the actions of the CEOs of the giant oil companies, this will surely prove to be the greatest criminal enterprise in history, since it takes the all-time largest greenhouse gas emitter out of the running (except at the state and local level) when it comes to impeding global warming. In other words, whatever else he may be, President Donald Trump seems singularly intent on being a one-man wrecking crew when it comes to human history.
Since Lucy walked upright by that African lake three million years ago, this has been a remarkably welcoming planet for the human experiment. If, in the coming century, climate change hits full force, it won’t just be a matter of refugees in the hundreds of millions or individual deaths in countless numbers, or some failing democracy that became an empire. It could mean the failure of the whole human experiment in ways that are still hard to grasp. It could mean no more chance for failure, The End.
That’s something worth working against. That’s a failure no one in any possible future can afford.
In the meantime, here I am, another year closer to my own moment of “failure,” living in a potentially failing country on a potentially failing planet. Happy birthday to me.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands.
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House Republicans' Attempt to Impeach Rod Rosenstein Is a Total Clown Show. Here Are the Receipts. |
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Thursday, 26 July 2018 13:51 |
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Rupar writes: "House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Wednesday introduced articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Suffice it to say the five articles Meadows and Jordan put together fail to make a persuasive case that Rosenstein needs to go."
House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Jim Jordan (R-OH). (photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
House Republicans' Attempt to Impeach Rod Rosenstein Is a Total Clown Show. Here Are the Receipts.
By Aaron Rupar, ThinkProgress
26 July 18
They accuse the deputy AG of misconduct... dating back to six months before he took office.
 ouse Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Wednesday introduced articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Suffice it to say the five articles Meadows and Jordan put together fail to make a persuasive case that Rosenstein needs to go.
Ultimately, Meadows and Jordan are looking to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign for possible collusion with Russia and related wrongdoing. Following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal, Rosenstein oversees Mueller’s investigation — and forcing him out could allow President Trump to appoint a new deputy AG who would curtail Mueller.
But House Republicans aren’t able to make that case directly. So instead, they’re looking for other excuses to go after Rosenstein. The ones they’ve managed to come up with don’t make a lot of sense.
In one of the articles of impeachment, for example, they accuse Rosenstein of misconduct related to actions that occurred in October 2017 — or roughly six months before he was actually sworn in, following his appointment by Trump.
One article accuses Rosenstein of failing to recuse himself from the second special counsel’s investigation of “matters related to the 2016 presidential campaign that appear to be outside the scope of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.” That investigation doesn’t even exist.
The problems don’t end there.
One article accuses Rosenstein of making too many redactions to documents, even though such redactions are standard DOJ procedure. Another treats a House Republican conspiracy theory about the origins of the Russia investigation that has been debunked by the recently recently Carter Page FISA documents (among other public revaluations) as fact. At one point, Rosenstein’s name is misspelled.
House Republicans have been on Rosenstein’s case for months, often embarrassing themselves in the process. A House Judiciary Committee hearing featuring Rosenstein last month quickly descended into farce. Jordan provoked laughter after he revealed profound ignorance of how the DOJ works by asking Rosenstein whether he had threatened to subpoena “phone calls” made by House Intelligence Committee staffers, and Trey Gowdy (R-SC) — the same Gowdy who oversaw an investigation of Hillary Clinton that lasted more than two years — complained that Mueller needs to hurry up.
It’s unlikely that the Meadows/Jordan impeachment resolution will ever come up for a vote.
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