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Pierce writes: "At the end of another eventful Infrastructure Week, we have Scooter Libby pardoned by the president*, possibly for Obstruction-Signaling purposes."

Trump, Libby, Bush. (photo: Getty Images/Shutterstock)
Trump, Libby, Bush. (photo: Getty Images/Shutterstock)


Trump's Scooter Libby Pardon Is a Signal in More Ways Than One

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

15 April 18


It's not just a sign for Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen.

t the end of another eventful Infrastructure Week, we have Scooter Libby pardoned by the president*, possibly for Obstruction-Signaling purposes. We have Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein adopting quite a fatalistic approach to what appears to be the onrushing end of his employment at the Justice Department. And the president* is bouncing off the walls of the White House.

The Libby pardon is signifying, and not in the way you think I mean it. The president* may indeed be sending a flare up for Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort and all the rest of them. But it also fashions an unbreakable link between the malfeasance and misfeasance of the Bush administration and the malfeasance and misfeasance of the Trump administration*. Primary among Libby’s partisans are veteran Republican legal hacks Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing. They’ve been pitching Scooter’s case for years. Now, they’re also working as legal advisers down in Camp Runamuck.

Since I don’t believe that Trump would know Libby if the latter sat in his lap, I’ve got to believe that this pardon is at least partly a little cookie thrown to Libby’s legal team. But this ties it all up in a nice bow. DiGenova and Toensing became famous for being TV lawyers during the Great Penis Hunt of 1998. They’ve since surfed the Republican sewage-treatment plants for clients, finally washing up in the sludge maelstrom of this White House. Their very presence, and what they’ve just managed to bring about on behalf of Scooter Libby, is all the proof you need of one fundamental fact.

Republicanism simply was Trumpism in waiting, and Trumpism is Republicanism in excelsis.

The administration* also had a pretty bad week in the courts. First, the appeal of a lawsuit that argues that Mick Mulvaney’s appointment to head the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is unlawful and illegitimate was allowed to move forward.

And a federal judge took a look at the administration’s plans to dragoon local cops into its immigration cleansing activities and broke out the big old spiked gavel. From The New York Times:

United States District Judge Manuel Real in Los Angeles issued a permanent, national injunction against the federal funding rules, giving the city an important win in a long-running legal battle with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House. The ruling is “a complete victory,” Mike Feuer, the Los Angeles city attorney, said Thursday. “This is yet another dagger in the heart of the administration’s efforts to use federal funds as a weapon to make local jurisdictions complicit in its civil immigration enforcement policies.”
In the ruling, Judge Real said that the funding rules violated the notion of separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution and improperly tried to force local police officers to take on immigration enforcement, which legally is the responsibility of the federal government. The department’s action “upset the constitutional balance between state and federal power by requiring state and local law enforcement to partner with federal authorities,” he wrote. He added that Congress, not the executive branch, has the authority to control government spending.

A mark, that will surely leave.

So much winning.


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