This Is a Lunatic Attempt to Obstruct Justice

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

09 September 20

The Justice Department has moved to grant Trump government lawyers to defend him against E. Jean Carroll's defamation lawsuit.

his is so intergalactically stupid and illegal that even my capacity to be astonished by this pack o’bastids, which I thought exhausted a year ago, is fully engaged again. From the New York Times:

The Justice Department moved on Tuesday to replace President Trump’s private legal team with government lawyers to defend him against a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. In a highly unusual legal move, lawyers for the Justice Department said in court papers that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied ever knowing Ms. Carroll and thus could be defended by government lawyers — in effect underwritten by taxpayer money.

"A highly unusual move,” NYT? That’s the best you got? How about “an unprecedented and howl-at-the-moon-in-your-underwear-with-your-face-painted-blue crazy-assed lunatic exercise”? How about “obvious criminal attempt to obstruct justice”? In brief, Carroll has accused the president* of raping her in a Manhattan department store back in the mid-1990’s. Carroll went public with the story in June of 2019. The president* then gave an interview and denied the whole thing on the grounds that Carroll “wasn’t my type.” Lovely man. Anyway, Carroll sued him for defamation and the hounds were beginning to sound ominously close to the White House.

The motion also effectively protects Mr. Trump from any embarrassing disclosures in the middle of his campaign for re-election. A state judge issued a ruling last month that potentially opened the door to Mr. Trump being deposed in the case before the election in November, and Ms. Carroll’s lawyers have also requested that he provide a DNA sample to determine whether his genetic material is on a dress that Ms. Carroll said she was wearing at the time of the encounter.

So in steps the United States Department of Justice (William Barr, head bobo) to defend, on our freaking dime, the president* in a civil defamation action connected to an alleged rape the president* had committed. Quite simply any DOJ attorney up to and including the attorney-general who participates in this insanity should have their tickets pulled immediately. (If the House wanted to cut off their salaries, I would be all in for that, too.) According to the DOJ, the president* was acting in his official capacity when he called Carroll a liar because she said he’d raped her. I suppose, if he wanted to debase his office any further, Barr could turn the DOJ headquarters into an opium den. How do you go into court with this and not vomit on the bailiff? Where are the mass resignations? Where is the ABA? Where is my Archie Cox? Not any of these guys, per the Washington Post:

The department’s filings were signed by Jeffrey Bossert Clark, the acting attorney general in charge of the Civil Division, as well as James G. Touhey Jr., director of the torts branch, and attorney Stephen R. Terrell. Citing the Federal Tort Claims Act, the department said that Barr has the authority under federal law to move such a case to federal court if he certifies a federal employee was acting within the scope of their job during an incident, though he had delegated that authority to Touhey. Touhey, the department said in a filing, “certified that the defendant employee, President Trump, was acting within the scope of his office or employment at the time of the incident out of which the claim arose.”

Precisely what official duty was the president* undertaking when he told an interviewer that Carroll “wasn’t his type”? Was he taking care that the laws be faithfully executed? Was he preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution? Was he acting as commander-in-chief of the armed forces? Or was he just another barroom pussy-grabber concocting a cheap and worthless non-denial? I know which way I’m betting. Some federal judge gets a chance to be a hero.