Los Angeles Times
Suddenly conservative lawyers are condemning Trump for abuses of power
By DOYLE MCMANUS
MAY 12, 2019 | 4:00 AM
WASHINGTON
Suddenly conservative lawyers are condemning Trump for abuses of power
George Conway is a prominent conservative lawyer and frequent critic of President Trump. His wife is Kellyanne Conway, a top advisor to Trump. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
Washington seems to be barreling toward a constitutional crisis.
Democrats are barraging President Trump with demands for witnesses and documents. Trump has answered by stonewalling, vowing to fight “all the subpoenas.”
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As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned, Trump seems to be goading the Democratic-controlled House toward impeachment, perhaps because it’s a battle he thinks he can win.
Politicians on both sides are repairing to their tribal corners.
Is there anyone who can serve as honest referees in this partisan standoff?
One answer — don’t laugh — is lawyers. Specifically, Republican lawyers.
Even as Republicans in Congress have fallen in line to defend Trump at every turn, a surprising number of conservative lawyers have broken ranks and are condemning the president for abuses of power and denouncing his blanket claims of executive privilege.
Last week, John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who drafted a notorious memo justifying the torture of detainees under President George W. Bush, warned that Trump had gone too far in asserting unbridled presidential power.
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“That’s what Nixon did,” Yoo told NPR. “That’s what other presidents who have failed have done.”
In an email exchange, Yoo told me he stands by the comparison, and added that Trump’s actions are sufficient grounds for the House to consider impeachment.
“Impeachment [is] the only solution to Trump’s challenge to the constitutional order,” he wrote.
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Yoo isn’t alone. George Conway, a leading conservative lawyer (and dissenting husband of Trump aide Kellyanne Conway), declared that Trump is “a cancer on the presidency,” echoing White House Counsel John Dean’s famous warning to Nixon during Watergate. Conway urged Congress to remove Trump from office.
“Presidential attempts to abuse power by putting personal interests above the nation’s can surely be impeachable,” Conway wrote in the Washington Post. Last year, he changed his voter registration from Republican to “unaffiliated,” saying the GOP had become a “personality cult.”
Other attorneys have been more restrained, but only a little.
“The president’s conduct demonstrates a flagrant disregard for the rule of law— a disregard that is in direct conflict with his constitutional responsibilities,” 11 conservative lawyers wrote last month. They urged the House to continue its investigations, but stopped short of endorsing impeachment.
“This president is undermining the basic principle of checks and balances,” one of the 11, former Deputy Atty. Gen. Donald B. Ayer, told me. “It’s really kind of tyrannical. It’s un-American. It’s the sort of expansion of government power you would expect Republicans to worry about.”
In addition, more than 800 former federal prosecutors, many of them Republicans, signed a statement declaring that the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, far from exonerating Trump, showed that he deserved to be indicted for obstruction of justice.
“It seems to me important, especially today, for lawyers to speak with consistency about the rule of law and apply it without consideration of party,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former assistant to independent counsel Kenneth Starr in the investigation of President Clinton that led to his impeachment by the House in 1998. The Senate did not convict, and Clinton served out his term.
The existence of dissident Republican voices shouldn’t be noteworthy — but it is. There aren’t many institutions in Washington that have resisted the descent into tribalism.
To take the most glaring example, the Republican caucus in the Senate — home to Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who once called Trump “a complete idiot” and “a race-baiting bigot,” and Ted Cruz of Texas, who called him a “pathological liar” — is now, on most working days, a chorus of Trumpolatry.
Why are so many Republican lawyers standing against their party’s prevailing tide?
Maybe they just take their professional canons seriously.
“You are the guardians of the rule of law,” Rod Rosenstein, then Trump’s deputy attorney general, told the American Bar Assn.’s annual meeting last year. “Honorable lawyers defend the rule of law, even when it is difficult, so it will be there when we need it.”
On a more visceral level, some are offended by Trump’s disdain for lawyers. After all, two of Trump’s, Roy Cohn and Michael Cohen, were disbarred.
“There’s a point in the Mueller report where Trump complains that [then-White House Counsel] Don McGahn is always taking notes, and McGahn explains that real lawyers do that,” Ayer said. “If you want to be an autocrat, you don’t want people who care about what’s legal looking over your shoulder. They’re out to get the lawyers.”
And they know that this constitutional crisis, like most, is likely to end up in the courts.
In their recent book “How Democracies Die,” Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt noted that one way autocratic regimes rise to power is by undermining the media, the legal profession and the judiciary. All are potential independent checks on government.
“Democracy no longer ends with a bang, but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions,” they wrote.
Trump has often described the courts in partisan terms. He has condemned judges appointed by Democratic presidents as biased against him, while extolling the Supreme Court as a Republican-led refuge.
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“If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court,” he tweeted recently.
The president seems to think government lawyers are duty-bound to defend his every whim, and that Republican judges are duty-bound to decide cases in his favor.
These GOP lawyers are reminding their colleagues — justices as well as attorneys — that their real duty lies elsewhere.
Doyle McManus is a Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times and director of the journalism program at Georgetown University. During his long career at The Times, he has been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, a White House correspondent and a presidential campaign reporter.
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ABCNews
Trump repeats unsubstantiated claims of ‘coup’ attempt after former FBI lawyer knocks them down
By Cheyenne Haslett
May 13, 2019, 9:10 AM ET
WATCH: Meanwhile, his chief economic adviser says American businesses and consumers will pay for tariffs on Chinese imports, not China. ABC News’ Trevor Ault reports.
President Donald Trump on Monday repeated unsubstantiated claims that efforts by law enforcement to investigate the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia were part of a “coup.”
The president’s tweeted reference to a “coup” – short for “coup d’etat,” the French phrase for a government overthrow – elevates claims from conservative voices including Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton and pro-Trump commentator Dan Bongino.
The president also attacked the FBI as having “no leadership,” an insult aimed at FBI Director Chris Wray, whom Trump nominated to replace former FBI Director James Comey. Wray testified before Congress last week that he wouldn’t use the word “spying” to describe the bureau’s investigative activity.
Trump retweeted a claim that Wray was “trying to protect the same gang.”
Wray’s comments stood in contrast to Attorney General William Barr’s, who told Congress in April that he thought “spying did occur.” Barr also said he wasn’t suggesting that it “wasn’t adequately predicated,” but that he needed to “explore” that.
The president’s comments, issued in a late-night Twitter thread quoting Judicial Review’s Fitton last week on one of the president’s favorite Fox News shows, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” followed public push-back on his allegations of spying and a coup from a former senior aide and lawyer for the FBI, James Baker.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies during a hearing on Capitol Hill, May 7, 2019 in Washington, D.C.
Last week, Baker spoke out against the president publicly for one of the first times.
“There was no attempted ‘coup,'” Baker, the FBI’s former general counsel, said in an interview at the Brookings Institution on Thursday. “There was no way in hell that I was going to allow some coup or coup attempt to take place on my watch.”
“I want to talk about the origin of the investigation to reassure the American people that it was done for lawful legitimate reasons and was apolitical throughout in my experience,” Baker said in an interview with Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes.
The president also tweeted about the House Judiciary Committee’s vote to hold Barr in contempt of Congress, which Trump quoted Fitton describing as “just another abuse of power in a long series of abuses of power by the Democrats.”
The vote came after the attorney general’s refusal to produce the full, unredacted report from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, along with all of the underlying documents. Ahead of the vote, Trump asserted executive privilege over the report and its underlying evidence.
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Some background-
May/June 2018 Issue
Eastern Europe’s Illiberal Revolution
The Long Road to Democratic Decline
By Ivan Krastev
In 1991, when the West was busy celebrating its victory in the Cold War and the apparent spread of liberal democracy to all corners of the world, the political scientist Samuel Huntington issued a warning against excessive optimism. In an article for the Journal of Democracy titled “Democracy’s Third Wave,” Huntington pointed out that the two previous waves of democratization, from the 1820s to the 1920s and from 1945 to the 1960s, had been followed by “reverse waves,” in which “democratic systems were replaced . . . by historically new forms of authoritarian rule.” A third reverse wave was possible, he suggested, if new authoritarian great powers could demonstrate the continued viability of nondemocratic rule or “if people around the world come to see the United States,” long a beacon of democracy, “as a fading power beset by political stagnation, economic inefficiency, and social chaos.”
Huntington died in 2008, but had he lived, even he would probably have been surprised to see that liberal democracy is now under threat not only in countries that went through democratic transitions in recent decades, such as Brazil and Turkey, but also in the West’s most established democracies. Authoritarianism, meanwhile, has reemerged in Russia and been strengthened in China, and foreign adventurism and domestic political polarization have dramatically damaged the United States’ global influence and prestige.
Perhaps the most alarming development has been the change of heart in eastern Europe. Two of the region’s poster children for postcommunist democratization, Hungary and Poland, have seen conservative populists win sweeping electoral victories while demonizing the political opposition, scapegoating minorities, and undermining liberal checks and balances. Other countries in the region, including the Czech Republic and Romania, seem poised to follow. In a speech in 2014, one of the new populists, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, outlined his position on liberalism: “A democracy is not necessarily liberal. Just because something is not liberal, it still can be a democracy.” To maintain global competitiveness.
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