Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) angry-tweeted it this morning. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is pushing back against the feds over it. Four members of Congress and local officials reached out to the Trump administration expressing “urgent concern” after we broke the news.
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“I don’t kid.”
JoinAs we noted this morning, we still don’t know what was so urgent or important that Bill Barr tried to force the ouster of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York on Friday evening, even going so far as to lie in a series of press releases and letters about what US Attorney Geoff Berman had done (resigned; he hadn’t) or what President Trump had done (fired Berman; he denied it). But another critical question is why Barr thought he could trust the US Attorney from the District of New Jersey to handle whatever it was he couldn’t leave in the hands of Geoff Berman or his deputy Audrey Strauss, who would normally succeed him.
This is important. Also, I couldn’t have said it better than TPM Reader JS …
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As a man who above all things lacks discipline, Trump always tells on himself. People are rightly focusing on his casual claim to have told “his people” to “slow the testing down” to keep the COVID numbers low. The assumption has been that he’s possibly doing this now. And perhaps he is – we can never underestimate Trump’s depravity. But the US has now actually done a pretty sizable amount of testing relative to other major countries, even on a per capita basis. And the number of tests completed each day continues to creep up. There’s not a lot of clear evidence this is happening now. But there is a lot of evidence and has been for months that this is precisely what happened during the critical early weeks of the pandemic, from late January through the first weeks of March. That was the critical window of time in which the fate of tens of thousands of Americans was sealed.
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A TPM reader whose name I will withhold checks in with a reminder on the chaos COVID-19 has unleashed within the criminal justice system. Trump ousting Berman and appointing someone with no prosecutorial experience is bad. Doing it in the middle of the pandemic? Give this a read:
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Out of sight, out of mind.
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All political power is unitary. It is one of the great lessons for thinking about politics. You are always in the process of adding to it or diminishing it. Assert power and sustain it and you gain power. Fail to do so and a politician grows weaker. This is why the concept of expending ‘political capital’ is mostly nonsense.
We have seen this unfolding before us over the last month. President Trump now daily asserts power he cannot sustain. ‘Law and Order’ street fighting confrontations using the US military, Bolton’s book, bungled DOJ purges, a humiliating Tulsa venture. Each gambit newly exposes his deteriorating power and thus hastens the process, emboldening others to oppose or resist him.
JoinNearly 24 tumultuous hours after this latest DOJ saga began, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoff Berman has now stepped down.
