Democracy Fading Fast

Death Throes of the Republic?  The New Hampshire primary is newsworthy, I’ll get to that next, but I am starting with what happened yesterday at the Justice Department because those events were stunning and in a very bad, end of democracy as we know it way.  On Monday, after the Justice Department filed its sentencing recommendation for Trump’s long term associate Roger Stone, Trump tweeted that the sentencing  recommendation was “very horrible and unfair.”  Clearly, Attorney General Barr got Trump’s message  because yesterday, while most were diverted by events in New Hampshire, the Justice Department pulled their sentencing recommendation.  That’s unprecedented, so unusual and alarming that as the day progressed all four of the career prosecutors handling the Roger Stone case, including Jonathan Kravis,  Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed and Michael Mirando, withdrew from the case in protest with Kravis leaving government service altogether. At the same time, Trump revoked the nomination of Jessie Liu, the former US attorney in the District of Columbia, to a top Treasury Department post. Liu, who had supervised the Stone case when it went to trial, was due to appear before Congress this week and there was no way that Trump wanted to see her answering any questions about the severity of Stone’s crimes.  Of course when asked by the press about his involvement in any of this Trump, the gas lighter in chief, claimed that he had nothing to do with the decision to pull the Stone sentencing memo but that he had every right to do so, kind of his way of acknowledging that of course he demanded the change.  Through a spokesman Barr disingenuously asserted that he’d never approved the recommended sentence in the first place but that after learning about its severity had decided, without speaking to Trump, that it was outrageously harsh.  By the end of the day Justice submitted a revised memo, one that said nothing more than that it might make sense for Stone to serve some time in prison but that failed to say how much. 

Attacking the Good Guys:  For good measure Trump then tweet attacked the four departing US attorneys, alleging they “cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9 year prison sentence to a man that got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam.” He also then raised questions about Stone’s Judge, Amy Berman Jackson, tweeting "Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did she treat Crooked Hillary? Just asking!."  Why not go with some fascist style judge intimidation when you’re getting away with every other crime you’ve ever committed?   And  then he queried “Whatever occurred to Hillary marketing campaign supervisor Podesta’s BROTHER? Wasn’t he caught, pressured to go away his agency, with BIG BAD issues to occur? Why did nothing ever occur to him, solely to the “other” facet?”  Not yet done,  Trump also called for the Defense Department to punish Lt. Col Vindman for his actions, though we all know his only “crime” was that he showed up to testify and told the truth when he was subpoenaed to do so.  The Stone sentencing decision is now in Judge Jackson’s hands, of course it probably doesn’t matter what she does because it's clear that ultimately Trump will pardon all the members of his crime family: Stone, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn.  As to Flynn we also learned yesterday that Barr’s hands are all over the decision that led to his sentencing being put on hold.  The bottom line is that Barr’s Justice Department no longer has anything to do with justice, it’s fully controlled by Trump. And that’s not how democracies are supposed to work, at all.  In case you are wondering Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer and a number of other Democrats have already expressed their outrage, but no Republicans, especially those who said that they were sure that Trump had “learned” from his impeachment experience have had anything to say and sadly little the Democrats say or do matters anymore.

New Hampshire News:  Senator Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary but not by as much as anticipated.  With 88% of the results tallied he’s in the lead with 25.7% of the vote to Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s 24.4%, Senator Amy Klobuchar’s 19.8%, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 9.3% and former VP Joe Biden’s 8.4%.  Those results mean that both Sanders and Buttigieg will receive 9 of New Hampshire’s delegates with Klobuchar receiving the remaining 6.  While winning is a good thing and Bernie most definitely won, he underperformed expectations, doing far worse than he did in 2016 when he won 60% of the vote which isn’t much of a surprise since that race was just between him and Hilary Clinton but also giving up share to rising star Buttigieg and that other moderate Klobuchar.  Buttigieg’s performance, on top of his Iowa win, was impressive, a clear sign that Iowa despite it failings was no fluke.  As to Klobuchar her jump up the leader board provides proof that people really were impressed by her stand out performance at last Friday’s debate and that there’s a lot of interest in selecting a centrist candidate but that voters are not yet sure who that moderate choice should be.  Though she’s not ready to throw in the towel, Elizabeth Warren admitted that her performance was not a good thing and Joe Biden just left New Hampshire early, heading to South Carolina, because if he doesn’t do well there or in Nevada he’s toast.  One very good thing for Democrats in general is that despite Republican efforts to make it more difficult for new residents, mostly students, to vote, participation was up.  Though Mike Bloomberg wasn’t on the ballot, he got a lot of attention yesterday after some old videos of him defending “stop and frisk” surfaced.  It’s not clear whether his campaign released them to deal with their consequences now or whether they came from the Trump campaign, but Trump of course jumped on them, calling Bloomberg out as a racist.  In response to  Trump’s tweet attack some of his very recent demands for “stop and frisk” to be used in Chicago then surfaced leading his team to pull his anti-Bloomberg messages from his twitter feed.  And so it goes, the race for those key Black voters is on and that will be a challenge for many, most notably Buttigieg and Klobuchar who have not yet gained any traction in the African American community.  In any case there will be fewer Democrats seeking those votes.  Both entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet have ended their runs though that other billionaire Tom Steyer and Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard are still running.  To that end, Gabbard has been doing most of her campaigning on Fox News where, among other things, she  most recently called for DNC Chairman Tom Perez to resign his post.

Et Cetera:  Yesterday the Republican led Senate blocked an effort by Democrats to unanimously pass three election security-related bills because those bills would require campaigns to alert the FBI and the Federal Election Commission about foreign offers of assistance and would provide more election funding and ban voting machines from being connected to the internet and why would anyone want to make any of that happen?