Trump's Troubles

Turning on Those You Trust is Dangerous

Secret Recordings Come to Light

President Trump’s longtime personal attorney and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, secretly recorded some of his private conversations with Trump. When the FBI searched Cohen’s offices, home and apartment, they seized lots of recordings. Cohen’s attorney recently released one of those recordings and it reveals a conversation between Cohen and Trump where they discussed how to buy and bury a story from a former Playboy Bunny who claims to have had a sexual relationship with Trump before he ran for President, but after he married his current wife, Melania.

Trump long denied knowing anything about efforts to hide the Bunny’s story and Cohen’s lawyer released the recording to counter Trump’s current claims that Cohen should not be believed. Trump badly needed to make Cohen out as a liar because it appeared that he was changing sides and cooperating with prosecutors looking into many of the Trump family enterprises. 

Trump then tweeted about how unusual and illegal it was for Cohen to have recorded their conversations. He asked, “what kind of lawyer records conversations with his client?”

As a former criminal defense lawyer, I can make an educated guess why Cohen would have recorded conversations with Trump. Having represented people with mental health issues, a heavy dose of “I can do no wrong” and a less than firm grip on reality, I can tell you that many with those afflictions will gladly turn on their lawyers when their cases go south. Hoping to save themselves, they try to implicate their lawyers with prosecutors anxious to sweep up criminal activity with a broader net. Defendants caught with the evidence against them try too often to offer up their lawyers in order to avoid a lengthy stay behind bars. When the conduct of the client and the lawyer approaches or crosses legal or ethical lines, it is even easier to tempt prosecutors with the defense lawyer’s scalp. 

Experienced lawyers understand what’s involved in representing prominent, but mentally or morally challenged, clients in high stakes matters. They know that one day the advice they gave may come into question and often seek protection by secretly recording their private confidential conversations where strategies are discussed just in case the client later tries to blame the lawyer for the client’s actions. 

Cohen’s recordings were completely legal where they were made. New York law allows for secret recordings when just one party to the conversations, Cohen in this instance, consents to the recording. Wisconsin has a similar rule. Any ethical duty not to disclose the otherwise confidential contents of the recording vanishes when they are legally revealed to others or when the client later makes claims against the lawyer that can be contradicted by the recording.

Trump’s continued attempts to distract and deflect attention away from his own behavior just makes his situation worse. He will soon pay the dictator’s price for following the old patterns telling supporters that his is the only “truth” and all of the mounting evidence of his duplicity, venality and depravity is nothing more than “fake news.”

In Trump’s unreality world, Cohen just joined the conspiracy of false prophets already populated by the mainstream media, the FBI, Courts, Democrats, Republicans who are beginning to question his actions and the “rogue” special counsel investigating him. 

Republicans facing re-election bids in the upcoming mid-term elections have a tough choice to make. They stand with Trump at their peril. Moderate Republicans who have had enough of Trump are challenging them from the center in primaries and progressive Democrats are winning their elections with impressive numbers running anti-Trump, anti corruption, populist campaigns. If GOP legislators seeking re-election repudiate Trump, the financial support his team control goes away, leaving them swinging in the wind. Recent polling puts Trump’s approval rating at an all time low, making their choice all the more difficult.

Trump’s days are numbered. The chief financial officer of the Trump family businesses who has been at Trump’s side for decades was just subpoenaed by the special counsel to appear before the grand jury investigating allegations of criminal activity. He knows where Trump’s money came from and where it went.  He’s a cagey sort and I would not be surprised to find out he has secret recordings too and a second set of books detailing Trump financial dealings. 

Trump is learning the hard way that trusting people and then stabbing them in the back is dangerous business. 

Beware the Federalists

Federalist Society Judicial Ideologues

Injustice Rules

Supreme Court Justices were originally envisioned as impartial arbiters of what the United States Constitution required when disputes arose between people or those between people and their governments, large and small. The Justices are supposed to be legal scholars and put themselves above the partisan fray of their times. The nine who sit on the highest court in the land, after all, have the final say in those disputes they choose to resolve. 

From time to time in our nation’s history, the Court has strayed from its lofty mission of impartial decision maker and become a player for one side or another, diminishing its stature and credibility as a result. We are now caught up in one of those times. Partisanship does not become the blindfolded lady Justice.

The latest assault aimed at capturing the Court’s power and prestige was launched decades ago with the formation of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. It has become one of the most powerful and little known organizations in our political system. 

Funded by libertarians and conservative business interests, the Federalists have for years been recruiting and training lawyers to become judges in our state and federal courts. Those recruited are groomed to be conservative legal thinkers bound by the literal texts in constitutions and amendments. They give no room to modern notions of constitutional interpretation that take social and cultural changes into account when making important decisions. 

Take the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution for example. It was written to allow slave owning white citizens to keep arms against possible slave insurrection at a time when the average muzzle loading rifleman was at the top of his game if he could get off one shot a minute. Federalist literal constitutional interpretation of this Amendment makes ignores the facts that no one can own slaves anymore or that AR-15 rifles with high capacity magazines and bump stocks can deal death at hundreds of shots a minute. To these limited legal thinkers, this translates easily into banning most forms of gun control legislation as a violation of the original text. 

Our whole system of law is designed to maintain the status quo and apply the brakes to legal innovations. Unfortunately, the maintenance of things the way they are is not sufficient for the Federalists who want to return to a time long past when hierarchical gender roles were clear, white supremacy was the law of the land and government was supposed to stay out of your business.

With the election of conservative legislatures and executives, Federalist judges in waiting have finally achieved their nirvana. With Trump acolytes in control of the Senate, we will soon see a solid majority of Federalist trained or sympathetic Justices in control of the United States Supreme Court. 

Conservative controlled legislatures in state and federal governments will soon pass more laws challenging established precedents involving abortion rights, civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, voting rights and many governmental regulations setting up disputes for final resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade provides another example. It established a framework to end illegal abortions and save women’s lives. It did not allow unlimited abortions on demand, as many countries do. It has been used to strike down state and federal laws that limited access to early term abortions. We will soon see outright bans passed in many so-called “pro-life” states and the challenges to them will ultimately be heard by the Federalist dominated Court where they will receive a friendly reception. 

The only potential brake on the wholesale revision of constitutional law the Federalists embrace is found in an often-overlooked canon of judicial interpretation known as “Stare Decisis.”  Simply put, it means the Court should not overturn a prior decision of the same body unless there is a compelling reason to do so. A decision must have been so wrongly decided in the first place that no present court would make the same decision. As with most rules governing interpretation of the laws, there are many exceptions that the Federalists will use to rid us of those pesky precedents they do not like.

This brings us to President Trump’s recent nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Judge Kavanaugh brings not only impressive Federalist Society credentials and experience, he also penned an impressive law review article advancing the startling proposition that a sitting president should not be subjected to criminal investigation or prosecution for illegal acts committed in office. For Judge Kavanaugh impeachment is the only remedy. This had to be seen as a “get out of jail free” card for this president. 

Needless to say, the partisans will pull out all the stops to pressure those few GOP Senators who don’t fear Trump’s tweets and those Democrats elected in Trump country.  It should make for an interesting confirmation process in the Senate. Stay tuned.

Fear Not

The Only Thing We Have to Fear

Is Fear Itself

During some of its darkest hours President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the country that, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Those words ring with even more truth today than they did during the depths of the Great Depression in 1932.

Today’s politics of division and supremacy are primarily based on nothing but fear. Our leaders and some of their followers would have us fear each other, fear those whose skin is a different color, fear those who come to our shores escaping violence, fear those who believe in a different supreme being, fear those who love differently, fear those who seek to control their own reproductive systems, fear those who believe in science as a basis for sound policy, and fear those who follow different economic or political systems.

We need to own firearms in even greater numbers because we fear the “bad guy” who might come to take what is ours. Second Amendment purists and those who profit from it, base their beliefs and business model on the myth that there is some “other” out there who is looking to bring us harm. Virtually every email I see from the NRA and its local offspring, Delta Defense, promotes their platform based on fear. 

Recent fervor supporting immigration bans prohibiting people entering our country from neighboring countries to the South is mostly based on fear of the Mexican criminal who will deal drugs, rape our women and steal our children. Many cling to this myth even in the face of clear proof that most immigrants come here to work and make a better life for themselves and their families.

The rise of newly emboldened white supremacy groups is based upon the irrational fear that somehow Anglo European immigrants will soon be forced from power and become an under class as America becomes more multi-ethnically diverse. Genetically, human beings are much more alike than different. Skin color differences do not translate into a better or worse human being. It makes no difference, yet too many of us are taught to fear based just on this element of the human condition. 

Fear of those who love those with similar gender characteristics is another one of those irrational emotions used to divide. Folks attracted to those like themselves are not trying to kidnap children or lure them into a heretical lifestyle. Same sex couples can be just as good or just as bad at parenting as opposite sex couples. Gender fluidity will never upset the social order. 

The recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding President Trump’s travel ban unfortunately gives it an aura of legitimacy it does not deserve. The travel ban prohibiting Muslims from certain countries from entering our country is based on another irrational fear, that all who share that faith from those countries are bent upon committing terrorist acts on our soil. Most people who practice Islam are just as anti-terror as anyone else who disavows its use. To ban entire populations based upon a few dangerous individuals does nothing to advance world peace and a belief in a common humanity.

Fear of women becoming hyper-sexualized and running amok was one of the original motivations for limiting access to birth control and opposing reproductive choice.  Fear of feminism is based on outmoded notions of women’s’ inequality and inability to think and act for themselves without male guidance. 

Fearing the erosion of Christian belief systems led to challenges to science-based policy decisions in education. If you teach evolution as a fact proven by the scientific method, the underpinnings of beliefs in divine creation will evaporate. If you challenge the way we live because we know humans have created climate change and must wean ourselves from the use of fossil fuels in order to survive, I will lose my livelihood. Therefore, acting on climate change is an evil to be feared.

Fear of communism, socialism, tribalism, cooperatives and the other economic and political systems that compete with capitalism drives current political thought away from our being able to choose aspects of those competing systems that might be beneficial to our continued prosperity. Universal healthcare and food security come to mind as rational ways to maintain the species. We seem to fear them just because they have worked in different political systems than our own and threaten certain capitalistic institutions. 

As we approach the annual celebration of America’s founding on July the Fourth, let us resolve to banish fear as a reason to act or fail to act. Let us boldly embrace the other, the different, the new and the experimental so we truly can make America greater than she was before.