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Former national security adviser Michael Flynn arrives for his sentencing hearing at the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. on December 18, 2018. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Progressive critics and Democratic lawmakers expressed outrage Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced a pardon of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn--who despite pleading guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his conversations in 2016 with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, will now face no consequences for his actions.
"It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon," Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday afternoon.
The pardon was announced six months after Attorney General William Barr moved to drop the Department of Justice's case against Flynn, an action which led to calls for Barr's impeachment by public advocacy groups including Common Cause. Flynn's sentencing for his guilty pleas has also been delayed twice.
Barr's attempt to drop the case has been held up by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who was urged to scrutinize the legitimacy of the move. Trump issued the pardon after Flynn unsuccessfully requested that an appeals court block Sullivan's review of Barr's decision.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) noted that Trump's pardon of Flynn fit a pattern that was established when the president commuted the 40-month sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, who was convicted of seven felony counts, including lying to Congress under oath, withholding documents pertaining to the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's alleged communications with Russia, and threatening another witness if he cooperated with the probe.
"It is important to talk about why the President pardoned Flynn," said Nadler. "President Trump dangled this pardon to encourage Flynn to backtrack on his pledge to cooperate with federal investigators--cooperation that might have exposed the President's own wrongdoing. And it worked. Flynn broke his deal, recanted his plea, received the backing of the Attorney General over the objections of career prosecutors, and now has secured a pardon from the President of the United States."
"This pardon is part of a pattern," Nadler continued. "We saw it before, in the Roger Stone case--where President Trump granted clemency to protect an individual who might have implicated the President in criminal misconduct. We may see it again before President Trump finally leaves office. These actions are an abuse of power and fundamentally undermine the rule of law."
\u201cOne liar pardons another. What a disgrace.\u201d— Public Citizen (@Public Citizen) 1606339787
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law was among the groups which condemned Trump for using his pardoning power selectively in favor of his own friends and associates--not to restore justice to the wrongly convicted.
"President Trump is on pace to have one of the lowest rates of pardons and commutations of any president in recent time," said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers' Committee. "While he has pardoned convicted felons, including a sheriff notorious for terrorizing immigrant communities, a war criminal, and two men whose release was sought by violent white extremists, he has failed to use his power to grant clemency to those who remain incarcerated for low-level, non-violent offenses. The pardon of Michael Flynn, just like the Justice Department's abrupt decision to abandon his prosecution, is another gross abuse of executive power."
Trump has pardoned only 38 people since taking office in 2017, while President Barack Obama issued more than 1,900 pardons.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich denounced the pardon, which he said offered a stark illustration of the unequal system of criminal justice in the United States.
\u201cSo let me get this straight: Michael Flynn will face no consequences for lying to the F.B.I, undermining prosecutors, and betraying the country \u2014 while countless people are dying of coronavirus in prison because they were jailed on technicalities or parole violations?\u201d— Robert Reich (@Robert Reich) 1606340508
\u201cMichael Flynn will face no consequences for lying to the FBI, undermining prosecutors, and betraying the country.\n\nThis is the same system that sentenced Crystal Mason to five years in prison for voting when she didn't realize a past felony conviction made her ineligible.\u201d— Robert Reich (@Robert Reich) 1606340971
"This pardon is undeserved, unprincipled, and one more stain on President Trump's rapidly diminishing legacy," said Nadler.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
Progressive critics and Democratic lawmakers expressed outrage Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced a pardon of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn--who despite pleading guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his conversations in 2016 with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, will now face no consequences for his actions.
"It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon," Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday afternoon.
The pardon was announced six months after Attorney General William Barr moved to drop the Department of Justice's case against Flynn, an action which led to calls for Barr's impeachment by public advocacy groups including Common Cause. Flynn's sentencing for his guilty pleas has also been delayed twice.
Barr's attempt to drop the case has been held up by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who was urged to scrutinize the legitimacy of the move. Trump issued the pardon after Flynn unsuccessfully requested that an appeals court block Sullivan's review of Barr's decision.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) noted that Trump's pardon of Flynn fit a pattern that was established when the president commuted the 40-month sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, who was convicted of seven felony counts, including lying to Congress under oath, withholding documents pertaining to the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's alleged communications with Russia, and threatening another witness if he cooperated with the probe.
"It is important to talk about why the President pardoned Flynn," said Nadler. "President Trump dangled this pardon to encourage Flynn to backtrack on his pledge to cooperate with federal investigators--cooperation that might have exposed the President's own wrongdoing. And it worked. Flynn broke his deal, recanted his plea, received the backing of the Attorney General over the objections of career prosecutors, and now has secured a pardon from the President of the United States."
"This pardon is part of a pattern," Nadler continued. "We saw it before, in the Roger Stone case--where President Trump granted clemency to protect an individual who might have implicated the President in criminal misconduct. We may see it again before President Trump finally leaves office. These actions are an abuse of power and fundamentally undermine the rule of law."
\u201cOne liar pardons another. What a disgrace.\u201d— Public Citizen (@Public Citizen) 1606339787
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law was among the groups which condemned Trump for using his pardoning power selectively in favor of his own friends and associates--not to restore justice to the wrongly convicted.
"President Trump is on pace to have one of the lowest rates of pardons and commutations of any president in recent time," said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers' Committee. "While he has pardoned convicted felons, including a sheriff notorious for terrorizing immigrant communities, a war criminal, and two men whose release was sought by violent white extremists, he has failed to use his power to grant clemency to those who remain incarcerated for low-level, non-violent offenses. The pardon of Michael Flynn, just like the Justice Department's abrupt decision to abandon his prosecution, is another gross abuse of executive power."
Trump has pardoned only 38 people since taking office in 2017, while President Barack Obama issued more than 1,900 pardons.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich denounced the pardon, which he said offered a stark illustration of the unequal system of criminal justice in the United States.
\u201cSo let me get this straight: Michael Flynn will face no consequences for lying to the F.B.I, undermining prosecutors, and betraying the country \u2014 while countless people are dying of coronavirus in prison because they were jailed on technicalities or parole violations?\u201d— Robert Reich (@Robert Reich) 1606340508
\u201cMichael Flynn will face no consequences for lying to the FBI, undermining prosecutors, and betraying the country.\n\nThis is the same system that sentenced Crystal Mason to five years in prison for voting when she didn't realize a past felony conviction made her ineligible.\u201d— Robert Reich (@Robert Reich) 1606340971
"This pardon is undeserved, unprincipled, and one more stain on President Trump's rapidly diminishing legacy," said Nadler.
Progressive critics and Democratic lawmakers expressed outrage Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced a pardon of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn--who despite pleading guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his conversations in 2016 with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, will now face no consequences for his actions.
"It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon," Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday afternoon.
The pardon was announced six months after Attorney General William Barr moved to drop the Department of Justice's case against Flynn, an action which led to calls for Barr's impeachment by public advocacy groups including Common Cause. Flynn's sentencing for his guilty pleas has also been delayed twice.
Barr's attempt to drop the case has been held up by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who was urged to scrutinize the legitimacy of the move. Trump issued the pardon after Flynn unsuccessfully requested that an appeals court block Sullivan's review of Barr's decision.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) noted that Trump's pardon of Flynn fit a pattern that was established when the president commuted the 40-month sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, who was convicted of seven felony counts, including lying to Congress under oath, withholding documents pertaining to the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's alleged communications with Russia, and threatening another witness if he cooperated with the probe.
"It is important to talk about why the President pardoned Flynn," said Nadler. "President Trump dangled this pardon to encourage Flynn to backtrack on his pledge to cooperate with federal investigators--cooperation that might have exposed the President's own wrongdoing. And it worked. Flynn broke his deal, recanted his plea, received the backing of the Attorney General over the objections of career prosecutors, and now has secured a pardon from the President of the United States."
"This pardon is part of a pattern," Nadler continued. "We saw it before, in the Roger Stone case--where President Trump granted clemency to protect an individual who might have implicated the President in criminal misconduct. We may see it again before President Trump finally leaves office. These actions are an abuse of power and fundamentally undermine the rule of law."
\u201cOne liar pardons another. What a disgrace.\u201d— Public Citizen (@Public Citizen) 1606339787
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law was among the groups which condemned Trump for using his pardoning power selectively in favor of his own friends and associates--not to restore justice to the wrongly convicted.
"President Trump is on pace to have one of the lowest rates of pardons and commutations of any president in recent time," said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers' Committee. "While he has pardoned convicted felons, including a sheriff notorious for terrorizing immigrant communities, a war criminal, and two men whose release was sought by violent white extremists, he has failed to use his power to grant clemency to those who remain incarcerated for low-level, non-violent offenses. The pardon of Michael Flynn, just like the Justice Department's abrupt decision to abandon his prosecution, is another gross abuse of executive power."
Trump has pardoned only 38 people since taking office in 2017, while President Barack Obama issued more than 1,900 pardons.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich denounced the pardon, which he said offered a stark illustration of the unequal system of criminal justice in the United States.
\u201cSo let me get this straight: Michael Flynn will face no consequences for lying to the F.B.I, undermining prosecutors, and betraying the country \u2014 while countless people are dying of coronavirus in prison because they were jailed on technicalities or parole violations?\u201d— Robert Reich (@Robert Reich) 1606340508
\u201cMichael Flynn will face no consequences for lying to the FBI, undermining prosecutors, and betraying the country.\n\nThis is the same system that sentenced Crystal Mason to five years in prison for voting when she didn't realize a past felony conviction made her ineligible.\u201d— Robert Reich (@Robert Reich) 1606340971
"This pardon is undeserved, unprincipled, and one more stain on President Trump's rapidly diminishing legacy," said Nadler.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy called President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs "a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy."
Analysts puzzling over the bizarre formula the Trump administration used to calculate its country-by-country tariff rates are wasting their time, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said in a response to the American president that has gone viral in recent days as global markets continue to nosedive.
"It's not economic policy, it's not trade policy," Murphy (D-Conn.) said in remarks recorded after Trump announced the sweeping tariffs last week. "It's a political weapon designed to collapse our democracy."
While President Donald Trump's universal tariffs on imports make no sense as an effort to rectify the failures of the status quo trade regime and bring back offshored U.S. jobs, they are comprehensible when viewed as "a tool to try to compel pledges of loyalty, this time from companies and industries in the United States," Murphy argued.
"You have to understand that everything Donald Trump is doing is in service of staying in power forever—either him or his family or his handpicked successors," the Democratic senator continued. "He's trying to destroy our democracy."
Murphy contended that the president designed the tariffs to be so widespread that corporations across private industry would have to come to the White House and "make an agreement with Trump in which he gives them tariff relief in exchange for a pledge of political loyalty."
"What could that pledge look like?" Murphy continued. "Well, maybe they agree to champion his economic policy publicly. Maybe they agree to make contributions to his political campaign. Maybe they agree to police their employees to make sure that nobody that works for that company works for the political opposition."
Politico reported late last week that businesses across corporate America "fear Trump's wrath" and are thus declining to criticize the president's tariff policies even as they wreak havoc worldwide and threaten to spark a devastating recession.
"There is zero incentive for any company or brand to be remotely critical of this administration," one unnamed public affairs operative told Politico. "It destroys your ability to work with the White House and advance your policies, period."
"While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power."
Murphy is hardly alone in seeing Trump's tariffs as an instrument of power consolidation.
Robert Reich, the former U.S. labor secretary, wrote Monday that "we're turning into a dictatorship" as Trump conjures "fake national emergencies" to jack up tariffs, deport people en masse without due process, gut efforts to combat the climate crisis, and dismantle large swaths of the federal government.
"As Trump declares emergency after emergency to justify his reign of terror, he's simultaneously eliminating America's capacity to respond to real emergencies," Reich wrote. "Make no mistake about what’s really going on here. While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power."
One analyst, Zack Beauchamp of Vox, argued the tariffs are more a symptom of the decline of U.S. democracy rather than a cause of it.
"Trump's tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn't have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes," Beauchamp wrote. "The fact that America isn't functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin."
"It's still possible that Trump steps back from the brink," he added. "But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: The long decay of America's democratic system means that we are all living under an axe. And if this isn't the moment it falls, there will surely be another."
"If the 4.8% fall in S&P 500 futures at the Asian opening isn't reversed, then it's on course for its worst three-day selloff since the Black Monday crash of October 1987."
U.S. President Donald Trump late Sunday openly embraced the global chaos sparked by his sweeping tariffs, careening headlong into a potentially catastrophic trade war as worldwide financial markets plummeted and American retirees began to panic.
In a post on his social media platform, Trump declared that his tariffs are "already in effect, and a beautiful thing to behold."
"Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!" Trump wrote as recent retirees and people near retirement expressed fear and astonishment at the swift damage the president's policy decisions have done to their investment accounts.
One retiree, a 68-year-old former occupational health worker in New Jersey, told NBC News that she is "just kind of stunned, and with so much money in the market, we just sort of have to hope we have enough time to recover."
"What we've been doing is trying to enjoy the time that we have, but you want to be able to make it last," the retiree, identified as Paula, said on Friday. "I have no confidence here."
Trump's post doubling down on his tariff regime came as Asian markets cratered and U.S. stock futures opened bright red, signaling that Monday will bring another broad sell-off in equities. One of Trump's top economic advisers claimed in a Sunday interview that the president is not intentionally crashing the stock market, even as Trump—returning from a weekend golf outing in Florida—characterized the tariffs as "medicine."
"I don't want anything to go down," the president said. "But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something."
Bloomberg's John Authers wrote early Sunday that "if the 4.8% fall in S&P 500 futures at the Asian opening isn't reversed, then it's on course for its worst three-day selloff since the Black Monday crash of October 1987."
Though the stock market and the economy are not synonymous, economist Josh Bivens recently noted that they are currently "mirroring each other: Stock market weakness is reflecting broader economic weakness."
"While the stock market isn't the economy, the stock market declines we have seen in recent weeks are genuinely worrying," wrote Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "They are a symptom of much larger dysfunctional macroeconomic policy that will likely soon start showing up in higher unemployment and slower wage growth for the vast majority."
"This was an illegal act," said U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis.
A federal court judge on Sunday declared the Trump administration's refusal to return a man they sent to an El Salvadoran prison in "error" as "totally lawless" behavior and ordered the Department of Homeland Security to repatriate the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, within 24 hours.
In a 22-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis doubled down on an order issued Friday, which Department of Justice lawyers representing the administration said was an affront to his executive authority.
"This was an illegal act," Xinis said of DHS Secretary Krisi Noem's attack on Abrego Garcia's rights, including his deportation and imprisonment.
"Defendants seized Abrego Garcia without any lawful authority; held him in three separate domestic detention centers without legal basis; failed to present him to any immigration judge or officer; and forcibly transported him to El Salvador in direct contravention of [immigration law]," the decision states.
Once imprisoned in El Salvador, the order continues, "U.S. officials secured his detention in a facility that, by design, deprives its detainees of adequate food, water, and shelter, fosters routine violence; and places him with his persecutors."
Trump's DOJ appealed Friday's order to 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Virginia, but that court has not yet ruled on the request to stay the order from Xinis, which says Abrego Garcia should be returned to the United States no later than Monday.