Trump’s rudeness is a STATE SECRET
Let’s go back to February 16 to revisit Trump’s fury over “leaks” about his tantrums and train-wrecks.
President Trump said Thursday that he had personally directed the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation and determine who was responsible for what he said were illegal leaks that have unfairly damaged his fledgling administration.
“I’ve actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks,” Mr. Trump said during a contentious, 75-minute news conference at the White House. “Those are criminal leaks.”
No law forbids a president
from making[to make] a criminal referral to the Justice Department, but it is unusual for a president to direct the agency to open a criminal investigation into his perceived opponents or to talk publicly about having done so. The White House, under presidents of both parties, has generally restricted direct contact with the Justice Department about prospective investigations to avoid the appearance of politicizing law enforcement.
But of course “unusual” and “generally” cut no ice with Trump, because he’s here to drain the swamp, which means he can do anything he wants to.
Mr. Trump appeared particularly incensed at public reports about his rancorous phone conversations with foreign leaders, including telling the president of Mexico the he might send American troops to stop “bad hombres down there,” and berating the prime minister of Australia over an Obama-era deal to resettle refugees and then cutting the call short.
But that’s just too bad, because we need to know how rash and inappropriate and incompetent he is.
He also expressed frustration over leaks about federal surveillance that picked up pre-inaugural phone calls between the Russian ambassador and Michael T. Flynn, who resigned under pressure this week from his role as national security adviser.
We get it: he wants his lies and corruption kept secret. Of course he does. But that’s in his interest, not ours.
Susan Hennessy, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington and former intelligence agency lawyer who has written about leaks, said that Mr. Trump’s directive could send a chilling message.
“The fear is that these leak investigations will be used as a form of political retaliation” against people who may have exposed information that is personally embarrassing to Mr. Trump, she said. “We don’t want this to become a political witch hunt.”
If they can get away with using leak investigations as a form of political retaliation, they will use them that way.
During the news conference, Mr. Trump did not directly answer questions about the substance of other recent reports on private dealings his aides may have had with Russia. Instead, he reframed the question as a problem of leaks. He declared that the “leaks are real,” but denounced articles based on the leaked information as “fake news.”
This is all about the reframing.
For most of American history, the government did not prosecute those suspected of leaking. From the founding of the country through the end of the 20th century, just one person was convicted of leaking, and he was later pardoned.
But starting during the George W. Bush administration and intensifying in the Barack Obama administration, the government has brought leak-related charges far more frequently. Depending on how they are counted, Mr. Obama oversaw nine or 10 leak-related cases, more than all previous presidents combined.
Still, Matt Miller, a former director of public affairs for the Justice Department in Mr. Obama’s first term, said none of those cases involved going after someone who had leaked information about embarrassing or inappropriate activity by a president or his immediate staff.
But that’s what they’re planning to do now, if they can get away with it.
The Trump administration has been bedeviled by leaks large and small that have disclosed infighting inside his administration, including the president’s rancorous phone conversations with foreign leaders. Information shared with reporters brought to light what surveillance showed about contacts by Mr. Trump’s associates with Russia and even what Mr. Trump said to Russian visitors in the Oval Office about his firing of Mr. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.
In May, Mr. Trump himself disclosed sensitive intelligence to visiting Russian officials about an Islamic State plot, blurting out details that had been shared by Israel — a disclosure that some intelligence officials worried might have effectively exposed an important Israeli government source. The president does have the authority to declassify and disclose information at his own discretion.
Not all leaks are illegal, but the Espionage Act and a handful of other federal statutes criminalize the unauthorized disclosure of certain categories of national-security related information that could harm the country or aid a foreign adversary.
He tweeted sensitive intelligence just the other day, too.
In February, Mr. Trump said at a news conference that he told Mr. Sessions to look into leaks — an unusual thing to say, since presidents generally try to avoid appearing as if they are asserting political control over law enforcement.
Mr. Comey also wrote in a memo, recounting one of his conversations with Mr. Trump, that the president had told him to consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information.
It would be unusual to prosecute a journalist for publishing government secrets, a step that would raise significant First Amendment issues. Mr. Sessions took no questions, but Mr. Rosenstein afterward demurred when asked whether he would prosecute reporters for doing their jobs, saying he would not “comment on hypotheticals.”
That’s nice. Threaten journalists, and then refuse to answer reasonable questions.
Somehow I don’t feel any more secure.
He shouldn’t. This is too much power for one man, and too easy to misuse, especially in the hands of a toddler president who wants to show off.
@iknklast I agree. But if Trump is teaching us anything, it’s that too much of the American political system’s vaunted checks and balances relies entirely on established norms, unwritten rules of engagement etc.
We were told the antiquated Electoral College would save us from a Trumpian figure, it did not. We were promised that Congress would prevent calamity, so far I am unimpressed. And the Republicans in Congress seem as flummoxed as to how to deal with their Toddler-In-Chief (with apologies to actual toddlers) since actually growing a spine and putting an end to this farce is apparently off the table at least for now.
It is notable that actions McConnell once used to screw Obama are now being turned on Trump. Using pro forma sessions in the Senate to prevent a recess appointments, effectively thwarting any plans he might have had to move Jeff Sessions sideways and appoint a more toadying AG is bewildering in context.
Bills are being introduced that are genuinely bipartisan to protect Robert Mueller and his investigation. Elsewhere, Congress is either outwardly defying the President by ignoring him on the budget and his views on Russian sanctions, not to mention the moves now being made to ringfence the CSRs for ACA. By one of the senators from my state, no less! It boggles the mind, quite frankly.
But despite this, nobody on the R side seems to want to push the big red button marked impeachment. Which is a problem because Trump has another big red button within reach, and don’t think the military will balk if he decides he wants to drop a nuke on Pyongyang because they made fun of his hair.
I was once assured that the advantage of the American system over my home country’s Parliamentary system is that the grindingly slow nature of it meant a crazy person couldn’t do real damage. That has proven to be laughably, demonstrably false. Real damage has been and continues to be done, every day Trump is in power. The trouble is the idea of President Pence makes me throw up in my mouth and the idea of that snot-nosed brat Paul Ryan as president is not really much more palatable.
Claire,
The most significant aspect of the US style presidential system is how few democracies have adopted it, most use a version of Westminister. Better a ‘first amongst equals’ than the election of a quasi-monarch.
I’d prefer the volatility of a parliamentary system over America’s glacially paced ‘checks and balances’ every time. Of course under a fair electoral system Trump wouldn’t now be president.
Seems like President Trump may want some “plumbers” to help him out. Just like Richard Nixon.
@RJW #3, I checked on your assertion that “The most significant aspect of the US style presidential system is how few democracies have adopted it, most use a version of Westminister.” I used the Economist magazine’s Democracy Index, and I compared systems of government to where nations stand in that index.
Twenty-one nations scored higher than the US: Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, Denmark, Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Malta, United Kingdom, Spain, Mauritius, Uruguay, Japan, Italy.
Of these nations, only Uruguay has a US-style presidency. The only other of these nations with an activist head of state is Switzerland, and that nation has a 7-member collective presidency elected by the legislature. All the rest have ceremonial heads of state, whether hereditary or elected, and their acting leadership (prime minister, etc.) is chosen by the legislature in Westminster fashion. These nations almost always elect their legislatures with proportional representation, with only Canada and the UK using first-past-the-post.
Looking lower on the list, activist presidents become more common. In some cases, such a president coexists with a prime minister chosen by the legislature, a “semi-presidential” system. France is the highest-ranked nation with such a system, and it’s not far behind the US. As one goes downward, activist monarchs start to appear, and even farther down, they start ruling without legislatures — absolute monarchy.
Loren Petrich,
Interesting. Most presidential systems usually seem to end in autocracy. The US is sometimes cited as one of the few nations to have avoided that fate, so far.
You mentioned Nixon, I remember the long agonising process to get rid of him. In many ways Nixon was a competent president, if somewhat ethically challenged. Another weakness in US style politics is the corruption of the electoral system which Ophelia has criticised on B&W on a number of occasions.
RJW – I think you may be blaming the powers of the Presidency for a lot of problems in U.S. politics we’d still have with a Westminster-style system and everything else held constant, or have only modestly different variations on. I wish this were just American pride making me say that, but it comes down to an admission that we’ve got problems that go so much deeper than a detail on the constitutional structure of the executive branch, so if anything, it’s a claim in the teeth of my love of country.
As it is, the President could be reined in by Congress far, far more thoroughly than they have. Since the 1970’s, and worse after 9/11, they’ve surrendered a lot of power to the president when it comes to the use of the military. Some of that is an argument from responsiveness, and the way peace and war can change so much more quickly in a nuclear age, but it’s gone further than that into an abdication of their role. They could take it back at any time, and they don’t. A Westminster-style PM and Cabinet would have that kind of power even more naturally, at the price of being more smoothly responsible to the party for using it, and the party being more readily identified at the ballot box for abusing it, but U.S. Presidents still will suffer losses to their party’s representation in Congress when they get unpopular, at home or abroad, and they still require their party’s support in Congress to do much.
We’ve got Trump because he got voted in; we have kept Trump because he’s still been better than getting rid of him in the view of Republicans in the House and Senate, or in the Cabinet approved by that Senate. That represents just the kind of backing that would get someone made Prime Minister, or that would tie the hands of a P.M. who may maintain a majority only with the backing of extremist members of his/her party or coalition partners. (Take Israel’s Knesset for one example of that sort of thing.) Granted, a Prime Minister isn’t going to be someone from outside party politics, but right now, the U.S. electorate has (kittens help us) regarded that as a good thing. If a constitution demanded that we be run by someone who by the nature of his/her selection was someone that, by the nature of the electorate, could not be respected, we’d not have a democratically legitimate government.
The concentration of power in a P.M and Cabinet backed by a Parliamentary majority capable of altering any law with a simple majority gives me the willies. Westminster systems avoid that kind of nightmare scenario with tweaks to the principle of Parliamentary sovereignty, with the strength of norms and traditions that limit what use of that theoretically infinite power a government will wield, or with a combination of multiple elements of both. With a generous definition of “tweak”, you could regard a Presidential system as one such limitation on Parliamentary sovereignty – for that matter, it’s a plausible way of thinking of the design of the U.S. Constitution.
The problems we’ve got with Electoral College misrepresentation have existed in Westminster systems with rotten boroughs particularly but also the failure of democratic representation in the House of Lords. (Granted, easily, that the U.K. has done a lot better addressing those in the last 200 years than we have here, and granted as well, that the Westminster system makes reform that way easier – but the problem in our case that way isn’t to do with the Presidency that way but rather the amendment process.) The problems with gerrymandered districts have existed in Parliamentary systems, although addressing them has had more success there. (Why that is is an interesting question – my guess is simply a more civilized, less polarized political culture.) And voter suppression and voter apathy are not problems limited to presidential versus parliamentary systems.
Jeff Engel @ 6
A poltical malaise is not unique to the US, there are disturbing developments here in Australia, particularly an increasingly cynical attitude to politicians and politics. Recent surveys have indicated an alarming disillusionment with democracy by younger voters. I wasn’t really blaming the Presidency, the dysfunction is not confined to the US.
” The concentration of power in a PM and Cabinet backed by a Parliamentary majority capable of altering any law with a simple majority gives me the willies”. There’s more than tweaking involved in Westminster systems, most democracies have written constitutions and an elected Upper House which limit the power of any PM and cabinet.
The U.K.has FPTP voting and an unelected Upper House so I don’t regard the Mother of Parliaments as the model of a Westminster system. You’ve concentrated rather too much on the British version, it’s not representative. The British can’t distinguish a plebiscite from a referendum and they seem rather confused about direct democracy.
As to gerrymanders, conservatives everywhere love a gerrymander. As to why they have been less of a problem outside the US— one solution, adopted in Australia is a nationwide Electoral Commission administered by bureaucrats. It’s far from perfect but it’s superior to allowing each state’s apparatchiks to interfere with the electoral rolls. That gives me the willies.
Americans have been presenting their nation as the exemplar of democracy for 200 years, it’s not true of course. Like any polity the US has its flaws.
Jeff Engel @#6:
In 1776, the United States served as a lighthouse for the world, with a constitution that was the very best around. (Iceland I believe has the world’s oldest continuously functioning democracy, and the Swiss cannot be very far behind.) But England in 1776 was a political quagmire, with a parliament akin to a mud wrestling contest; ‘pocket boroughs’, ‘rotten boroughs’… those terms tell pretty well the whole story.
There had to be Trumps around in America in 1776, but they were kept in the shade by the Founding Fathers.
Trump it seems to me is a creature and a sign of our times. He is a product of reality TV, and before he became POTUS he was just another NY inheritance billionaire who had never been elected to public office. The British Parliament was pruned of such dead wood by the Reform Bill of 1831, but it was not just to it but to the US that the Founding Fathers of our Australian Constitution turned for inspiration. (The famous explorer WC Wentworth, something of a Trump of his day, proposed that an Australian (‘bunyip’) aristocracy be set up and installed in a local house of lords, and for his trouble became an object of general public mirth and derision straight away.)
Trump can only sack those immediate underlings who displease him. He does not have the options that were available to say, Joseph Stalin in the 1930s: though stand by for developments on that one.
His place in history is likely to be as something of a Mad King George; as an out-of-his-depth clown who used his underlings like Kleenex tissues, and staggered from crisis to crisis while trying to sell the problematic idea of ‘make America great again’.
And if that sales pitch fails, as quite likely, then he and America are both in trouble.
Trump is by no means out of the woods yet.
The forest could actually be closing in on him rapidly.
“In the investigation into the obstruction of justice, the White House is the potential crime scene. That is where Trump contrived to be alone on two occasions with Comey and where the alleged arm-twisting took place.
“In the Watergate scandal, to which the Russian influence affair is drawing inevitable comparisons, it was the cover-up that ultimately proved fatal to Richard Nixon’s presidency. It is increasingly possible the same fate could befall Trump.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/05/robert-mueller-donald-trump-russia