Yer fired
So the Trump people solved the problem by firing Preet Bharara.
On Friday, acting deputy attorney general Dana Boente began making calls to 46 prosecutors asking for their resignations. Such requests are a normal part of a transition of power from one administration to another, and about half of the 94 Obama-era U.S. attorneys had already left their jobs.
But Boente’s call to Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, appears to have left some confusion in its wake, in large part because President Trump met with Bharara soon after the election and had asked him to stay on.
During Friday’s call, Bharara asked for clarity about whether the requests for resignations applied to him, given his previous conversation with Trump, and did not immediately get a definitive answer, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
So that sounds less like a show of defiance from Bharara than simply uncertainty about what was going on. It also sounds like clumsy rudeness and incompetence on the part of the Trump people…but perhaps I’m being too generous, and they meant to be rude and abrupt-for-no-reason.
When asked Friday whether Bharara was also being asked for a resignation letter, one White House official not authorized to speak publicly said, “Everybody’s gone,” and would not engage further on the issue. Two people close to the president said the president’s chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Attorney General Jeff Sessions want a clean slate of federal prosecutors and are unconcerned about any perception that the White House appears to have changed its mind about Bharara. The ouster of former president Barack Obama’s federal prosecutors is about asserting who’s in power, these people said.
It’s about asserting who’s in power despite having decisively lost the popular vote and unprecedentedly low ratings in the polls, along with the ever-expanding knowledge base about Putin’s influence on the election.
It’s a swaggering bully show of strength. Bullies almost always realize people don’t like them, and I suspect Trump realizes the same, but his ego refuses to admit it. He thinks if he shows us how strong he is, we will respect and fear him, even if we do not like him.
It may be his response to people laughing at him for being a clown. By god, he’ll make sure we stop laughing.
I do know that I am not laughing. This is so far from funny. A real clown can trip all over everything in sight and have no consequence in the real world. And we know he isn’t really breaking things because that’s part of the act, and those things were created for the purpose of being broken. But this clown, and the other clowns shoved into the Executive and Congressional Volkswagens, are breaking real things that can lead to real consequences for real people.
I lived through Hurricane Katrina and lost everything I had but for a couple bags of clothes. It too wasn’t funny – or smart, or something to admire or respect. Trump reminds me a lot of it, without even the sublime majesty.
And Hurricane Katrina had no malice. It was just a storm, doing what storms do.
Caroline O. has some great coverage on her twitter. Too much of a firehose for me to swallow, but here’s one drop:
Caroline O. @RVAwonk 10h10 hours ago
Caroline O. Retweeted Caroline O.
The letter to Preet Bharara is dated March 8th. What a *coincidence*… (Link: http://www.democracy21.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Group-letter-to-US-Attoney-calling-for-investigation-Trump-Organization.pdf …).
Caroline O. @RVAwonk 11h11 hours ago
Here’s the letter from @CREWcrew, asking US Atty Preeet Bharara to look into Trump/Trump org receiving payments from foreign governments.
My theory is that one day last week, the Manbaby Prez was busy learning the ABC when he suddenly realised that all of those funny squiggly shapes that made up the name Bharara could also be found in Barack H Obama (though the second name only had one of the Christmas candy-cane crooks. Even worse, when he tried his hardest to sound out the squiggly shapes, Bharara and Obama sounded eerily similar, possibly because he has yet to master the correct mouth movents for the squiggles ‘b’ and ‘m’.
Obviously a cospiracy was afoot; but it was obvious to Manbaby that Bharara and Obama were the same person, and the sheer genius required to untangle this long-standing deception proved he was right. What more evidence could anybody need?
Bharara/Obama was one Bad (or pathetic) man pretending to be two men.
He had to go.