Chickenshit Club Notes:

• In 2002, James Comey was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan. When giving a speech to the criminal division, Comey asked the audience: “Who here has never had an acquittal or a hung jury?”  People proudly raised their hands.  Comey looked out over the assembled and said: “You are members of what we like to call the Chickenshit Club.”
• Comey was talking about the tendency for attorneys to go after easy targets that provide celebratory newspaper headlines rather than bringing cases that would right the biggest injustices. He was talking about the incentives that existed (and still exist and should be resisted) for prosecutors to advance their careers through wins, not fights.
• As Eisinger writes: Prosecutors should “…be righteous, not careerist….Victory in the courtroom should be a secondary concern, meaning that government lawyers should neither seek to win at all costs nor duck a valid case out of fear of losing. Federal prosecutors should not be judged on their trial record, whether they are criticized, or what the political consequences might be of their prosecutions.”
• Sadly, the very thing that Comey was criticizing, became standard practice in the SDNY and also in the Justice Department itself.
• Eisinger’s book is about how we wound up with a prosecutorial system that makes it standard practice to settle out of court white collar, corporate and political crimes. It is about how white shoe law firms, corporations and big money interests pressured the legal system so that it now works for their benefit not for the benefit of the society at large.
• This book is essential reading. It provides the context in which to understand many of the recent failures of the system to hold high level people accountable.
• If we had a functioning justice system for high level offenders, people like Manafort, Stone, Trump would all be in jail rather than involved in running a country.

George Bush, Barack Obama, and the CIA Torture Cover-Up

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) held up military assistance funds for Ukraine that had been approved by the Congress and cleared by the State Department.

Some officials in the OMB knew that holding up properly approved funds was illegal.  At least two of them resigned.

The Administration struggling to find a legal method for withholding the funds.  They opted for a strategy that required the hold be reapproved every few days.

Because career officials saw the dodge, the con, the administration had to get rid of career people and replace them with political appointees who either didn’t know or didn’t care that what they were doing was illegal.

This is exactly what the “drug dealers” did with the Ambassador to Ukraine.  They got rid of her and replace her with a political appointee who would do what the President said even if it was illegal.

This is exactly what the administration is doing with appointments to the federal courts.  The Republicans are rushing to confirm judges who are outrageously unqualified for the positions they are being appointed to.  These are people who wouldn’t get near a federal judgeship without the favor of the Federalist Society and the Republicans.

When forced through the Senate by McConnell, they will be beholden to those who secured them their cushy positions.  These men and women are either ideologues or incompetent to analyze and understand the law and therefore more likely to decide cases as their Republican benefactors tell them.  They know they would never be in the position without the advocacy of the Republicans and therefore don’t’ care if their legal reasoning is unsound.  Make no mistake about it, if these Federalist Society lawyers take over the federal bench, we will have no legal system in the traditional sense of the word.

There will be no traditional sense of the word.  Once you have destroyed meaning, destroyed language and the shared meaning of language, you have destroyed the legal system and then the democracy.

We can’t allow them to do this.