U.S. Judges Call Emergency Meeting Over Fears About William Barr And Trump

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U.S. Judges Call Emergency Meeting Over Fears About William Barr And Trump

Published February 17, 2020

Quote:

An association of federal judges is holding an emergency meeting Tuesday to address concerns about the interventions in politically sensitive cases by Attorney General William Barr and President Donald Trump, USA Today reported.

The Federal Judges Association, which has about 1,100 members, called for the meeting last week after Trump attacked federal prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation for his longtime pal and convicted felon Roger Stone and then soon after the Justice Department pulled back the recommendation.

Trump also criticized the judge who is presiding over Stone’s case.

“There are plenty of issues that we are concerned about,” U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, the president of the association, told the newspaper. “We’ll talk all of this through.”

The issues are so serious that the judges “could not wait” for the association’s April conference to address them, according to Rufe, a judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania who was appointed by George W. Bush in 2002.

The meeting will be arranged via a conference call involving 15 to 20 officers and members of the association’s executive committee, Rufe told USA Today. The judge said she doesn’t yet know if the association will share the results of the meeting.

More than 2,000 former Justice Department officials and federal prosecutors called on Barr to resign in an open letter Sunday. The letter condemned Barr’s treatment of the Stone case as “openly and repeatedly” flouting the “fundamental principle” of equal justice.

The attorney general has come under intensifying pressure after the Justice Department overturned its own prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years for Stone. He was convicted of seven felonies, including lying to investigators and witness tampering.

Barr has also ordered a review of the case against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who initially pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his communication with the Russian ambassador before Trump was sworn into office. Flynn withdrew his guilty plea last month.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/us-judges-call-emergency-meeting-over-fears-about-william-barr-and-trump-report/ar-BB106nbg

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Over 1,100 Former Justice Department Officials Call For Barr To Resign

Following the fallout from handling of Roger Stone's case, over 1,100 former Department of Justice officials have signed a letter calling for the resignation of Attorney General William Barr. One of those signees, Nelson Cunningham, joins Alex Witt to explain why the letter is condemning Barr's "interference in the fair administration of justice."

Published February 16, 2020

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This sounds like a lot of hysteria to me. The President is the executive branch. He gives orders to the people who work for him. What's the big deal?

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@Real Music,

Over here the relationship between Barr and Trump is all about soft drinks.

As you know Trump has a golf club in Scotland. Barr is the name of Scotland's top soft drinks manufacturer, known for two unique drinks Tizer and Irn Bru. Irn Bru is Scotland's national soft drink, it's bright orange but it's been banned from Trump's golf course because it stains.

Quote:

White House diplomacy has dipped to a new low after it emerged that Donald Trump’s luxury golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland, has banned the sale of Irn-Bru on the premises.

The ban came to light after guests asked for Scotland’s favourite non-alcoholic beverage to be supplied at an event but were refused because staff were concerned about potential spills.

The combination of colourants that give the fizzy drink its distinctive luminous orange hue are believed to be responsible for its notorious indelibility.

The five-star resort on the Ayrshire coast has recently benefited from a £200m upgrade, which is believed to have included hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on carpets.

Turnberry’s general manager, Ralph Porciani, told the Ayrshire Post: “We can’t have it staining when to replace the ballroom carpet would be £500,000 alone.

“We have villas here with Irn-Bru stains in the carpets which I can’t let.”

The latest affront comes after a change in recipe cut the sugar content of the drink by almost half following the introduction of the UK government’s sugar tax, prompting fans to stockpile cans of the original version.

The piecemeal ban on Scotland’s other national drink, long avowed as the ultimate hangover cure, has caused inevitable outrage on social media and will likely swell the protests already planned should Trump visit Scotland as part of his trip to the UK in July.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/09/trump-angers-scots-with-ban-on-irn-bru-at-luxury-golf-resort<br />

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71wrNgM1GiL._SL1500_.jpg

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@oralloy,

Quote:

This sounds like a lot of hysteria to me. The President is the executive branch. He gives orders to the people who work for him. What's the big deal?

Umm...wow...

- Conflict of interest
- Nepotism
- friends scratching friends backs
- inequality before the law
- who you know, rather than what you've done
- encouraging corruption
- precedents for the above

No...not much wrong with interfering with judicial proceedings that affect your friends or your reputation...not much wrong at all...

2 Replies

@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

Quote:
This sounds like a lot of hysteria to me. The President is the executive branch. He gives orders to the people who work for him. What's the big deal?
Umm...wow...

- Conflict of interest
- Nepotism
- friends scratching friends backs
- inequality before the law
- who you know, rather than what you've done
- encouraging corruption
- precedents for the above

No...not much wrong with interfering with judicial proceedings that affect your friends or your reputation...not much wrong at all...

Wow, is that what the liberal media is telling you guys?

Crazy. The TDS is getting bad.

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@vikorr,

It's hardly interfering.

Prosecutors get to decide what charges to bring, and against who. Prosecutors also get to make sentencing recommendations.

Prosecutorial discretion is not unjust. Courts still require the prosecution to prove someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt before they are found guilty. Judges are not required to adhere to recommendations that are offered to them.

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@oralloy,

Quote:

It's hardly interfering.

Riiiiiight. That's why he bothered saying anything in the first place - because it wouldn't achieve anything....only his motivation was to achieve something....and the results show he did.

And it's not like he doesn't have a history of sacking people in the law enforcement system who go against him. Nor bringing in people who do as he says....

So the first is similar behaviour he displays towards other other people within his government. He has a history, and this behaviour is consistent with it.

1 Reply

@McGentrix,

Quote:

Wow, is that what the liberal media is telling you guys?

Don't know which media you are referring to. I don't watch much news, and don't read much news. Further, I don't live in the U.S. Your politics are largely your own, though they affect the rest of the world to some degree. In any case, I was responding to the commentary here on the actions of a leader of a democratic State.

It is by the way, my experience that the first people to throw accusations of 'youve obviously been influence by' (and any really), particularly when the accusation is without explanation - are those who are largely what they accuse others of.

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

Riiiiiight. That's why he bothered saying anything in the first place - because it wouldn't achieve anything....only his motivation was to achieve something....and the results show he did.

Of course he was trying to achieve something. That is his job.

When someone does the job that he was hired to do, that's hardly interfering.

vikorr wrote:

And it's not like he doesn't have a history of sacking people in the law enforcement system who go against him. Nor bringing in people who do as he says....

People who work for him are supposed to do what he tells them to do. That is the nature of employment.

2 Replies

@oralloy,

Quote:

Of course he was trying to achieve something. That is his job.

You need to make up your mind. He criticises a judicial process to get a favourable outcome for his friend...which you say he's not doing...then say he's trying to achieve something (obviously trying to get a favourable outcome for his friend)

History, which you are so fond of as relates to freedom...shows that heads of state interfering with judicial processes is a bad thing. Though current dictatorships don't consider it to be a bad thing.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

Quote:

People who work for him are supposed to do what he tells them to do. That is the nature of employment.

That is the nature of a private business. Not the nature of democracy, nor a democratic government.

1 Reply

@vikorr,

That is incorrect. Government employees also have to do what their boss tells them to do.

1 Reply

@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

You need to make up your mind. He criticises a judicial process to get a favourable outcome for his friend...which you say he's not doing...

What I said was that he was not interfering. When a prosecutor exercises prosecutorial discretion, that hardly counts as interference.

vikorr wrote:

then say he's trying to achieve something (obviously trying to get a favourable outcome for his friend)

Correct. Prosecutors have the right to make sentencing recommendations. They also have the right to not charge someone with a crime at all.

2 Replies

@oralloy,

I've found that we humans can justify almost anything we want to ourselves. Al Capone thought he was an upstanding citizen. Many people even worse than him justify their behaviours to themselves no matter what is said. I remember one member on this forum arguing black and blue that pre-pubescent sex was okay (this is made purely to illustrate that we can justify just about anything to ourselves) over hundreds of pages in these forums. This type of behaviour (over all sorts of behaviours) occurs time and again within society.

So it seems to me Oralloy that you desperately want to believe that it's not interfering. That's your choice. It doesn't make it any less interference. I've no doubt you understand that I'm correct in this - though your motivations for wanting to justify this to yourself I don't know.

2 Replies

@oralloy,

then say he's trying to achieve something (obviously trying to get a favourable outcome for his friend).

Correct. Prosecutors have the right to make sentencing recommendations. They also have the right to not charge someone with a crime at all.

And here you admit, once again, that it's interfering, but don't want to stick to the definition of political interference in the judicial process

You can do a search on 'judicial independence' or 'judicial independence in democracy'. Each of them affirm that what Trump is doing is interfering. But I'm sure you already know this.

Judicial independence. Judicial independence is the concept that the judiciary should be independent from the other branches of government. That is, courts should not be subject to improper influence from the other branches of government or from private or partisan interests.

The reason why judicial independence is of such public importance is that a free society exists only so long as it is governed by the rule of law - the rule which binds the governors and the governed, administered impartially and treating equally all those who seek its remedies or against whom its remedies are sought.

As a practical matter, the type of judicial independence that is widely considered both the most important and the most difficult to achieve is independence from other governmental actors

You can also do a search on 'political interference judiciary' - and find plenty of similarities to Trumps interference (usually to much worse degree). But this too, I'm sure you already know.

1 Reply

@vikorr,

No. When I say he is not interfering, I am not admitting to interference. I am doing the opposite. I am denying interference.

Nothing that Mr. Trump is doing is an attack on judicial independence.

0 Replies

@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

I've no doubt you understand that I'm correct in this - though your motivations for wanting to justify this to yourself I don't know.

You aren't correct. Prosecutors are supposed to make sentencing recommendations. Prosecutors are supposed to make decisions over whether or not to bring charges against people.

That's not interference. That is what prosecutors are supposed to do.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

Quote:

Prosecutors are supposed to make decisions over whether or not to bring charges against people.

I'll refer you to my two previous posts - as your post once again, highlights that you are trying to convince only yourself. Because we both agree on the above quote, and you know very well the above quote isn't what is being discussed - it's the political interference with the above quote.

1 Reply

@vikorr,

All I'm doing is stating the truth. I do not need to be convinced of the truth, as I am already aware of it.

Presumably you have a career. What it is isn't important. But when you go to work and do your job, is that "interference"?

The President is just doing his job and exercising his normal prosecutorial powers.

2 Replies

U.S. Judges Call Emergency Meeting Over Fears About William Barr And Trump

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