{"id":177913,"date":"2019-05-06T18:48:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T23:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/06\/remember-the-times-when-i-said-that-it-was-the-crime-not-the-coverup\/"},"modified":"2019-05-06T18:48:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-06T23:48:00","slug":"remember-the-times-when-i-said-that-it-was-the-crime-not-the-coverup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/05\/06\/remember-the-times-when-i-said-that-it-was-the-crime-not-the-coverup\/","title":{"rendered":"Remember the Times When I Said That It Was the Crime, Not the Coverup?"},"content":{"rendered":"
It appears that hundreds of former federal prosecutors have signed a letter in agreement<\/a>:<\/div>\n

More than 450 former federal prosecutors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations have signed on to a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III\u2019s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump \u2014 if not for the office he holds. <\/p>\n

The statement \u2014 signed by myriad former career government employees as well as high-profile political appointees \u2014 offers a rebuttal to Attorney General William P. Barr\u2019s determination that the evidence Mueller uncovered was \u201cnot sufficient\u201d to establish that Trump committed a crime.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cEach of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s report<\/a> would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice,\u201d the former federal prosecutors wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe emphasize that these are not matters of close professional judgment,\u201d they added. \u201cOf course, there are potential defenses or arguments that could be raised in response to an indictment of the nature we describe here. .\u2009.\u2009. But, to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice \u2014 the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution \u2014 runs counter to logic and our experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The statement is notable for the number of people who signed it \u2014 375 as of early Monday afternoon, growing to 459 in the hours after it published \u2014 and the positions and political affiliations of some on the list. It was posted online<\/a> Monday afternoon; those signing it did not explicitly address what, if anything, they hope might happen next.<\/p>\n

Among the high-profile signers are Bill Weld, a former U.S. attorney and Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who is running against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination; Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration; John S. Martin, a former U.S. attorney and federal judge appointed to his posts by Republican presidents; Paul Rosenzweig, who served as senior counsel to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr; and Jeffrey Harris, who worked as the principal assistant to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was at the Justice Department in the Reagan administration.<\/p>\n

The list also includes more than 20 former U.S. attorneys and more than 100 people with at least 20 years of service at the Justice Department \u2014 most of them former career officials. The signers worked in every presidential administration since that of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former federal prosecutor, joined the letter after news of it broke, and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted his support for its premise<\/a> . <\/p>\n

The signatures were collected by the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, which counts Justice Department alumni among its staff and was contacted about the statement last week by a group of former federal prosecutors, said Justin Vail, an attorney at Protect Democracy.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fact is that conspiring to interfere with a federal investigation is a crime, even if it is later determined that no crime happened, and even if your co-conspirators refuse your instructions.<\/p>\n

I am looking forward to Mueller’s testimony on this, which has tentatively been scheduled for next Wednesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears that hundreds of former federal prosecutors have signed a letter in agreement: More than 450 former federal prosecutors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations have signed on to a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III\u2019s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump \u2014 if not for the office …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[581,435,573,407,374],"class_list":["post-177913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-conspiracy","tag-crimes","tag-donald-trump","tag-justice","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177913"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}