Tag: abcs this week
#EndorseThis: Preet Bharara Shreds Trump Defense Against Comey

#EndorseThis: Preet Bharara Shreds Trump Defense Against Comey

Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who shares with James Comey the honor of being fired by Donald Trump under highly questionable circumstances, sat a few rows behind the former FBI director when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8. On Sunday, Bharara discussed that hearing with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, where his measured responses did not quite conceal his disdain for the president.

As a law enforcement veteran who has worked with both Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller, the former New York prosecutor laid out the critical facts revealed by Comey and placed them in context:

“You have uncontroverted evidence, from someone who is under oath, that on at least one occasion the President of the United States cleared the room of his vice president and his attorney general, and told his director of the FBI that he should essentially drop a case against his former national security adviser.

“And whether or not that is impeachable or indictable, that’s a very serious thing.”

Pressed by Stephanopoulos to say whether Trump indeed had obstructed justice, Bharara replied judiciously: “There’s absolutely evidence to begin a case” for obstruction. But, he added, “I think it’s important for all sorts of armchair speculators in the law to be clear that no one knows right now whether there is a provable case of obstruction… It’s also true that there’s no basis to say there’s no obstruction.”

But without additional evidence — such as tapes of their conversations — how would a jury determine whom to believe in a “he-said-he-said” such as this case?

Bharara permitted himself a tiny smile. “You look at the surrounding circumstances and the indicia of truthfulness,” he said. “And those things include contemporaneous statements to other people; they include the track record of the witness; they include whether one of the ‘he’s’ in the ‘he-said-he-said’ has a track record for lying or not, both on the air and in legal proceedings such as depositions — and I believe there is such a track record with respect to one of the parties.”

Now what could he mean by that?

h/t Raw Story

WATCH: The GOP’s Solution To The Christie Crisis — Jeb Bush?

With the presidential prospects of Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) swirling down the drain as Bridgegate unfolds, the Republican establishment has a new business-friendly candidate in mind: Jeb Bush.

That’s the word from Bill Kristol, head cheerleader for the Iraq War and the man who first suggested Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate.

“Having talked to various Republican establishment types — I’m pro-Tea Party — but anyway, the establishment types over the last 24 hours when you ask them about the Christie situation, there’s a two-word answer: Jeb Bush,” he said on ABC’s This Week. “And I’m really struck by how much Christie was kind of the establishment donor-class favorite, I think, for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. They are beginning to, maybe foolishly, they are beginning to write them off.”

As our Joe Conason pointed out the last time the GOP imagined Jeb Bush as its savior, the obstacles the former governor of Florida would face in a presidential run are multitudinous:

Leaving aside the historic burden of his family name, Jeb Bush carries a résumé of dubious episodes that stretch back three decades, to his early days as a Florida real estate developer and consultant, when he told reporters that he intended to become “very wealthy.” Among the partners he encountered in that quest was one Miguel Recarey, whose International Medical Centers was accused of one of the largest Medicare swindles of all time. Before Recarey fled the country ahead of several federal indictments, Jeb had made a call on his behalf to Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler – a cabinet secretary serving at the pleasure of his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, who was then president. Recarey paid him $75,000 for that lobbying errand, which forestalled government action to stop Recarey’s skimming of millions in Medicare dollars. Although Jeb has denied that Recarey — a mob associate — paid him to call Heckler, both the fugitive and the former HHS secretary have since confirmed those circumstances.

Jeb soon did amass a fortune in real estate, mostly with the assistance of the Cuban-American community in South Florida. He returned the favor by seeking a presidential pardon from George H.W. Bush for the late Orlando Bosch, a murderous anti-Castro militant denounced by his father’s own attorney general Richard Thornburgh as “an unreformed terrorist” responsible for killing dozens of innocent people.

Although he never hesitates to denounce government regulation and praise the unfettered free market, Jeb didn’t exactly reject the federal teat when one of his own investments went south during the savings-and-loan crisis. With an infusion of more than $4.5 million from the Treasury, Jeb and his partners managed to hold on to a downtown Miami office building in 1989 that they soon sold for $8.7 million. In other words, Bush benefited from a government “bailout.”

Bill Kristol