Monday, February 12, 2018

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

As I told you Saturday, Rachel Brand, the number 3 at the DoJ tendered her resignation over the weekend.  I told you what it meant then:

Trump can search more carefully for somebody willing to fire Mueller now with Brand gone, that is if he doesn't already have somebody in mind. My guess is that Brand was asked if she would do it, or knew that she very soon would be, and decided to leave rather than be a part of it. Her departure is a thundering alarm that Trump is moving sooner rather than later on this.

Turns out I was exactly right.

The Justice Department's No. 3 attorney had been unhappy with her job for months before the department announced her departure on Friday, according to multiple sources close to Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.
Brand grew frustrated by vacancies at the department and feared she would be asked to oversee the Russia investigation, the sources said
She will be leaving the Justice Department in the coming weeks to take a position with Walmart as the company's executive vice president of global governance and corporate secretary, a job change that had been in the works for some time, the sources said.

Imagine that.  Of course, the only way she would have been asked to oversee the Russian investigation into Trump was if Rod Rosenstein, the number 2 at DoJ and the man who appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller, was either recused or fired.

As far back as last fall, Brand had expressed to friends that she felt overwhelmed and unsupported in her job, especially as many key positions under her jurisdiction had still not been filled with permanent, Senate-confirmed officials. 
Four of the 13 divisions overseen by the associate attorney general remain unfilled, including the civil rights division and the civil division, over one year into the Trump administration.

This is important too, as currently the Trump DoJ basically has no civil rights division, and no intention of prosecuting federal civil rights cases.  At all.  Regardless of the outcome of Mueller's probe, the damage Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have already done to civil rights in America is incalculable.

But that kind of obvious disdain for the law brings us back to the real reason Brand left: Trump's obstruction of justice continues daily.

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