As I said yesterday, the notion that Attorney General William Barr is going to resign is absolute nonsense, and the bogus reports that Barr would even consider stepping down was in response to defuse the hastily-called meeting of the Federal Judges Association. The plan worked beautifully as the meeting scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed until further notice.
A group of federal judges hastily postponed an emergency meeting that was scheduled to take place Wednesday to discuss concerns about President Donald Trump and the Justice Department's intervention in politically charged cases.
Megan Cruz, the executive director of the Federal Judges Association, said the meeting was set to occur Wednesday afternoon and the group was considering whether to issue a statement afterwards. But later in the day, Cruz said that the conference call between the 14 judges who serve as officers on the Executive Committee had been postponed.
Cruz offered no further details and did not respond to questions asking whether the group had been asked to reschedule the meeting.
The fact that the little known independent group -- originally established in the 1980s to respond to issues concerning judicial compensation -- was having the meeting in the first place drew the attention in Washington on Tuesday and Trump made it the subject of one of his tweets.
"I hope the Federal Judges Association will discuss the tremendous FISA Court abuse that has taken place with respect to the Mueller Investigation Scam, including the forging of documents and knowingly using the fake and totally discredited Dossier before the Court. Thank you!" the President tweeted.
Judge Cynthia Rufe, the group's president, told USA Today that there were "plenty of issues we are concerned about." Her comments drew some criticism as judges are barred from commenting on pending controversies.
The cancellation came after a source told CNN's Kaitlan Collins Tuesday night that Attorney General William Barr had considered resigning over Trump's tweets discussing ongoing controversies and attacking the judge hearing the case.
Mission accomplished. The meeting will now most likely never happen, as I said yesterday, Trump has already appointed nearly a quarter of all serving federal judges in the last three years. Some of those judges are in the FJA, and there's got to be influence among the executive committee there.
The rumors around Barr were enough to stop the meeting. Barr couldn't have asked for a better outcome.
Meanwhile, all indications are that the Trump regime pardon machine is becoming the new normal.
President Donald Trump is considering issuing additional pardons and commutations and has assembled a team of advisers to recommend and vet candidates for clemency, a White House official confirmed Thursday.
The process is normally handled by the Department of Justice, but the White House has taken the lead, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, heading the effort, and is joined by White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
The Washington Post first reported Wednesday night that Trump had put together this team, which the report said is basically an informal task force of at least a half-dozen allies of the president. According to the report, the group has been meeting since late last year.
This comes as speculation swirls around whether Trump will pardon his longtime ally Roger Stone who is expected to be sentenced by a federal judge on Thursday. Early in the morning, Trump tweeted a video clip from a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News that suggested the president is considering pardoning Stone.
Stone got 40 months, a far cry from the 7-9 years originally recommended. It's important to note that all of this: the pardons from this week and the ones certainly coming later for Stone, Manafort and Flynn, the Justice Department prosecutors leaving high profile cases, the investigations into those cases by the DoJ, and the coming mass purge of everyone involved in the Mueller probe, all of this is going through Bill Barr. He could stop this at any point, but he won't.
Trump isn't the problem. It's the people who continue to enable his worst impulses, like Bill Barr, who are the real villains.
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