Donald Trump's Presidency Is a Saturday Night Massacre That Never Ends

[babylonsister]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/william-barr-donald-trump-justice-department-geoffrey-berman-roger-stone-michael-flynn-1018964/


June 23, 2020 6:00AM ET
Donald Trump’s Presidency Is a Saturday Night Massacre That Never Ends
The Trump administration’s assault on judges, watchdogs, and the ideal of impartial justice is ripped straight from the modern autocrat’s playbook, experts say
By Andy Kroll

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“In a normal political environment, a week’s worth of Saturday Night Massacres would lead to [Trump’s] impeachment and probably removal,” Greenberg says. “But we have such dysfunctional polarization, primarily the unwillingness of Republicans to step up and see Trump for what he is, that we’re not in a normal political environment anymore.”

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And the Trump administration’s attack on the justice system doesn’t end with the Barr-led Justice Department. In recent months, the administration removed multiple inspectors general in key oversight positions in what appeared to be retaliation for decisions that angered the president or his allies.

One of the ousted inspectors general was Steve Linick, the State Department’s top watchdog who had opened several probes focusing on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and an arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Another was Michael Atkinson, the IG for the intelligence community who had vetted and alerted Congress to the whistleblower complaint that helped spark the Trump impeachment inquiry. A third was Glenn Fine, who before he was fired was oversee the spending of the Trump administration’s multitrillion-dollar coronavirus relief package, one of the largest of its kind in U.S. history.

After Trump’s election, as Ian Bassin, the former Obama White House lawyer, prepared to launch his new group Protect Democracy, he and his colleagues consulted with scholars who’ve studied autocracy in places such as Venezuela, Hungary, and Turkey and asked those scholars a question: What do modern autocrats have in common?

“It turns out the playbook is the same all over the world,” Bassin says. “There are basically six things all modern autocrats do and one of them is they politicize independent institutions like law enforcement.” In other words, they capture the referees.

“From the get go, you’ve seen Trump try to do that,” Bassin says.