Tell our Senators: Justice in the Senate
Call BOTH of your Senators.
Call Script
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
(1) While MAGA Republicans are rolling out ludicrous investigations in the House, we need you to make sure the Senate Judiciary Committee is documenting the chilling details we have just learned about ongoing efforts to cover up the compromising of a US president by a foreign power:
(a) What influence did the tenure of Charles McDonigal in the DOJ and FBI have on the 2016 US election?
(b) How did Attorney General Barr shape Special Counsel Durham’s investigation and why weren’t all the leads investigated?
(2) Blue Slips: Has Chairman Durbin forgotten what Republican Senators did to President Obama? They made a mockery of the blue-slip process then and are going for a repeat now. Please stop the blue-slip process right now. It can be reinstated later, in December 2024 if necessary. You must continue the vital work of diversifying the federal bench racially and professionally.
Background
Blue Slips
The blue-slip process is a courtesy that allows Judiciary Committee Senators to issue blue slips to question, examine, and sometimes prevent the nomination of candidates from their states to the federal bench. It used to be employed in good faith, with the understanding that Senators knew their state’s candidates best. However, Republican Judiciary Committee members tossed good faith out the window during President Obama’s term, using blue slips to stall the selection and confirmation of more than 100 of President Obama’s nominees in order to hold open those seats—17 of them on appellate courts—for the next Republican president. That ended up being Trump, and so the Republicans stole these nominations from President Obama, and and under Trump slanted those federal courts to the right.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin is in favor of keeping blue slips as they are, perhaps because when the GOP took over the White House, they got rid of blue slips for appellate nominees but kept them in place for district court judges. We think he should listen to Obama White House Counsel’s Office alum Chris Kang, who notes that if Chairman Durbin allows Republicans to block Biden from filling trial judge nominees in their home states, it “really is going to hamper president Biden’s ability to leave a mark on the judiciary.”
Charles McGonigal
On 23 January, we learned that Charles McGonigal, the FBI special agent who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign’s Russian connections, had been arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. He seems to have gone on to work for Oleg Deripaska, the former employer and creditor of Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort. This is bad news for Trump personally, but also for the FBI New York, the FBI generally, and for the US.
McGonigal’s indictment requires that we revisit the 2016 Russian influence operation on Trump’s behalf and the oddly weak American response. Now we know a crucial detail that was not included in the five-volume report of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Moscow’s influence operation succeeded in moving minds and institutions to ensure that Hillary Clinton lost and Donald Trump won in part because a trusted FBI agent, in charge of protecting us against this sort of operation, was corrupt.
As Professor Timothy Snyder notes, “The McGonigal spy scandal brings with it the trauma of 2016. Russian support for Trump put us on this timeline: the one with the Covid deaths, the Putin worship, the coup attempt, the Big Lie. But the enduring source of pain, I think, is our half-awareness that this did not have to happen, that we could have done better in 2016, that our institutions let us down. This is hard to face, but must be faced; and the arrest of FBI counterintelligence specialist Charles McGonigal gives us a chance.” We need Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to document these transgressions for history.
Barr’s Durham Investigation
It seemed like Attorney General Garland was bending over too far backward to appear fair, when he allowed Bill Barr’s highly political Durham Investigation (intended to undermine the FBI’s basis for investigating Trump) to continue, because the two-volume Mueller Report and five-volume Senate Intelligence Report had documented ample justification for the FBI investigation of Russian influence on the 2016 election. We felt vindicated when the Durham Investigation concluded with so little to show for it.
But perhaps AG Garland was giving them enough rope with which to hang themselves. The Durham Investigation was even worse than we thought, according to the New York Times’s interview with over a dozen officials involved in it. Among the failures of the Barr-Durham team that the Senate Judiciary Committee should put into the Congressional Record are these questionable decisions :
Not following up on a tip from Italian officials about some suspicious financial dealings of Trump’s
Using Russian intelligence information to hack the email of an aide to George Soros
Resignations of team members over prosecutorial ethics
References
Blue Slips
How to Stop a Senator From Blocking a Federal Judge - The New York Times, 2/06/2023
Senate GOP used “blue slips” to block Obama judicial nominees, but now wants to trash the practice, 5/25/2017
McGonigal Arrest
Did the FBI’s Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump? Craig Unger, 02/03/2023, TNR
The Specter of 2016 - by Timothy Snyder - Thinking about...
The Trauma of 2016 Spy Scandal, part 2 - by Timothy Snyder
Barr’s Durham Investigation
Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Trump-Russia Investigation - The New York Times No Paywall
“Friends” Across the Aisle