This Lame Duck Session will be pretty interesting...

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_MeDotOrg
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This Lame Duck Session will be pretty interesting...

Post by _MeDotOrg »

Interesting? To say the least. After Tuesday, both Trump and Mueller are no longer constrained by the niceties of pre-election decorum. Expect a lot of findings released, committee investigations started and people fired.

Here's a fascinating tidbit from the Citizens for responsibility and ethics in Washington. On April 24th, the White House made this interesting notification:

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The signature at the bottom is of the recently resigned White House Council Don McGahn. Conspicuously absent is any justification for the waiver.

If Donald Trump fires Rod Rosenstein, the next person in line as Robert Mueller's boss Noel Francisco, the Solicitor General. The Solicitor General's former law firm, Jones Day, represents the Trump Presidential Campaign in the Special Council investigation. Mr. Francisco has an ongoing financial relationship with Jones Day as well.

CREW wrote:The first of the three obstacles Mr. Francisco faces – his former employment relationship with Jones Day – raises an issue under the Trump ethics Executive Order. As required by that Executive Order, Mr. Francisco signed an ethics pledge in which he promised that, for two years after joining the government, he would not participate in any investigation in which Jones Day represents a client. That promise means he must stay out of the Special Counsel investigation until at least late January 2019.

However, CREW has discovered that the Trump administration issued Mr. Francisco an ethics waiver on April 24, 2018. The waiver relieves him from any obligation to honor his ethics pledge to recuse from investigations involving Jones Day. The waiver states only that he is relieved of this obligation and offers no justification whatsoever. It simply waives the obligation, thereby eliminating one of the three obstacles to his overseeing the Special Counsel investigation.

The waiver is troubling for a couple of other reasons, as well. First, the Office of Government Ethics maintains an online list of all ethics pledge waivers issued by the Trump administration to political appointees serving outside the White House. Notably absent from this list is Mr. Francisco’s waiver. At least one more recent waiver was included in the list, so it is strange that Mr. Francisco’s waiver was left off the list.

So, nothing to see here, folks, just keep moving? Actually, this might have been a contingency plan McGahn could have been forced to accept after McGahn said he would resign if Trump fired Mueller. Something to watch...
"The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization."
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