“Lay on Macduff, and damned be him who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ ”
It has been quite some time since I have had to revert to quoting William Shakespeare, but today it seems appropriate since we are surrounded by death, ineptitude, skullduggery and incompetence — constant themes in the Bard’s memorable writings — and that sums up just the past few months of President Donald Trump’s failure to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
As I write this, there are congressional hearings underway that begin to shine a light on the failure of the Trump administration to follow the science designed to properly handle the pandemic and which, only hindsight will confirm, led to thousands of deaths that could and should have even avoided. Instead, the man who fancies himself as the master of the art of dealmaking — complete with flummox, distraction, histrionics and, yes, flat-out lying — dithered in the art world while eschewing the scientific realities that needed immediate implementation.
And America, as we know all too well, has been and continues to pay a very steep and horrific price for such failure.
In the meantime, the art of Trump’s distraction continues. This time through the actions of Attorney General William Barr, who cloaks himself in the cloth of justice while he wolfishly devours all semblance of fairness under the law.
I am talking about Barr’s decision to fall for Trump’s claims of the Russia “hoax” — a claim dispelled by every U.S. intelligence agency and all of the alphabet soup departments that fall thereunder — and do his best to do Trump’s bidding. As opposed to doing the bidding of the people of the United States, to whom he is supposed to owe his allegiance but, apparently, doesn’t.
The attorney general decided that Gen. Mike Flynn’s case — the one that followed his firing by Trump for lying to Vice President Mike Pence and which was predicated by his lying to FBI agents and to which he pleaded guilty what seems like a long time ago — should be dismissed in the interests of justice because Barr decided that law enforcement acted improperly.
By the way, this happens sometimes. Not at the attorney general level but in prosecutor’s offices across the country. Sometimes the prosecutors screw up, and it is incumbent upon them to ask the court to dismiss the charges. That is the way justice is supposed to work.
And that may be the case with Gen. Flynn. May be, I said. But how would the public ever know the truth if the AG decides to bury it amid the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s Twitter rants?
Usually, the federal judge, in deference to the prosecutor’s request to dismiss and the defendant’s obvious agreement, does just that. After all, federal judges are people too and they have caseloads that demand that they move them along. A voluntary dismissal here and there helps in that effort.
And that is what makes Federal District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s actions in the Flynn case so unusual. Judge Sullivan has been an outstanding jurist for decades. In his career he has been appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, by President George H.W. Bush to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, and by President Bill Clinton to the Federal District Court.
Rather than do what is expected of him, Judge Sullivan took a page from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” Rather than accede to the attorney general’s decision to end the Flynn matter in relative silence and confine it to the obscurity of the history books, he decided to “lay on.”
Judge Sullivan, rather than gavel the case over, decided to appoint a retired federal judge to look into and report back to the court the facts and circumstances of the highly unusual about-face that Trump’s Justice Department had just performed for Gen. Flynn and Attorney General Barr.
That’s another thing federal judges can do. They have the inherent power to act as they deem necessary to protect the independence of the judiciary, which is a co-equal branch of government, a fact that is often obscured in the give and take of today’s political mayhem.
I don’t know what this process will ultimately determine, but it is heartening that Judge Sullivan had the courage to say, “hold, enough” to any thought of abusing the court in what seems clearly to be a quest to undermine justice, all in the name of furthering Trump’s hoax on the American people.
“Damned be him” indeed.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun