Ralph Nader's Blog, page 30

Letter to Attorney General-Designate Merrick Garland

March 8, 2021

Merrick Garland
Attorney General-Designate
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Re:  Criminal violations of the Hatch Act, 18 U.S.C. 610

Dear General Garland:

Enclosed is correspondence (including attachments) we had with predecessor Attorney General William Barr requesting the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate credible evidence of criminal violations of the Hatch Act, 18 U.S.C. 610 involving former President Donald Trump’s commandeering of federal property or employees to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, i.e., gratuitously ordering his name on CARES Treasury checks and using White House stationary to insinuate to Direct Deposit recipients of COVID-19 relief funds that he was their benefactor. The significant purpose of the Act was to prevent the exertion of federal government power to control public property and resources to advance the private political ambitions of high officeholders, including the electoral prospects of incumbents.

Attorney General Barr did not extend us the courtesy of a reply or even acknowledge receipt. We expect a marked change in your leadership, initiating a responsive Department of Justice, after four years utter corruption and contempt for the laws.

Since our last letter to Mr. Barr dated June 6, 2020, multiple additional instances of seeming criminal violations of the Hatch Act emerged in connection with Mr. Trump’s seeking and obtaining the Republican Party’s nomination to be re-elected President of the United States.  Among other things, Mr. Trump formally accepted the nomination in a speech delivered from the White House, and numerous prominent officials spoke to the Republican National Convention there or on other federal property promoting Mr. Trump’s candidacy, for example, secretary of state Mike Pompeo, national security advisor Robert O’Brien, and Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

Mark Meadows, confronted with unprecedented serial violations of the Hatch Act, evasively retorted on August 26, 2020 to POLITICO, “Nobody outside the Beltway really cares.” But whether Meadow’s evasion is true or not, officials inside the Beltway, including the Attorney General, must care about the multitudinous flagrant violations because they are bound by oath to enforce federal criminal prohibitions.  And that obligation is at its zenith when government officials are the suspects.  As Justice Louis D. Brandeis taught in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928) (dissenting opinion):

“Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

We thus reiterate the request we made of Mr. Barr that you appoint a special counsel to investigate the volumes of credible evidence that Mr. Trump and former high- level White House and Cabinet officials violated the Hatch Act by using federal employees or federal property to engage in “political activity” to influence the 2020 presidential election against his competitors.

The predecessor administration normalized official criminality across the board and contempt for the Constitution culminating in the January 6, 2021 insurrection against the Capitol and the rule of law.  You have a duty to restore regular constitutional order for the benefit of the living and their posterity.  Enforcement of the Hatch Act would be a decisive beginning.

We thank you in advance for your consideration.

Ralph Nader                               Bruce Fein                                 Lou Fisher

Link to attachments

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Reporters’ Alert: Launching a New Website

By Ralph Nader
March 4, 2021

Reporters at major newspapers and magazines are hard to reach by telephone. Today it is increasingly hard to converse with them about timely scoops, leads, gaps in coverage, and corrections to published articles. Their voicemail messages often tell you how rarely they check their calls and urge reaching them by email. Good luck getting through the email clutter, filters, and voluminous commercial pitches, etc. More importantly, email exchanges can’t compare with quick back and forth of personal exchanges on the phone.

There are some fine reporters, like David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post, Charlie Savage of the New York Times, and David Brancaccio of NPR, who do pick up their phones or promptly return calls. When I asked Fahrenthold why he responds to calls he replied that that was how he gets stories. Years ago, that would have been such an obvious explanation, as not to be uttered.

Citizen groups constantly have ideas and industry documents and materials they have obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that they are willing to share with reporters. But they too often cannot easily get through to key reporters. Some stop trying. They wonder why today’s media mavens do not replicate their predecessors in the 1960s and 1970s when their newsworthy reporting and editorializing helped mightily in the success with Congress by the emerging consumer, environmental, civil rights, and other reform groups. A better, safer country resulted from solid reporting on the drives for justice waged by citizen groups.

While hoping for more introspection by editors, TV producers, their reporters, and columnists, we are starting an online Reporters’ Alert. From time to time we will use Reporter’s Alert to present suggestions for important reporting on topics that are either not done or not done thoroughly. Just nibbling on the periphery won’t attract public attention or be noticed by decision-makers. Here are the first entries:

Massive billing fraud by profiteering businesses rips off of tens of millions of consumers and public insurers such as Medicare and Medicaid. Leading expert, Professor Malcolm Sparrow at Harvard University estimates some $350 billion a year is drained away just in the health care industry. Sarah Kliff of the New York Times is exposing the gouging of a few people but has not addressed the systematic aggregate treatment this little prosecuted mega heist requires.The Federal Reserve’s boastful near-zero interest rate policy is taking tens of billions of dollars a year from tens of millions of small savers with money in savings banks and money markets because these funds earn virtually nothing. This saps consumer demand, endangers pension funds requiring a reasonable rate of return to be solvent, and increases the inequality of incomes. It also does nothing to induce to lower staggering interest charges on credit cards, payday, auto, and student loans.You read about the federal government imposing sanctions seemingly everywhere around the world, on governments, on government officials, on any one group we don’t like. Broad sanctions in Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea don’t bother the plutocrats and oligarchs in these countries. They do, however, impose horrific costs and deprivations on innocent civilians. Just what are these sanctions, who enforces them (private banks?), who evades or corruptly profits from them? Are they all legally authorized by Congress and when are they illegal under international law? Do the sanctions include medicines, water disinfectants, medical devices, food, fuel used by millions of ordinary people? Without detailed reporting on sanctions, readers, viewers, and listeners get endless general repetitions about sanctions. Citizens in a democracy need more and better information.In these Covid-19 times, the auto and health insurance companies are making out like bandits. Traffic is down, so are collisions. People are postponing going to doctors and hospitals for customary treatment due to the heavy load of the Covid-19 pandemic. Where are the refunds and rebates and lower premiums? There were some refunds last spring by auto insurance companies, but state regulators have largely been passive. Billions of consumer dollars are at stake and could be helping people make ends meet.How about some attention on the corporate law firms that figure out the ways for their big-business clients to escape the law, advance weak enforcement, get sweetheart settlements, write those fine-print contracts that plague the marketplace? The special role of a Philadelphia corporate lawyer in undermining consumer rights deserves media coverage. Law firms that increase the number of helpless consumer serfs should stop all but the most clueless reporters from describing lawyers and their law firms as “prestigious.”Where in the world did the all too regular three-day a week Congress come from? Congressional “recesses” already provide our Senators and Representatives plenty of time to handle matters in their home states. Small wonder Members of Congress don’t have time to hold many Congressional oversight hearings. They don’t work on Monday and Friday and spend too much time in between, at nearby private offices, furiously dialing for campaign dollars. Members of Congress are well paid for full-time work. How about our elected officials start working as hard as the average American workers work back home? The solons of Congress need to spend more time working for the taxpayers who pay their salaries.We hear that there are hundreds of billions of dollars from previous Covid-19 stimulus-relief laws that are still unspent? Break it down. What is unspent, why, and who should be receiving these monies? Also, how much is there to claw back from entities and persons who were not entitled to their checks in 2020?Check out how Jeff Bezos has enriched Amazon’s Board of Directors. It’s mostly public information. The Directors wealth is stunning. How can this small Board be independent with self-gifts of stock options and other remunerations, benefits, and expenses? Reporters need to look for other similar examples of corporate board members controlled by management tricks and treats.Public Citizen tracks the rise and fall of imposed corporate fines by the federal government. This is fresh information. Their reports are released with little coverage in a period marked by a corporate crime wave, puny prosecutorial and other enforcement budgets, and enabling politicians. According to experts, there are fines which are not paid at all.More than random references to the deliberately starved IRS budget, mostly by Congressional Republicans aiding and abetting tax evasion over the past decade, are needed for the public’s right to know. The beleaguered IRS estimates that it cannot collect between $400 billion and $600 billion a year, over 80% of which are uncollected corporate taxes. Real money that is not spent on people’s needs, infrastructure, or reducing deficits. What’s the problem with Democratic House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA)?

Visit www.nader.org/Reporters-Alert for future updates There is much more to come.  Members of the media should let us know what they think.

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Reporter Extraordinaire: The Pioneering Pathways of James Ridgeway

By Ralph Nader
February 25, 2021

James Ridgeway formally majored in English in the late 1950s, but he really majored in “Reporting” as the editor of the Daily Princetonian. Imagine what it took to put out a daily college newspaper. He had it all in spades and proved it over the next sixty years, with quiet energy and a boundless range of subjects.

I have never met a more honest, meticulous, humble, and productive reporter so persistent in getting the hidden story out to the people, whatever the odds. For Jim, reporting what wasn’t going to get reported was his way of seeking justice for the downtrodden, the powerless, and everyone else unfairly afflicted.

He broke many stories with his articles in the New Republic, the then formidable Village Voice, the Guardian, the Nation, and Mother Jones, among other publications that featured his terse, vivid prose.

The books he wrote also marked him as a reporter who saw stories, trends, and stirrings in the society earlier than his peers. Without pretense and ego, he had the key traits of the great reporters – unquenchable curiosity and the rare ability to “read the scene,” and maintain a driving empathy. He was immune from being jaded and calmly saw through phonies. He asked short questions to more readily evoke candor or expose evasion.

Ridgeway knew the tradition he was extending in his coverage of corruption, profiteering, and betrayals of duty in government and business. The shoulders he stood on were of the great muckrakers of the early 20th century – Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and I.F. Stone.

I first met Ridgeway while scouring Washington D.C. in 1963-1964 to find someone who would take my findings on suppressed auto safety engineering and boldly report them. It was a tedious search. A visit to the Washington Post resulted in a twenty-minute presentation with a polite editor, who much later told me he thought I was just pitching for an inventor of some car safety device.

I finally walked into the house of the New Republic magazine and was ushered up the stairs to a young Ridgeway deep in thought at his typewriter. He looked at me, saying he just had a few minutes. Well, his curiosity resulted in a major article titled “Car Design and Public Safety.” The next year, he broke the fuller story titled “The Dick” about GM and its detectives tailing me, including to the U.S. Congress where I was soon to testify.

Ridgeway had the dual talent of digging into primary sources (Congressional, court transcripts, and internal memos) like I.F. Stone did and also hitting the ground where the affected people were ready to talk if anyone bothered to listen. And, like Lincoln Steffens, he knew that injustice and devastation undocumented would only fester.

That combination made his books prescient. They included The Politics of Ecology (1970), The Last Play: The Struggle to Monopolize the World’s Energy Resources (1973), and his early expose of corporate influence on the “University-industry” titled The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis (1968). This book was an early alarm call for what has become deep and destructive corporatism inside higher education.

As corporatization of the mainstream press became more restrictive, Ridgeway went to the free culture of the Village Voice, where he worked for 20 years. When the Voice ownership changed, he started producing documentaries. His book and film, Blood in the Face, on the far-right militias and other racist groups. The first edition, published in 1991, foreshadowed much of the turmoil we are seeing today. (A revised edition is due to release in June from Haymarket Books.)

During the past ten years, he and his colleagues resolved to focus on the cruelties of solitary confinement, giving voice to inmates so often arbitrarily imprisoned in a cage-size cell for 23 hours a day, trying to fight off going mad or suicide. Their stories were told in the book, Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement (2016). He built an influential project with his longtime editor Jean Casella called Solitary Watch (see: solitarywatch.org), which received thousands of messages from prisoners and their desperate families. Jim would speak to these people on a regular basis, never exhausting either his empathy or his outrage. He maintained this level of engagement despite his painful ailments.

Add moral and physical courage to this dwindling species of truth-seekers no matter what. His was a generous spirit, sharing credit with others, and a patient mentor to his many interns and young journalists.

When Jim heard that we were organizing an intensive workshop to teach college students investigative reporting skills he offered to help. The 2008 event at Wesleyan University in Connecticut was also to memorialize/commemorate the luminous career of another courageous reporter, David Halberstam. Jim generously spent time with the students during and after the formal sessions. He also documented the entire week’s proceedings with his video team. Some of the country’s greatest journalists, including Sy Hersh, Jim Wooten, Roberta Baskin, Christopher Hedges, Amy Goodman, David Burnham, and others (see: www.journalismworkshop.org) journeyed to Middletown to train the next generation of reporters and to pay tribute to their late colleague. (I could see the respect they showed to Jim when they greeted him.) Jim sensed that they would be very candid and revealing about their own experiences and the restrictions imposed on reporters by government and business, which they and David and Jim experienced, but heroically resisted. As usual, his forecast was right on.

You can expand Jim’s legacy by supporting Solitary Watch (solitarywatch.org) either materially or with advocacy for expanding state reforms of this arbitrary cruel and unusual punishment in both corporate and public prisons.

His wife Pat and son David fervently wish that this work continues in their beloved Jim’s memory.

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Why Didn’t Speaker Pelosi Want Witnesses?

By Ralph Nader
February 19, 2021

On the morning of February 13, 2021, just before the Senate impeachment trial abruptly ended with Trump’s acquittal, Constitutional law specialist Bruce Fein and I sent the following plea to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

More than 240 years of heroic sacrifices by our forebearers to plant the seeds of a government of the people, by the people, for the people are not being furthered by your shortsighted eagerness for an abbreviated gravely historic second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. The trial has thus been shorn of “smoking gun” witnesses and full exposure of his daily wrecking ball against the Constitution rooted in Mr. Trump’s unprecedented, brazenly monarchical pronouncement on July 23, 2019, “Then I have Article 2, where I have the right to do anything I want as president.” Mr. Trump was as determined as his words.

He usurped the congressional power to tax and spend.

He defied hundreds of congressional subpoenas and demands for testimony or information to disable oversight and to substitute government secrecy for transparency.

He turned the White House into a crime scene with serial violations of the Hatch Act.

According to former national security advisor John Bolton, fortified by the Mueller Report, he made obstruction of justice “a way of life” at the White House.

He appointed principal officers of the United States without Senate confirmation in violation of the Appointments Clause.

He transgressed both the letter and spirit of the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses.

He flouted his obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed by dismantling enforcement of environmental, safety, consumer protection, and labor laws.

January 6, 2021 was but the predictable culmination of Mr. Trump’s unalloyed contempt for the Constitution and rule of law. If Article 2 crowns the president with limitless power, then to incite the use of force and violence against the legislative branch of government to prevent the Vice President from counting state-certified electoral votes, falls squarely within his vast dictatorial domain.

We submit you will be committing a dereliction of constitutional duty if you do not immediately make the demand to subpoena witnesses in the pending second impeachment trial.

The subpoenas should be issued to at least the following: Donald Trump, Mike Pence, William Barr, John Bolton, Christopher Krebs, Brad Raffensperger, Jeffrey Rosen, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, and Pak Byung-Jin (B.J. Pak).

Your immediate call for witnesses critical to fortifying the impeachment evidence will be the definitive test of your resolve to convict Donald J. Trump and your understanding of the serious and gravity of the impeachment charges. A trial without key witnesses possessed of crucial incriminating testimony diminishes the seriousness of the proceedings and the huge stakes for the future of the American Republic.

The haunting question that history will raise will be this: Why didn’t Speaker Pelosi call the witnesses?

The Senate resumed its trial on Saturday, February 13th at 10:00 am. Soon, came the revelation of an exchange between Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler’s (R-WA) on January 6th with House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA), regarding his telephone conversation with Donald Trump during the storming of Congress. What followed was a call for witnesses by a Senate vote of 55-45. Eureka! The window for Republican witnesses previously rejected by Democratic House Managers was reopened. There was another chance to overcome Speaker Pelosi’s desire for a quick trial without witnesses.

Then came another reversal pressed by President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Democratic leaders told the House managers to huddle privately with Trump’s defense lawyers to strike a deal. They did. They would place a mere statement from Rep. Beutler into the trial record and call no witnesses. The Republicans couldn’t have been more delighted, knowing that the Democratic leadership wanted the trial over that day before Congress went on a week-long vacation.

Before the deal, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) predicted on NPR that there would be a call for witnesses, requiring a deferral of the trial for two weeks. How mistaken he was about his Party’s defeatism and rejection of going forward with a full hand.

They could have added to their single impeachment Article of inciting an insurrection, two more Articles – intimidating Mike Pence and others plus Trump’s refusal to call back the attackers during their riot. Those three Articles would have made for a more powerful case against Trump’s defense attorneys, in the opinion of former federal judge Michael McConnell.

An even stronger impeachment and one deterring future wannabe Trumps was to pair Trump’s physical attack on the Capitol with Trump’s four-year institutional attack on the Congress with his constant usurpation of the legislative branch’s constitutional authority (some noted above).

For reasons yet to be divulged, the Democrats, as they did with the first impeachment of Trump, were unwilling to use the full evidence subpoena powers they possess. Trump can now run again, vitiating the rule of law and debasing our democratic institutions.

As Republican strategist Kevin Philips noted years ago, The Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries.

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STATEMENT BY RALPH NADER AND BRUCE FEIN ON THE SENATE’S IMPEACHMENT ACQUITTAL OF DONALD J. TRUMP

Donald J. Trump has once again circumvented justice, but not because of a want of facts or law. His life preserver was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to refrain from calling critical witnesses possessing “smoking gun” incriminating evidence at Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial. Her plan to abandon an Ace of Spades for a Two of Clubs to prove Mr. Trump’s guilt was upset by Republican freshman Congresswoman Jamie Herrera Butler (Wash.) who gave the Democrats an opportunity to subpoenas witnesses to testify under oath to fortify the video evidence introduced during the House Managers’ case in chief.

Ms. Butler’s disclosing a conversation with House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) proving President Trump’s endorsement of his mob’s resort to lethal force and violence to unconstitutionally prevent a peaceful transfer of presidential power precipitated a surprise 55-45 Senate vote this morning, including several Republicans, to entertain live witnesses. Democratic Senator Benjamin Cardin (Maryland) appeared on NPR shortly before the Senate reconvened from a recess at 12:30 pm. The Senator declared that the impeachment trial would be continued for two weeks; and, that the only issue remaining for resolution between the prosecution and defense (then in private negotiations) was whether five witnesses for each side would be named or left open for later identification in a Senate witness resolution.

Mr. Cardin was clueless of the Democratic capitulation, snaring defeat from the jaws of victory. The House Managers and Mr. Trump’s defense team agreed to a stipulation to admit into the record a mere written statement by Congresswoman Butler, not delivered in person under oath or via a deposition. Not a single witness would be called.

The impeachment case presented by the House Managers was only the tip of the iceberg of what transpired in the White House, in Washington, D.C., in George, Michigan, and Texas, and around the country generally in Mr. Trump’s relentless, lawless, unconstitutional exertions to falsify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trials without witnesses are not genuine trials—even in a civil impeachment prosecution in which the sole sanction is disqualification from future federal office, not loss of liberty or even a fine.

During Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial over his attempt to brandish the powers of the White House to coerces Ukraine into announcing a criminal investigation against Joe Biden, Democrats sought a few witnesses. The Senate Republican majority nixed the request. During the second and vastly more consequential impeachment trial, the Democrats bypassed witnesses notwithstanding Mr. Trump’s flagrantly unconstitutional attempt through force and violence to prevent Vice President Mike Pence from counting state-certified electoral votes and Democrats enjoying a Senate majority.

Once again, Speaker Pelosi, the puppeteer of the House Managers, took impeachment to the Senate without a full hand. She disarmed the Democratic case against Mr. Trump for inciting an armed insurrection against the legislative branch in two respects: no witnesses; and, no additional impeachment articles pivoting on Mr. Trump’s systematic institutional attack on Congress and usurpation of its authorities with impunity. (Note his monarchical decree on July 23, 2019: “Then I have Article 2, where I have the right to do anything I want as president.,” which he employed to justify serial violations of law. See our attached letter to Speaker Pelosi and proposed Articles of Impeachment printed in the Congressional Record (December 18, 2019, H12197).

We expect that aggressive investigative reporting will soon reveal the details of Speaker Pelosi’s masterminding the calamitous decision to forego trial witnesses in the second impeachment trial, the last clear chance to hold Mr. Trump accountable for shattering separation of powers. The reported ostensible reason for a truncated trial—shorter than the narrower Ukraine predecessor—was to avoid distraction from President Biden’s agenda and stimulus legislation. But the argument does not wash. The Senate could have completed both a full impeachment trial and moved Mr. Biden’s agenda by working a full week (not the customary three-day routine) and split their time between the trial and legislation. The urgency of the Biden agenda seems attenuated since the Senate is in recess all next week.

An NPR reporter observed: Democrats had a chance of opening up the trial with witnesses about what really happened in the White House “from primary sources, but in the end the desire to be done won out.” The loss was steadfast courage and an abdication of constitutional duty to lay down markers to preserve the nation’s Republic for ourselves and our posterity against wannabe Trumps craving dictatorial powers.

In the end, the rush trial was not a matter of rationing the Senate’s time, it was not a matter of Senate ignorance or incapacity. It was a loss of nerve and the disastrous misguided strategy of Speaker Pelosi with her House Managers selected for pliability.

Democrats deliberately disabled themselves. History teaches that cowardice is possessed of infinite obstinacy. We are fortunate that the nation’s founders against King George III were made of sterner stuff. The Constitution’s framers endowed their descendants with sufficient congressional authority to prevent coming full circle back to monarchy under a different name. Alas, we are not so fortunate in our current congressional leadership and the portentous forces they have emboldened and ignited in the coming years.

Historical Note: During the Watergate impeachment proceedings in 1974, on the verge of an affirmative House impeachment vote, Senate Republican leaders Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott traveled to the White House to inform President Richard Nixon that conviction in the Senate was inevitable. Where are Republicans today with a former president who criminally incited force and violence with the imminent danger of death against Members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 election in violation of the Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act? Where were you Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Lindsey Graham, and other lawmakers intimidated by Trump within the GOP? Groveling before the tyrant, or aiding and abetting his despotic movement?

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Why didn’t Speaker Pelosi call the witnesses?

February 13, 2021

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Office of the Speaker
H-252 US Capitol
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madam Speaker:

More than 240 years of heroic sacrifices by our forbearers to plant the seeds of a government of the people, by the people, for the people are not being furthered by your shortsighted eagerness for an abbreviated gravely historic second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. The trial has thus been shorn of “smoking gun” witnesses and full exposure of his daily wrecking ball against the Constitution allegedly justified by Mr. Trump’s unprecedented, brazenly monarchical pronouncement on July 23, 2019, “Then I have Article 2, where I have the right to do anything I want as president.” Mr. Trump was as good as his word.

He usurped the congressional power to tax and spend.

He defied hundreds of congressional subpoenas or demands for testimony or information to disable oversight and to substitute government secrecy for transparency.

He turned the White House into a crime scene with serial violations of the Hatch Act.

According to former national security advisor John Bolton, fortified by the Mueller Report, he made obstruction of justice “a way of life” at the White House.

He appointed principal officers of the United States without Senate confirmation in violation of the Appointments Clause.

He transgressed both the letter and spirit of the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses.

He flouted his obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed by dismantling enforcement of environmental, safety, consumer protection, and labor laws.

January 6, 2021 was but the predictable culmination of Mr. Trump’s unalloyed contempt for the

Constitution and rule of law. If Article 2 crowns the president with limitless power, then to incite the use of force and violence against the legislative branch of government to prevent the Vice President from counting state-certified electoral votes falls squarely within that vast domain.

We submit you will be guilty of a dereliction of constitutional duty if you do not immediately demand to subpoena witnesses in the pending second impeachment trial. Senator Benjamin Cardin informed Scott Simon of NPR a short time ago that the House possesses that power.

The subpoenas should be issued to at least the following: Donald Trump, Mike Pence, William Barr, John Bolton, Christopher Krebs, Brad Raffensperger, Jeffrey Rosen, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, and “BJay” Park.

Your immediate call for witnesses critical to fortifying the impeachment evidence will be the definitive test of your resolve to convict Donald J. Trump and your understanding of the serious and gravity of the impeachment charges. A trial without key witnesses possessed of crucial incriminating testimony diminishes the seriousness of the proceedings and the huge stakes for the future of the American Republic.

The haunting question that history will raise will be this: Why didn’t Speaker Pelosi call the witnesses?

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

Bruce Fein

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Democrats Disarm Themselves Before Trump’s Senate Impeachment Trial

By Ralph Nader
February 8, 2021

Donald Trump, has with luck, eluded the consequences of being a failed gambling czar with no respect for the law. But his luck has reached a new level with Congressional Democrats refraining from holding him accountable for breaking the law and violating the Constitution as regularly as the rising and setting of the sun for four years. (See: December 18, 2019, Congressional Record, H-12197).

Now the Democrats are moving forward into an impeachment trial, using only a fraction of the voluminous incriminating evidence against a president who incited insurrection against Congress and the Constitution. Trump directly incited an armed mob, bent on mayhem, against both Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate who were gathered to count state-certified electoral votes under the Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act. The Joint Session of Congress heard the vile mob chant the chilling phrase “Hang Mike Pence,” the Vice President who had fallen from Trump’s favor by refusing to compromise his constitutional duty to count rather than to second-guess the state-certified votes.

The Democrats know if the Senate neglects to convict Trump (requiring a two-thirds majority) and prohibit him from running for the White House ever again (requiring only a simple majority) they will be unleashing a vengeful monster, loaded with cash for a 2024 presidential run. Republicans should fear that prospect to avoid the risk of internecine warfare.

So, wouldn’t you think with the election over the impeachment managers would go full throttle before the national television audience and conduct a trial for historical accountability, the rule of law, and protection of posterity?

Instead, Democrats are signaling failure by prejudging how Republicans will vote before seeing what should be gripping trial evidence and the rising outrage of the American people. Trump’s polls are steadily falling already.

Prejudgment leads to another Democratic mistake – settling for a short trial. Even Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) have said they want a truncated impeachment trial so the Senate can focus on the Covid-19 driven stimulus bill. This legislation is already moving quickly. Besides, the Senate can drop its routine of working three days a week and start working five days a week or more just as do most Americans.

There are other self-inflicted constraints. Democrats should have subpoenaed Trump and Pence immediately after the House impeached Trump on January 13, 2021. Trump has spurned an invitation to testify voluntarily under oath by lead House manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD). House and Senate Democrats should know the hazards of declining to issue a trial subpoena to Mr. Trump because special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was compromised by his failure to do so. Why follow a losing playbook?

The courts have no jurisdiction over impeachment questions the Supreme Court said in Nixon v. United States, 506 U.S.224 (1993). The Senate runs its impeachment trial as it chooses, including holding Mr. Trump’s lawyers in contempt if they attempt to disrupt the proceedings or continue to argue issues they have lost, like the absence of jurisdiction over a former president. As a no-show in a civil, not criminal proceeding, Mr. Trump’s defiance of a subpoena would justify an adverse inference of guilt by the Senate.

There is also no sign the Democrats are seeking other witnesses such as Garrett Miller who has said he and others were operating at the direction and approval of President Trump. The liar-in-chief had just told his supporters at the notorious rally on the Mall, “We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” before Trump the betrayer retreated to the White House to witness on television the violence, he provoked and incited.

Families of victims deserve to be heard. And members of the Senate and the public should hear of the detailed thuggery by Trump in Georgia and at the Justice Department. The prosecution must go deep, starting with the testimony of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and then acting U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.

The Democrats are not subpoenaing Mike Pence to testify about Mr. Trump’s bullying him to reject state-certified electoral votes in violation of the Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act in key states that would deny Joe Biden’s electoral vote majority. Pence’s refusal angered Trump who then resorted to an insurrection against the Capitol to accomplish by force and violence what he was unable to accomplish by bullying.

Given their penchant for a short trial, the Democrats seem unlikely to highlight Trump’s pattern and practice throughout his presidency of flouting the Constitution and duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, including protections for all Americans. Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, has declared that obstruction of justice was “a way of life” at the White House.

The House impeachment managers are under the direction of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. As in the first impeachment of Trump, she believes the American people have a short attention span and proceeds to prejudge the vote by Republicans in the Senate. Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy – assuring failure by holding back the full hand the Democrats possess – an Ace of Spades – under the Constitution?

Do the Democrats want to convict or just impeach a president who brazenly asserted “Then I have article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” He produced four years as proof of such lawbreaking. Will Trump overcome the Democrats on this last clear chance for our Constitution to prevail and for the assault on Congress, its legislators, staff, and other employees to be answered with justice?

Do you know how weak and spineless the National Democrats are? They almost blew the Presidential election to the worst, most delusional, lawbreaking, incompetent president in U.S. history. Less than 100,000 votes in four swing states saved the country from a second despotic Trump term. The Democrats also lost House and Senate seats to the most crazed, cruel, anti-people, corporate-indentured, militaristic, and monetized Republican Party in history.

If the Democrats do not go full throttle in this trial – this last clear chance to exercise the Constitution against Tyrant Trump – they will be remembered as profiles of infamy. If the Party of Jefferson and FDR fails to meet this fundamental challenge, history will show them as betraying the people’s trust, abdicating their constitutional duties, and setting an awful precedent ready for use by any future president to annihilate the Constitution.

The post Democrats Disarm Themselves Before Trump’s Senate Impeachment Trial first appeared on Ralph Nader.

The Struggle Inside Senator Mitch McConnell’s Brain

By Ralph Nader
February 3, 2021

Since 2015, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has ruled the Senate with an iron hand, describing himself as “the Guardian of Gridlock.” He was Senator “NO,” except for confirming over 200 mostly corporatist federal judges.

Now comes a new challenge for Mitch McConnell as he leads 49 other Republican Senators, twenty of whom are up for re-election in 2022. Earlier this month, McConnell broke with Trump publicly in a Senate speech holding the wannabe American Fuhrer responsible for the January 6th storming of the Congress. On that day, Trump had just spoken to a crowd on the Mall and incited his followers to rush the Capitol and “stop the steal.” In the aftermath of this insurrection, the Kentucky Senator said he was keeping an open mind about his vote during the coming impeachment trial of Trump.

Predictably, McConnell received a flood of criticism from the Trump supporters for daring to distance himself from the dangerous, unstable, Liar-in-Chief.  Senate insurrectionists Senators Cruz and Hawley stood firm with Trump, even after the Trumpsters’ violent riot in their hallowed workplace.

Then came Senator Rand Paul, a crypto-libertarian opportunist and Trump toady (a scheming shadow of his father, ex-Rep. Ron Paul) to propose a vote on whether a president who is impeached while in office could be tried after his term was up. In a January 21, 2021 letter, an overwhelming number of liberal and conservative constitutional law experts said, “In sum, the Constitution’s text and structure, history, and precedent make clear that Congress’s impeachment power permits it to impeach, try, convict, and disqualify former officers, including former presidents.” (The full text of the letter is available online at Medium.Com) Not to do so, as Republican constitutional law specialist Bruce Fein said, “would fail to a set a precedent to deter future presidents from committing all kinds of impeachable offenses during the last days of their presidency and would undermine the  additional sanction, by majority Senate vote, of banning Presidents who have committed ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ from ever running for federal office again.”

McConnell, reverting to form, voted with Rand Paul and all but five courageous Republicans for the nonsense assertion that the Constitution prohibits a trial of an impeached president after departure from office. Since it would take seventeen Republicans to join with fifty Democrats to convict Trump, the media pundits quickly prejudged the outcome as an acquittal.

Inside McConnell’s brain, however, the path ahead is not preordained. McConnell still insists, as one of 100 Senate jurors, he is keeping an open mind as he weighs the evidence at the open televised trial starting on Tuesday, February 9th in the Senate. This might be true.  Allowing the Trumpian half of his brain to overpower his judgment and vote to acquit Dangerous Donald would spell disaster for the Republican Party (assuming the Democratic Party doesn’t go to sleep as it did after Obama’s win in 2008).

Here is what the “survival” part of McConnell’s mind may be thinking:

“My GOP is a minority Party. We’ve only won the popular vote for President once since 1988, having been saved by the Electoral College in 2000 and 2016. Our majorities in the House have been due to gerrymandering designed to produce safe Republican districts in key states. We can’t assume that the cowardly Democrats will continue to give us seats in the Senate that they should have won, apart from giving up contesting many seats altogether.”

“We should break completely with Trump and his uncontrollable, delusional, hardcore extremists dedicated to “civil war,” that the Department of Homeland Security has deemed the “leading domestic terrorist” threat. Conviction of Trump is the way forward. He wouldn’t be able to run again. We won’t be bullied, intimated, and lied about every day in order to push us toward these political militias and their crude, violent talk and actions by acquitting Trump.   We can’t be the “law and order” Party if we don’t accept that “no one is above the law.”

“Also, the media would demand answers for out-of-control Republican outlaws and their Trumpian grip on state Republican Party committees. We will be so relentlessly distracted daily by Trumpian chaos and Trump’s 2024 candidacy that we won’t be able to reset the traditional stable GOP and advance our conservative agenda. Trump is causing us to lose our campaign contributions from frightened corporate CEOs who cannot tolerate daily political disruptions and overtly divisive rancor that rankles the workplace.”

“Some of our own legislators already are being investigated by the FBI for their involvement with these extremist groups.” (See the New York Times article: Republican Ties to Extremist Group Are Under Scrutiny).

“Furthermore, letting Trump go triumphantly into the electoral arena would increase the risk of internally splitting the Party with Trump either saying “his way” or creating a new “Patriot Party”. For many reasons, that would end our electoral chances for a generation.  It will be worse than what FDR did to our Party.”

“I make these arguments to my Senate Republicans, having just been re-elected. The Senators up for election in 2022 are fearful of being primaried. They cannot stand the burst of hate mail they would receive.”

“To them, I would say: “relax, look at the huge margins most of you won by in 2016. You’re just too cozy and not used to a primary challenge, which should make you an even better campaigner. Besides, you’ll raise much more campaign money by standing tall against the tyrant who attacked America, who will turn on you at a tweet’s notice if you’re not 100% with him.”

“Given the super-safe seats – no one is going to beat Thune, Moran, Lankford, Kennedy, Crapo, Boozman, and Shelby in any primary. Besides, any ultra-extremist candidates who win primaries are sure to lose in the general election. That’s what happened in Delaware in 2000. The great majority of sane GOP voters know a suicide drive when they hear and see it.”

Such is the swirling mind of Mitch McConnell these days. With more incriminating evidence coming out about Trump’s attempted election coup, and the expected alarming under oath testimony at the Senate trial, the sheer political self-interest and regard for the GOP’s future should result in the Senate voting for conviction.

See: Wrecking America Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All by Mark Green and Ralph Nader, for a detailed exposé of Donald Trump, Liar-in-Chief.

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New Auto Safety Report Demands Biden Strengthen Federal Programs Now

By Ralph Nader
January 22, 2021

Today the New York Times rediscovered its previous auto safety news beat that blossomed in the 1960s after my book, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) caused an uproar in Detroit. Reporter Christopher Jensen told New York Times readers about a new report by a coalition of six automotive safety groups demanding that the new Biden Administration recharge the moribund, industry-dominated National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) with strong leadership, adequate budget, and long-overdue, proven vehicle safety standards.

Since its creation by Congress in 1966, NHTSA has had some bright moments which made motor vehicles more crash-worthy and operationally safer, with less pollution and more fuel efficiency. Since then, over four million lives have been saved and many more injuries prevented. Property damage was diminished and insurance premiums were lower than they would have been had the “wild west” non-regulation, “style over safety” manias been allowed to continue. Laissez-faire runs amok.

In recent decades, however, under both Democratic and Republican Administrations, NHTSA was degraded into more of a sporadic, meek consultant to the auto giants, instead of a strong law enforcement agency. Its Administrators wafted sleepily in their few years at the helm and then retired to lucrative positions in the industry they failed to regulate.

To the extent that NHTSA did anything significant, it was due to a small band of gritty citizen safety advocates such as Joan Claybrook, the prime author of this report, Clarence Ditlow of the Center for Auto Safety, and the insurance-industry-funded Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety led until recently by Jackie Gillan and now Cathy Chase. These advocates used the tools of litigation and lobbying to protect all of us, receiving little recognition for their unsung and life-saving endeavors.

Alas for the most part, at NHTSA, the routine was official inaction, not considered “news” by the mass media. Standards not issued nor strengthened, recalls not ordered, penalties not applied, data not compiled by make and model, safety research vehicles not funded and chronic secrecy by the auto companies and government not qualifying as “newsworthy.” A few high-profile auto defect scandals, often exposed when manufacturers were sued by tort lawyers, were widely reported, but the news coverage rarely included NHTSA’s inaction and institutional abandonment by Congress and the White House.

The revival of the federal government’s motor vehicle safety/pollution/fuel efficiency missions must start with Congressional hearings for updated, stronger laws, including criminal penalties for refusal by auto companies to recall defective or noncompliant vehicles, legislatively mandated safety advances, and more capacity and funding for NHTSA’s tiny budget, now far less than what is spent on military bands!

With distracted driving and ever more vehicles on more crowded highways, fatalities (including pedestrian casualties) started to increase pre-Covid.

The media, on its part, should not be distracted by the hype around a premature autonomous vehicle and super smart highways. Every day, people are dying in the old-fashioned ways that could be prevented by long-ready, better-handling and crash-protective vehicles.

Imagine the benefits of safer vehicles with far more environmentally benign engines and adequate funding for cost-effective public investment in new forms of public transit and upgrading existing mass transit. Getting around on the ground should include many diverse forms of arriving at one’s destination in a timely, safe, and environmentally preferable manner.

The Claybrook report titled, Safer Vehicles and Highways: 4.2 million U.S. Lives Spared Since 1966, is very specific about what needs to be done. New technical talent is needed at NHTSA in this era of electric cars, autonomous safety assists, and the computerization of motor vehicles vulnerable to hacking.

A tougher position on recalls is essential. “Automakers continue efforts to minimize expensive recall costs by delaying the recall, narrowing the scope of a recall, or denying the defect,” declares the report.

Moreover, many of the safety features and performance levels in your vehicle have not been updated for years in practical, cost-effective ways long urged by the more innovative automotive suppliers. These include child safety safeguards.

It is time for the Biden people, under the new Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, to catch up and end the soporific record of their predecessors, including that of those from the Obama/Biden Administration. (See: Jerry Cox Steven Bradbury and Why 30 Million Takata Airbags Are Not being Recalled).

The French have a saying “the more things change the more they remain the same.” That applies to the auto company executive-suite culture. In their comfortable atriums, they arrange for deniability while they press for immunity from criminal and tort laws. They still preside over obscure financing and advertising deceptions. They still dangle before buyers of their less expensive vehicles, over-priced options for long-amortized safety improvements that are standard equipment on higher-priced vehicles so as to pressure them to upgrade.

They still instruct their lobbyists to go to Congress with one message “NO, NO, NO” to long-delayed improvements for motorists to reduce the casualty toll on the highway and the various economic costs associated with such stagnant corporate stubbornness.

Biden promises a New Day from Trumpism. Let’s see if he and his team can provide America with a New Day of Public Safety from callous corporatism on the nation’s roadways.

The post New Auto Safety Report Demands Biden Strengthen Federal Programs Now first appeared on Ralph Nader.

Trump’s Finale from Impeachment to Conviction

By Ralph Nader
January 15, 2021

Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro, a graduate of Harvard Law School, asked his colleagues: “If inciting a deadly insurrection is not enough to get a president impeached, then what is?” Ten Republicans voted for Impeachment, but 197 House Republicans disagreed. Trump incited the crowd in person on the Mall. He lied to his supporters saying, “I’ll be with you” on the march to the Capitol. Trump then refused to call the crowd back when it turned into a mob that violently stormed into the Capitol. Trump scurried back to the White House to gleefully watch on TV his “special people” rampage through the Congress with destructive intent.

Why should the GOP obeisance to Trump, the Mobster in Chief, this recidivist criminal, a violator of many provisions of the Constitution, obstructor of justice “as a daily way of life” according to his former national security advisor John Bolton, and hourly lying sociopath, surprise anyone?

Congressional Republicans have aided and abetted, for four years, Trump’s assertion that “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as president.” Dangerous Donald did just that. He finally incited a massive, homicidal street crime against the very Congress that let him get away with everything, day after day, as if there were no laws and no Constitution to be observed whatsoever.

The GOP speakers who defended Trump in the House Impeachment debate will go down in history as unsurpassed political cowards and lying bloviators, led by Trump clone, belligerent Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Trump’s Congressional protectors, however, failed. The House of Representatives voted for Articles of Impeachment that are on their way to the Senate for a certain trial. The Senate should convict treacherous unrepentant Trump and ban him from ever seeking federal office again.

In the days before the trial, more incriminating evidence will emerge.

Already, a GAO investigation is underway into Republican lawmakers suspected of being complicit in aiding the mob’s objective of physically overturning the results of the presidential election. Evidence of early facilitation both before and during the armed invasion is reaching investigators, including the involvement by some Capitol Police and other police officers in plain clothes.

Trump’s business allies and supporters are not waiting for any verdicts. Major corporations such as Disney, Coca-Cola, and J.P. Morgan Chase have suspended campaign contributions to the GOP. Last week, the powerful National Association of Manufacturers demanded that Trump be removed from office under the 25th Amendment. Trump’s banks, to whom he owes hundreds of millions of dollars, are distancing themselves from their insatiable borrower. New York City has canceled its contract with the Trump corporation. More cancellations of deals with TRUMP, Inc. will come.

Though verbally defiant, admitting no mistakes, and as usual taking no responsibility, Trump is a broken man, assailing his most loyal subjects including total toady Vice President Mike Pence. Deprived of his Twitter machine and other Internet platforms, Trump will soon be a besieged debtor, a manyfold investigated and sued defendant abandoned by the likes of Mitch McConnell.

The calculus of political survival for the just re-elected McConnell’s Congressional Republicans has changed. In the minority, no longer will Republicans be able to confirm corporatist judges or pass Trump-like corporate tax cuts for the super-rich, or dismantle health and safety regulations.

But out on the MAGA hustings, Trump may be a huge tormentor, raising money and wanting to run again. Such a prospect is intolerable to McConnell. That is why he is turning against Trump by declining to oppose Impeachment and signaling that he may unleash his Republican Senators to convict Trump, if only for their own political survival. The GOP polls are slipping and will slip more as the toxic stench of what occurred before and during the January 6th attack increases.

McConnell does not want Trump either to run or threaten to run again in 2024. The only way that yoke can be lifted is to free 17 or more Republican Senators to vote for conviction followed by a simple majority vote banning Trump from future federal office.

Out of office and prohibited from regaining office, Trump will be increasingly defined by his more violent, hardcore Trumpsters. Trump being Trump, will not oppose their street actions. He will want to continue to address and exhort his followers to remain a political force.

This entanglement is already underway. While Washington, D.C. is brimming with thousands of soldiers, police, and surveillance technology, the Trump militants are unfazed. They are planning more protests.

According to Pentagon officials, reported in the New York Times, “Some 16 groups – some of them saying they will be armed and most of them made up of hardline supporters of Mr. Trump – have registered to stage protests.” This cannot be good political news for the Congressional Republicans left behind after the Trump family departs the White House.

What are the probabilities that a conviction in the Senate will be achieved? Better than 50/50, given the survival instincts of the politicians wanting the felonious Trump off their backs.

As for Trump, what he has left until noon on January 20th, barring some last-gasp grotesque eruption, is the pardon power for his closest allies like Rudy Giuliani, his family, and himself. He could enlarge the range of pardons by declaring a Day of Forgiveness on January 19th with general pardons of deserving, elderly prisoners, political prisoners, and nonviolent drug offenders in the federal prisons.

However, such a vision is inconsistent with narcissism. We’ll see.

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