In congressional testimony a few days ago, Attorney General William Barr commented that President Trump has the power to legally fire any prosecutor he believed was investigating false charges against him. Presumably, his comments were limited to federal prosecutors, but given Trump's ongoing run for tyranny, maybe that applied to all prosecutors in his mind.
Slate writes:
That defense was shocking not simply because it had nothing to do with the legal questions of conspiracy and obstruction before Mueller and Barr, but also because it seemed to have explicitly adopted and accepted the Trumpist worldview that holds any attempt at oversight or investigation deemed by the president to be unjustified harassment is illegitimate. This is, by the way, pretty much the same legal theory being invoked this week to reject the authority of congressional oversight and subpoenas. As Steve Vladek observed this past weekend, the defense that absolutely everything is a witch hunt and thus not legitimate is not a specific constitutional claim. It is, however, a recipe for a constitutional crisis.
Then, in response to questions from Sen. Dianne Feinstein about why it was that Trump ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to end the Mueller probe, Barr seems to have again taken the legal position that the president’s anger and frustration over press reports that he had instructed McGahn to fire Mueller somehow made this directive permissible. Barr seemed to be saying that Trump could not have committed obstruction by asking McGahn to fire Mueller, so long as he was attempting to forestall further negative press. As Barr put it: “If the president is being falsely accused, which the evidence now suggests that the accusations against him were false [which is a lie], and he knew they were false, and he felt that this investigation was unfair, propelled by his political opponents and was hampering his ability to govern, that is not a corrupt motive for replacing an independent counsel.”
That Trump is truly making a run at being a tyrant cannot be much clearer. Of course, if Trump declares martial law, shuts the “enemy of the people” press down, arrests democrats in congress, and orders the US military to machine gun protestors down in the streets, then it would be about a clear as it can get.
The question is obvious: How much clearer does this need to be for Trump supporters and the republican party (the Trump Tyrant Party, not the GOP) to see what is happening before their eyes, or do they actually want tyranny? It is hard to imagine that by now hardly any Trump opponents do not see the grave danger that American democracy and the rule of law are both in. Or, does that overstate the situation?
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