Independent investigators, courts and press guard us all

Published May 26, 2017

by Doug Clark, The Greensboro News-Record, May 24, 2017.

This is a tough time for our country, but we can count on our strong national institutions to carry us through them.

If we protect those institutions.

President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in the midst of an FBI investigation into connections between Trump campaign figures and Russian operatives trying to influence the presidential election. In a meeting at the White House May 10, the day after he fired Comey, Trump told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that he had taken “great pressure” off by getting rid of Comey, who was “crazy, a real nut job.”

It is highly disturbing, not only for the president of the United States to smear a respected, career American law-enforcement official in talks with representatives of an adversarial foreign country, but for him to so blatantly claim that he’d managed to derail a federal investigation.

But he was wrong. The probe continues, headed now by a special counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller. While a special counsel is not immune from political pressure, he can work with a degree of independence that other Justice Department employees cannot.

At the same time, congressional committees continue to look into the Russia affair. Congress has a responsibility to carry out an oversight function in regard to the executive branch of government.

Our Constitution established a system of checks and balances, as the Founders didn’t think one branch should exercise appreciably more power than another. We can anticipate that the courts will get involved in this episode at some point, as well. The older folks among us might remember that, on July 24, 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to release tape recordings of White House conversations to the Watergate special prosecutor. Nixon complied and, because the contents revealed proof of a criminal conspiracy, he resigned his office 15 days later.

We should expect that a special counsel, congressional committees and the courts all will do their jobs with integrity and in the national interest, whatever the outcome.

I admit to being skeptical about Congress because of our national climate of extreme political partisanship, which is amply displayed on Capitol Hill. It makes Democrats too quick to assume the worst about our Republican president and Republicans too reluctant to find fault. In the end, maybe both sides will view whatever evidence emerges with perfect clarity and agree on a conclusion — whatever it is.

The federal courts should be most immune from the push and pull of partisan politics because judges — appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate — serve for life. I applaud the brilliance of our Founders. Honorable jurists, bound solely to the rule of law, are supposed to secure the constitutional rights of the people. They owe allegiance to nothing else. Often, they stand up for the minority, the disliked, even the offensive against the weight of the majority and the powerful.

http://www.greensboro.com/blogs/clark_off_the_record/doug-clark-independent-investigators-courts-and-press-guard-us-all/article_e75fba95-b20c-501d-85cb-e8d9c258f821.html

May 26, 2017 at 1:26 pm
Richard L Bunce says:

The Independent ones do, the Biased ones not so much.

Mr. Clark is the latter, not the former.

Mr. Clark does not always practice what he preaches either...

http://www.greensboro.com/blogs/clark_off_the_record/brandon-calls-for-convention-to-overturn-citizens-united/article_3354cdf2-ecef-11e3-9344-001a4bcf6878.html