Lobbyist for Russian interests says he attended dinners hosted by Sessions

Richard Burt contradicts Jeff Sessions’ testimony that he didn’t believe he had contacts with lobbyists working for Russian interests during Trump’s campaign

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By Stephanie Kirchgaessner

An American lobbyist for Russian interests who helped craft an important foreign policy speech for Donald Trump has confirmed that he attended two dinners hosted by Jeff Sessions during the 2016 campaign, apparently contradicting the attorney general’s sworn testimony given this week.

Sessions testified under oath on Tuesday that he did not believe he had any contacts with lobbyists working for Russian interests over the course of Trump’s campaign. But Richard Burt, a former ambassador to Germany during the Reagan administration, who has represented Russian interests in Washington, told the Guardian that he could confirm previous media reports that stated he had contacts with Sessions at the time.

“I did attend two dinners with groups of former Republican foreign policy officials and Senator Sessions,” Burt said.

Asked whether Sessions was unfamiliar with Burt’s role as a lobbyist for Russian interests – a fact that is disclosed in public records – or had any reason to be confused about the issue, Burt told the Guardian that he did not know.

Several media reports published before Trump’s election in November noted that Burt advised then candidate Trump on his first major foreign policy speech, a role that brought him into contact with Sessions personally.

Burt, who previously served on the advisory board of Alfa Capital Partners, a private equity fund where Russia’s Alfa Bank was an investor and last year was lobbying on behalf of a pipeline company that is now controlled by Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled energy conglomerate, first told Politico in October that he had been invited to two dinners that were hosted by Sessions last summer, at the height of the presidential campaign.

Sessions, a former senator for Alabama who was chairman of the Trump campaign’s national security committee, reportedly invited Burt so that he could discuss issues of national security and foreign policy.

When John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona who is a frequent critic of Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, asked Sessions in a hearing this week before the Senate intelligence committee about whether the attorney general had ever had “any contacts with any representative, including any American lobbyist or agent of any Russian company” during the 2016 campaign, Sessions said he did not.

“I don’t believe so,” Sessions said.

Other outlets, including the New Yorker magazine and Reuters, also reported last year that Burt had contributed his views to Trump’s speech. When NPR interviewed Burt in May 2016 about the talk, he said he was “asked to provide a draft for that speech, and parts of that draft survived into the final [version]”.

The speech, delivered on 27 April 2016 at the Mayflower Hotel, was attended by Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and is now at the heart of new questions about Sessions’ personal dealings with Russian officials. Sessions recused himself from oversight of the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign in March after it emerged that he held two undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador last year.

In his explosive testimony before Congress earlier this month, former FBI director James Comey, who was fired by Trump, suggested that he had known that Sessions would eventually have to recuse himself from the Russia probe, but declined to explain the details in public.

Questions directed at Sessions by lawmakers days later – after they had privately been briefed by Comey – suggested it related to a third alleged encounter with Kislyak that had not been disclosed, this time at the Mayflower Hotel speech. In his confirmation hearing, Sessions had told lawmakers under oath that he had never had communication with Russian officials.

This week, in the latest hearing, Sessions said he may have “possibly” had an “encounter” with the Russian ambassador during a reception at the Mayflower, but could not recall any specific conversations.

The speech was hosted by the Center for the National Interest, a Washington thinktank. Burt sits on the group’s board of directors.

While Burt has not played a central role in the FBI and congressional investigation, Sessions’ response about his dealings with American lobbyists – which appears to contradict previous reports that Burt and Sessions communicated during the campaign – could invite more scrutiny of the attorney general’s testimony.

It is also possible that Sessions was not fully aware of Burt’s lobbying history, although Burt’s affiliation with Russian interests is fairly well known in Washington circles.

The former ambassador is managing director of the Europe and Eurasia practice at McLarty Associates. In that role, he’s served as a lobbyist for the New European Pipeline AG, the company behind Nord Stream II. At the time the work started, Gazprom, the Russian state-owned oil company, owned a 50% stake, but it now owns the entire entity. The pipeline, which is seen as making Europe more dependent on Russian energy exports, was opposed by the Obama administration.

Burt also serves on the board of Deutsche Bank’s closed-end fund group, according to his online biography.

The former ambassador and lobbyist appears to have recently sought to downplay his role in helping Trump to formulate the Mayflower speech, telling the Daily Beast earlier this year that he had transmitted his counsel through a third party intermediary.

In the speech, Trump said an “easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia – from a position of strength – is possible” and that “common sense says this cycle of hostility must end”.

The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

Asked about Burt and the exchange between McCain and Sessions, Carter Page, another former foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign and a central figure in the Russia investigation, said he found “the entire line of questioning to be near the pinnacle of witch hunt tactics”.

“In the grand scheme of things, the severe civil rights abuses by Clinton-Obama-Comey regime carried out against myself and other supporters of the Trump campaign in their illegal attempts to influence the 2016 election will help clarify how irrelevant all these petty side-questions are,” he said.

Page added that he was writing a book on his experience and that he was “still in discussions” with publishers.

Amid Trump Chaos, Republicans Keep Their Eyes on the Big Prize: The Courts

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By Jake Johnson

While the Trump administration remains embroiled in scandals of its own making and continues to blunder forward seemingly without direction, Republicans have their collective gaze fixed on a prize they have coveted for years: complete domination of the judiciary.

This goal, thanks to years of obstructionism, may be just on the horizon.

"Control the Supreme Court, stack the judiciary, and you can stop the progressive movement, no matter how popular it is, no matter how much legislative power it has, for decades." 
—Corey Robin

As Esquire's Charles Pierce notes, President Trump has effectively "subcontracted the job of picking judges to the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and various other wingnut intellectual chop shops." Three of the finalists—Kevin Newsom, Damien Schiff, and John Bush—sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday for their confirmation hearings, which were scarcely mentioned by the press.

Much of the questioning, as NPR's Nina Totenberg reported, ultimately centered around blog posts two of the nominees—Bush and Schiff—had written throughout their careers.

"Among the posts Bush said he now regrets is one that equated the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery, with the Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion," Totenberg noted.

Schiff has a similarly tinged history, Totenberg added, "challenging everything from environmental regulations, to health and safety laws, to gay rights laws."

Since the hearings came to a close on Wednesday, commentators have expressed alarm about how little attention the fact that individuals with such records could soon fill the ranks of the judiciary is receiving from the media and the Democratic Party.

"Wednesday's confirmation hearing for three of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees may lack the intrigue of James Comey’s blockbuster testimony," wrote Politico's Kyle Barry, "but for anyone who cares about the integrity and independence of America's courts, the stakes could hardly be higher."

Barry continued:

Trump's initial nominees to fill more than 120 lower court vacancies—many of which exist only because the Republican Senate refused to act on the qualified nominations put forth by President Barack Obama—foretell a Trump-stacked judiciary that would clear the way for constitutionally suspect executive actions, shield corporate wrongdoers from accountability, and imperil the civil rights of all Americans.

Political theorist and author Corey Robin, in an piece for the Guardian on Thursday, expressed similar urgency, arguing "elite sectors" of the Republican Party have remained faithful to Trump only because of the leverage he gives them to stack the courts in their favor.

"Trump has gotten one supreme court appointment, he may well get more, and he's moved more quickly on lower-court appointments than Obama did," Robin wrote. "The legal arm of the conservative movement is probably the best organized, most far-reaching and far-seeing sector of the right. They truly are playing—and have been playing—the long game."

If progressives don't respond quickly with a similarly organized and long-term approach, Robin warned, the results could be disastrous, potentially hindering civil rights and dealing a vicious blow to workers and the environment.

"Control the Supreme Court, stack the judiciary, and you can stop the progressive movement, no matter how popular it is, no matter how much legislative power it has, for decades."

An open-ended Afghan war can serve ‘America First’

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By M.K. BHADRAKUMAR

US President Donald Trump’s reported decision to delegate the Afghan war to Defense Secretary James Mattis reflects smart thinking.

The POTUS doesn’t have a military mind – unlike his predecessor Barack Obama. The decision to delegate the war to the Pentagon generals should have been taken by Obama eight years ago when the war party comprising then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates (plus the top brass) hustled him into sanctioning the famous “surge”.

Had he done that, once it transpired that the “surge” was getting nowhere, circa 2012, Obama could have taken matters into his own hands and wound up the war. Instead, he took the job as commander-in-chief seriously and over-strategized the war. Senator John McCain says Obama is responsible for the failure of the war.

Now, Trump’s decision puts the onus entirely on the Pentagon. Mattis claimed during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, the “Taliban had a good year last year; they are trying to have a good one this year. Right now I believe the enemy is surging. We are not winning in Afghanistan right now. We will correct this as soon as possible.”

What he implied was that there are still ways of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. According to AFP, Mattis’s remarks prompted Trump to hand over to him the authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan.

Indeed, why should Trump prevent Mattis from winning the Afghan war? It is a safe bet, too. The Pottery Barn rule expects Mattis to own the responsibility for the war.

So, the big question is: Does Mattis have a winning strategy? Mattis promised to return to the lawmakers by mid-July with one. However, he disclosed his mind just enough to trigger misgivings.

Mattis said, “We’re taking a regional approach to this. We’re looking at everything from the situation between India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan; obviously Iran and that whole South Asia area.”

He essentially underscored that the Trump administration’s Afghan policy would factor in the impact of the tensions between India and Pakistan on the situation in Afghanistan. That’s a proposition that will go down well in Pakistan.

Of course, it is not a terribly original idea. It had occurred to Obama, too, initially, while appointing Richard Holbrooke as his administration’s special representative in 2009. But then, New Delhi threw tantrums, Obama retracted, and Holbrooke ended up merely as “AfPak” man – instead of “AfPakIn”.

Indeed, India and Pakistan are incapable (or unwilling) of behaving responsibly. At the recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at Astana (June 8-9), the two prime ministers couldn’t even bring themselves to have a 15-minute conversation.

Meanwhile, the situation in the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir, which Pakistan regards as the core issue, remains explosive. The resulting India-Pakistan tensions, in turn, have spilled over to the Afghan turf. Pakistan fears that Kabul and Delhi have embarked upon a covert project across the Durand Line to destabilize it.

Pakistan’s expectation will be that the Trump administration should mediate a solution to the Kashmir dispute. It will see hope in Mattis’s words.

But then, the possibility of Delhi agreeing to US mediation to settle Kashmir is zero. The Hindu nationalists claim that the only thing to be discussed is the vacation of parts of Kashmir that are under Pakistani control.

Clearly, Mattis’s “regional approach” is a non-starter – unless Trump can persuade Prime Minister Modi otherwise when they meet in the White House on June 26. But Trump lacks the leverage to force Modi, and Russia will not allow the US to muzzle India. Doesn’t all this occur to Mattis’s erudite mind?

Meanwhile, new fault lines have appeared on the Afghan political landscape. On the one hand, Pashtun nationalism is on the ascendancy and a dramatic realignment of forces along tribal lines is under way. On the other hand, the inevitable ethnic backlash has also begun. Such undercurrents have a history of acquiring demonic fury in the Hindu Kush.

To be sure, US intelligence is clued in on the churnings in the sub-soil of Afghan tribal politics since the peace deal was concluded with the Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Earlier this week, Kabul’s garrison commander and police chief – both Pashtuns – have been suspended and a state minister – a Tajik (a “Panjshiri” to boot) – has resigned.

Mattis would realize that the old battle lines that he knew as the brigadier general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade who was given command of Task Force 58 to move into southern Afghanistan in November 2001 – or as the head of the US Central Command in 2009 – may not hold good today.

Mattis has bought time till July to watch how the fuming Afghan volcano behaves. But US lawmakers cannot be held at bay for long. They are in a hurry to know what’s in it for Academi, Northrop Grumman, CACI, Lockheed Martin, or Raytheon – and IBM, a company not generally known as a defense contractor but was the largest beneficiary of a Pentagon program to stabilize Afghanistan by facilitating private investment in its vast mineral wealth.

In last week’s Breitbart News Sunday radio program, Blackwater founder and former US Navy SEAL Erik Prince made a tantalizing proposition:

“I say go back to the model that worked, for a couple of hundred years in the region, by the East India Company, which used professional Western soldiers who were contracted and lived with and trained with and, when necessary, fought with their local counterparts… The more we’ve gone into a conventional approach in Afghanistan, the more we are losing.”

Prince’s recommendation will appeal to any shrewd business – or military – mind. That was indeed the way an open-ended British occupation of India became possible, at affordable costs, which eventually transformed as the jewel in Queen Victoria’s crown.

All in all, Trump’s decision to detach himself from Mattis’s conduct of the war appears to stem from a sober assessment.

Lawsuit Accuses Private Prison Company of Illegally Funding a Trump Super-PAC

Did it influence Trump’s pro-private prison policy?

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By SAMANTHA MICHAELS

It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has been very good for private prison executives. After the Justice Department announced earlier this year that it would continue using private lockups—a reversal of an Obama policy announced in 2016—prison companies’ stock prices soared. Now, a campaign finance watchdog is suing to figure out whether one of these prison companies influenced the Trump administration’s policy reversal by donating large sums to a pro-Trump super-PAC during the 2016 presidential campaign.

In August and November, GEO Group, the country’s biggest private prison company, donated a total of $225,000 through a subsidiary to a pro-Trump super-PAC, according to campaign disclosures. The super-PAC, Rebuilding America Now, had been heartily endorsed by the Trump team; Mike Pence said contributions to the group would be “one of the best ways to stop Hillary Clinton and help elect Donald Trump our next president.” But according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by the Campaign Legal Center, the prison company’s decision to fund the super-PAC allegedly violated federal law, which prohibits government contractors from making political contributions.

GEO Corrections Holdings made a donation of $100,000 on August 19, just one day after the Obama administration announced that it would phase out its use of private prisons because of their high rates of violence. In November, before Election Day, the GEO subsidiary made another donation to Rebuilding America Now.

After Trump’s inauguration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Justice Department would continue its relationship with private prisons. The following month, GEO won a $110 million contract to build a federal immigrant detention center in Texas.

In its lawsuit, the Campaign Legal Center is asking the Justice Department to turn over documents related to the administration’s decision to keep working with private prisons. In particular, the nonprofit watchdog is seeking records that might shed light on whether the administration’s decision was influenced by GEO contributions to the pro-Trump super-PAC. The Campaign Legal Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request for these records more than three months ago. But the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has delayed the fulfillment of the request, according to the lawsuit, which seeks to speed up the disclosure process.

“GEO made illegal contributions to influence the election, and now DOJ is refusing to release the documents that might show whether the Administration rewarded GEO for its illegal spending,” Adav Noti, a senior director at the Campaign Legal Center and a former associate general counsel for policy at the Federal Election Commission, said in a statement.

GEO Group denies the allegation that its contributions broke campaign finance laws. “These are absolutely baseless and meritless allegations. All of our company’s contributions have been fully compliant with all applicable laws,” the company said in a statement to Mother Jones. It defended its $110 million contract to build an immigrant detention facility in Texas. “The contract we were awarded by the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Justice, was part of a competitive procurement process which was initiated by the Obama Administration in 2015.” It also noted that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has worked with private prison companies since the 1990s.

GEO noted in December that its subsidiary’s super-PAC donations were legal because its subsidiary “is a non-contracting legal entity and has no contracts with any federal agency.” However, a page on USASpending.gov, a government website, suggests the subsidiary did receive funds from a federal contract in the past. A spokesman for the GEO Group told Mother Jones that the information on the USASpending.gov page was incorrect and “GEO Corrections Holdings has never held any federal contracts.” The Federal Election Commission has yet to weigh in on the matter.

Hawaii Governor says he is 'looking forward' to Trump's travel ban going to Supreme Court

'Hawaii is a very special place. We are a community of minorities. Our legacy is that we have welcomed wave after wave of immigrants to our state'

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By Clark Mindock 

The Governor of Hawaii is looking forward to the seemingly inevitable Supreme Court showdown between his state’s Attorney General and Donald Trump’s administration over the President’s controversial travel ban.

That contest became a virtual certainty just this week when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a freeze originating in Hawaii on Mr Trump’s proposed ban. Governor David Ige says that the diversity in his state is something to be celebrated – not curtailed – and that his state government is willing to push back against the isolationist impulses coming out of the White House.

“Hawaii is a very special place. We are a community of minorities. Our legacy is that we have welcomed wave after wave of immigrants to our state, and they have all contributed greatly to the sense of community,” Mr Ige told The Independent.

The court decisions over the travel ban have clearly upset the President, with his administration already on its second attempt to halt incoming travel from several predominantly Muslim countries. The executive order would prohibit incoming travellers from Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Iran and Libya for 90 days and all refugees for 120 days while the US government reviews vetting procedure looking for possible improvements. 

As for the Hawaiian islands, they have an extensive history of immigration that has contributed to the rich cultural diversity there. It is one of just four US states where residents of European ancestry don’t add up to a majority, and many of the residents there descend from Asian settlers who came to work on sugarcane plantations starting in the late 19th and early 20th century. Even today, more than one in six residents in the state are immigrants, providing billions of dollars in tax revenue and more than $31bn (£24bn) in consumer purchasing power.

Located in the central Pacific, Hawaii is geographically distant from the US, but houses the military base that fell victim to the largest military attack on American soil in history. Even after those Pearl Harbour attacks by Japan – which served as a catalyst for the US to join the Second World War – the state refrained from joining American mainland countries in widespread detainment of Japanese immigrants there. Just 1 per cent of the island state’s Japanese-origin population ended up in internment camps during that war.

It is with that backdrop that Mr Ige's administration decided to push back against the travel ban Mr Trump has championed as a means of boosting American security. Aspects of that ban that appear overtly aimed at specific nationalities and religions don’t vibe with politicians in a state that is perhaps best known for its laid back surfing culture, colourful leis, and beautiful beaches.

“Certainly we felt compelled to take a stand against the executive order which, to us, is clearly focused on national origin and religious basis”, Mr Ige said.

The 9th Circuit Court decision this week affirms the decision by a federal judge in Hawaii to temporarily block Mr Trump’s travel ban just before it was to be implemented.

Mr Trump has said the ban is in the security interests of the US, but in their ruling the 9th Circuit Court went against the ban on statutory grounds, saying that the President had exceeded the authority Congress had granted his office to make national security judgements.

An earlier decision by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals blocking the ban said that the executive order violated the First Amendment’s religious protections. The judge in that case wrote that the federal government’s argument for the travel ban “drops of religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination”.

Mr Trump has also not seemingly helped himself with tweets about the proposed bans. One in particular, sent in response to the London Bridge terror attack earlier this month, said: “That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries,” Mr Trump wrote, “not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!”.

The President has repeatedly called on the Supreme Court to reinstate his travel ban – and faced a awkward moment on Thursday in visiting the court to for the investiture of new Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose Senate confirmation in April was his first major accomplishment. Mr Trump was due to speak to the Supreme Court justices before the event, as former presidents have traditionally done.

The Trump administration has moved to amend the start date of the travel ban – which was introduced in March – with the 90-day limit having been set to expire on Wednesday. The White House have said that the start dates would not start until the court injunctions are lifted. The Supreme Court has also recently given the Trump administration more time to file papers responding to the 9th Circuit Court ruling, possibly delaying any decision.

As for Mr Ige, he said he wouldn’t mind if the nation’s highest court hear arguments from his state on the matter of the ban.

“We look forward to the Supreme Court taking up the issue, we are committed”, he said. “We do believe that it has an impact on our community, and we wanted to make certain that the most important tenants of the Constitution are upheld.”

Hawaii Considers Radical Idea to Make Life in Paradise a Little Easier

A new bill enshrines the right to ”basic financial security.”

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By JOSH HARKINSON

Hawaii has become the first state in the country to officially start exploring a means to provide its residents with a guaranteed basic income. The bill, passed recently by both houses of the state legislature in a unanimous vote, declares that all Hawaiians “deserve basic financial security” and directs state agencies to analyze “universal basic income” and similar policy options.  

“As innovation and automation and inequality disrupt our economy, we want to make sure that everybody benefits and nobody is left behind,” the author of the bill, state Rep. Chris Lee of Kaliua, told Mother Jones. “It’s past time that we had a serious talk about not just tweaking our economic policies but having a new discussion from the ground up about what our values and priorities are.”

Though Alaska has, since 1976, provided its residents with a stipend funded by oil revenues, Hawaii is the first state to formally consider the idea of offering its residents a basic income sufficient to cover living expenses. Enacted in early May, the resolution, Lee says, was motivated by Hawaii’s sky-high cost of living—the highest in the country—and its heavy reliance on low-paid service industry jobs.

The text of the measure focuses heavily on the potential impact of job-killing technological change in Hawaii, citing factors such as the development of self-driving autonomous vehicles, automated grocery store checkout lines, e-commerce, and 3-D printers. Hawaii has a very limited manufacturing and tech sector, the lawmaker says, making the state and its service-focused economy particularly vulnerable to disruption.

“There has been a discussion for a long time about how do we build an economy where everybody can afford to live here and survive,” Lee says. 

The idea of universal basic income, or UBI, has also been gaining traction in parts of California, albeit yet not on a state-wide level. The proposition has taken particular hold in Silicon Valley, as tech leaders look to address concerns about their industry’s displacement of blue-collar workers. Early last year, the San Francisco tech incubator Y-Combinator began rolling out a UBI pilot project in Oakland and is now giving 100 local families around $1,500 a month. In October, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and others launched the Economic Security Project, a $10-million fund aimed at researching and promoting UBI. In March, freshman Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley proposed $1-trillion earned income tax credit for working families—a move heralded as a major step toward UBI. And the nonprofit Golden State Opportunity Foundation is pushing to expand access to California’s state earned income tax credit in this year’s budget. 

The concept has attracted the support of some well-known labor, social justice, and academic leaders, such as former Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “As artificial intelligence takes over more and more good jobs, a larger percentage of the workforce will be pushed into low-wage work,” Reich, a UC Berkeley public policy professor and former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, told Mother Jones. “They are going to need some universal minimum in order to ensure that everybody has at least what they need to avoid dire poverty.” 

While the Hawaii bill is now on the books, it still has a long way to go before UBI becomes a reality. Now, a “basic economic security working group” will be drafted and will include leaders from government, business, organized labor, and academia. The group will assess Hawaii’s exposure to “disruptive innovation” and submit studies on UBI and similarly sweeping programs to the legislature. “There is definitely a recognition that beyond just talking about basic income that things need to change,” Lee says. “We need to take proactive action to chart a stable path forward for our economy and all of our residents.”

If Trump Tries to Fire Mueller, It Might Be Up to This Woman

Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand may soon face a historic decision.

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By Jefferson Morley

On Monday, I predicted Trump would soon begin talking about firing special prosecutor Robert Mueller. Within hours NewsMax publisher Christopher Ruddy told PBS NewsHour that the president was considering exactly that possibility.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Trump had genuinely contemplated trying to get rid of the independent counsel, only to have aides talk him out of it. TheTimes added:

But people close to Mr. Trump say he is so volatile they cannot be sure that he will not change his mind about Mr. Mueller if he finds out anything to lead him to believe the investigation has been compromised. 

Now that the Washington Post is reporting that multiple senior officials say that Mueller is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, Trump's volatility will be tested. Given the credible testimony of former FBI director James Comey and the high-powered legal team assembled by Mueller, Trump is right to view the special prosecutor's investigation as a dire threat to his presidency.

Waiting for the Crazy

Phillip Bump of the Washington Post says firing Mueller would be "foolish." Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a conservative, calls it a "crazy scenario."

But since Washington under Trump experiences foolish and crazy scenarios on a regular basis, it is fair, if not necessary, to ask what will happen if and when the crazy comes to pass.

What may well happen is that Rachel Brand, a little-known conservative lawyer who now serves as associate attorney general of the United States, will face a momentous political decision.

How she could wind up helping Trump fire Mueller is a complicated story.

Chain of Command

According to the law that created the special prosecutor position, only the attorney general or a responsible Justice Department has that authority to dismiss an independent counsel.

Since Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from Russia matters (with one huge exception), the decision falls to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, then a series of senior DOJ officials. The chain of command was set by a little-noticed executive order issued by Trump on March 31, "providing an order of succession in the Justice Department."

In addition, if Trump wants to fire Mueller, he would have to certify that Mueller’s actions had created “good cause” for his removal.

Asked Tuesday what he would do if Trump ordered him to fire Mueller, Rosenstein said he had not seen any evidence of “good cause” for dismissal and asserted Mueller’s independence would be protected.

“I’m not going to follow any orders unless I believe those are lawful and appropriate orders,” he said.

A month ago, Rosenstein "trashed the reputation he had built over the years as a fair-minded and above-the-fray prosecutor by allowing Trump to use him as cover for Trump’s own decision to sack FBI Director James Comey," wrote the Post's Dana Milbank. Only Rosenstein's appointment of Mueller on May 17 "redeemed his reputation, preserved the justice system, pulled American politics back from the brink."

To approve the firing of Mueller, Rosenstein would have to repudiate his decision to hire him, which seems unlikely.

“I can’t imagine Rosenstein agreeing to act on the basis of a conclusion that the 'good cause' standard has been met,” wrote Marty Lederman, former Justice Department official and founding editor of the Just Security blog.

If Rosenstein is fired or resigns, Trump’s March 31 executive order designates the associate attorney general, as the top ranking official in the department, namely Rachel Brand.

What Would Brand Do?

Brand is much more likely to carry out Trump’s orders, at least judging by her record.

Confirmed by the Senate on May 18, Brand has impeccable conservative credentials, according to Breitbart News.  A 1998 graduate of Harvard Law School, she is a member of the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal network. She clerked for Justice Charles Fried, a leading conservative jurist, on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Brand has been politically active on behalf of Republican presidents. During the Bush administration, she helped prepare Supreme Court nominees Samuel Alito and John Roberts for Senate confirmation.

She has a reputation for bipartisanship, which could help her in time of controversy.  President Obama appointed her to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency that seeks to protect civil liberties and privacy in the so-called “war on terrorism.”

She has the esteem of more liberal colleagues. Lederman predicts Brand would reject any Trump order to fire Mueller.

“If Trump removes Rosenstein, the new acting AG would be associate AG Rachel Brand, another excellent and principled official who is also very unlikely to play along with such a plan," Lederman wrote.

Kate Martin, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, who saw Brand in action at the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, disagrees.

“My dealings with Rachel on issues surrounding national security surveillance leave me concerned that her views on the lack of restraint on executive power would lead her to agree to a request from this president that should be rejected,” Martin said in a phone interview with AlterNet.

Bork, the Role Model

In a speech at a Federalist Society conference in February 2015, Brand argued that in the context of national security, the president must be able to exercise his “power with the nimbleness and flexibility required to predict and respond to a very wide array of foreign threats.”

Thus Brand may be sympathetic to the arguments of White House lawyer Jay Sekulow. When asked about the possibility of firing Mueller, Sekulow's first response was to assert that President Trump is a “unitary executive.” The concept of a unitary executive, advocated by former Vice President Dick Cheney, holds that the president has virtually unlimited powers in the area of national security that cannot be curbed by the courts or the Congress.

One reason Republicans lawmakers sought to dissuade Trump from firing Mueller was the memory of the so-called "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973.

When President Nixon wanted to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in October 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his top two deputies refused to carry out his order and were fired. The task of dismissing the special prosecutor fell to the fourth ranking official in the department, an opinionated former Yale Law School professor named Robert Bork. He was willing to carry out Nixon’s order, and Cox was gone.

The Saturday Night Massacre slowed the Watergate investigation while devastating Nixon’s credibility. Democrats advocating Nixon's impeachment, politically isolated up until that point, were emboldened. Congressional Republicans, previously loyal to Nixon, began to abandon him. Ten months later, on the brink of impeachment and conviction, Nixon resigned.

Bork went on to become a conservative hero, not the least for his refusal to abandon Nixon. In the 1980s, President Reagan named him to a federal judgeship and in 1987, nominated him for the Supreme Court. When the U.S. Senate rejected his nomination because of his extreme positions on civil rights and abortion, Bork became a martyr of the American right and a role model for conservative legal activists.

Is Rachel Brand another Robert Bork? I suspect we may find out sooner rather than later.