While the tyrant Donald Trump has rewarded Republican donors with prime seating for his taxpayer-funded July Fourth political rally on the National Mall, the public deserves answers about why other top officials cannot muster effective responses to his years of law breaking, including his corrupt giveaways as president to family and business cronies — and his financial alliances with murderous dictators.

NBC's Democratic 2020 presidential "debates" last week showcased 20 Democratic candidates who specialize for the most part in self-righteous grievances, soaring personal ambition, and impractical giveaways that they promise for their own hoped-for voting blocs.

Meanwhile, the candidates provided diminished hope that one of them can win next year's election and carry into office a Senate majority, as a New York Post front page at right aptly noted. 

The Democratic contenders launched the most visible phase of their primary campaign with two nights of debates on June 27 and 28 in Miami.

They pushed their failed themes of "identity politics" near-certain to fall flat at the same time that Trump's corrupt political machine is raising record amounts from GOP donors to fund the kind of propaganda and election-rigging that brought him into office in 2016.

This cycle, Trump is augmenting his chances by ruthlessly exploiting his presidential power, including via the greedy and craven Senate GOP majority and an increasingly partisan federal judiciary. They are delivering a radical right overthrow of U.S. government Constitutional checks-and-balances and other norms.

Such Democratic "solutions" as non-criminal status and free health care for illegal immigrants and "free college" for students loom as failed strategies to win the presidential and Senate elections. They are transparent leftist sops to presumed voting blocs.

Even Democratic-leaning pundits are pointing out their economic and other structural flaws, as in a column by Washington Post business commentator Steve Pearlstein. Regarding "free college," for example, he noted that turning a slogan into a program would create many problems, including unfairness to non-college youth and those who have paid off their student debt.

The real trouble would begin when the well-funded and right-dominated media ramp up their ridicule against Democrats for their poorly conceived policy programs.

Updates:

• Palmer Report, Commentary: Donald Trump has completely unhinged psychotic racist meltdown, July 14, 2019.
• Washington Post, Opinion: Wake up, Democrats. Trump is on something of a roll, July 12, 2019.

Meanwhile, Democrats have failed to put their self-centered ambitions and flawed strategies aside long enough to expose in an understandable way the deep and sinister corruption of the Trump Family regime.

One such way would be to shorten the 11-day congressional Fourth of July holiday and convene high-profile public hearings to bring forward such compelling witnesses as former President Jimmy Carter.

The usually mild-speaking U.S. president from 1977 to 1981 has assessed the current president in the kind of frank language never voiced publicly by any of his predecessors about one another.

Speaking at the Carter Center in his native Georgia, Carter made the little-noticed but vitally important historical judgment that Trump is an illegitimate president who stole the 2016 election with the help of Russians, as reported here by the Washington Post: Jimmy Carter says Trump wouldn’t be president without help from Russia. The Carter Center is a world-renowned locale for human rights, including advocacy for honest elections worldwide.

“There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” said Carter, shown in a file photo. “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”

Yet the former president failed to garner the front-page coverage such comments deserve even though they were backed by similar words from his vice president, Walter Mondale of Minnesota. Similarly, few in the press covered Carter's comments several years ago that the United States may not be a democracy any longer.

Democrats should lead the way in providing a Capitol forum for such a unique voice. Separately, they should invite journalist author and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, shown right in a file photo, to answer questions posed by her rape allegation against the president, as first reported June 21 by New York Magazine in E. Jean Carroll: “Trump attacked me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, excerpting her new book.

This tab provides supplementary reading, including source articles, for the Justice Integrity Project column published for the July 4, 2019 holiday, Democrats Dally While Trump Guts Constitution, Decency, Democracy.

The column began:

While the tyrant Donald Trump prepares to reward his Republican donors with prime seating for his taxpayer-funded July Fourth political rally on the National Mall, the American public deserves answers about why the nation's other top officials cannot muster effective responses to his years of law breaking, including his corrupt giveaways as president to family and business cronies --  and his financial alliances with murderous dictators.

The materials are arranged in reverse chronological order below. They total too much material to include as an appendix to the column.

President Trump's clumsy explanation on June 21 of his planned military strike against Iran rapidly collapsed. But it falls within a longer tradition of Executive Branch secrecy and deception regarding history-making United States military and intelligence developments.

Trump claimed via Twitter and then during an interview with NBC's Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that he learned from military officials for the first time just 30 minutes before a planned retaliatory attack on Iran that it would cause an estimated 150 Iranian deaths.

Trump is shown in an NBC News photo with Todd at right during the June 23 interview at the White House.

Trump said that he cancelled the Air Force attack on Iran just before launch because the effect would be disproportionate to Iran's downing of an unmanned drone with no casualties.

Experts, including pundits quoted by name and unnamed sources, promptly disputed Trump's version.

Former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, told an MSNBC audience, for example, that military officials always gave her casualty estimates early during any advance briefing for her as a senator — and that the military would certainly provide an even more thorough briefing to a president before a major strike. Military and intelligence experts concurred on air.

The New York Times first reported that airplanes were already in the air when Trump aborted the mission, contradicting his account. The Washington Post later reported that Trump had in fact been briefed on casualty estimates early on Thursday, unlike his claim that he raised the issue for the first time just 30 minutes before the attack and that "generals" had to research the matter and then get back to him in time for his executive decision.

Other critics roundly criticized Todd and NBC. Aaron Rupar of Vox, for example, published a June 24 column, Chuck Todd’s Trump interview, and the backlash to it, explained. Rupar wrote: "At numerous points throughout the interview, Todd let Trump get away with blatant falsehoods and gaslighting. Todd also teed up a number of softball questions for the president, like 'Do you think you’ve been more successful in business or the presidency?'”

Similarly, the conservative but anti-Trump Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote on June 24Trump’s lies need to be exposed in real time.

The dispute over Trump's veracity raises many issues. One involved the sudden resignation of Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan after someone leaked rumors of a long-ago domestic scandal.

Some commentators have claimed that the replacement of Shanahan smacks of internal Trump Administration intrigue.  Shanahan's replacement is Secretary of the Army, Mark Esper, (shown at right), a West Point classmate of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a purported ally of the administration's most extreme hawks like Pompeo. Shanahan is reported to have been more cautious about embarking on war against Iran than Pompeo.

Whatever the facts on that, one issue noted all too seldom by major media is that dissembling and secrecy have a disturbing history in such presidential decision-making on the most important matters, typically involving war, assassinations and covert backgrounds of elected office-holders.

With a few exceptions, such as the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" hoax leading to the 2003 U.S. coalition attack on Iraq, the mainstream, corporate-owned media are especially reluctant to reassess the past even, or especially, in historically important "national security" matters.

The reasons?

Journalists fear of lost access to powerful officials. By contrast, NBC's Todd showed his eagerness to host Trump and feed him questions regarded as "softballs" by some news colleagues. Journalists often fear also that if they dig too deep they might expose their own news  organizations' mistakes or complicity in suppressing previous stories.

Regarding government lies to promote venal policies under the rhetoric of "national security" or other foreign policy goals, the major media may serve as silent partners in elite government intrigues -- and not independent voices, as promoted in conventional wisdom.

For example, our most recent column here, Trump Found His Roy Cohn In Deep State Fixer Bill Barr, reported how the major media and Congress alike have been extremely reluctant even to mention Attorney General William Barr's disgraceful record as a CIA operative and Justice Department apparatchik decades ago in helping cover up heinous, state-sanctioned narcotics and arms smuggling along with associated financial crimes totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in victim losses. 

Attorney General William Barr, center, is flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, right, and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Edward O'Callaghan of the National Security Division,as Barr used pro-Trump language to dismiss the findings of the Mueller Report at Justice Department news conference on April 18, 2019.

In the time since that column, there are new examples of how secrecy surrounds even the most important foreign policy decisions and even when enough time has passed so that they become the focus of historical inquiry.

A vivid example occurred two weeks ago when former U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter spoke at the Atlantic Magazine's headquarters at the Watergate about his new book, Inside the Five-Sided Box): Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon.

Carter, shown at right on the cover of his book, had spent three decades at the Pentagon before his promotion from deputy defense secretary to the cabinet position during President Obama's second term.

During Q&A, this reporter noted that the book briefly addressed Obama's failure to enforce his "red line" in Syria during the late summer of 2013 but failed to describe who advocated for war authorization from Congress and who advocated for an immediate strike against the Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad.

Carter, now director of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and no longer an administration employee, is writing and speaking for "history," I mentioned as a preface to my question.

"I'm not going to tell you that for two reasons," Carter responded. "One, I'm not sure I know because I was deputy secretary at the time....Second, I don't remember that kind of detail and I would never betray that kind of confidence."

This tab provides supplementary reading, including source articles, for the Justice Integrity Project column published on June 24, 2019 Trump Lied About His Planned Iran Strike, Following A Pattern.

The column began, "President Trump's clumsy explanation Friday of his planned military strike against Iran rapidly collapsed. But it falls within a longer tradition of Executive Branch secrecy and deception regarding history-making United States military and intelligence developments."

The materials are arranged below in reverse chronological order below. They total more than 4,300 words, too much material to include as an appendix to the column.

In protecting President Trump, Attorney General William Barr is meeting the president’s demand for a loyal legal fixer in the radical right mold of the canny, connected and immoral Roy Cohn.

That is the not-so-hidden backstory of the radical gutting of American constitutional government now underway to expand and cover up Team Trump's corruption.

The synergy between Barr's ugly past as a CIA-trained strategist implicated in massive drug, arms and financial crime cover-ups decades ago makes his current alliance with Trump far more dangerous for United States democracy than Cohn's long-ago relationships with the big-talking hotelier Trump of the early 1980s or even with Cohn's own 1950s mentor, the red-baiting Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.

Some see Barr as a conservative "institutionalist" committed to a "rule of law" at the Justice Department. Others increasingly regard him as the president's puppet and defender against other law enforcers. We argue in this column that his track record shows a pattern of cynical manipulation of law and rhetoric to enhance the power of the already powerful.

First, our deep dive into this history introduces the cast of characters. The future president is shown at right (photo by Sonia Moskowitz/Altimeter Films) with Cohn, his one-time mentor, attorney and Manhattan nightlife companion before Cohn's 1986 death from AIDS.

Fast forward to March, where Trump is shown below at left congratulating Barr at the White House upon Barr's joining Team Trump as Attorney General.

Updates:

Barr Defies Flynn Judge: Despite court order, prosecutors don’t release transcripts of Flynn, Russian ambassador, May 31, 2019.

CBS Delivers Softball "CBS This Morning" Interview of Barr, May 31, 2019.

Worst Trump Assault Claim Yet? E. Jean Carroll: “Trump attacked me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman,” (shown via Twitter), June 21, 2019.

Trump last week gave Barr unprecedented power to declassify, upon his own initiative, U.S. intelligence, as reported by the New York Times and elsewhere in such stories as Trump Gives Attorney General Sweeping Power in Review of 2016 Campaign Inquiry on May 24. "The directive gives Mr. Barr immense leverage," the Times reported, "over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation."

Congruent with Barr's view on near-unlimited powers for a president under what others might view as a fascist "unitary executive" theory of the Constitution, Trump's delegation of power could be an attempt to mobilize the Justice Department against his political opponents.

Based on Trump's Twitter rants, these opponents could include intelligence analysts and law enforcers who have raised suspicions about corruption in Trump Team's foreign alliances and funding relationships.

Potentially lost in the blizzard of other news is the historical fact that such efforts by the Nixon administration prompted so much public outrage and legal liability as to form one of the building blocks for the impeachment momentum that drove Nixon from office in 1974 before the House could vote to impeach.

Our Justice Integrity Project was founded nearly a decade ago to expose instances of federal political prosecutions. So this looming Constitutional and human rights crisis sits squarely within our charter.

Barr's Rise To Power, Again

With that background, our column today focuses on Barr's disgraceful past as a fixer, cover-up artist  and world-class hypocrite spouting high-minded rhetoric about "rule of law" while abusing his power in service of corrupt goals and masters. The Mueller Report and its revelations provide our news peg, underscoring the importance of this historical inquiry at this point, but are not themselves our focus today. The Justice Integrity Project publishes daily updates of such developments in our sections summarizing general news, Trump Watch and Deep State.

For this more in-depth column, we start by citing Trump's repeated complaints about the Justice Department, as quoted in a documentary film, Where's My Roy Cohn?, which has been described as a "thriller-like exposé," released in January.

A year previous, on Jan. 4, 2018, the specific concept that Trump wanted a fixer in the mold of Roy Cohn to run the nominally independent U.S. Justice Department became prominent also with publication of a New York Times story by Michael S. Schmidt. It began:

“President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election.

"Public pressure was building for Mr. Sessions, who had been a senior member of the Trump campaign, to step aside. But the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

"Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.

"Mr. Trump then asked, 'Where’s my Roy Cohn?' He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986 [emphasis added]."

In the film clip, and as amplified in a Vanity Fair article, Where’s My Roy Cohn? Digs into One of the 20th Century’s Most Evil Men, Trump bemoaned (with his emphasis on the "my"), in effect, not being able to use the the Justice Department as a kind of personal legal team.

A weirdly evocative still photo from the documentary shows Cohn and Trump (at left below, both in headdress) during one of their gala evenings on the town together.

In the structure of the column unfolding below, we next touch briefly on the kind of criminal undertakings common for Trump and Cohn during the future president's early years in business.

We then move to Barr's concurrent rise as a loyal legal apparatchik for ultra-right-wing politicos during the 1980s.

Barr's work most notably served the Bush family and its allies, who became heavily involved in organized crime during the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s, according to multiple sources. These included Republican operative and former Reagan-Bush aide Roger Stone, author of Jeb! and The Bush Crime Family (2016), a remarkably detailed account of the family's corruption and deviance, as recounted by an insider notorious for his own dirty tricks. 

Before undertaking that history, however, we must note at the outset the shocking failure of society's watchdogs during recent years to refresh public recollection about Iran-Contra.

That's especially harmful when so many of the malefactors are still prominent. These include Barr, the recent National Rifle Association President Oliver North and Presidential Special Envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams.

Barr, who was U.S. attorney general from 1991 to 1993 as he protected President George H.W. Bush from corruption investigations, had sought the Trump post with a unsolicited 19-page memo to the Justice Department last year arguing for expanded presidential immunities.

Not surprisingly, the embattled Trump then chose Barr to replace Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who had angered the president by failing to protect him from the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into claims of 2016 Trump presidential campaign wrongdoing and cover up.

Barr went on at news conferences to spin his redacted version of Mueller's 448-page report before anyone in Congress or the public could see it.

Trump's designation of new powers for Barr is an invitation for Team Trump to cherry pick information to argue that Trump is the victim of "spying" and other unfair practices during the 2016 campaign. Scant rebuttal is possible because Team Trump controls much of the classified documentation and has vowed minimal cooperation with Congress or other oversight bodies.

The rest of the public can safely assume -- based on past practices and the indictment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on May 23 on spy charges for releasing classified documents -- that Team Trump will try to use Barr to thwart independent investigations of the classified materials at issue.

Justice Integrity Project Editor's Introduction: Guest columnist Mark Channing Miller shares below his tool kit for everyone who wants to change the blackout of news coverage of the landmark legal filing this spring by family members of 9/11 terror attack victims and by independent researchers who seek to require public disclosure by the U.S. Justice Department of hidden federal government records.

Just under Miller's introduction is his transcription of remarks by the lawsuit plaintiffs, some shown below at right, during their March 25 news conference near the federal courthouse and Justice Department headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, DC. The event was outside the Newseum, which was charging nearly $25 admission (including to see displays of 9/11 attack debris) but whose management tried to shoo from the public sidewalk the 9/11 lawsuit plaintiffs at right. 

Guest column for the Justice Integrity Project by Mark Channing Miller

What follows introduces a bundle of six documents related to the latest legal action to force a new, thorough, external assessment of any evidence related to September 2001 terrorist attacks that was known to the FBI as of 2013 but not considered by the 9/11 Commission. This action was filed on March 25, 2019. Five documents are linked; the sixth, a news conference transcript, follows this introduction.

The bundle is for the benefit of all citizens, including journalists, journalism students, lawyers and law students. As the news media have not acknowledged the mounting evidence at odds with government accounts of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, all are invited to put together their own "stories" as if you were members of the Fourth Estate and:

(1) attended the news conference after three plaintiffs sued the FBI in federal court on March 25; or (2) covered the release of the 9/11 Review Commission's report four years ago.

Because most people already spend so much time looking into screens, it may be worth having a print shop print out each of the six documents -- to be able to read each with pen in hand for underlining and writing questions and comments in the margins. Save money and paper by having them printed double-sided.

The bundle includes:

* The 44-page, seven-count complaint filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on March 25 charging that the FBI and the Justice Department ignored a 2014 Congressional mandate to provide Congress all evidence known to the Bureau regarding the September 2001 attacks, along with external assessments of that uevidence. Plaintiffs: Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and Robert McIlvaine. (Most of it is double-spaced for easier reading.)

* A 7,000-word rush transcript of the news conference [following this introduction] at which four individuals spoke about the complaint after filing it in federal court and answered questions. They are Attorneys Mick Harrison and David Meiswinkle of the Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, Richard Gage of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and Robert McIlvaine, father of a man killed in the 9/11 attack. No news organization representative was present. A video of the news conference is