Garland's vow can eradicate Trump's corruption of the Justice Department

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

After four years of the Trump administration running roughshod over evenhanded, apolitical law enforcement at the Department of Justice, there is an understandable desire to strengthen constraints on the presidency through legislation or regulation. A former White House counsel and a former assistant attorney general, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, have written a whole book — "After Trump" — proposing guardrails to put into place.

Merrick Garland, who may be confirmed as the nation’s next attorney general as early as this week, signaled a different approach during his confirmation hearings. Instead of calling for a formalized, legislated code of conduct governing the relationship between the White House and the Justice Department, Garland invoked the norms that were taken for granted before Trump decided he had an “absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.”

Garland, of course, imbibed the department's norms in his years as federal prosecutor and a deputy assistant attorney general. On Monday, he explained them as “policies that protect the independence of the department from partisan influence in law-enforcement investigations; that strictly regulate communications with the White House; … that respect the professionalism of DOJ employees; and that set out the principles of federal prosecution to guide the exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

Perhaps the most notable of these principles is this one: There is to be no communication between the White House and the department with respect to pending cases, except in narrowly drawn circumstances between a small subset of officials (the deputy attorney general and the White House counsel). The general way this works actually exists in writing, but only in letter form — nothing more formal than that — and before Trump and his various attorneys general, that’s all it took to effectively separate the president from misusing the massive investigative and prosecutorial power of the Department of Justice.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/litman-garlands-vow-eradicate-trumps-110058341.html

[Mopar151]

1. It's the old pro's home track!

He knows exactly where the guardrails are...... Every bump and seam in the pavement, too!