Roger Stone & How Trump's Corruption Undermines the Rule of Law & Threatens our Republic

After Donald Trump leaves office, it may take decades to unravel all the corrupt acts he and members of his administration have perpetrated while president. And, historians and political scientists will marvel at what he has gotten away with in plain sight, almost begging [or challenging] us to rein him in. So, his commutation of Roger Stone's sentence yesterday is not at all surprising. Corrupt and detestable, but not surprising.

Washington Post Editorial Board Statement: ..."The president may have had the power to help his longtime friend. But that does not make it any less a perversion of justice — indeed, it is one of the most nauseating instances of corrupt government favoritism the United States has ever seen." "There is no doubt about Mr. Stone’s guilt. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he tried to play intermediary between WikiLeaks, which had become a front for the Kremlin, and the Trump campaign, which reaped the benefits of WikiLeaks’s publication of stolen Democratic emails. A jury concluded that Mr. Stone obstructed Congress, lied to investigators and tampered with a witness in the investigations that followed the 2016 race — “covering up for the president,” as the judge in his case noted."

Trump feels certain that Republicans in the Senate and his base will find some way to defend it even as Stone himself is out on the talk show circuit admitting his commutation was corrupt and defying anyone to do something about it.

Roger Stone in an interview with Howard Fineman tying his silence to a pardon [or commutation]: “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.”

Stone's quote is like something you would hear from a member of an organized crime family. Nixon would blush..... Hell, even John Gotti would blush.

One might imagine that there is a point beyond which even Trump's base would be sickened by the corruption within this administration, but, no, there isn't. You can hear them now saying, "well, what about Hillary's emails and at least he is protecting our confederate monuments from mobs of angry brown people," or some such sickening nonsense.

Each day Donald Trump sets out to pervert and sully our republic, to prove that he really could, "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody," without alienating his base. And, thus far, his Republican Senate allies and his supporters have lived up to that warped level of loyalty, ignoring his racism, his incompetence, his ignorance and his corruption.

And so, like it or not, we all live in Trump's America now where integrity and the rule of law are meaningless anachronisms.

Washington Post: "The United States is supposed to be a place in which laws apply equally to all. And while it never has — and never will — live up to that ideal in full, no modern president before Mr. Trump has so clearly renounced it. The president seems to be doing his best, within the confines of the U.S. constitutional system, to emulate the gangster leadership of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man whose ruinous reign Mr. Trump has always admired. If the country needed any more evidence, Friday confirmed that the greatest threat to the Republic is the president himself."

Many commentators say that we are poised to reject Trump's twisted version of America on Nov. 3rd, but I'm not so sure. The President seems to understand a great deal about the darkness in the soul of America, things that we thought were in our past. He has reawakened them, and we might not be ready to abandon them just yet.

#Trump #news #corruption #opinion

By: Don Lam & Curated Content

Photo credit: The Circus on Showtime