Obstruction of Justice seems to be his goal…
Along with stiffing desent….
And he’s NOT gonna stop unless he is removed from office….
…..while Trump’s apparent ongoing intimidation of the national-security apparatus is worrying, the truly terrifying exercise in power has been his purge of federal law enforcement. If a determined authoritarian president were to probe the system for weaknesses that would allow him to consolidate his power, the awesome authority of the Department of Justice is where he would focus. Either by instinct or by happenstance (we can rule out conscious planning), this is where Trump has arrived. The police powers of the state could, if corrupted, become a fearsome weapon both to hound the opposition party and to permit illegality by the president’s allies.
The Department of Justice has designed a credo, undergirded by a web of rules, to restrict it from interfering in politics. Those rules have proved pliable — indeed, Trump and his party began battering away at them during the 2016 campaign. The FBI’s famously Republican-leaning staff leaked promiscuously to Republicans such as House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes and, likely, Trump crony (and now lawyer) Rudy Giuliani. It was in part to head off a revolt from partisan agents, Comey later acknowledged, that he violated FBI norms by announcing a reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails in the waning days of the election.
Later, of course, Comey’s capitulation to Republican pressure became a pretext to fire him. The twisted genius of Trump’s purge is that it feeds on itself. Officials who resist Trump’s bullying can be fired for “bias,” but so too can officials who try to accommodate it.
Accommodation is the survival strategy employed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has drawn Trump’s ire for failing to shut down Mueller’s investigation. Republicans have issued a series of demands to Rosenstein to let them inside the FBI’s investigation of Trump. Normally, the FBI keeps Congress away from ongoing political investigations, for obvious reasons. As House Republicans have demanded more and more access to the FBI’s and DOJ’s files, Rosenstein has beaten a series of retreats rather than take a stand and dare Trump to fire him. He may eventually be vindicated. On the other hand, it would hardly be shocking if Trump not only fires Rosenstein but uses his willingness to bend protocol as a reason to do so.
The last time the Republican Party controlled the Executive branch, it carried out a dry run for Trump’s current course of action, when the George W. Bush administration directed U.S. Attorneys to find and prosecute voter fraud…..