Dear Commons Community,

NBC News and other media are reporting that President Donald Trump blasted his former chief of staff John Kelly yesterday after the ex-top aide said Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman did the right thing in reporting his concerns about Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president.

“When I terminated John Kelly, which I couldn’t do fast enough, he knew full well that he was way over his head,” Trump tweeted. “Being Chief of Staff just wasn’t for him. He came in with a bang, went out with a whimper, but like so many X’s, he misses the action & just can’t keep his mouth shut, which he actually has a military and legal obligation to do.”

“His incredible wife, Karen, who I have a lot of respect for, once pulled me aside & said strongly that ‘John respects you greatly. When we are no longer here, he will only speak well of you,” Trump continued. “Wrong!”

Trump was responding to comments Kelly made during a 75-minute speech and question-and-answer session at a Wednesday night event before students and guests at Drew University in New Jersey, which The Atlantic reported.

The retired Marine Corps general, who also served as Trump’s Homeland Security secretary prior to taking on his job as chief of staff, said Vindman was simply following his military training in reporting concerns about Trump’s call.

That phone call, in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden and Democrats, led to Trump’s impeachment. Last week, the Senate acquitted the president on two charges, although it was the first time in history a member of a president’s own party voted to convict.

Vindman “did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave,” Kelly said. “He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

Vindman, who was the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council and testified in the House impeachment inquiry, was escorted out of the White House last week. Trump later attributed Vindman’s removal to the impeachment.

Kelly said Vindman was right to flag the call because it marked a huge change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine and suggested the content of that call was akin to hearing “an illegal order.”

“Through the Obama administration up until that phone call, the policy of the U.S. was militarily to support Ukraine in their defensive fight against … the Russians,” Kelly said, according to The Atlantic. “And so, when the president said that continued support would be based on X, that essentially changed. And that’s what that guy [Vindman] was most interested in.”

“We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss,'” Kelly added.

Kelly, who departed the administration in late 2018, was also critical of other areas of the Trump presidency. He said Trump “tried” to get North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons “but it didn’t work.”

“I’m an optimist most of the time, but I’m also a realist, and I never did think Kim would do anything other than play us for a while, and he did that fairly effectively,” Kelly said.

In announcing Kelly’s impending departure in 2018, Trump told reporters: “John Kelly will be leaving — I don’t know if I can say ‘retiring.”’

“But, he’s a great guy,” Trump continued.

Trump is such a two-faced individual who talks out of both sides of his mouth!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Attorney General William P. Barr delivered an extraordinary rebuke of President Trump yesterday, saying that his attacks on the Justice Department had made it “impossible for me to do my job” and that “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”

Mr. Barr has been among the president’s most loyal allies and denigrated by Democrats as nothing more than his personal lawyer, but he publicly challenged Mr. Trump in a way that no sitting cabinet member has. 

“Whether it’s Congress, newspaper editorial boards or the president, I’m going to do what I think is right,” Mr. Barr said in an interview with ABC News, echoing comments he made a year ago at his confirmation hearing. “I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”   As reported by The New York Times.

“Mr. Barr’s remarks were aimed at containing the fallout from the department’s botched handling of its sentencing recommendation for Mr. Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr., who was convicted of seven felonies in a bid to obstruct a congressional investigation that threatened the president. After career prosecutors initially recommended a sentence of seven to nine years in prison, Mr. Trump spent days attacking them, the department and the judge presiding over Mr. Stone’s case.

Such tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity,” Mr. Barr said.

He added, “It’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases.”

The fallout from the Stone episode threatened to spin out of control after the four prosecutors on the case withdrew from it and Mr. Trump widened his attacks on law enforcement, thrusting Mr. Barr into a full-blown crisis. Career prosecutors began to express worry that their work could be used to settle political scores and doubts that he could protect them from political interference.

The attorney general had been contemplating how to respond since he became aware of Mr. Trump’s attacks on the department, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Speaking up could have put Mr. Barr at risk of losing the backing of the president, but remaining silent would have permitted Mr. Trump to continue attacking law enforcement and all but invited open revolt among the some 115,000 employees of the Justice Department.

Ultimately, Mr. Barr concluded that he had to speak out to preserve his ability to do his job effectively, the person said.

Mr. Trump did not immediately respond on Twitter, but his press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, played down the attorney general’s remarks. “The president wasn’t bothered by the comments at all, and he has the right, just like every American citizen, to publicly offer his opinions,” she said, adding that Mr. Trump has confidence in his attorney general.

Mr. Barr was hardly the first top adviser to the president to wish he would stop tweeting, but he was the first to say it so publicly and forcefully while still in office. His action instantly set off speculation inside the administration about what it would mean for his future.”

I am sorry Mr. Barr but if you sell your soul to the devil, you are going to get burned.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who was disgraced by President Trump amid the heated impeachment inquiry, received an award for her excellent conduct in diplomacy.

The Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University gave Yovanovitch the Trainor Award during a ceremony yesterday. Every year, the Trainor Award is given to an “outstanding American or foreigner for distinction in the conduct of diplomacy,” according to the Institute.  As reported by the Huffington Post.

“Yovanovitch warned about the leadership within the State Department as she received the award at a university auditorium. It was her first public appearance since her hearing with lawmakers during the House impeachment inquiry in November.

“Right now, the State Department is in trouble,” Yovanovitch said during the award ceremony, The New York Times reported. “Senior leaders lack policy vision, moral clarity and leadership.”

Trump publicly attacked Yovanovitch in November as she testified before the House Intelligence Committee and detailed how she felt threatened by the president and targeted in a smear campaign despite her long tenure as a diplomat.

Yovanovitch, who was recalled from her ambassadorship in May, appeared astonished when Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) read Trump’s live tweets, which disparaged her diplomatic career, to her during the hearing.

She said she found the president’s behavior “very intimidating.”

Trump had previously insulted Yovanovitch during his infamous July 25 call with the Ukrainian president ― which prompted a whistleblower report and eventual impeachment proceedings ― saying that she was “bad news’ and was “going to go through some things.”

At Georgetown on Wednesday, Yovanovitch said that her experience with Trump gave her a new perspective on life.

“When you ‘go through some things’… you have to dig deep a little bit. So I’ve tried to be grateful for the silver linings,” she said, noting that she received immense support from family and friends.

Yovanovitch has since retired from career in diplomacy, which spanned 33 years year under six U.S. presidents.

She wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post last week urging Americans to stand up to the government in defense of democracy.

“I have seen dictatorships around the world, where blind obedience is the norm and truth-tellers are threatened with punishment or death,” she wrote. “We must not allow the United States to become a country where standing up to our government is a dangerous act.”

No one is more deserving of this award than this loyal public servant.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Senate Democrats have called on Attorney General William Barr to resign or face impeachment after President Donald Trump appeared to confirm that Barr had intervened in the case against the president’s longtime friend Roger Stone. 

“Donald Trump is shredding the rule of law in this country,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted  yesterday. “Congress must act immediately to rein in our lawless Attorney General. Barr should resign or face impeachment.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, another Democrat, told NBC News earlier in the day that he believes Barr has “no choice” but to resign.

“He’s acting simply as a henchman of the president,” Blumenthal said. 

As reported by the Associated Press.

“All four federal prosecutors who ran Stone’s trial abruptly withdrew from the case on Tuesday after Justice Department leadership intervened to reduce their sentencing recommendation. 

The prosecutors told the court on Monday that Stone should face seven to nine years behind bars for witness tampering and lying to Congress. Trump, who has leaned on Stone as an adviser since the 1980s, tweeted that the sentencing recommendation was too long and called it a “miscarriage of justice.”

After Trump’s tweet, which was sent around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, the Justice Department signaled that it planned to revise the sentencing recommendation. The career prosecutors dropped out one by one soon after.

Trump appeared to confirm that Barr had intervened in the case in a series of tweets on Wednesday, praising the attorney general for “taking charge.” Trump had appointed Barr to head the Justice Department in 2018 after firing Jeff Sessions.

Meanwhile, White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley denied that Trump had interfered in Stone’s sentencing during an appearance  yesterday on Fox News. “Look, [Trump] is the chief law enforcement officer,” Gidley said. “He has the right to do it. He just didn’t. He didn’t make any comment, didn’t have a conversation with the attorney general and that’s just ludicrous.”

Asked whether he would pardon Stone, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that he doesn’t “want to say yet.”

“I want to thank the Justice Department,” he said. “They saw the horribleness of a nine-year sentence for doing nothing. You have murderers and drug addicts — they don’t get nine years.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called on the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate the revised sentencing recommendation and urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing on the matter.

“The president is claiming that rigging the rules is perfectly legitimate,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “He claims an absolute right to order the Justice Department to do whatever he wants. And the president has as his attorney general an enabler.”

“That is third-world behavior ― not American behavior,” Schumer continued. “This is not ordinary stuff. Never seen it before with any president.”

Barr is a disgrace to the position of the attorney general and should go.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I just finished reading  A World Without Work:  Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind, an economist at Balliol College, Oxford University.   His main thesis is that artificial intelligence and robotics are on the cusp of replacing many jobs and that this is not necessarily a bad thing.  He sees  these technologies as possibly bringing about unprecedented prosperity,  However, he points out that the main problems will be the distribution of this prosperity, the burgeoning power of Big Tech, and how to provide meaning in a world where work is no longer the center of our lives.   I can relate to much of what Susskind is saying especially the last item.  I published an article last year entitled, Artificial Intelligence and the Academy’s Loss of Purpose that covers some of Susskind’s concerns as applied to higher education.

I believe he has a good take on the issues and is worth a read if you are interested in how technology will affect the world of work in the 2030s and beyond.

Below is a review that appeared in The Guardian.

Tony

——————————————————————————————————————————

The Guardian

A World Without Work by Daniel Susskind review – should we be delighted or terrified?

It has long been argued that workers will be replaced by machines, but now the threat is real. H

By Dorian Lynskey

9 Jan 2020

Oscar Wilde dreamed of a world without work. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) he imagined a society liberated from drudgery by the machine: “while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure … or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.” This aesthete’s Eden prompted one of his most famous observations: “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.”

In Wilde’s day the future of work was the first question that every aspiring utopian, from Edward Bellamy to HG Wells, needed to answer. Everything else, from gender relations to crime prevention, flowed from that. But proponents of the more attainable goal of drastically shorter working hours have also included Benjamin Franklin, Bertrand Russell, AT&T president Walter Gifford and John Maynard Keynes. When the great economist coined the phrase “technological unemployment” (“unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”) in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1931), he focused on the potential benefits a century hence.

Written as a sprightly provocation rather than a detailed prophecy, Keynes’s short essay has since become a set text for the diverse thinkers, such as Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt and Nick Srnicek, known as “post-workists”. The prospect of disappearing jobs has at least created a few new ones for economists and polemicists, some of whom make Keynes look stingy. In his future-drunk Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani maps out a post-scarcity paradise in which, by way of solar panels, asteroid mining and 3D-printed bacon, “luxury will pervade everything as society based on waged work becomes as much a relic as the feudal peasant and medieval knight”.

Running parallel to this bullish tendency has always been the dystopian analysis, in which robots toss workers on to the scrapheap, dooming them to empty lives of poverty and despair. The New York Times ran the ominous headline “A Robot Is After Your Job” in 1980 but it could have done so at almost any point in the last century. The title of Daniel Susskind’s book, therefore, is either a threat or a promise, depending on your point of view.

Susskind, an economics scholar and a former government policy adviser, has come up with an explainer rather than a polemic, written in the relentlessly reasonable tone that dominates popular economics: the voice of a clever, sensible man telling you what’s what. He always has a helpful graph to hand and a greatest hits collection of anecdotes about technology and society, from Ned Ludd to Deep Blue via the 1890s horse manure crisis.

Susskind guides the reader through a boneyard of discredited assumptions about technological unemployment. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, automation tended to replace human labour in “routine” tasks without destroying entire occupations. Even when certain professions were eliminated, new ones were created. The somewhat technophobic utopian socialist William Morris saw this happening in 1890: “All their devices for cheapening labour simply resulted in increasing the burden of labour.”

But AI, Susskind argues, has changed everything, starting with the definition of “routine”. Time and time again, it has been assumed that a task required a human being until a machine has come along and proved otherwise, and without needing to mimic human cognition. It used to be argued that workers who lost their low-skilled jobs should retrain for more challenging roles, but what happens when the robots, or drones, or driverless cars, come for those as well? Predictions vary but up to half of jobs are at least partially vulnerable to AI, from truck-driving, retail and warehouse work to medicine, law and accountancy.

That’s why the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers confessed in 2013 that he used to think “the Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I’m not so completely certain now.” That same year, the economist and Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote that fears of technological unemployment were not so much wrong as premature: “Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.” Yet Skidelsky, like Keynes, saw this as an opportunity. If the doomsayers are to be finally proven right, then why not the utopians, too? Committed to neither camp, Susskind leaves it late in the day to ask fundamental questions. The work ethic, he says, is a modern religion that purports to be the only source of meaning and purpose. “What do you do for a living?” is for many people the first question they ask when meeting a stranger, and there is no entity more beloved of politicians than the “hard-working family”. Yet faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and stagnant wages, many are losing faith in the gospel of work. In a 2015 YouGov survey, 37% of UK workers said their jobs made no meaningful contribution. Susskind wonders in the final pages “whether the academics and commentators who write fearfully about a world with less work are just mistakenly projecting the personal enjoyment they take from their jobs on to the experience of everyone else”.

That deserves to be more than an afterthought. The challenge of a world without work isn’t just economic but political and psychological. To paraphrase the children’s author Richard Scarry: what will people do all day? You can only contemplate the world with admiration and delight for so long. Joblessness tends to create loneliness, lethargy and social dysfunction. But is relying on work to provide self-worth and social status an inevitable human truth or the relatively recent product of a puritan work ethic? Keynes regretted that the possibility of an “age of leisure and abundance” was freighted with dread: “For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”

The state, Susskind concedes with ambivalence, will need to smooth the transition. Moving beyond the “Age of Labour” will require something like a universal basic income (he prefers a more selective conditional basic income), funded by taxes on capital to share the proceeds of technological prosperity. The available work will also need to be more evenly distributed. After decades of a 40-hour week, the recent Labour manifesto, influenced by Skidelsky, promised 32 hours by 2030. And that’s the relatively easy part. Moving society’s centre of gravity away from waged labour will require visionary “leisure policies” on every level, from urban planning to education, and a revolution in thinking. “We will be forced to consider what it really means to live a meaningful life,” Susskind writes, implying that this is above his pay grade.

The virtue of his reluctance to take a firm political position on an inevitably political issue is that it makes pragmatism and idealism seem to point in the same direction. While other writers make a strongly socialist, feminist or environmentalist case for a post-work world, he says simply that the jobs will go and we’ll have to make the best of it. In light of the current state of political leadership, his optimistic sign-off feels more dutiful than persuasive. Still, if AI really does to employment what previous technologies did not, radical change can’t be postponed indefinitely. It may well be utopia or bust.

Roger Stone

Dear Commons Community,

The four attorneys who prosecuted Roger Stone quit the case after the Justice Department overruled them and said it would take the extraordinary step of lowering the amount of prison time it would seek for President Donald Trump’s longtime ally and confidant.

The departures yesterday raised immediate questions over whether Trump, who earlier in the day had blasted the original sentencing recommendation as “very horrible and unfair,” had at least indirectly exerted his will on a Justice Department that he often views as an arm of the White House.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“The department insisted the decision to undo the sentencing recommendation was made Monday night — before Trump’s tweet — and prosecutors had not spoken to the White House about it. Even so, the departures of the entire trial team broke open a simmering dispute over the punishment of a Trump ally whose case has long captured the Republican president’s attention. The episode was the latest to entangle the Justice Department, meant to operate free from White House sway in criminal investigations and prosecutions, in presidential politics. 

The four attorneys, including two who were early members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia team, comprised the entire Justice Department trial team that won convictions against Stone last fall. 

Each had signed onto a Monday sentencing memo that recommended between seven and nine years in prison for Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election. None lent their names to a Tuesday memo that called the original recommendation excessive.

The departures leave in limbo the resolution of a case that was one of the signature prosecutions of Mueller’s team and that cut to the heart of his mission — to determine whether the Trump team had access to nonpublic information about Democratic emails hacked by Russian operatives and provided to WikiLeaks.

Trump was back on the attack late Tuesday, slamming the original sentencing recommendation and questioning the judge overseeing the Stone case. And by early Wednesday, he had tweeted a congratulations to Attorney General William Barr “for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have been brought,” suggesting the prosecutors had gone rogue.

Barr, the Justice Department’s leader, has been a steady ally of the president’s since taking the position. Barr last year cleared the president of obstruction of justice even when Mueller had pointedly declined to do so, and has declared that the FBI’s Russia investigation, which resulted in charges against Stone, had been based on a “bogus narrative.”

It’s unclear what sentence the department will ultimately seek — a new sentencing memo filed Tuesday evening indicated that the original recommendation was too harsh but proposed no specific punishment of its own.

A Justice Department official said authorities decided to step in and seek a shorter sentence because they had been taken by surprise by the initial recommendation. The person, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said prosecutors had told the department to expect a recommendation for a shorter sentence.

In their revised sentencing memo, Justice Department officials argued the initial recommendation could be “considered excessive and unwarranted under the circumstances” but also said they would defer to the court.

It is extremely rare for Justice Department leaders to reverse the decision of its own prosecutors on a sentencing recommendation, particularly after that recommendation has been submitted to the court. A mass exodus from a case is also rare, though the tumult did conjure an episode from last summer when Justice Department lawyers abruptly left a lawsuit over whether a citizenship question could be added to the census.

The day of upheaval began with a morning tweet from Trump that the Stone case was a “miscarriage of justice.” He later told reporters he didn’t speak to Justice Department officials, though he said he could if he wanted.

“I have the absolute right to do it. I stay out of things to a degree that people wouldn’t believe, but I didn’t speak to them,” Trump said.

Hours after Trump’s tweet, a Justice Department official called the original recommendation “extreme” and “grossly disproportionate” to Stone’s crimes and said it would file a new sentencing memo.

The departures began soon after. Aaron Zelinsky, a Mueller team member, quit the case and his job in Washington, with plans to return to his position as a federal prosecutor in Baltimore.

Another early Mueller team member, Adam Jed, also withdrew from the case. His status at the Justice Department was unclear.

Another federal prosecutor in Washington, Michael Marando, withdrew from the case, and a fourth trial team member, Jonathan Kravis, resigned his position as an assistant U.S. attorney.

Sentencing decisions are ultimately up to the judge, who in this case may side with the original recommendation.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson has repeatedly scolded Stone for his out-of-court behavior, which included a social media post he made of the judge with what appeared to be crosshairs of a gun.

Meanwhile, Democrats decried the decision, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calling for an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said it would be a blatant abuse of power if Justice Department leadership intervened on Trump’s behalf.

“Doing so would send an unmistakable message that President Trump will protect those who lie to Congress to cover up his own misconduct, and that the Attorney General will join him in that effort,” the California Democrat said.

Federal prosecutors also recently softened their sentencing position on Flynn, saying they would not oppose probation after earlier saying he deserved up to six months in prison for lying to the FBI. That prosecution is also being handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington.

In the initial memorandum Monday evening, prosecutors asked for Stone to serve between 87 and 108 months in federal prison, which they said was consistent with federal guidelines. Such a sentence would send a message to deter others who might consider lying or obstructing a congressional probe or tampering with witnesses, they said.

The prosecutors wrote that “Stone’s actions were not a one-off mistake in judgement” and that he “decided to double — and triple — down on his criminal conduct by tampering with a witness for months in order to make sure his obstruction would be successful.”

Stone has denied wrongdoing and criticized the case against him as politically motivated. He did not testify, and his lawyers did not call any witnesses in his defense.

Witnesses testified that Trump’s campaign viewed Stone as an “access point” to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks, which was in possession of more than 19,000 emails hacked from the servers of the Democratic National Committee, and tried to use Stone to get advance word about hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Take a few moments today to remember Abraham Lincoln who led our country through its darkest hours and gave his life for it.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

With almost 90 percent of the precincts reporting, Bernie Sanders is projected to win New Hampshire’s presidential primary, edging out  moderate rival Pete Buttigieg. 

In his win, the 78-year-old Sanders, running as a democratic socialist, beat back a strong challenge from the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. The dueling Democrats represent different generations and different visions of America’s future.  As Sanders and Buttigieg celebrated, Amy Klobuchar scored an unexpected third-place finish.  Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden posted disappointing fourth and fifth place finishes respectively and were on track to finish with zero delegates from the state.

Other than the top five, several of the other candidates have to rethink their chances of winning the primary.  Even Warren may have to do some soul-searching.

Tony

George Conway

Dear Commons Community,

Conservative attorney George Conway  has a scorching op-ed about President Donald Trump, in the wake of the president’s firing of two witnesses who testified in the House impeachment inquiry. 

Conway, who is married to the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway, opened his Washington Post piece with a quote from Trump following his Senate acquittal Thursday. “We’ll probably have to do it again, because these people have gone stone-cold crazy,” the president riffed on impeachment in the East Room.

Conway posited that, the very next day, Trump demonstrated “precisely why he could be destined to achieve that ignominious fate” with his “retaliatory” dismissals.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top National Security Council official on Ukraine, was fired and escorted from the White House on Friday. Some hours later, European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland was also fired. Both provided key testimony in the House inquiry. Army Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, Alexander Vindman’s twin brother, was also dismissed.

“With essentially no pretense about why he was doing it, the president brazenly retaliated Friday against two witnesses who gave truthful testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry,” Conway wrote in the article, published Monday.

“Trump essentially admitted his retaliatory motive on Saturday, when he tweeted that he sacked Vindman in part for having ‘reported contents of my “perfect” calls incorrectly.’”

Conway argued that, had this been a criminal investigation, this so-called “Friday Night Massacre” could have been a crime. He linked to a piece of U.S. Code about the criminal repercussions of retaliating against witnesses and informants.

Conway continued:  “At the very least, it ought to be impeachable: If Richard M. Nixon was to be impeached for authorizing hush money for witnesses, and Trump himself was actually impeached for directing defiance of House subpoenas, then there should be no doubt that punishing witnesses for complying with subpoenas and giving truthful testimony about presidential misconduct should make for a high crime or misdemeanor as well.”

But, Conway said, it’s not only about “this one day, or this one egregious act,” but the fact that the president has a duty to uphold the public’s trust.

“And that Trump’s narcissism won’t allow him to put anyone else’s interests above his own, including the nation’s,” he wrote.

“Indeed, he can’t even distinguish between his interests and the nation’s — and doesn’t need to, according to his lawyers and now the judgment of the Senate.”

Highlighting the now-walked-back remarks from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that Trump had learned a lesson from the impeachment (Trump contradicted this when asked about her assertion), Conway warned that the president’s behavior indicates he will only get worse.

The lawyer listed multiple other examples he called “vindictive” uses of presidential power from the duration of Trump’s time in office, including the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director and his threats against companies including Facebook and Twitter.

“So America beware,” Conway concluded. “The state is Trump, and he’s very, very angry. We might, indeed, have to do it again.”

Trump will go bonkers (even more than he is now)  if he is the only president of the United States to be impeached twice!

Tony