He has no plans to step aside
A senior Justice Department ethics official concluded acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker should recuse from overseeing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe examining President Trump, but advisers to Whitaker recommended the opposite and he has no plans to step aside, people familiar with the matter said.
Earlier Thursday, a different official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said ethics officials had advised Whitaker need not step aside, only to retract that description of events hours later.
They know we can see them, right?
Within days of the president’s announcement in early November that he had put Whitaker in the role on a temporary basis, Whitaker tapped a veteran U.S. attorney to become part of a four-person team of advisers on his new job, according to a senior Justice Department official. Their guidance included the question of whether Whitaker should recuse himself from Mueller’s investigation because of his past statements regarding that probe and because of his friendship with one of its witnesses, the official said.
Whitaker never asked Justice Department ethics officials for a formal recommendation, nor did he receive one, this official said.
Well sure, that’s how you do that – you pick your own advisers so that they’ll tell you what you want to hear, and you ignore the actual ethics officials because they will tell you not to do the unethical thing you want to do.
All this is aid of keeping a criminal authoritarian monster in power and above the law.
However, after Whitaker met repeatedly with Justice Department ethics officials to discuss the facts and the issues under consideration, a senior ethics official told the group of advisers on Tuesday that it was a “close call” but that Whitaker should recuse himself to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, the official said. Whitaker was not present at that meeting, they said.
Those four advisers, however, disagreed with the ethics determination and recommended to Whitaker the next day not to recuse, saying there was no precedent for that, and doing so now could create a bad precedent for future attorneys general.
As opposed to the awesome precedent set by this move?
This is turning into an enormous scandal. Ethics officials told Whitaker they would recommend recusal, so he set up a different group of officials (probably political appointees, but unclear) to make a different recommendation. What in the hell is going on at DOJ? https://t.co/gYBeY3RoGP
— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) December 20, 2018
Indeed —@waltshaub @RWPUSA & I have just teamed up to write a cri de coeur. This is one of the two most heinous days in the history of the government ethics program. (Any guesses what the other one was?) I will post the link here when we publish. https://t.co/cnXA19f9aw
— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) December 21, 2018
Memo to GOP senators: What you are doing now will go in your obituaries.
— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) December 21, 2018
H/t Screechy Monkey
