The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight was a 1971 movie starring Robert DeNiro about a mafia family in New York that’s led by a buffoon who surrounds himself with other incompetents and thus seems to always screw everything up. It’s the perfect metaphor for the Trump administration.
Over a period of several years, I did consulting work for one of the three-letter federal agencies that keeps our nation secure. It was back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I was the CEO of an Atlanta advertising agency; this work involved how that federal department.
The first day of my work with them I’d been in DC teaching a seminar and still had in my briefcase the wireless microphone and receiver to plug into the hotel sound system that I’d used the day before. I entered the outer area of the building, went through the obligatory fingerprint, facial recognition, and examination of my passport, then was taken to the secure entrance to run my briefcase through an X-ray machine as I walked through a magnetometer.
When I arrived on the other side of the magnetometer to pick up my briefcase, the young Marine guard had a rifle pointed at my chest. I stopped, not sure what was going on, when the X-ray machine operator said, “You have a wireless transmitter in your briefcase. Was this authorized?”
I tried to laugh it off, that I’d forgotten it was there (the truth), but the young Marine was having none of it, saying:
“You’re trying to tell me that you brought a transmitting device into the fuckin’ [three-letter-agency] by accident? Are you really that stupid?”
It took a few minutes, and a conference with the guy who’d hired me, to determine that I was, in fact, that stupid, and didn’t mean to try to spy on the spies. “Unnerving” is a good description of the experience of being threatened with being shot or imprisoned for attempted espionage, but I learned a lot from my work there about what it means to protect government secrets.
Apparently, I’m way ahead of our Defense Secretary, Director of National Intelligence, Vice President, Secretary of State, CIA Director, Middle East Negotiator, Treasury Secretary, and White House Chief of Staff. That particular “gang that can’t shoot straight” was just busted for having a Top Secret conversation about waging war against Yemen on the publicly-available private-sector app Signal, as revealed by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.
Given how Republicans in Congress and candidate Trump peeled the bark off Hillary Clinton for a handful of Secret emails that accidentally ended up on her personal email server, you’d think this will lead to resignations and possibly even prosecutions for violations of multiple laws and policies regarding classified information.
Sadly, that’s unlikely; like the bumbling Mafia family in the movie, this bunch is similarly led by an incompetent criminal (convicted of 34 felonies and found liable for “what is commonly understood as rape,” among other things).
Friends of Donald are largely immune from prosecution or even serious investigation. Just look at how the FBI handled allegations against Brett Kavanaugh and Pete Hegseth. As columnist David French, a former JAG officer, notes in The New York Times:
“Federal law makes it a crime when a person — through gross negligence — removes information ‘relating to the national defense’ from ‘its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted or destroyed.’
He adds that any military officer would be immediately removed from command and could well be facing criminal charges if they’d done what this crowd did, adding:
“What example has Hegseth set? That he’s careless, and when you’re careless in the military, people can die. If he had any honor at all, he would resign.”
And while this screw-up is pretty bad, it’s mild compared to the legal disaster that played out before a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit yesterday.
In that case, the administration’s lawyers tried to convince the judges that Trump has the power — on his or Marco Rubio’s own say-so without any sort of hearing, trial, or other due process proceeding — to grab people off the street and dump them in a foreign prison for the rest of their lives.
Nobody, they say, has the right to contest their imprisonment before a court (the function of a writ of habeas corpus); these people were already determined to be guilty and sentenced by their one-man judge and jury Donald Trump.
This is not only a clear violation of the Bill of Rights, but it even blows away the Magna Carta, which King John signed in 1215 and has been the foundation of English and later American law for over a thousand years. It’s enshrined in Article I, Section 9 of our Constitution, which explicitly says:
“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
Trump’s people are trying to argue that the government of Venezuela sent these people to “invade” the United States and therefore they’re justified in suspending habeas corpus. It’s an outrageous argument, and if they get away with it there’s little to prevent them from coming after dissident American citizens they can charge with “rebellion” against Trump or being a “threat to public safety.”
No lawyer. No court hearing. No judge. No jury. Trump simply has you arrested, and you end up in a private prison in a foreign country where you have no enforceable rights whatsoever.
(It’s useful to note that Hitler also moved out of Germany the people he’d targeted. While over 1000 labor and prison camps were built within that country, the death camps where the real horrors happened were located outside Germany: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno, and Majdanek were all in Poland. Trump’s running a similar scam with El Salvador.)
The outcome of the Appeals Court hearing will be fascinating; the only one of the three judges who seemed comfortable with the administration’s argument was Justin Walker, who’d been appointed to his position by Trump himself during his last term. Obama appointee Patricia Millett was openly skeptical, noting that “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act” than these immigrants, while Reagan appointee Karen LeCraft Henderson didn’t say anything during the arguments.
The real test, though, will come when the appeals court’s ruling is pushed before the Supreme Court. Along with a few other cases arising from Trump’s lawlessness, we’ll probably know by early this summer if the Republicans on that Court are going to continue their deference to Trump (like last year when they gave him a pass for sedition and ruled that he can break laws with impunity) or will start to defend the rule of law.
Meanwhile, the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight continues to randomly fire away at the Constitution, the press, lawyers, law firms, TV networks, unions, immigrants, and would-be tourists who’ve spoken ill of Trump on social media.
At the same time, they’re apparently holding conversations on Signal to get around the legal requirement that such deliberations be held in a way that the federal government can keep a record of them. And Witkoff was apparently inside the Kremlin when he participated in that infamous group chat.
Dictatorial regimes are famously corrupt, and a hallmark of most is the ignorance and incompetence of the people the dictator has surrounded himself with; this, though, is beginning to approach the level of street theater. It’d be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
Fans of democracy across our country and around the world are holding their breath to learn how the Supreme Court will treat the American experiment. Will Trump, et al face a day of reckoning, or is this going to play out the same way it did in modern Russia and Hungary, or Germany back in the 1930s?
As they say in the radio business, stay tuned…
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