LieberDouche to run the FBI

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nbcnews.com
Joe Lieberman Withdraws Name From FBI Director Search
by Andrew Rafferty
2 minutes

Former senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman withdrew himself from consideration to be the next director of the FBI on Thursday, saying his work with an attorney President Trump has retained to represent him in the Russia investigation would be a potential conflict of interest.

"With your selection of Marc Kasowitz to represent you in the various investigations that have begun, I do believe it would be best to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, given my role as a senior counsel in the law firm of which Marc is the senior partner," Lieberman wrote Trump in the letter.

Trump had said last week that Lieberman was a leading candidate to head the bureau after his dismissal of Director James Comey earlier this month. But Democrats on Capitol Hill quickly expressed concerns about his nomination after his name was floated as a finalist.


Lieberman, who unsuccessfully ran as Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and waged his own presidential bid four years later, lost his Democratic Senate primary race in Connecticut in 2006. He went on to win re-election as an independent, and in 2008 endorsed Republican Sen. John McCain for president.

While Republicans were largely approving of him becoming the next head of the FBI, Democrats said they would like to see a non-politician with a law enforcement background take the job.

Lieberman will be a guest on MSNBC at 4 p.m. on Thursday.

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Well, I don't credit Holy Joe for much, but good on him for acknowledging the obvious conflict of interest in this case. Too bad he didn't do that when he was taking money from the ConnectiCunt insurance industry, while ensuring the Public Option was removed from Barry's health care "reform" bill.

[Seshmeister]

The US system is very confusing sometimes.

Why would anyone even consider putting an elderly career politician in charge of the FBI anyway? How many years of law enforcement experience does he have?

A guy 10 years past retirement age in charge of 35 000 people learning a new field?

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He had no law enforcement experience whatsoever. What he DID have was a track record of advocating for an authoritarian police state, which is probably why Cheeto thought he was a "good choice".

Hostility to basic civil liberties

The conflict between Trump’s view that executive branch leaders owe him personal loyalty and the institutional needs of the country casts its own historically unique shadows across this new hiring process. But Lieberman’s political career is full of evidence he would be a dangerous pick to head the domestic security service even under a more normal presidency.

Lieberman is very fond of spying on Americans — and not just in the post-9/11 context. Lieberman pushed to give local police authority to wiretap without seeking a warrant as far back as 1995. Years later, when President George W. Bush had drastically expanded the National Security Agency’s listening capabilities and turned the U.S. informational spying apparatus on his own people, Lieberman emerged as a key Democrat ally to an embattled Republican White House. He called civil liberties concerns about the Bush programs “petty partisan fighting.”

The Bush wiretapping case is another Lieberman resume detail with awkward implications for Trump today. The story contains vague echoes of Trump’s modern, and more personal, conflict with the FBI. When the extent of Bush’s warrantless surveillance of Americans became clear to government insiders, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey stood athwart the White House’s push to scrap the Bill of Rights. With Attorney General John Ashcroft briefly hospitalized for gall bladder surgery, Bush sent officials to his bedside to seek the incapacitated man’s signature on documents extending the surveillance system’s authorization.

Comey and Mueller got there first, prevented the signing, and then prevailed on Bush to either bring the program back into line with the law or accept their resignations.

“That’s a pretty pivotal thing, when you look the president in the eye and say no,” Weiner said. “That takes integrity. That takes a measure of bravery.”

Lieberman was not part of that backstage drama, which Bush has written caused him to think of the Watergate-era “Saturday Night Massacre” that helped accelerate President Richard Nixon’s downfall. But he was on the opposite side of the argument to Comey and Mueller — two men who stood on principle over politics that day in 2004, and who today are key figures in the ongoing investigation of Trump’s Russian entanglements.


The president reportedly asked former FBI Director James Comey to “let this go,” according to the New York Times.

In the debate over a 2007 bill that gave Congressional imprimatur to a slightly modified version of Bush’s surveillance program, Lieberman once again treated the kinds of principled constitutional objections Comey, Mueller, and most civil libertarians raised as mere foibles to be cast aside in the face of the terrorist threat.

“We’re at war. The enemy wants to attack us. This is not the time to strive for legislative perfection,” Lieberman, one of 17 Democrats to vote for the bill, said at the time.