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“This too will pass"

Curtis Ward, Judith Wedderburn, Nicole Gordon, speaking on the March 18 edition of That's a Rap

 

“This too will pass, and America will be reinstated as the global leader that we’ve all come to respect, and I have no doubt in my mind that there will be cleansing; there will be a lot of people who will be brought to book.”

That’s the optimistic view of Ambassador Curtis Ward, a prominent Jamaican attorney domiciled in the United States, concerning the chaotic presidency of Donald Trump.

Ambassador Ward, who comments regularly on major issues of public concern via The Ward Post, was speaking Sunday on RJR’s weekly news review show, That’s a Rap, with host Earl Moxam, in the wake of the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Critics of the firing of McCabe, two days before he was due to retire with his pension benefits, have decried the action as a vindictive act and possible instance of obstruction of justice.

“There’s no question that the President, Donald Trump, interfered in the Justice Department’s responsibilities by continuously sending messages to the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, that Andrew McCabe should be fired. That to me is stepping way outside of the bounds of the president.”

Noting that Andrew McCabe “is a very important witness in the Mueller investigations concerning obstruction of justice,” he said the aim was to discredit McCabe and thereby discredit the Mueller investigation as a pretext to having Special Counsel Mueller himself fired.

“This period that we’re going through in the United States is an aberration; there’s no question about it. I’ve been following American politics very closely since 1968, and I’ve never seen anything the likes of this,” Ward said.

Nevertheless, he maintained that “America is still the country that most people look to; leaders around the world look to America for its leadership, but leadership that is grounded in morality and justice and fair play.”

America has always made mistakes, he acknowledged, but according to him, “these mistakes can be forgiven if the vast majority of what America does is for the better of the international community, so America will recover from this.

Judith Wedderburn, another panelist on That’s a Rap, agreed only in part with Ambassador Ward that this period might represent only a short-term departure from the norm for the United States.

“I believe that the danger of what is happening now is that, while Mr. Trump is carrying on with those antics, at another level below him in some very key places there are some government officials who are carrying on certain kinds of work, based on his instructions, that are very damaging,” she said.

Attorney-at-law Nicole Gordon, also speaking on That’s a Rap, noted that concerns have been raised about some of Trump’s judicial nominations, citing this as possibly another avenue of entrenching the changes he espouses:

“The reason that it’s problematic is because it seems as if he’s been on a campaign to obstruct justice; so if it is that he has a campaign to obstruct justice, then one would think that it might be a little bit easier if he feels like he has - for want of a better word – justice on his side.”

In the event of a Democratic Party controlled Congress after the November mid-term elections, Ambassador Ward said it was likely that articles of impeachment will be brought against Trump, “and that in itself will send a very strong message to the international community that America’s democracy works.”

He expressed concern about the reluctance of the current US Congress to properly exercise its oversight responsibility “and questioned the activities of the President in terms of his interference in the Justice Department.”

“I think they are trying to protect the President; and everything that we see coming out of this Republican Congress suggests strongly that that is their objective. They have their own narrow agenda and they believe that, having a Republican president, and with their margin in the House (and) very narrow margin in the Senate, they can get the kind of legislation out of the Congress that he will sign, and so they are protecting them, but are giving up on their constitutional responsibilities.”

 


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