He cited the President’s support of the armed forces and his “emphasis on religious liberty.” But the first item on Meese’s list was “your commitment to the Constitution and your commitment to making sure that it’s interpreted it as it actually reads.” Referring to the fact that Trump has already appointed a hundred and fifty-two conservative judges to the federal bench, and two to the Supreme Court, Meese declared this to be “a monument to justice and the rule of law that will last literally-literally, for decades.” In praising Trump, Meese singled out three policy areas. In doing so, he helped explain why so many prominent Republicans have continued to defend Trump despite all his outrages, and why, almost certainly, they won’t desert him now, when he needs them the most. After listening to the President shower praise on him, Meese, who started out during the 2016 campaign as a critic of Trump but eventually endorsed him, returned the compliment. But coming on the same day that the White House announced its refusal to coöperate in any way with the Trump impeachment inquiry, the ceremony also highlighted an important dynamic that is now playing out on the right. In addition to Trump, the eighty-seven-year-old Meese, and several generations of his family, those present included the Vice-President, Mike Pence the Attorney General, William Barr the acting director of the Office of Budget and Management, Russ Vought Kay Coles James, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which Meese joined after leaving the Reagan Administration and a number of other prominent conservatives.Īpart from Trump, this was a conclave of the conservative establishment celebrating the battle scars of one of its oldest members. Without any hint of irony, Trump lauded Meese as an “absolute titan of American law and a heroic defender of the American Constitution.” The award ceremony took place in the Oval Office. And, he added, “We managed very well in this country for one hundred and seventy-five years without it.” Not for nothing did “Meese Is a Pig” T-shirts and posters become cult items during the Reagan era. “Miranda only helps guilty defendants,” because “most innocent people are glad to talk to the police,” Meese declared. As Attorney General in 1985, he infamously spoke out against the Supreme Court’s Miranda ruling, from 1966, which confirmed a suspect’s right to remain silent when being questioned by police and to have an attorney. In 1988, half a dozen senior Justice Department officials, including the Deputy Attorney General and the head of the criminal division, resigned to protest Meese’s leadership of the department.Īrguably, Meese’s involvement in these three scandals wasn’t even the worst of his sins. Robert Wallach, a lobbyist for Wedtech, who, in 1989, was sentenced to six years in prison for racketeering and fraud. Meese was never charged with any crimes, but the evidence suggested that he misled Congress about Reagan’s knowledge of the Iran-Contra scheme, which Oliver North ran out of the White House turned a blind eye to the bribery of foreign governments in the Bechtel case and did favors from the White House for his close friend E. military contracts to a New York company called Wedtech. Yes, that Ed Meese: the longtime Reagan aide and conservative legal activist who, when serving as Attorney General, from 1985 to 1988, was directly implicated in not one but three major scandals-the secret sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, a corruption scam involving efforts by the construction firm Bechtel to build an Iraqi oil pipeline, and an even bigger scam involving the allocation of U.S. government can bestow on a civilian-to Ed Meese. On Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump took some time away from his efforts to portray the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings as a deep-state conspiracy to present a Presidential Medal of Freedom-the highest honor that the U.S.
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