Philip Rosmarin

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

He didn’t shoot somebody. Donald Trump shot the hell out of the democracy he’s sworn to protect. And all the top people who could do anything about it — Republicans and Democrats alike — are putting themselves in witness protection.

The Mueller report doesn’t exonerate the President of the United States. It all but buries him. It provides the pick and shovel, but says to the United States Congress, it’s your job, you bury him. Not many of our politicians want to get that dirty.

The Russians campaigned as early as 2014 to find a way to undermine the U.S. electoral system, and in 2015 found the perfect useful idiot (about the only thing useful about Donald Trump) to help them.

Any other candidate for the presidency would have turned them in to the FBI. Trump and his sycophants loved it, fed the conspiracy, and helped it grow. The only thing Trump didn’t do was put his gaudy scrawl to the document that signed his soul away to Vladimir Putin. Not much value in that soul, granted, but what Russian oligarch wouldn’t love to have his hand around this president’s tiny little balls.

The Russian president put the squeeze on so rapidly that Jared Kushner tried to establish a hidden backdoor channel to the Kremlin so the public couldn’t watch Trump pop.

James Comey wanted to watch, and the FBI director vowed to discover any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian efforts to elect their stooge. Weeks later, Trump fired Comey, and within days Mueller was appointed.

Mueller found that, upon his appointment, Trump thought the gig was up, that his presidency was over. And in his report, Mueller, who believes he is unable to bring indictments against a sitting president, lays out a road map for Congress to do its Constitutional duty to impeach and convict the bastard who took at least a dozen steps to obstruct justice by impeding the investigation.

Having already fired Comey to that end, Trump now turns to firing Mueller. Trump orders his lawyers to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions to unrecuse himself from oversight of the special counsel, so Sessions can fire him. The President’s lawyers refuse. Trump further, Mueller writes, “engaged in efforts to curtail the Special Counsel’s investigation and prevent the disclosure of evidence to it, including through public and private contacts with potential witnesses.”

Mueller all but screams that this is obstruction of justice and witness tampering. Screams that fall on deaf ears, so far, of most of the members of Congress at whom he is screaming.

Until and unless those men and women pull the stuffing out of their ears, an unindicted criminal will be at the head of the United States government.

The Russians won’t have done that to us.

We will have done that to us.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Texas executed John King today. And before President Trump gets too excited, I should point out it wasn’t that John King (the CNN journalist), but rather a white supremacist, so the chief executive is down one fan.

This John King may have richly deserved his fate: he was one of three men convicted of lynching James Byrd, Jr., almost twenty-one years ago, by dragging him behind a pickup truck for a mile and a half till he was decapitated, then dragging the body another mile and a half just for fun.

My mother was from Texas, and taught me that while John King may have deserved it, I didn’t deserve it. People convicted of capital crimes are executed by the state. Louis XIV was right: I am the state.

My own state, Colorado, has — again — given up on death penalty repeal for yet another year, mainly for want of political courage of Democrats in power who mainly want to stay in power.

The young Democratic state senator, Julie Gonzales, who sponsored the bill, was not unaware of the feelings of many survivors of homicide victims, that the killers richly deserve their fates: her own father-in-law was a victim. But like me, she doesn’t want to close ranks with the killers by becoming one.

Is there anyone with an ounce of awareness who thinks Jesus of Nazareth, your local rabbi, or Mister Rogers would not similarly refuse to pump the poison, throw the switch, pull the trapdoor or the trigger on even the worst of us?

So Senator Gonzales — seeing a Democratic majority still without a spine, complaining that the process had been rushed (Colorado’s only been executing people since 1859) — pulled her bill to repeal the death penalty this year, to give them the time they demanded.

“So when this bill comes back next session,” she addressed her colleagues, “there will be nothing left to hide behind except this abhorrent, terrible practice.” Thus giving the bill, she said, what we rarely give the people we execute in this country.

A dignified death.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has returned to Vietnam, the place of his birth, to die.

The stubborn old man has been dying for five years, but I think he will be gone soon. He is unable to talk, but that is all right, he has said everything he has to say. And though I wish more people had heard him, they yet have the chance: his books are translated into more than thirty languages.

There is one thing in particular that I wish the leader of the Free World might have heard. If he had, I don’t think he would so readily divide the world into black and white, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, Mar-a-Lago and shithole.

I first heard this at a funeral. It will probably be heard at the old monk’s funeral. I hope you will hear it now.

Please Call Me by My True Names

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow—
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when Spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond,
and I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay his
“debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

The Russian asset who is President of the United States wants to shut down the border again to stop rapists and thieves who are streaming in from Mexico.

Except for a few barriers along the way, a border is mostly an imaginary line that separates countries. Much like the imaginary criminals Donald Trump says are invading our country.

Until he can convince the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court to let him build his border wall (he never did figure out how to convince Mexico to build it), the sociopath-in-chief is going to do everything in his considerable power to stop more dark-skinned people from diluting his vision of a brighter and whiter America. He’s not going to let any more of them cross that line than he has to.

Donald Trump crosses the line every day.

He crossed the line on Day One of his presidential candidacy, when he said the vast majority of Mexicans entering our country brings drugs and crime with them, that they are rapists. He assumed there might be some good people among them, but he couldn’t think of any.

He crossed the line when he violated religious liberty and said all Muslims should be banned from the United States.

Donald Trump is good at violation. He crossed the line when he boasted of groping whatever appealing woman crossed his path, and getting away with it.

He crossed the line when he stole thousands of children from parents seeking asylum in what used to be known — before the Russians helped him win election — as the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

He crossed the line when he called American journalists the enemy of the people and encouraged damaged souls to do violence to them.

He crossed the line when he did a thousand other things that beggar human decency. There’s a listing of five hundred forty six such “atrocities” here. Interesting list, if you enjoy staring into the pit of hell that is the current American federal administration. 

Donald Trump crosses the line every day.

Somebody ought to shut down his borders.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Do not trust. 

That was the advice a spiritual teacher gave me some years ago. It resonated with me, a skeptic by nature and profession. 

We tend to invest our trust in figures we regard as though they were infallible gods. The parent. The teacher. The priest. Bob Mueller.

We don’t know for sure, and we probably will never know for sure, but the Mueller Report  — at least as interpreted by another iconic figure of trust, the President of the United States (I’m trying hard not to laugh here) — seems to have found no criminal behavior attached to that same comic figure. “Seems,” because we’ve only seen forty-five words of the four hundred page report, and because the carefully chosen Attorney General (chosen because he essentially promised, if given this job, to clear Trump of obstruction of justice) needs a few weeks to redact anything that might lead to an embarrassing alternative conclusion. 

In a way, it doesn’t matter what the report says, or actually should have said in a world where truth still featured a capital T and didn’t need air quotes around it.

Whatever it says, we still have a president who lies a dozen times a day (not including the times he talks in his sleep).

Who still regards President Putin, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, Crown Prince MbS (usefully yet more abbreviated to plain old BS), President Duterte, and every other expensive thug on the planet, as role models and best buds.

Still thinks the best political argument is a schoolyard insult or a silly nickname. 

Still is the greatest threat to human rights since World War II.

Still has yet to reveal the financial entanglements that have made him town pump to enemies foreign and domestic.

Still hopes to kill thousands of Americans by taking away their health care.

Still is the man fifty Republican national security experts called the most reckless president in U.S. history.

Still…

Still…

Do not trust.