… you can find them here, in a post by Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.
ADDENDUM: Please also see this post of Ace’s.
And if you want an idea about what the left is saying, there’s always, “Why Jack Smith’s January 6th Trump Indictment Is So Smart,” an opinion piece in The New York Times.
It used to be that people on both sides of US politics understood that the bar should be very very very high for the indictment of a major candidate for president or an ex-president, particularly any prosecution for matters that have to do with political acts or actions. This – and I suppose, some sort of integrity – led both sides to hold off. Impeachment/conviction was a substitute, a political process that could serve to remove a president, although it had never actually happened that a president was removed that way, despite attempts, because the Founders had purposely made the bar quite high for conviction in the Senate.
And this was the case even if only because each party thought such an act of prosecution might come back to bite them if the other party ever came to power.
But the Democrats are acting like they have nothing of that sort to fear anymore. And maybe they don’t, whether by hook or by crook. It’s ironic that this indictment stems from the fact that although Trump was claiming that the 2020 election was won by Biden through fraud, he actually knew that of course there was no fraud at all. And yet the indictment serves to indicate to the American people just the opposite – that the Democrats may indeed have committed fraud because this weakly-drawn and apparently politically-motivated indictment makes it clear the Democrats will stop at nothing in their quest for power. So, why not fraud, too?
Today Ann Althouse has a post in which she discusses this article written by Richard L. Hansen that appeared in Slate. Both Althouse and Hansen are (in Althouse’s case retired) law professors, she at the University of Wisconsin and he at UCLA. Here’s an excerpt from Hansen’s piece, which is entitled “U.S. v. Trump Will Be the Most Important Case in Our Nation’s History”:
After nearly a decade of Trump convincing many in the public that all charges against him are politically motivated, he’s virtually inoculated himself himself against political repercussions for deadly serious criminal counts. He’s miraculously seen a boost in support and fundraising after each indictment … One should not underestimate the chances that Donald Trump could be elected president in 2024 against Joe Biden—especially if Biden suffers any kind of health setback in the period up to the election—even if Trump is put on trial and convicted of crimes.
A trial is the best chance to educate the American public, as the January 6 House committee hearings did to some extent, about the actions Trump allegedly took to undermine American democracy and the rule of law. Constant publicity from the trial would give the American people in the middle of the election season a close look at the actions Trump took for his own personal benefit while putting lives and the country at risk. It, of course, also serves the goals of justice and of deterring Trump, or any future like-minded would-be authoritarian, from attempting any similar attack on American democracy ever again.
The whole thing is worth reading in order to get a sense of the mindset of a law professor such as Hasen, who is the head of something called the Safeguarding Democracy Project. The project was officially launched a year ago, and here is part of a description of Hasen and its mission:
… [Hasen is] a prominent election law professor who has criticized voter identification laws and accused Republicans of using the COVID-19 pandemic to keep Democratic voters from voting. In its mission statement, the project claims that Republicans who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were acting in bad faith and that election integrity laws passed after the 2020 election “make it harder for some eligible voters to register and to vote,” threatening “the cornerstone of American democracy.”
I wonder whether Hasen believes what he says or whether he’s just using rhetoric to further his own political ends. I’m not sure which possibility would be worse; they’re both bad enough.
In her blog post, Althouse writes this about Hasen’s Slate article:
It is an egregious abuse of power to criminally prosecute someone for the purpose of educating the public and generating publicity for your political position.
And yet that is what Hasen is advocating, although he also at least seems to think that Trump is actually guilty of the crimes for which he is being indicted, and that they are in fact crimes and not just free speech and following constitutional rules for challenging an election.
One could rephrase that excerpt from Hasen’s piece this way: The American people are just too stupid to reject Trump, so we who know better must educate them. We’ve tried and tried already, including hearings in Congress directed by the Democrats and a few handpicked Trump-hating Republicans, but apparently that didn’t work and the voting public might just elect him again. So in order to re-educate those stupid stubborn voters, we must stage a show trial in order to ram the truth – our truth – down their resistant throats.
Hasen’s essay concludes with this penultimate statement:
But as I wrote last year in the New York Times, the risks to our system of government of not prosecuting Donald Trump are greater than the risks of prosecuting him.
Depends what you mean by “risks” and “system,” Professor Hasen. If you mean risks of incredible disruption and strife, in which at least half of US voters feel disenfranchised and perceive that their favorite candidate was railroaded by his political opponents for naked political reasons, I’d say the risk of prosecution is higher. But if you mean – and this is what I suspect you mean – that the risks are to “our democracy” (“democracy” being what we elite Democrats say it is, which is to keep us in power and get the booboisie to do our bidding, for their own good of course) – then I suppose that you had better prosecute Trump.
Althouse also writes:
I’m not a Trump supporter. I’m a believer in freedom of speech and the rule of law. I deplore the criminalization of politics.
As all Americans – and especially law professors – should. But fewer and fewer seem to hold that view these days.
Althouse then adds:
Hasen proceeds to fret about Trump’s ability to push the trial date beyond Election Day, win the presidency, put his own people in charge, pardon himself, and then “then sic his attorney general on political adversaries with prosecutions not grounded in any evidence.” Yes, that’s a lowly incentive for protecting freedom of speech and the rule of law: You might be able to take out your enemies, but when the tables turn, they are enabled and motivated to come after you. Hasen knows this. He admits it. But he won’t come out and say this prosecution is a terrible mistake.
That harks back to how I began this post, with the old-fashioned idea that such actions can come back to bite you in the end. However, as I also indicated, I don’t think that Hasen or other Democrats who believe as he does ever intend to relinquish power and let such a thing happen. To twist a phrase that Hasen himself used in his essay in regard to Trump, I think Hasen believes that the Democrats have “inoculated themselves against political repercussions” for what they are doing. That is why he not only doesn’t come out and admit that this prosecution is a terrible mistake, he also doesn’t think it. He thinks it’s an absolutely necessary corrective.
Here’s a screenshot of a NY Times article seen at Ann Althouse’s:
The headline at the top right is what brought me up short. I knew the Times would never be so honest as to admit what’s the real purpose behind the Trump indictment. But I initially had trouble seeing that headline as saying anything other than that Trump has been indicted in order to prevent a possible Trump win in the 2024 election.
The headline is unintentionally but bleakly humorous. We have to take our yuks where we can these days.
Trump, the real villain, is indicted for J6:
The 45-page indictment charges Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
“This is nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election, in which President Trump is the undisputed frontrunner, and leading by substantial margins,” the Trump campaign said in a statement received by PJ Media.
Donald Trump teased the indictment Tuesday afternoon, questioning the timing and calling it election interference and prosecutorial misconduct …
As Trump points out, the timing of this indictment is extremely suspicious. Not only could this have happened any time over the past two and a half years, but it comes a day after Hunter Biden’s former best friend and business associate Devon Archer’s bombshell testimony
Trump couldn’t be more correct.
The trial will be in the kangaroo court capital otherwise known as Washington DC.
Here’s Jonathan Turley:
…I felt that the Mar-a-Lago indictment was strong. This is the inverse. This is closer to the case against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell where Smith was overturned by an unanimous Supreme Court…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 1, 2023
…The press conference held by Smith only deepened the unease for some of us. Smith railed against the January 6th riot and made it sound like he was indicting Trump on incitement. He didn't. The disconnect was glaring and concerning.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 1, 2023
As early as January 7, 2021, I and many others started comparing the events of the previous day to the Reichstag Fire in the way that the Nazis used the latter as a pretext to blame and suppress their opponents, and to grab more power. And indeed, it has played out in just that manner.
Yesterday the big news was that Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer testified before Congress and said that Joe Biden talked to Hunter’s business associates at least 20 times, but they all just chatted about stuff like the weather.
And of course, the left and the MSM are busy claiming that Joe Biden’s getting on the phone with these people sent no message whatsoever about the possibilities of doing business with any company with Hunter on the board, and how that might affect US policy towards that company. Nope; it was just about the weather, which after all is very important to us all. Hey, Joe didn’t even know who he was talking to – he was just being friendly old Joe.
We don’t have the transcript yet, although it’s been promised soon. But here are some of the comments on the testimony:
Goldman [a Democrat] claimed Archer had said Joe and Hunter’s business partners only exchanged ‘niceties’ like talking about ‘the weather, “what’s going on?”‘
But Republicans had a different retelling of Archer’s account.
Oversight member Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told DailyMail.com in an interview Archer testified that ‘the Bidens were in the actual business of influence peddling.’
‘It’s extremely damning,’ she said, claiming that the 20 phone conversations Archer referred to were directly about business deals.
‘We have Devon Archer coming out and telling the truth that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden spoke over 20 times about his business deals, not about the weather, not about what was for lunch about his business deals,’ she said.
I don’t even know whether the Democrats think any of their disclaimers are believable to anyone but the most stalwart Biden voters, or whether they’re just thumbing their noses and laughing at the lot of us. It helps that Biden is so foggy. But that’s not what you’d call reassuring.
Or was all this weather talk a ploy to maintain plausible deniability about what the effect of putting Joe on the line would be? Can we believe that Joe, even when he was Obama’s VP, would talk to just anyone, knowing that his son was in business in places like Ukraine and China, and not caring who might be on the other end of the line? Is he so very stupid and unaware that he doesn’t realize that there would be the potential for misuse of the Joe Biden connection?
Joe’s pretty stupid. But I don’t think he was ever that stupid. Perhaps Biden’s defenders think that we’re that stupid, though.
Here are Joe’s previous disclaimers about knowledge (or lack thereof) of Hunter’s business dealings, to refresh your memory.
Archer also said that Hunter and Joe were selling “the brand”:
Joe was there to add value, said Archer, to “the brand” of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma — which paid Hunter $83,000 a month while his father was VP, after which it cut his salary in half …
As Uncle Jim told Tony Bobulinski, another former business partner of Hunter’s, Joe is big on “plausible deniability,” a term coined by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to describe the practice of keeping the president only vaguely informed about illegal or unsavory activity so he can plausibly deny he knows anything if it becomes public knowledge.
And then there was the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor, Shokin. Remember him? I wrote many posts about him way back when. Here’s what Archer had to say yesterday:
Archer, a former business partner at the Rosemont Seneca firm who was convicted in 2018 in a tribal bond fraud scheme, also told lawmakers that Hunter Biden was pressured in late 2015 to help deal with Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s corruption investigation as Joe Biden was preparing to travel to Ukraine.
“In December 2015, Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, an executive of Burisma, placed constant pressure on Hunter Biden to get help from D.C. regarding the Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin,” the committee explained, recounting Archer’s testimony. “Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption. Hunter Biden, along with Zlochevsky and Pozharski, ‘called D.C.’ to discuss the matter. Biden, Zlochevsky, and Pozharski stepped away to take the call.”
A few days after that meeting, Joe Biden visited Ukraine as vice president and began an effort to force Ukraine’s president to fire Shokin, eventually threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if the termination did not happen. Biden’s defenders have long maintained the firing was not related to Burisma and was a result of U.S. policy because the Obama administration felt Shokin was corrupt.
Shokin has denied being corrupt and claims his firing was a result of his probe of Burisma.
That was all quite apparent long before Archer’s testimony, but it’s interesting that he actually said the pressure did occur. One of the most interesting things of all is that Joe Biden actually bragged about it. Apparently he felt completely insulated from ever getting into trouble for this:
Solid. Translated: solidly behind Burisma.
Ah, but it was Trump who was impeached.
It’s often said – at least on the right – that the Hunter/Joe Biden scandal is worse than Watergate.
Agreed. It’s worse in terms of what almost certainly happened, but it’s also worse in another way: the suppression of the truth. In Watergate, not only did the press eagerly investigate Nixon and the Plumbers, but the GOP abandoned him when the facts were revealed. That masked something else about Watergate, though, that has only become more clear in recent years: the tale would have been just a tiny footnote to history – if that – had the perpetrator been a Democrat.
I became convinced some years ago that the press would not have pursued Watergate except for the fact that it concerned a Republican, in fact the already-detested Nixon. And Huntergate (or whatever you want to call it) has only underlined that perception. No corruption is too egregious not to be covered up, rationalized, excused, or ignored if it’s committed by a Democrat.
It is hard to get cynical enough to keep up with events these days.
What collie guy? This collie guy.
What bear? This Chinese bear:
A Chinese zoo has been forced to deny that its sun bear is actually a human in a costume, after video of one standing on its hind legs raised online accusations of a furry imposter.
A video clip of a bear rearing up and interacting with a group of people at a zoo in eastern Hangzhou city went viral on Chinese social media.
Many users posted comments doubting that the bear was real, with some alleging that its bipedal posture and wrinkled skin suggested that it was actually a human in costume.
But the zoo dismissed the rumours, saying in a statement written from the bear’s perspective on Sunday that the animal was real and its detractors “really don’t understand me”.
“The zoo director called me after work yesterday and asked if I’d been slacking off by finding a two-legged beast to replace me,” the bear, named Angela, said in the statement.
Well, I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up. The bear can talk – or rather, write – but only to reassure us that it’s not really a human.
Which makes me think of this bear, from the ballet Petrouchka:
That’s a movie of the ballet, and they might take some liberties with the stage version – such as, maybe that’s a real bear? I’m really not sure. But here’s a staged version (not a very good one – the crowd is meager and the stage is very shallow, which ruins many of the effects that depend on a big lifelike crowd) that shows you how it’s done in a live performance:
Oh, and the Chinese bear in the zoo? Here it is:
Retired ballet dancer?
Okay – so how did we get to August so fast?
Archer’s testimony was in a closed-door session. I plan to write at some length about it tomorrow, but for now I’ll refer you to Ace’s take on it, as well as this from Mary Chastain at Legal Insurrection.
Wow:
Unfortunately, there can surely be no compromise with the organizers of the anti-reform protests, because for them the real issue was never the reform itself. As was stated explicitly from the start by former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and others, the aim was to bring down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
One of the main leaders of the protests is another former prime minister, Ehud Barak. An astounding video clip has now surfaced showing Barak in March 2020 addressing Forum 555, a group of retired Israeli Air Force pilots and navigators.
Three years before judicial reform was even a twinkle in the Israeli government’s eye, Barak detailed for this group a plan for a coup d’état that would overturn the Netanyahu government and install Barak himself as prime minister.
The plan involved inciting the civilian population to revolt by falsely claiming that Israel’s democracy was in danger and bankrolling protests that would manipulate popular patriotism by such measures as the mass purchase of Israeli flags.
Such an uprising, said Barak, had to be presented to the public as a defense of democracy rather than an attempt to get rid of Netanyahu. “Democracy is a better dividing line,” he said. “Support for democracy penetrates deep into the right as well.”
He went on, “I have a friend who is a historian and who once told me: ‘Ehud, they will call on you [to lead] when dead bodies float in the Yarkon River.’ But I wish to emphasize that the bodies will not be those of workers who infiltrated from the ‘territories,’ nor those of Israeli Arabs. The bodies that float will be those of Jews killed by Jews.” …
… So, Barak now just happens to be a leader of an uprising that fits every detail of the plan that he set out three years ago to mount a coup by misleading the Israeli public and enlisting them as useful idiots. Are we really supposed to believe this is just an astonishing coincidence?
The Barak video is virtually unknown in America or Britain, where the media hasn’t reported it.
If you look up Barak’s history, you’ll be reminded that he was the head of the Labor Party and was part of the failed 2000 Camp David negotiations. But there’s a lot more, some of it sympathetic (all four of his grandparents were killed either in pogroms or in death camps) and some of it courageous. An example of some of the latter:
Barak led several highly acclaimed operations, such as: “Operation Isotope”, the mission to free the hostages on board the hijacked Sabena Flight 571 at Lod Airport in 1972; the covert 1973 Israeli raid on Lebanon in Beirut, in which he was disguised as a woman to kill members of the Palestine Liberation Organization; Barak was also a key architect of the June 1976 Operation Entebbe, another rescue mission to free the hostages of the Air France aircraft hijacked by terrorists and forced to land at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda. These highly acclaimed operations, along with Operation Bayonet, led to the dismantling of Palestinian terrorist cell Black September …
Barak was awarded the Medal of Distinguished Service and four Chief of Staff citations (Tzalash HaRamatkal) for courage and operational excellence. These five decorations make him the most decorated soldier in Israeli history …
In addition, just to round things out:
Barak enjoys reading works by writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and he is a classical pianist, with many years of study behind him.
Barak earned his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968, and his master’s degree in engineering-economic systems in 1978 from Stanford University, California.
However, Barak is now 81 years old. Maybe he’s lost a few steps, and that accounts for his recent actions? If in the video Barak says what Phillips claims he says, the content is shocking – that is, it would be shocking except for all the things we’ve seen happen in this country during the last few years.
Commenter “Molly Brown” writes in the DeSantis thread:
There is a common assumption in many of these comments that if the GOP would just nominate a more ‘mainstream, likeable, whatever you want to call it’ candidate – that candidate will have a chance to sell himself to the ‘moderate, swing, independent’ voters that Trump can’t win.
But I see no evidence of support for “mainstream” candidates, although it was certainly true years ago as recently as 2008 and 2012 (McCain and Romney). But now, for example, there is nothing “mainstream” about DeSantis. He is actually even to the right of Trump in his policies. That is what has allowed the media to demonize him already, before he ever declared his candidacy.
And in fact, the idea that DeSantis is somehow “mainstream” is exactly the line that has been spread about him on the right as a criticism by the Trump forces, something that I described in that recent post: that DeSantis is some sort of GOPe Jeb-light. But look at what he’s done in Florida and you will see that he has been boldly conservative. Plus, when he was in the House, he was one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus in 2015.
And it’s also an odd thing to say he’s being presented as “likeable,” because another big criticism of DeSantis from the right is that he’s not very likeable – that he’s cold, wonky, etc.. His boosters do not call him “likeable”; they call him smart. He also has a history of fighting back, particularly against the MSM. His “likeability” quotient isn’t all that high, but he is not hated with the heat of a thousand suns by many moderates, unlike Trump. It’s certainly possible that DeSantis could end up being hated just as much as Trump and liked less, but another thing about DeSantis is that a great many people don’t know much about him and/or haven’t yet made up their minds what they think about them. But hated of Trump is baked into the cake for a lot of voters, who also find that Trump-hatred to be a potent motivator to vote in 2024 – even to vote for Biden, whom nobody much likes.
This election is quite different from previous ones. Trump is an unusual candidate, as is Biden. But so is DeSantis. And it’s very very early to tell how it will shake down. I think the vast majority of people will be voting for whomever their party nominates; it’s that group in the middle that tends to decide things. But the days of nominating a politically moderate Republican in order to supposedly appeal to that group are over. And the same is true for Democrats; no moderates can get traction, although Joe Biden sold himself as a moderate in 2020 – despite the fact that anyone who looked at his record under Obama, or actually has paid attention to the Democrats in the last decade and a half, should never have believed it. I don’t think many people are that naive anymore about Joe being a moderate politically.
Just a little while ago, commenter “wendybar” also had this to say:
The naysayers can keep naysaying, and keep voting for the Mitt Romneys and then wonder why we keep losing.
But there isn’t a single Romneyesque figure in the current GOP presidential candidate field who’s doing at all well. I suppose, though, that if the definition of a “Romney” is “anyone other than Trump,” then they are all “Romneys.” But they are not, and in particular DeSantis is not.
In addition, commenter “davemay” wrote this:
Until justice is restored, we can never go back to politics as usual. Trump vs. DeSantis (or whoever else) presupposes that elections are on the level, or even matter anymore. We cannot unsee what we have seen…
Simply, Neo, we are at war. We saw the cities burning, and that WILL HAPPEN again (no doubt there will be an inciting incident that will be used as a pretext for violence so as to ensure a Democrat, or acceptable not-Trump candidate, wins the presidency. Can the Deep State even take the chance of a free and fair election?
I have no disagreement with that, and I believe I have made it clear in the past. And of course “war” is at present a metaphor. And whether elections have been won by Democrats through outright fraud (possibly) or just through “rigging” (definitely) or through both, I also agree that the outlook is dire. But then “davemay” adds this:
To his great credit, Donald Trump exposed the rot and corruption and the sheer diabolical evil of our political class. No one else could have done it. No one else would have the courage to do it and withstand the vitriolic whirlwinds unleashed against him.
Trump exposed the rot by drawing their hatred, and if “no one else could have done it” that’s only because he was (and is) hated the most. But he was ineffectual in stopping it or fighting it, and it continues unabated to this day, with no small success. And yes, I’ve always given Trump much credit for “withstanding the vitriolic whirlwinds,” but he’s not the only strong person in the world. For example, DeSantis has already had plenty of vitriol unleashed against him during his Florida tenure, and I don’t think he’s the only one with similar courage.
What’s more, in terms of preventing voter fraud, Trump has been remarkably ineffective. Not only did he fail to stop it if in fact it’s occurring, but his efforts to right it have landed him in legal troubles – troubles in which so far he seems to be on the losing end. In contrast, DeSantis did a great deal to improve the voting rules in Florida. Most people don’t seem to be aware of this. The details can be found here. And yes, a governor has more control over a state in this regard, and Florida has a Republican legislature to greatly help. But plenty of other states with Republican-controlled legislatures have failed to accomplish what was done in Florida to make voting safer, and it was done in Florida with DeSantis’ leadership. He is well aware of the problem and has the track record to prove it (see also this).
I have no way of knowing who would be the GOP candidate most likely to beat Biden in the general (or beat the person who replaces Biden as the Democrats’ nominee). Neither do you. But I’m tired of this “Trump is the only one who…” business, and I’m tired of descriptions of DeSantis that just don’t conform to his actual history in politics. That is because this is such a vital election. We’ve been saying that for years, but it doesn’t get less true over time; it gets more true.
[NOTE: Commenter “davemay” also wrote that, “Support for Trump is not about a cult of personality. If there is no commitment to truth or justice, then what’s the point?” Support for Trump is not about a cult of personality for some people. I support Trump in the sense that I’ve supported much – in fact, most – of what he did as president, and I am outraged at the lies told to frame him. And I certainly am not part of any Trump “cult of personality.” But some Trump supporters are part of such a cult, and I see it constantly.
And to davemay’s question “If there is no commitment to truth or justice, then what’s the point?” I answer that the point is to restore that commitment. And it will not be restored by misrepresenting the strengths of other candidates or by ignoring Trump’s weaknesses, which have become more apparent since the fall of 2020.]