The feds try try again – and succeed in getting guilty verdicts for the remaining two Whitmer kidnapping defendants

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote in a previous post that the feds would keep trying until they managed to convict the remaining defendants of something. I’ve written about the case many times before, for example in this post.

This case involved one of the most obvious and egregious examples of entrapment by the FBI that I’ve ever seen. But for political reasons it was absolutely necessary to get a conviction, and so the original hung jury verdict couldn’t be allowed to be the last word. From Julie Kelly:

Legal observers bristled at the one-day jury selection process handled almost exclusively by U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker, who also presided over the first trial. On the first day of testimony, defense attorneys informed the court that one juror was potentially compromised for telling co-workers that he “had already decided the case and intended to ensure a particular result at the conclusion of the trial.” Jonker met privately with the juror and refused to allow either prosecutors or defense counsel from participating in the meeting; he ordered all related filings to remain under seal.

Jonker repeatedly scolded Gibbons and Blanchard for what he viewed as wasting the jury’s time on “crap” lines of questioning. Before the testimony of government witnesses last Wednesday, Jonker took the unprecedented step of limiting the amount of time for cross examination. Blanchard accused Jonker of openly favoring prosecutors while frequently interjecting and interrupting defense counsel. “Limiting us is unfair and it’s unconstitutional, and it doesn’t aid the jury in the search for the truth,” Blanchard told Jonker on August 17 after the jury had been dismissed for the day. “It’s creating a perception of how this case ends.”

The Justice Department also sought a narrower definition of entrapment, essentially asking Jonker to make it harder for the jury to conclude the defendants were set up by the FBI.

The case largely centered on accusations of a wide-ranging FBI entrapment operation…

Let [the government] know this is not what a fair trial looks like in America,” Christopher Gibbons, attorney for Fox, told the jury during closing arguments on Monday morning. “Do not endorse or reward this type of behavior. It is time to end this debacle and it is time to restore Adam’s freedom.”

Joshua Blanchard, Croft’s public defender, noted the government collected 1,000 hours of recorded conversations between FBI assets and defendants but played less than two hours of clips for the jury; one clip was only four seconds long. “The FBI doesn’t exist, it should not exist, to make people look like terrorists when they aren’t,” Blanchard said during his closing. “This whole thing has been a big FBI charade. This isn’t Russia, this isn’t how our country works.”

It is now.

Kelly adds:

It is unclear at this point whether [defense lawyers] Gibbons and Blanchard will appeal. Their clients face life in prison.

Life in prison.

Please read the whole thing.

Circumventing democracy in order to save it: the case of Sam Harris

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “BigD” writes:

I always like to point out that rigging an election isn’t just fraudulent votes but the use of propaganda, censorship, threats and use of political violence, and changing of electoral law often illegally to get people to vote “the right way.” All of that absolutely happened in 2020 and I know this because the people that did it to help defeat Trump openly admit they did it.

You may recall that one of those admissions was the Time article from shortly after Biden’s inauguration that I discussed here, here, and here. The Time article can be found here, with the telling title, “The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”

Recently Sam Harris weighed in on a related theme. I don’t ordinarily read him or listen to him, and in fact, I’ve only made two very minor mentions of him in the entire time I’ve been blogging (here and here). The only thing I really recalled about him till now was that his name was often listed with those of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as being a proud atheist of the sort who likes to go around debating religious believers.

But Harris recently appeared on a podcast called Triggernometry and displayed the extent of his extreme TDS. I think his type of thinking is typical of a huge number of successful intellectual people who pride themselves on their virtue and their logic but exhibit little of either where Trump is concerned.

Here’s the passage of the Harris interview to which I’m referring. Please make sure you watch the entire part I’ve selected; it isn’t very long but it builds:

And so it turns out that “Democrats” is itself an Orwellian descriptor. To modern-day Democrats, democracy is a train, and once the left has come to power it means that the train has reached the end of the station and it’s time to get off, if the people are too stupid to vote the way the left wants them to.

Follow the logic, and you must come inexorably to the idea that Trump wasn’t just irrationally paranoid when he asserted that the left had committed fraud to stop him from becoming president. Whether they actually cooked the voting books – which may or may not have happened to the extent that it changed the election results – they certainly cooked the information books so that anything that hurt their cause of electing Joe Biden was kept from the American people. Known truths – not just opinions, but truths that they knew were truths – were purposely covered up in order to deceive the voters. Not only was that always obvious to anyone closely following sources on the right, but now people such as Harris are admitting it (the writers of the Time story had previously admitted it, as well).

They also tried to (and are still trying to) frame Trump in the legal sense. Is that okay with Harris too, all because of the supposed evilness of Trump? The only example Harris gives of Trump’s surpassingly and uniquely evil corruption – that evil that justifies any means, including covering up the truth – was Trump University? That’s ludicrous. Harris also says in that interview that Trump’s attempt to block the results of the 2020 election afterwards was bad – but Harris doesn’t see the problem inherent in Harris’ making that judgment while simultaneously saying that those election results were arrived at through MSM fraud and coverup at the very least, and that anything would have been justified in order to stop Trump, and that there was a left-wing conspiracy to do whatever it took to accomplish that aim of getting rid of Trump. Harris, the supposedly smart person, doesn’t even see the connection between what he’s just admitted and Trump’s perception of an unfair election. But obviously, many people who feel that anything is justified to stop Trump would be highly motivated and willing to commit election fraud to accomplish that aim.

That’s why the following guy is so very correct:

I’ve never been one to say that atheists cannot be moral. Nor does religion confer automatic morality. However, when religion departs there’s always the risk that it creeps in through the back door and the person experiencing it cannot even recognize it because the new point of view doesn’t have religion’s conventional trappings. Harris’s new religion appears to be hating Trump and believing him to almost literally be the devil, and Harris resembles Roper in “A Man For All Seasons,” willing to cut down every law in England to get after that devil.

If I wanted to laboriously fisk what Harris said, this would be a very lengthy post. But, just to take one example, he says that Trump University was worse not just than anything on Hunter Biden’s laptop, but than anything that could be on Hunter’s laptop. That’s a statement that’s absurd on its face, unless he thinks the corruption of Trump University (where more was promised consumers than was delivered for the money charged) is the worst possible moral offense of which human beings can be capable. And that’s an assertion by Harris of absolutely towering moral ignorance and stupidity.

Another strange moment in the interview is when Harris admits there was a leftist conspiracy to subvert democracy in order to take Trump out, and then one of the interviewers repeats Harris’ phrase in asking him a question, and Harris says not all the people involved were on the left – after all, Liz Cheney isn’t on the left. But of course, that’s not the point – plus, at least as far as I know, Liz Cheney didn’t order the Times or Twitter to suppress the laptop news, which was the topic Harris had been talking about (I have little doubt she would agree with the suppression, however).

Still another illogical statement was Harris’s analogy of Trump to an asteroid heading for earth. Not only does an asteroid instantly imperil the entire planet, but its approach would be an obvious fact that could be proven, not a political opinion. But he doesn’t see his own subjective and over-the-top opinion about Trump as a mere opinion. He actually seems to see it as a self-evident and factual truth.

Turning to other things for the moment

The New Neo Posted on by

I just published one of those mammoth posts that ended up being about three times as wordy as I thought it would be, and taking five times as much time to write.

That happens sometimes.

I had originally planned a couple of additional posts for today, but I’ve decided to postpone them till tomorrow. Of course, other events might intervene tomorrow, as they often do. For example, you may wonder whatever happened to my long and long-promised Uvalde testimony and report post (which I still plan to write – I do have some draft notes – but as time passes it gets less and less urgent). Or maybe by now you’re forgotten Uvalde and are uninterested in the details as I see them. I could understand that, because so many events have transpired since then. That post I wrote previously today, for example, is on a subject that I consider to be of vital importance.

It’s also on a subject that’s remarkably depressing. That’s one of the reasons I need a short break from this today. Blogging is a voluntary labor of love, but immersing myself in the news can really be exhausting and it’s good not to overload.

This probably is as good a place as any to mention that I had finally had some success in fixing the redirect problem that was keeping posts from my old URL from redirecting properly to the new one. The people I hired to help me have so far been stumped by it, but fortunately late on Saturday night I had one of those “aha!” moments – plus a little bit of luck – and sure enough, my idea worked. Now I just have to do a few other things to spruce up the blog and make it function better. Maybe in a week or two that will have been accomplished.

In the meantime – to take my mind off things – what do I do? Here’s my non-exhaustive list:

(1) Take a fast walk outside.
(2) Listen to the Bee Gees. And then listen to the Bee Gees some more.
(3) Listen to any sort of music and dance around the room or sing along.
(4) Watch ballet videos.
(5) Talk to or visit a friend.
(6) Look at photos or videos of my grandkids. I have a large collection – of photos, not of grandkids.
(7) Watch videos on YouTube about (a) cosmology (b) ancient geology (c) hominid history (d) language (e) funny things animals do (f) fashion for older women; makeup for older women
(8) Cook. Eat.
(9) Shop for things I don’t need.
(10) Get rid of all the old scraps of paper on which I’ve written ideas, and which litter my workspace.
(11) Look online at real estate I don’t have the money to buy.
(12) Play Wordle.

The end of the Constitution at the hands of the left

The New Neo Posted on by

Many people have linked to this recent op-ed in The NY Times by Harvard Law professor Ryan Doerfler and Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn. John Hinderaker of Powerline discusses the piece here, as well, and he calls it “literally one of the stupidest things I have ever read.”

I could not disagree more with Hinderaker on that particular point. I don’t believe it’s the least bit stupid, except in the sense that it reveals too much of the left’s plans too soon, and might alarm people other than those on the right. It’s pernicious rather than stupid, and actually rather clever. Apparently the authors don’t think that alarming moderates by stating radical leftist proposals is much of a problem, because the article certainly calls attention to certain plans of the left if they ever get at least 51 reliable votes in the Senate for it while simultaneously controlling the House and the presidency. Right now they have all those things except for the 51 reliable votes for it, but I believe there are only a couple of holdouts.

Here’s the plan, as summarized by Hinderaker, to change what the two Ivy law prof authors call the “inadequate” Constitution – inadequate to leftist aims for total power, that is:

The Times op-ed links to a 2020 article in the Harvard Law Review that advocates a plan whereby leftists can take permanent control over the United States, in effect staging a coup. The proposal is to break the District of Columbia down into 127 neighborhoods, and admit each of those 127 neighborhoods as a new state.

In a comment of mine last night on the subject, I wrote:

It would basically be Washington DC taking control of the entire country and dictating what it would be doing. Sort of analogous to the Enabling Act (since we’re talking about Nazi analogies, right?) only with a DC-dominated legislature doing the dictating rather than the Fuhrer.

Tyrannies are often willing to use legal means to effect their ends of undoing the checks and balances placed in a constitution in order to avoid tyranny. No constitution is perfect, and clever and highly-motivated folks such as Doerfler and Moyn can certainly come up with seemingly legal ways to do it – and although perhaps SCOTUS would try to stop them, how many divisions does SCOTUS have, after all? Plus, the plans are to pack SCOTUS with far-left justices simpatico with “progressive” views.

However, as you can see by that reference to a 2020 Harvard Law Review article, these ideas are not new. I wrote about that Harvard Law Review article in this January 2021 post. Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote back then [emphasis added]:

…I know of no constitutional impediment to that scheme. Unfortunately. But why hasn’t it been tried before? I think the main reason is that the far left has never been in charge of this country before. Previously, although politics has been hard-fought and often dirty, with shady machinations of one sort of other, there has never been an all out totalitarian group in charge before…

Some of the constitutional impediments to making the District a state can be found in this 1993 article, from which you can see that Democrats have contemplated this move before.

Whether SCOTUS would be able or willing to bar the move is unknown, but one thing we do know is that the Democrats in Congress are very serious about this, having passed a bill this past June making DC (or most of it) a state, although the bill died in the GOP-held Congress. Rest assured that it would have a much better chance in the present Congress, and of course Biden would sign it with a flourish. And once a state is admitted it cannot be banished. I believe that the current Democrats are deadly serious about it, although I doubt that all that many people who voted for them last November were even aware of that fact.

D. Cohen mentions at the end of that comment that “it looks like [the Democrats] are being pikers settling for just two extra states.” My response is: what makes you think they plan to stop there?

I mean that quite seriously. Ideas once unthinkable are often first floated in op-eds and/or law review articles, to test the waters and in order to nudge that Overton Window a bit more open. In that regard, please note this article that appeared in the Harvard Law Review last January. It was published as an unsigned “note,” which means that it was the work of students.

It is titled “Pack the Union: A Proposal to Admit New States for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution to Ensure Equal Representation,” and I suggest you read it or at least part of it. Here is a small excerpt:

“To create a system where every vote counts equally, the Constitution must be amended. To do this, Congress should pass legislation reducing the size of Washington, D.C., to an area encompassing only a few core federal buildings and then admit the rest of the District’s 127 neighborhoods as states. These states — which could be added with a simple congressional majority — would add enough votes in Congress to ratify four amendments: (1) a transfer of the Senate’s power to a body that represents citizens equally; (2) an expansion of the House so that all citizens are represented in equal-sized districts; (3) a replacement of the Electoral College with a popular vote; and (4) a modification of the Constitution’s amendment process that would ensure future amendments are ratified by states representing most Americans.

“Radical as this proposal may sound, it is no more radical than a nominally democratic system of government that gives citizens widely disproportionate voting power depending on where they live. The people should not tolerate a system that is manifestly unfair; they should instead fight fire with fire, and use the unfair provisions of the Constitution to create a better system.”

So you see that the very recent op-ed in the Times is just a retread of older proposals, repeated in order to norm very radical ideas and also because I think the January 6th “insurrection” and persecutions, as well as the MAL raid and the continual discrediting of the Founders, have helped pave the way to scrap the Constitution. The right is now sufficiently demonized in the minds of many people that radical moves against the right probably wouldn’t seem all that radical to more and more people, although I don’t think it’s a majority who would support these proposals. However, I believe that most Democratic voters don’t understand the danger of voting for Democrats at this point, and therefore would vote for people who would vote for these sorts of radical changes.

In addition – and this is connected to the point I just made – I also believe that most Americans no longer know why we are a republic rather than a democracy, nor do a great many of them even understand the difference between those two terms. Madison’s “tyranny of the majority” and its dangers have no meaning to them, since so many either know little about American history or were taught it is pernicious. This is no accident; it is part of the whole, and that whole is designed to allow the left to take permanent power by hook or by crook.

That’s why you see in that Times op-ed from Doerfler and Moyn – and in so many other pieces and statements recently – references to “democracy” and “our democracy.” The authors are well aware of what a republic is and why the Founders established institutions such as the Electoral College, but the authors and the left rely on the public’s relative ignorance of those things and play up the “democracy” angle which they correctly believe appeals to a lot of people.

Here’s a small excerpt from the op-ed [emphasis mine]:

Starting with a text that is famously undemocratic, progressives are forced to navigate hard-wired features, like the Electoral College and the Senate, designed as impediments to redistributive change…

One way to get to this more democratic world is to pack the Union with new states. Doing so would allow Americans to then use the formal amendment process to alter the basic rules of the politics and break the false deadlock that the Constitution imposes through the Electoral College and Senate on the country, in which substantial majorities are foiled on issue after issue.

Of course there are no such “substantial majorities” – that’s why so many new states with small populations, coming from one wholly-Democratic enclave and encompassing federal employees, must be created to perform this supposedly “democratic” feat. But never mind, right?

And from the 2020 Harvard Law Review article [emphasis mine]:

More aggressively, Congress could simply pass a Congress Act, reorganizing our legislature in ways that are more fairly representative of where people actually live and vote, and perhaps even reducing the Senate to a mere “council of revision” (a term Jamelle Bouie used to describe the Canadian Senate), without the power to obstruct laws.

In so doing, Congress would be pretty openly defying the Constitution to get to a more democratic order — and for that reason would need to insulate the law from judicial review.

A very blatant statement of raw power and disregard for the checks and balances of our government, all in the name of “democracy” in order to engineer a takeover of the federal government that most Americans don’t want and of which they presently are unaware is part of the left’s plans.

In the comments to Hinderaker’s Powerline post, you can find these statements:

Well the French Revolution worked so well, why shouldn’t we try it over here.

What would they do, if they got their pure democracy they want, if the People decided that Harvard and Yale law professors are to be taken out and shot. For holding positions that should have gone to the chosen ones, picked by the People’s Party?

And explicitly have DC control the rest of the country.

In other words, while we have the power to do so we must change all the rules so that we will never lose power.

Indeed, that is the idea of the Times op-ed. And these are not just the thoughts of a few random law professors. Not only do they teach the younger generations, but I am convinced that they are speaking for the left as a whole.

Let me add that a less specific but similar op-ed appeared in the Times nearly a decade ago, and I wrote about it in this post from January of 2013. That was right after Obama had been elected for a second term, and I believe the timing was no accident. The author was another Ivy law professor, that time from Georgetown. Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote back then:

As for why the Times decided to publish this piece right now, one can only conclude they see the time as ripe for delegitimizing the Constitution in order to further the leftist agenda, and seek to use Seidman’s credentials to make the argument from authority. The ground has been well prepared for this by our president, the MSM, and our educational system, so their calculations may indeed be correct.

The left is very very patient.

NOTE: An in-depth discussion of the following point is way beyond the scope of this already-very-long post, but I want to briefly state that I believe the genesis of the approach of Doerfler and Moyn and their fellow legal “progressives” is the 40-year-old field of Critical Legal Studies, which like one of its more recent offshoots, CRT, teaches that power is the only reality and that objectivity in the law is a complete illusion and utter lie. Therefore, go for the power. Moyn himself has written about Critical Legal Theory here, in 2017, but unfortunately, I can only access the first page of his piece on the subject and therefore am not sure what he wrote about it. But from that small sample I am guessing that he would like to revive at least some of the tenets of CLT and reframe them in a more palatable fashion that will stand up better to criticism. Along these lines, see this very recent tweet by Moyn:

Of course, the fact that most judges are not able to be completely objective and totally apolitical is not an argument for throwing out the idea of striving for as much objectivity as possible, and instead to make the Court nakedly and obviously political with no pretense of objectivity at all. That would mean the Court was not any sort of court at all, and that the rules that govern a court and in fact law in general could be tossed for political reasons without reserve or apology.

You want range? I’ll give you range– and autotune?

The New Neo Posted on by

All parts are done by Foust:

However – I hear autotune. Do you? It doesn’t take away from Foust’s range if autotune is used – the range is real – but to me there’s something not right about the sound of his voice, something false, synthetic, and metallic. I listen to all videos with earphones now, so it increases the ability to hear details.

I’ve done a search about Foust and I see references to autotune for the group Home Free of which Foust is a member (for example here), but I’d like to know if they’re correct or just people guessing, as I am. Looking at him, I don’t see the emotion of the song, either. I see the focus on making beautiful sounds. I admire that bass of his, but I’m not moved by this in the least.

No autotune in this next video for that same first song. The Bee Gees never needed it or used it and this was recorded before it was invented anyway – shortly before, that is (1995). Autotune was first introduced the very next year, in 1996. The song was originally written in 1960 – I remember it well – by Carole King, and sung by The Shirelles. This later Bee Gees version from 1995 was part of a Carole King tribute and is one of the very few songs they ever sang that wasn’t written by the Bee Gees themselves:

Here’s the original from The Shirelles. A classic:

And here’s Carole King’s later live version in 1971, the same year her album “Tapestry” was released. It’s interesting to me that until then she had apparently been content to be a songwriter behind the scenes, and yet she has a wonderful voice with a unique quality that I find very appealing – that slight idiosyncratic “sob” in it. Needless to say, no autotune here:

Those Nazi analogies

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday there was a discussion in the comments about making any analogies to Nazism. Commenter “M J R” had this to say, for example:

I would agree with Stone [that the FBI has become Biden’s Gestapo], except I would not use Nazi-era language or allusions, as those allusions reek of hyperbole, and they tend to discredit otherwise salient points about what’s been happening in our USA.

I agree that it is always dangerous and sometimes counter-productive to make such comparisons. And yet, as I wrote in one of my replies to M J R, my attitude about Nazi comparisons is that they work insofar as they are comparisons to Nazis as an example of tyranny and how it works, including how it consolidates its power in the first place. Those comparisons are quite different from calling someone a Nazi. Nazism was one of the worst tyrannies, but some things about it were typical of and instructive about tyrannies in general, including lesser ones. Other things were particular to the particular awfulness of Nazism.

If we lose the ability to even refer to some of the techniques of the Nazis, we lose the ability to see some of the danger in going down certain roads.

So it is in that spirit that I offer the following information about the Gestapo, taken from its Wiki page. Make of it what you will:

Many of the Gestapo employees in the newly established offices were young and highly educated in a wide variety of academic fields and moreover, represented a new generation of National Socialist adherents, who were hard-working, efficient, and prepared to carry the Nazi state forward through the persecution of their political opponents…

The power of the Gestapo included the use of what was called, Schutzhaft—”protective custody”, a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings…

…[T]he Nazi regime sought to suppress any source of ideology other than its own, and set out to muzzle or crush the churches in the so-called Kirchenkampf. When Church leaders (clergy) voiced their misgiving about the euthanasia program and Nazi racial policies, Hitler intimated that he considered them “traitors to the people” and went so far as to call them “the destroyers of Germany”.

Demonizing whole groups of people makes it more and more possible to convince others that it’s fine to eliminate their rights and to ultimately go so far as to kill them without due process and even en masse.

I think also that many people have the misconception that the Gestapo worked to terrorize the people of German wholesale. But their aim was selective; they wanted to lull the rest into staying calm and relatively supportive [emphasis mine]:

While the total number of Gestapo officials was limited when contrasted against the represented populations, the average Volksgenosse (Nazi term for the “member of the German people”) was typically not under observation, so the statistical ratio between Gestapo officials and inhabitants is “largely worthless and of little significance” according to some recent scholars. As historian Eric Johnson remarked, “The Nazi terror was selective terror”, with its focus upon political opponents, ideological dissenters (clergy and religious organisations), career criminals, the Sinti and Roma population, handicapped persons, homosexuals and above all, upon the Jews. “Selective terror” by the Gestapo, as mentioned by Johnson, is also supported by historian Richard Evans who states that, “Violence and intimidation rarely touched the lives of most ordinary Germans. Denunciation was the exception, not the rule, as far as the behaviour of the vast majority of Germans was concerned.” The involvement of ordinary Germans in denunciations also needs to be put into perspective so as not to exonerate the Gestapo…The Gestapo’s effectiveness remained in the ability to “project” omnipotence…they co-opted the assistance of the German population by using denunciations to their advantage; proving in the end a powerful, ruthless and effective organ of terror under the Nazi regime that was seemingly everywhere. Lastly, the Gestapo’s effectiveness, while aided by denunciations and the watchful eye of ordinary Germans, was more the result of the co-ordination and co-operation amid the various police organs within Germany, the assistance of the SS, and the support provided by the various Nazi Party organisations; all of them together forming an organised persecution network.

Another interesting and depressing element was the cooperation of many citizens in occupied countries. For example:

In places like Denmark, there were some 550 uniformed Danes in Copenhagen working with the Gestapo, patrolling and terrorising the local population at the behest of their German overseers, many of whom were arrested after the war. Other Danish civilians, like in many places across Europe, acted as Gestapo informants but this should not be seen as wholehearted support for the Nazi program, as motives for cooperation varied. Whereas in France, the number of members in the Carlingue (French Gestapo) who worked on behalf of the Nazis was upwards of 30,000 to 32,000; they conducted operations nearly indistinguishable from their German equivalents.

It’s not that there was nothing unique about the Germans. There were indeed some characteristics peculiar to Germany. But every country has its uniqueness, and I believe that a great deal of what occurred in Germany during the Nazi era could have occurred in many other countries if accomplished with the same ruthless focus and attention to propaganda.

Is the United States immune? No. However, it does have certain characteristics that have so far made it less likely to happen here – such as the way our government and constitution are set up, for example, and certain highly individualistic cultural traditions here. But I think it’s very clear that we are not immune if those things are not robustly protected and defended.

Why these petitions fail: the Gascon recall and the Michigan Republican primary

The New Neo Posted on by

You may recall that in the Michigan governorship primary, five of the GOP primary contenders – including the frontrunners – were disqualified because of faulty petition signatures. I wrote a previous post about it in June, and I had planned a Part II but never got around to it. However, Part II was going to be about the fact that petition-gathering is a paid business subject to fraud, and that’s apparently what happened in Michigan. Whether that fraud was and is in part politically motivated, or simply motivated by financial greed and the lure of cutting corners, I don’t know. But there’s plenty of motivation to go around.

The Michigan fiasco involved firms hired by the candidates to do the signature-gathering, which is a normal practice. The gatherers are paid per signature, which is also normal. Turns out some of these people working for these unspecified firms were crooks, and gathered quite a few fraudulent signatures.

There never was any allegation that the GOP candidates who had the fraudulent signatures knew about it, much less ordered it. But they are considered responsible anyway, even though everyone knows they’re not going to personally verify the signatures. Who in the campaign was in charge of doing that intermediate work and checking the names against the voter rolls? Whoever it was, that person or people slipped up.

Much much more here. One of the disqualified candidates, Markey, had this to say:

Markey also noted that his campaign started collecting signatures early, paid $7 per signature while others paid $20, and determined independently that his signature validity rates were high before submitting the petitions to the state.

“You associated me with fraud. That’s a really, really big accusation,” Markey told the canvassing board and state Elections Director Jonathan Brater.

“This is why normal people do not run. Because I did everything I was supposed to do, I added extra quality controls and then you just assumed that I was like the rest,” Markey said.

Digging deeper, here’s an article on who or what might be behind this:

Shawn Wilmoth is one of several people now at the epicenter of an alleged fraudulent petition scheme that has disrupted the Republican campaign for governor…

“They (the records) say he was wanted for extradition by Arlington, VA for election fraud,” said Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido.

In Arlington County, Virginia, records show Wilmoth later pleaded guilty to election fraud and served 5 years probation…

…[O]ther campaigns impacted hired Wilmoth, too…

While some states require circulators be from that state, Michigan only requires they are U.S. citizens.

Two experts from the University of Michigan says the responsibility for preventing problems like this falls on campaigns, but Michigan’s system does not allow much time for corrections.

Again, you can find much much more information at the link. And there’s more here as well as here and here.

Which brings us to the Gascon recall petition, where essentially the same thing happened, only a little worse because it seems as though there was some condonation of the fraud by some of those wanting to recall Gascon. The players are not the same, although there’s this curious bit (it’s a long essay, and again I suggest you read or at least skim the whole thing):

However, screenshots from a private Facebook group administered by Mark Jacoby, owner of LTVD [which is one of the signature-gathering firms], show that he actively encouraged gatherers to leave California for Michigan, saying, “Michigan is where it’s at,” and, “It’s up to you to prove that when we get paid correctly and we’re able to make a fair living wage to support us and our families, we can get anything done!!! Then if a campaign is not willing to do that, they won’t get on the ballot!”

There are problems inherent in the entire signature-gathering-for-hire business, many of them described here, for example:

Banning paid signature gatherers was an idea that came about early in the initiative’s history, and was seen as a way to stop wealthy individuals or groups from buying their way onto the ballot. Ohio, South Dakota and Washington passed bans on paid signature gatherers in 1913 and 1914. Oregon passed a ban in 1935, Colorado in 1941, and Idaho and Nebraska in 1988. Until the 1980s, courts upheld bans on paid signature gatherers. That changed in 1988, when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Colorado’s ban in the Meyer vs. Grant, 486 U.S. 414 (1988) decision.

Several states have tried to ban payment per signature, but do permit payment on a salary or hourly basis. These restrictions have met with mixed review in the federal courts. Presently, seven states have such bans (Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oregon) and five states have had them held unconstitutional (Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, Ohio and Washington). Most recently, Colorado’s restriction was temporarily enjoined on June 11, 2010, awaiting the outcome of a trial.

Today, the vast majority of petition campaigns use paid circulators, who are paid between $1 and $3 per signature [that’s from around 2012, so the numbers are different today]. Very few campaigns attempt to qualify an initiative petition with volunteer circulators, and even fewer do so successfully. Paid drives, on the other hand, are much more successful. A campaign that has adequate funds to pay circulators has a nearly 100 percent chance of qualifying for the ballot in many states.

The increase in reliance on paid circulators has increased the cost of qualifying an initiative. In California, it now costs more than $1 million…

…The U.S. Supreme Court’s opinions on petition circulators have made the prevention of fraud in the signature gathering process very difficult for states. Since the 1988 Meyer vs. Grant decision invalidated state bans on paid signature gatherers, it has become more difficult to regulate the signature gathering process.

This is an important and apparently fairly widespread problem of which I was previously unaware.

Realclearinvestigations ties it all together: the Russiagate agents and the MAL search agents are one and the same

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a summary of the links between the Russiagate crowd and the MAL search crowd. An excerpt:

The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the bureau’s alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.

The law of parsimony.

More:

Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau’s disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team – Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten – has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian “disinformation,” an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

Auten has been allowed to work on sensitive cases even though he has been under internal investigation since 2019, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred him for disciplinary review for his role in vetting a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier used by the FBI to obtain a series of wiretap warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz singled out Auten for cutting a number of corners in the verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into warrant affidavits and mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

The article goes on to say that the only thing Wray has blocked this group from doing is to write FISA applications. But the MAL case wouldn’t involve FISA, as far as we know.

“It is a disgrace that Auten is still even employed by the bureau,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello. “I would substitute other analysts and agents.”

You would, Mr.Biasello; I would – but we’re not in charge, are we? And those in charge seem to have different standards and different goals. Clearly, from his demeanor and answers in his recent Congressional hearing, Christopher Wray doesn’t feel the need to answer to anyone other than the Biden administration.

The article goes on to list other people involved in both investigations, all of whom are DC-based. It concludes this way:

Former FBI counterintelligence official and lawyer Mark Wauck said he is troubled by signs that the same cast of characters from the Russiagate scandal appears to be involved in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

“If these people, who were part of a major hoax that involved criminal activity and displays of bias and seriously flawed judgment, are still involved, then that’s a major scandal,” he said in an interview.

But if a major scandal falls in the forest and the MSM doesn’t report it, does it make a sound that anyone except those on the right will hear? Of course not – at least, that’s what previous experience tells us.

Many Democrats could believe every word in that article and not care, or even applaud the situation, because they want Trump disgraced and imprisoned and they could not care less how it’s accomplished as long as it’s accomplished.

But among those why might be uneasy if they came to understand what’s been happening, precious few will ever read that article or any others like it. And if somehow they did – let’s says you forwarded it to them and they actually did read it – they would almost certainly dismiss it. The sources aren’t named, for example – which wouldn’t trouble them if it were an anti-Trump article and the same thing were the case. They are unaware of how often unnamed sources speaking to the right have later been proven correct, as compared to those speaking to the left. In general, they would probably put the article on a par with the sort of thing that purports to prove that NASA never sent anyone to the moon.

And let’s not forget the Iran deal

The New Neo Posted on by

The Biden administration certainly hasn’t forgotten [emphasis mine]:

Admittedly, the [Iranian] regime has more than once pumped the brakes on nuclear diplomacy. This intransigence signaled that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, may not have ever wanted an agreement at all. Rather, he may seek to prolong talks to advance the regime’s nuclear program while avoiding harsh decisions by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Still, recent news out of Vienna suggests a deal may be imminent, with even more Western concessions.

If at first you don’t succeed in getting a terrible nuclear deal, try try again.

The article goes on to summarize the last couple of decades of Iranian efforts to get nuclear weapons, and the negotiations around that. Here’s a portion of that discussion. You probably recall a lot of this, but read it if your memory could use some refreshing [emphasis mine]:

However, while one American team was building trust with Israel, secret negotiations between the United States and Iran began in Oman in 2012. The talks were led by figures now holding key positions in the Biden administration: National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William Burns, then serving as the State Department’s director of policy planning and deputy secretary of state, respectively. These secret negotiation laid the foundation for both the 2013 interim agreement, formally known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), and the 2015 final agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

In exchange for minimal nuclear concessions, the JPOA granted Iran — for the first time — a de facto authorization to enrich uranium, contravening multiple Security Council resolutions. This concession directly reneged on the Obama administration’s pledge to Israel. The agreement, designed to last six months, lasted two years as Iran and world powers repeatedly extended talks past self-imposed deadlines. The deal effectively rewarded Tehran with cash every month simply for negotiating. Billions of dollars in sanctions relief injected new life into Iran’s sanctions-battered economy.

Betrayal of Israel, concessions and payments to Iran. Then, of course, Trump the Terrible ended all that. But now Biden and company are desperate to go back to those glory days of The Deal:

Israel’s shadow war [against Iran] notwithstanding, the [Iranian] regime’s nuclear advances have rendered a return to the old agreement futile. Iran’s nuclear progress since 2015, and particularly since Biden’s election, is beyond the point of containment. This underscores why the original deal was a mistake. The data disclosed by the nuclear archive, as well as new information obtained by IAEA inspectors since 2015, show that the JCPOA failed to account for the full range of Iranian nuclear activities, including activities that preceded the agreement…

The decision to close the PMD investigation was among the West’s biggest mistakes. Today, the regime insists this issue is not open for discussion. Regime negotiators now demand that all IAEA investigations — new and old — be closed or written off. This is reportedly one of the remaining sticking points in Vienna.

Regardless of the terms of any deal that is reached, the regime in Iran is much closer to a bomb than previously estimated. The IAEA has only recently reached this conclusion, thanks largely to Israeli evidence. The nuclear watchdog appears incapable of fulfilling its mandate independently. This alone raises troubling questions about the feasibility of a sustainable agreement, which would require reliable monitoring and verification.

As far as I can tell, the Iranians are progressing quite nicely without a deal. The question of why Obama and now the Biden administration want one so badly has been debated here and elsewhere for over a decade, but the bottom line is that they do, and they are willing to (and already have) give up a lot to get one.

More:

The Iranian nuclear strategy appears to be based on four assumptions. The first is that the United States, under its current leadership, lacks the will to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. This view has yielded a second — and erroneous — belief that Israel lacks sufficient capabilities to strike Iran’s nuclear program and will not attack without American support. Third, the Islamic Republic believes its economy can withstand Washington’s current economic pressure, which is significantly weaker than the sanctions of past administrations. And finally, the regime believes it faces no meaningful internal threats to its survival. These four views explain why Tehran has not exhibited any flexibility at the negotiating table.

I have long thought that stopping Iran will be up to Israel. That country’s current leadership is nearly as terrible as ours, but that may be due for a change after the election scheduled to take place there in November. For now [emphasis mine]:

With negotiations now at a pivotal moment, Jerusalem’s primary concern is that Washington will agree to a “JCPOA-minus.” The White House is reportedly willing to offer sanctions relief that goes far beyond the JCPOA’s concessions. In particular, the Biden team has offered to lift sanctions on thousands of individuals and entities, including Iranian banks, the supreme leader, and his inner circle. Moreover, U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley and his team, together with some EU high officials, have explored ways to comply with the Iranian demand to remove IRGC-related entities from the FTO list despite promises from the White House to the contrary.

Offering additional concessions to the regime is irresponsible, particularly amidst a spate of regime-inspired attacks and plots on American soil.

Since when did that ever stop them?

A great deal more at the link, including what I consider an unrealistic proposal for a bipartisan Congressional group to demand something better from the Biden administration. I don’t see that more than a sprinkling of Democrats would sign on, if that.