Dershowitz on Letitia James and her Ahab-like pursuit of Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Dershowitz writes [emphasis mine]:

The first move former President Donald Trump’s attorneys should do to fight back against New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil lawsuit against him and his family members is to push that she be recused and disqualified from the case, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said on Newsmax Wednesday after her announcement.

“I like Letitia James,” Dershowitz said on Newsmax’s “American Agenda.” “She’s a very nice person, but she campaigned on the promise to get Trump before seeing any evidence, and so she is just fulfilling a campaign promise. You can’t have prosecutors even civilly prosecute a defendant if they made a campaign promise.”

James said in a press conference that New York is suing Trump, Trump Organization officials, and three of his adult children — Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric — on allegations of widespread fraud involving financial statements made by the company and that at least $250 million in penalties is being sought.

It’s obvious that James is trying to use dubious legal theories to persecute a political opponent for her own political purposes. This used to be rare and done more clandestinely; now it’s more common (“lawfare”) and bragged about.

More from Dershowitz:

“Why does Letitia James have to be out there protecting and defending the biggest banks in the country who haven’t sued him at all?” said Dershowitz. “This doesn’t pass the test of a legitimate civil complaint, and I think they should be challenging it very vigorously.”…

Further, James will have to prove that the Trump properties were not what he claimed they were when using them to obtain financing, the basis of the case.

“One thing we know about real estate assessment is it’s very open-ended and very subjective,” said Dershowitz. “You know apartments have sold in New York for double their assessment. It’s gonna be a very hard case for her to prove because they have to prove deliberate, intentional, willful fraud, not just that he had a different opinion of the value of his properties and others.”

But when prosecutors bring a case, they have to be objective, he added.

“It can’t be somebody who thinks that this will help their reelection campaign, and if she didn’t bring the case, she would have been unelectable the second time around,” said Dershowitz.

Further, it will take a long road to win the case, and James likely “feels she’d be better off politically litigating and losing than not litigating, which is another reason for not allowing her to make that decision,” said Dershowitz.

He noted that if he was Gov. Kathy Hochul, he would remove James from the case, even if they are both Democrats.

I don’t know whether Dershowitz is really that naive or is pretending to be. He and Hochul have very little in common except their party affiliation.

The Biden administration: if you can’t find white supremacist terrorists, invent them

The New Neo Posted on by

FBI whistleblowers are saying that they were pressured by the Biden administration to come up with more “white supremacist terrorist” cases in order to support the leftist narrative.

I had already assumed that was what was happening. One reason that seemed obvious is that they were drumming up the “right-wing white supremacist terrorist” fears even before Biden became president, and – ludicrously – even as the left (Antifa and fringe parts of BLM) were trying to destroy city after city in the name of George Floyd. To refresh your memory, see this from September 4, 2020, not long before the 2020 election, describing a campaign by the DHS that had been in the works for quite a while already back then to make domestic white supremacist terrorists the main threat to watch out for:

White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States, according to a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security.

Two later draft versions of the same document — all of which were reviewed by POLITICO — describe the threat from white supremacists in slightly different language. But all three drafts describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups…

None of the drafts POLITICO reviewed referred to a threat from Antifa, the loose cohort of militant left-leaning agitators who senior Trump administration officials have described as domestic terrorists.

It seemed preposterous at the time – particularly in view of the leftist mayhem that had been going on during the summer of 2020. But it seemed clear there was method in the DHS’s madness – and there was.

By that time, the FBI was already engaged in orchestrating the Whitmer kidnapping plot by recruiting and entrapping a group of hapless big-mouthed losers in Michigan. Did I say “a group”? Actually, the FBI introduced most of them to each other and directed them in the plot the FBI also organized. January 6th was to follow, and some of the same FBI people involved in orchestrating the Michigan operation oversaw the FBI’s involvement in that. We still don’t know the full extent of the role the FBI played in January 6th – how much of it they directed and how much was spontaneous. But even the FBI has admitted to having many informants involved prior to the event as well as during it.

Here’s more from that September 2020 report about DHS:

The assessment comes as DHS has faced scrutiny for its response to increasingly violent domestic extremism during the Trump era. Top DHS officials have spent years grappling with how to do more to combat the threat, and long chafed at what they called disinterest from the White House. Two former top DHS political appointees told POLITICO last month that White House national security officials shied away from addressing the problem and didn’t want to refer to killings by right-wing extremists as domestic terrorism.

Who were these right-wing extremists DHS was so hot to label? I published a piece about some of this as early as 2015 (prior to Trump’s presidency). Please read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

Another point of interest is how non-Muslim terrorist acts are classified. For example, what is a right-wing terrorist group? White supremacists are a category responsible for some domestic terrorist acts, and they are routinely counted as being on the right politically (follow that link for a very helpful chart), even though very often they don’t espouse the political principles of the right. For example, perpetrators such as Dylann Roof, a crazy drug-addled white supremacist who hated blacks and liked the Confederate flag are automatically considered to be on the right even though what I’ve just described was about the sum total of his politics. Many of these people are simply anti-government, or are often neo-Nazis or Nazi admirers. Here’s one who was fairly typical, a crazy white supremacist racist reacting with anger to something. Hardly what we think of as a terrorist act or a member of the right:

“In 2009, Robert Poplawski killed three police officers who responded to a domestic dispute call at his mother’s house where he was living. Poplawski frequented white supremacist websites and expressed anti-government and racist views. Poplawski was reportedly lying in wait and ambushed the responding officers.”

When you get rid of all the white supremacist neo-Nazis, all that seems to remain of this “right-wing terrorist” group are people like the killer of George Tiller, a terrorist (or rather, assassin, which is somewhat different) who was anti-abortion, a bona fide cause of the right as opposed to white supremacy [NOTE: which is not a cause of the right but is labeled that way by the left]. He was also fiercely anti government, and mentally ill. How is a guy who’s basically an anarchist considered to be on the right? Anarchists defy classification, and the attempt to shoehorn some of them into the left and some into the right is a doomed one, because anarchists are not part of either group.

In sum: everyone intuitively understands that a manic-depressive white supremacist who tries to hurt his mother and then kills police officers who come to answer the domestic violence call is a dangerous murderer. But everyone also understands that classifying the act of such a person as of the same type and magnitude as the destruction of the World Trade Center by jihadists is a travesty.

The FBI and other agencies such as DHS categorize people as they wish, and that is a political decision too. For example, the Ft. Hood killer, clearly a Muslim jihadi, was long labeled a “workplace” killer rather than a fanatical Islamic terrorist:

The U.S. government declined requests from survivors and family members of the slain to categorize the Fort Hood shooting as an act of terrorism, or motivated by militant Islamic religious convictions. In November 2011, a group of survivors and family members filed a lawsuit against the government for negligence in preventing the attack, and to force the government to classify the shootings as terrorism.

And it took years for the leftist would-be assassin of Scalise and other Republican House members to be referred to by the FBI as a possible terrorist, even tentatively and in retrospect: see this as well as this.

NOTE: See also this about the categorization of the January 6th cases.

Slavery and reparations

The New Neo Posted on by

This video of Don Lemon being confronted – by a British royalty spokesperson named Hilary Fordwich – with some salient facts about the history of slavery, has been making the rounds. In case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is:

Lemon looks like he doesn’t quite know what hit him.

I wonder whether he actually is unaware of facts such as the Brits’ role in ending slavery. I guess he doesn’t read my blog; in 2015 I wrote a post with some later history on the subject.

On questioning the integrity of the voting process

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “stan” has this to say:

The gaslighting on elections has gotten ridiculous. Reality:

1. Democrats have a long, sordid history of election fraud.
2. Every other major democracy in the world requires voter ID.
3. There is zero evidence to support the Democrats’ racist assertion that blacks are too stupid to get a voter ID. Zero.
4. Even if there were people of certain demographics who didn’t have an ID, the remedy — eliminating the most basic election integrity measure — is nonsensical. The obvious remedy is simply to make an effort to reach out to that community to help them get IDs. Democrats have used artillery to kill mosquitos who don’t exist.
5. The dishonesty and lack of good faith demonstrated by Democrats on voter ID extends to every other voting change they have jammed through — voting by mail is the worst. We now mail ballots to addresses that don’t have buildings, to people who don’t exist or have died or moved, and count the votes that are mailed back without the slightest effort to ensure the ballots are honestly cast. This is madness.

The current setup is blatantly fraudulent. To ridicule those who point out this obvious reality is gaslighting or worse. There’s simply no good faith way that anyone can defend this. We need to condemn those who do. Turn over the rock. Expose the cockroaches. And fumigate.

Democrats must pretend that the voting process they designed is sacred and wonderful, and that criticizing it is tantamount to heresy. Of course, when they’re not in charge, criticizing the voting process is perfectly fine and even laudable.

A trip back in time:

And remember all those “Question Authority” bumper stickers that Democrats used to sport? No more, now that they have become the authority.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep doing these roundups lately because there are so many stories to cover:

(1) Biden’s hateful rhetoric seems to have borne fruit in this killing. But don’t look to the MSM to talk much about it.

(2) I guess according to Hollywood, slavery was okay as long as African women were in charge – or something like that.

More here:

The reason for the anger is that the film centers around an all-female group of warriors called the “Agojie” who fought for the “Dahomey” kingdom in the early 1800s. According to the film, the Dahomey were on the front lines of pushing colonialist white people out of Africa who were out to enslave the African people. However, in real life, the Dahomey and their female warriors were actually known for raiding African villages, brutally torturing and killing those who couldn’t be used, and selling others they captured to slave traders.

This had many people, including the black community, angry that Hollywood was glorifying the very people we all agreed were the bad guys.

But it’s my impression that, according to woke lore, some African people’s complicity in the slave trade can be safely ignored.

(3) More here on the effect of Germany’s green policies on its economy.

(4) Are you aware of the term “caudacity”? Kelisa Wing, the “defense equity chief” at the Department of Defense’s Education wing, wrote this:

“[T]his lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too… I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS… [W]e are not the majority, we don’t have power,”

This is classic CRT, which states that black people cannot be racist because they’re not in power – by definition, even if (like Kelisa herself) they occupy positions of power. Neat trick.

As for “caudacity,” it means the audacity of white people. I guess white people have a special special audacity that Ms. Wing is able to spot and denounce when she sees it.

(5) Matt Taibbi has written this article about the out-of-control DOJ, going into the lengthy pro-Trump history as well as what’s been going on versus Trump. The piece is long but well worth reading. I may write a post about it sometime, because I think it’s an extremely important topic. I disagree with a couple of details, but on the whole I highly recommend it.

(6) No bail for the ax-wielder.

Martha’s Vineyard demographics

The New Neo Posted on by

With all the brouhaha about Martha’s Vineyard lately, I’ve noticed a lot of pundits saying that it’s an enclave for the white and the rich. Far be it from me to defend the Vineyard, but in this case I’d like to clear up some misconceptions.

The demographics:

According to the 2010 census, African Americans remain a small percentage of the Island’s full-time population — less than four per cent — but their numbers are growing steadily, with many choosing to retire here.

And that full-time cohort appears to be migrating throughout the Island. Oak Bluffs is still the Island’s black population center, but Edgartown and Vineyard Haven are creeping up with significant increases over the past decade.

Reliable data about the summer population is scarce, but a wide range of black residents say the Vineyard has retained its grip on the imaginations of vacationers, as more and more are finding their way here from places far beyond New England, New York and Washington D.C. The Island’s beauty, history, cultural and intellectual institutions — and not least — comfort factor all combine to create an atmosphere that keeps attracting short-term visitors, seasonal residents and year-rounders of all races, most especially blacks.

When compared with other summer resorts that have historically welcomed blacks — Idlewild in Michigan, Sag Harbor in New York, or Highland Beach in Maryland, for example — the Vineyard still stands apart, they say.

I’ve been to the Vineyard a few times. I used to have a relative by marriage (now deceased) who had a good friend with a very large home there that was often empty. So my relative visited now and then and invited my husband and me to join her. Free vacation – nice deal! It didn’t take but one visit to learn of Martha’s Vineyard’s special history vis a vis black people, which at one point involved a section of the island named Oak Bluffs.

The article goes into some of that history:

Mrs. Goldson articulates a message that is repeated over and over among many long-time seasonal African Americans on the Island. Their love for the place keeps getting passed down, with each successive generation making its own memories.

“For us,” she says, speaking about her own family but she might just as well be talking about scores of others, “it’s about family and friends. I can be with friends who have been friends my whole life.”

Mrs. Goldson was among a generation of kids lucky enough to come to the Island for the entire summer. Usually the mothers stayed with them, while the fathers came when they could, often on the Friday night Daddy Boat, as it was known.

Occasionally, Mrs. Goldson’s father would fly down from the Boston area in his two-seater Ercoupe, buzzing State Beach as he headed to Trade Wind airfield, a grass landing strip that today serves as a dog park as well. What many families sought here was the kind of community they lacked the rest of the year, a critical mass of black friends, which had been sacrificed as families moved from black-only neighborhoods into predominantly white communities.

“You [had been] segregated, but not lost,” says Bettye Baker, who first came to the Vineyard in 1964 and writes about Oak Bluffs for the Gazette. “So you came to Martha’s Vineyard and recaptured that.”

Obviously, these were black people with the financial resources to do this. But it’s been going on for a long time, and is part of the Vineyard’s history, with events such as the following:

The demand for tours on the African American Heritage Trail, with its 23 sites across the Island, can sometimes overwhelm the supply of available guides, says Elaine Cawley Weintraub, chairman of the high school history department and co-founder of the Heritage Trail with Carrie Camillo Tankard, who is also vice president of the Vineyard chapter of the NAACP. “For older African Americans, they are so excited and honored and pleased” to take in the trail, she said.

Here they may learn that a black man, the Rev. John Saunders, first brought Methodism to the Island in 1787, not those who later founded the famed Methodist Camp Ground; that the great blues, jazz and gospel singer Ethel Waters stayed in the Shearer guest cottage; that Adam Clayton Powell Jr. bought a house in the Highlands; Dorothy West, the novelist and youngest Harlem Renaissance figure, was virtually unknown to recent generations until Oprah Winfrey produced a TV movie of The Wedding; that Edward Brooke, the first black elected to the U.S. Senate since Reco nstruction, taught swimming at Inkwell beach; and that President Obama probably won’t vacation on the Island in 2012, an election year.

The other thing I have to say about Martha’s Vineyard is that it has the world’s best fudge. At least, it was the best fudge the last time I was there, which was about 25 years ago. It’s this stuff. Extremely yummy – and I don’t even get a commission. Since I can’t eat chocolate without getting a migraine, I appreciate their excellent non-chocolate selections, which sometimes included a kick-ass cranberry flavor.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go again with another roundup:

(1) Scott Johnson of Powerline has a post on Jan Karski, the Polish officer who tried to warn the US about the Holocaust in a timely fashion, to little or no avail. I wrote a post on Karski as well (in 2014), which you can find here.

(2) Joe, do you feel his hot heavy breath on the back of your neck? Newsom is waiting in the wings, tanned, rested, and ready for 2024.

(3) Andrew C. McCarthy on the upcoming Danchenko trial:

Durham’s investigation indicates that Danchenko lied to the FBI multiple times, falsehoods that should have been easy for the nation’s flagship federal investigative agency to run down. Yet they kept him on board, kept paying him.

But it gets worse. While the bureau used inane, unverified information from Steele and Danchenko to suggest to a court that the president of the United States might be a Russian asset, the FBI had intelligence indicating that Danchenko himself might actually have been a Russian asset.

That was detailed in yet another Durham court filing last week, in the Virginia federal court where Danchenko is soon scheduled to be tried. The prosecutor related that Danchenko was “the subject of an FBI counterintelligence from 2009 to 2011.”…

…Danchenko, like Sussmann, is charged with lying to the FBI, and a jury may once again be left to wonder whether the bureau was actually fooled.

Yet these prosecutions are secondary to the vital story: What role did the FBI, whether by misfeasance or malfeasance, play in the Clinton campaign’s project to paint Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin? For now, we have to hope that Durham’s final report will answer that question.

I don’t think that hope will be fulfilled. But if it is, I am virtually certain that it will be ignored or twisted by the Democrats and their MSM helpers.

(4) A couple of oopsies from Biden: (1) declaring the pandemic over, and (2) saying that US personnel will defend Taiwan if it is attacked. The first undermines his rationale for student loan bailout and the second garnered a denial from the White House – the real White House, I suppose (more here on that).

(5) The funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.

Why would any “election denier” respond to a pollster?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: “Stan.”]

This seems intuitively obvious to me:

A leading independent pollster said Saturday that polls might seriously undercount Republican voters in the current political climate.

In a Twitter thread, Trafalgar Group chief pollster Robert C. Cahaly said that President Joe Biden’s recent attacks on so-called “MAGA Republicans” will make polling supporters of former President Donald Trump even harder to poll than in previous years. Cahaly pointed out that in the last two presidential election cycles, name-calling and threats from prominent Democrats contributed to the phenomenon of the “shy Trump voter.” But as the 2022 midterms have begun in earnest, Biden’s escalating rhetoric against Trump supporters, accusing them of embracing “semi-fascism” and being a threat to America, will make these voters even harder to reach in polling.

The title of my post is somewhat hyperbolic; of course, some “election deniers” will want to respond. But I believe a significant number will not, or will lie.

The beauty of it as far as the Democrats are concerned is twofold, however. The first desired effect is that an under-representation of Republicans in the polls can serve to discourage people on the right from voting, because they feel it’s hopeless. I don’t think that would work this year, but who knows? Of course, it could also backfire and make Democrats feel they don’t have to vote because it’s in the bag for them. Again, I don’t think it would work that way this year, but again, who knows?

Under-representation of GOP voters in the polls has a second probable effect desired by the left: if the Democrats are going to commit voter fraud in order to win races, it helps if the predictions about the GOP vote versus the Democratic vote are kept artificially low. That way, there would be less suspicion later on when the Democrat wins.

Biden’s attacks on Trump voters and those who think fraud was probably involved on the part of Democrats in 2020 – a huge number of Americans – also may have the result of people on the right becoming more afraid to donate to causes or candidates on the right. This phenomenon of exposing lists of donors on the right has been going on for a long time, but I suspect that the current escalation of the campaign against Democrats’ opponents and their willingness to either sic the Twitter crowd on them or prosecute them legally, or both, will have a desired effect of discouraging political donations.

Makes me think of this song by Phil Ochs, which came out in 1964; I heard it some time in the mid-60s. Ochs was on the left, but he didn’t exempt them from criticism: