A couple of days ago the redirect command from my old blog stopped working. Ever since I started at this new URL a few years ago, I’ve had a redirect command put in that means that if anyone tries to go to my old blog, the redirect automatically sends them to this one instead. It’s worked perfectly for years. But now it’s on the fritz, so it has to be fixed. If any of you are still using the old blog URL and relying on the redirect, it’s probably a good idea to update to thenewneo.com . Sorry for any inconvenience.
Open thread 8/16/22
Reading the Mar-A-Lago raid tea leaves: it’s the Netanyahu lawfare gambit
Margot Cleveland speculates:
NONE of the three criminal statutes used to justify the search require materials to be “classified”…
Espionage Act’s plain language does not require material related to “national defense” to be classified. (Preliminary research confirms my reading but want to dig deeper).
Second criminal provision, also doesn’t distinguish between classified and unclassified.
Nor does the third. And IN FACT the third isn’t concerned about Trump’s possession of it, but his “destruction” of it…
…[I]t would seem that any document that WAS classified at some point between 2017-2021 would be definition be a Presidential Record, and viola a crime to keep.
And Nick Arama of RedState adds [emphasis mine]:
…[Trump] didn’t even remove the items — they were sent to him by the GSA. He likely didn’t even know what was there and was cooperating to give them anything they wanted. So it’s going to be hard to impute any kind of actions to him regarding removal. But the aim ultimately here might be to get an indictment and hang him up, even knowing they would likely lose.
I have no idea whether Cleveland’s speculations are correct, but they are certainly plausible. There is little question in my mind that they are willing to do virtually anything to stop Trump, and that they know they don’t need to make it fair because half the country thinks anything is justified in getting after that devil Trump.
And I bolded Arama’s final sentence there for a reason. Back in June I featured one of Caroline Glick’s articles comparing what was done to stop Netanyahu to what had been done to stop Trump. She didn’t foresee the Mar-A-Lago raid and the current renewed attempts to get Trump; she was focusing on what had already occurred, which was plenty. Here’s an excerpt from what Glick wrote about Russiagate:
One of the keys to understanding the Russiagate conspiracy is that it wasn’t only the FBI that operated as one with the Democratic Party. The media was also a full partner. It was a circular operation. Campaign operatives like Sussman farmed false allegations to the FBI to convince it to open investigations. Then they farmed the same fables to the Washington press corps and used the fact that the FBI was also looking into the allegations to convince the reporters to publish the allegations. They then used the media stories to persuade the FBI to keep investigating.
And again, the investigations went on and morphed into the Mueller probe and 24/7 media drumbeat of prejudicial leaks that paralyzed the Trump presidency. All along, all parties involved knew that the allegations against Trump and his advisers were false and originated from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.
It’s a good summary, but you already know those broad outlines. You may be less familiar with what happened to Netanyahu [emphasis mine]:
Netanyahu is standing trial for bribery and breach of trust. The “breach of trust” charge is a subjective catch-all concept that the prosecutors admit wouldn’t have sufficed on its own to bring Netanyahu to trial. The bribery charge was the key to Netanyahu’s political downfall.
Netanyahu’s trial opened last April. Last May he was ousted from office. To date, some 15 prosecution witnesses have taken the stand, and one by one, they have not merely demolished every aspect of the prosecution’s charges against Netanyahu, they have exposed the full partnership of police investigators and state prosecutions in their joint mission to “get Netanyahu,” that is, to oust him from power, at all costs.
To achieve their political goal, the police descended on Netanyahu’s advisers one by one, and gave them the treatment generally reserved for terrorists and violent criminals. They were dragged from their beds at dawn, in front of their families, and carted off to investigation rooms and flea-ridden jail cells. They were denied food. They were subjected to public humiliation in the media. Their electronic communications were illegally tapped. Their families were threatened. Their livelihoods were destroyed.
And the police didn’t let them go until they gave them something—anything—to incriminate the prime minister of Israel.
Since Netanyahu had committed no crime, then-Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit and State Attorney Shai Nitzan reinvented the bribery statute to claim that lawful actions Netanyahu did undertake were criminal.
Like every politician on the face of the planet, Netanyahu sought positive coverage from news organizations. The prosecution decided that this effort amounted to a solicitation of a bribe. Netanyahu signed regulatory decisions that affected a telecommunications firm owned by his friend. The prosecution decided this was a favor—a payment for positive coverage from his friend’s news website. Unfortunately for the prosecution, Netanyahu received terrible coverage from the website. But no matter, the prosecutors simply updated the definition of bribery. They said Netanyahu received “undo responsiveness” from the website’s management to his requests for better coverage, and that was now the definition of a bribe.
…They invented laws just for him. They defined politics and journalism as criminal enterprises to criminalize Netanyahu’s non-criminal actions—which, it turns out, he didn’t even take. They trampled the very notion of the rule of law in their “ends justify the mean” campaign to force Netanyahu from power.
…Just as was the case with Trump and the US media, so in Netanyahu’s case the Israeli media was a full partner in the plot to overthrow him. Throughout the two-year investigation, the media received a constant stream of illegal, and grossly distorted information from police interrogations which carefully selected reporters breathlessly reported daily on the evening news.
Israel’s prosecutors tied their actions to the elections calendar to tilt the results against Netanyahu. And they succeeded.
As I said, that was written in June. Since then, the trial against Netanyahu imploded – for now – and he may end up in power again after the next election.
I quoted liberally from Glick’s piece for reasons that I hope are obvious. The parallels are all too clear. When she wrote the piece, Russiagate was in the rearview mirror, and Trump had been ousted from office (and whether you think fraud may or may not have been involved in the results of the 2020 election that ousted him, it is unquestionable that Russiagate cost him many votes). Now, of course, the Biden administration’s DOJ and the aforementioned Trump-hating FBI are at it again, and this time they mean to do what was done to Netanyahu. They will use any convoluted and never-before-thought-of legal theory to trap him and make it impossible for him to win.
To do this, as Nick Arama points out, they don’t even need to a case that would ultimately hold up in court. He wrote, “the aim ultimately here might be to get an indictment and hang him up, even knowing they would likely lose.”
‘Tis enough, ’twill serve. And with the right (that is, left) judge and/or jury, they could even convict him of something and send him off to prison.
Roundup
(1) Some background on the Chautauqua Institution.
Also, here’s an interesting interview with Rushdie’s attacker’s mother [hat tip commenter “Miguel cervantes”].
(2) Al Franken, always making with the jokes:
Kinda says it all. https://t.co/MvJ9bsD6nf
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 13, 2022
(3) Exactly and precisely as expected, the FBI is warning us:
In the days since the warrant was executed, the FBI and DHS have seen an increase in “violent threats” against law enforcement, judiciary and government personnel, including a particular threat to “place a so-called Dirty Bomb in front of FBI headquarters,” according to the bulletin.
“General calls” for “civil war” and “armed rebellion” have also increased in recent days on social media.
The bulletin states that many of the threats include references to the claim that the 2020 election was stolen, in addition to other perceived claims of government overreach.
Perceived claims of government overreach. How far-fetched and deluded!
(4) If the name of the Inflation Reduction Act is “almost Orwellian,” what would it take for it to be actually Orwellian? An interrogation by O’Brien to go with it?
ABC'S JONATHAN KARL: "Isn't it almost Orwellian? How can you call it the Inflation Reduction Act when the nonpartisan experts say it's not gonna bring inflation down?"
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: "I appreciate the question." pic.twitter.com/tmtFTdsgXx
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 14, 2022
(5) Not your father’s Concorde, the newly-designed supersonic aircraft called Overture has some unusual features, including running on something called “Sustainable Aviation Fuel.” What is that?:
The fuel comprises different types of sustainable resources, such as used cooking oil and animal fat waste, to name a few.
More on SAF here – from the folks who produce it. It’s currently blended with regular jet fuel, and is (unsurprisingly) more expensive. A lot more information can be found here.
Open thread 8/15/22
A special needs duck:
Makes me think of this, sorta kinda:
The story of my left eye – so far: Part VIII
[NOTE: [Part I can be found here.
Part II can be found here.
Part III can be found here.
Part IV can be found here.
Part V can be found here.
Part VI can be found here.
Part VII can be found here.]
I meant to include these pictures in my series of cataract surgery posts and forgot.
The first photo is a pretty close simulation of what I saw with my left eye at night around streetlights and car headlights prior to surgery. It’s also what I still see with each eye, although it’s considerably smaller now in my left eye than it was before the surgery.
“Halo” doesn’t begin to describe it, although that’s the usual term. This photo is the best approximation I’ve ever found of the gorgeous geometric pattern of little rainbow diamond shapes – thousands of them – that I see and saw. The phenomenon in my left eye prior to surgery was large and surrounded the lights about six feet out in all directions, and was far more precise, complex, and beautiful even than this photo. If I were a better artist I’d try to draw it, but even then I probably wouldn’t succeed. Now, as I said, it’s smaller in my left eye, and it’s of intermediate size in my right. If it weren’t so disruptive to night driving it would simply be amazingly and awesomely beautiful:
And the rays in this second picture are what I now see in my left eye around lights at night as a result of my surgery. They were not present before. I created this image at a site (see this; and by the way I had all the phenomena shown there except “trails”) that gives you tools to construct so-called “positive dysphotopsias” (see this article if you’re interested in learning more about the dysphotopsia phenomenon). This photo is very close to what I actually see around lights when I drive in the dark, combined with the rainbow halos. It’s still much better than my vision was at night before the surgery. The lights overwhelmed just about everything else back then, and of course the rest was blurry and lacked contrast. This is considerably easier to process out and focus on what I need to see instead:
I’ve been told if I want to have the right eye done, I might get more of these dysphotopsias in the right eye afterwards, but a silicon lens rather than an acrylic lens would probably be less likely to cause them. However, a silicon lens is a more old-fashioned type that can lead to other problems.
Right now I’m taking a break from the whole thing and enjoying the improvements, which are considerable. Scenery is sharp and beautiful, street signs are legible, it’s much easier to use my computer, and those signs in the supermarket that designate what’s in each aisle are quite readable. It remains amazing.
More reflections on the Mar-A-Lago raid: Trump as an illegitimate president
One thing the Mar-A-Lago raid has driven home is that the left truly believes – and they think much of the general public will agree – that what ordinarily would be allowed most presidents and ex-presidents is not to be allowed to Trump. That is because they think and have always thought that he was an illegitimate president with no right to hold that office.
It doesn’t matter which reasoning they use to explain that point of view: he’s too uncouth, he’s stupid, he’s a clown, he’s beneath us, he’s a Russian puppet, he’s a racist, he wears a MAGA hat, he didn’t get the popular vote, Russian disinformation enabled his win – the bottom line is that they think he wasn’t a real president and shouldn’t be treated as one.
He has possession of classified documents? Indict him under an act that is virtually never used as a criminal statute (except in rare cases, and then involving a misdemeanor), and absolutely never used against a president or ex-president – because he really wasn’t a real president and therefore he’s not a real ex-president either.
Spy on him. Lie about him. Frame him. Shame him. Do whatever is necessary.
Get a search warrant so general that it allows you to search his entire residence and confiscate every bit of paper you find that has anything to do with his bogus non-presidential “presidential” years. Probable cause? Don’t tell the American people what you cited as the probable cause, because the probable cause is actually that the illegitimate Trump deserves no respect and deserves everything bad that’s coming to him.
And they know that half of America will agree and applaud them.
Oh, and the goal was never to get the documents for the documents’ sake. They knew the documents were not at all at risk. The goal was to get evidence to get Trump, period. What was it Schumer said? Oh yeah – and he said it seventeen days before Trump’s inauguration:
“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Is there any doubt whatsoever that the Mar-A-Lago raid is that intelligence community (and the left) “getting back” at Trump, for the umpteenth time?
Just to take one example of the attitude being expressed by the left, this is from Yahoo News:
One factor that McCord (Mary McCord, national security lawyer under Obama) suggested would be on the minds of DOJ national security lawyers is what Trump might have done with the highly classified material that was still believed to be at Mar-a-Lago. “Are we worried that some of this information would actually be shared outside of Mar-a-Lago, potentially with foreign adversaries? I’d be really concerned about that,” she said.
Yes, we all know how soft Trump was on our foreign adversaries, as opposed to previous tough-guy Obama and current tough-guy Biden. The left keeps peddling this preposterous dreck, the MSM keeps dutifully and uncritically spinning it back to the public, and half the country nods and says, “Yes, that’s just what he was probably going to do.”
On this blog, commenter “Greg Hlatky” remarked:
You are watching the Ruling Class lose its collective mind over a man who has not been in office for more than a year and a half, didn’t take his salary when President and likely isn’t drawing a pension. Unless Trump is just a MacGuffin.
Trump isn’t just a MacGuffin, but he is at least partly a symbol. Sarah Palin was a similar symbol before him, but because she never was elected VP, the focus on her faded. Trump would have faded, too, if he had lost the 2016 election. His winning and becoming president was the outrage that cannot be forgiven, ever. They could not believe it happened, and they think he must be prevented from ever winning again or ever taking a position of any kind of political power.
Not just Trump, though; any Republican who isn’t part of the genteel NeverTrumper club must never take power. Any Republican who might really be serious about stopping them and especially about draining the so-called swamp cannot have any power. It is a deadly serious game and they are determined to win.
Trump himself said, and he was correct: “They’re not after me, they’re after you – I’m just in the way.”
More on the security failure at the Chautauqua Institution where Rushdie was stabbed
When I heard of the attack, I immediately wondered about security there, because everyone knows – and has known for over thirty years – that a significant number of radical Muslims with Iranian sympathies are out to kill Rushdie. Therefore heightened security is not optional; it’s necessary.
But if this report is true, the venue lacked even some of the most basic security. According to anonymous sources:
The institution’s leadership had rejected recommendations for basic security measures, including bag checks and metal detectors, fearing that would create a divide between speakers and the audience, according to two sources who spoke with CNN. The leadership also feared that it would change the culture at the institution, the sources said…
The two sources have direct knowledge of the security situation at the Chautauqua Institution and past recommendations and spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly…
There were no security searches or metal detectors at the event, a person who witnessed the attack told CNN. The witness is not being identified because they expressed concerns for their personal safety…
“We assess for every event what we think the appropriate security level is, and this one was certainly one that we thought was important which is why we had a State Trooper and Sheriff presence there,” [Institution President] Hill said.
If fear of “changing the culture at the institution” was really their concern and the reason for the lax security, it certainly backfired, didn’t it? Denial of reality is not a good approach, and a single State Trooper and Sheriff are unlikely to be able to do much if the attacker is quick (this one was very quick indeed, by all reports) and if there are no metal detectors or inspection of backpacks and bags.
I suspect that the Rushdie attack has already “changed the culture” of the institution very significantly.
Open thread 8/13/22
A trip back in time:
The suspect in the Rushdie attack is ID’ed [scroll down for UPDATE]
And surprise surprise surprise:
The man arrested in Friday’s stabbing of famed novelist Salman Rushdie was identified by police as a New Jersey man, who law enforcement sources tell The Post he had sympathies toward the Iranian government that has called for Rushdie’s death.
Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, was arrested after he stormed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York and allegedly stabbed the author multiple times, New York State Police said Friday.
Law enforcement sources told The Post that an initial investigation suggests Matar has made social media posts in support of Iran and its Revolutionary Guard, and in support of Shi’a extremism more broadly.
New York State Police, however, said that Matar’s motive remained unclear.
Those New York State Police, always making with the jokes. Motive unclear? I realize they have to be very careful, but come on.
They also say he acted alone.
If you call decades of fatwas and exhortations to kill Rushdie “alone.”
There’s also this:
Regardless, the attack comes amid a slew of foiled Iranian plots on American soil, including a plot against former National Security Advisor John Bolton and an apparent attempt on the life of an Iranian-American journalist in Brooklyn.
Of course, one always has to be wary of foiled plots like the one about killing Bolton, because of what we know about entrapment. And sure enough, an agent was involved, but in the Bolton case from what we’ve learned so far, entrapment does not seem to have been involved:
Prosecutors alleged that in October 2021, Poursafi [a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] contacted a person online, seeking someone to take photographs of Bolton for a supposed book project.
The U.S. contact, identified in court documents as “Individual A,” connected Poursafi with an associate who served as a confidential source for U.S. authorities.
Beginning in early November 2021 and continuing through April 2022, according to prosecutors, Poursafi discussed the plot with the source, offering $250,000 to “eliminate” the former national security official – an amount “negotiated up” to $300,000.
Poursafi allegedly related that he had another “job” for the source that would pay $1 million.
According to court documents, the source asked Poursafi’s help locating Bolton, and the Iranian operative provided Bolton’s work address in Washington.
A search of Poursafi’s online accounts revealed “screenshots of a map application showing a street view of the former national security advisor’s office,” according to court documents. Attached to a screenshot was a note that Poursafi was communicating from Tehran, Iran.
“Poursafi told the (source) that it did not matter how the murder was carried out, but his ‘group’ would require video confirmation of the target’s death,” prosecutors said.
More at the link, and it really doesn’t seem like entrapment was an issue there.
Hadi Matar certainly might have acted alone, but I think it’s a bit premature to say that he actually did.
UPDATE 8:55 PM:
First report on Rushdie’s injuries:
“The news is not good,” Andrew Wylie [Rushdie’s agent] wrote in an emailed update. “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”
Brutal and horrible, but it sounds survivable.
I had earlier suggested that security might have been lax, especially considering that Rushdie is always at risk of assassination, even after all this time. There’s apparently still a $4 million bounty on his head (does the perp get half that for effort?). Here’s more on security:
The lecture hall where Rushdie was stabbed had at least historically featured middling security measures, a former employee of the Chautauqua Institution, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said in an interview on Friday.
Bags were allowed, the employee told The Daily Beast, which they claimed had concerned staffers at the institute as high-profile speakers like Rushdie frequently visit.
In a brief phone call, the Chautauqua Institution told The Daily Beast: “We are dealing with an emergency at this time and have no further comment or information to provide.”
Did Rushdie have his own security? I don’t know, but even if he did, it was clearly inadequate. My guess is that the perp, who lives in New Jersey, researched where Rushdie was going to be speaking and may have discovered that Chautauqua had security that might be the easiest to overcome.
By the way – although I doubt this has much of anything to do with anything, since the perp is not Hispanic – the name “Matar” means “to kill” in Spanish.
The warrant and the inventory
William Jacobson writes this about the warrant and inventory:
The affidavits supporting the warrant have not been unsealed, and it’s unclear whether Trump would have a copy.
The inventory does not give any indication what the records were, other than that some were marked as having high classifications, such as:
2A – Various classified/TS/SCI documents
lOA – Miscellaneous Secret Documents
11A – Miscellanous Top Secret Documents
14-A – Miscellaneous Confidential DocumentsWhat also is clear is this was a wholesale rummaging through Trump’s office. They even seized a lot of boxes of documents that had no classification markings…
Fishing expedition, of course. That was a foregone conclusion.
There’s a lot more information at the link, including quotes from that WSJ article I quoted earlier today in my previous post.
Also from Professor Jacobson, this is Trump, writing on Truth Social:
Number one, it was all declassified [by Trump]. Number two, they didn’t need to “seize” anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request…
…They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?
That last question is rhetorical, of course. Trump knows, you know, and I know, they did nothing about that; he was allowed to just give them back (NOTE: actually, they are apparently still in storage with NARA – has no one gone through them yet?), just as Hillary was allowed to do whatever she did with her server.
Obama doesn’t exist. Only Trump exists. And he must be stopped by any means necessary.
They say they found some classified information in the papers they took from Mar-A-Lago…
Something like this raid would have to have been done with the utmost transparency and documentation, as well as objective observers, if it’s done at all. But none of that was present.
FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal,” the outlet reported. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the ‘President of France,’ according to the three-page list. The list is contained in a seven-page document that also includes the warrant to search the premises which was granted by a federal magistrate judge in Florida.”
Plus, think about it: Trump was president for four years with access to all the classified information – about nuclear weapons and everything else – and nothing bad had ever happened as a result. Also, if he indeed had taken some papers of this type, and they were in his possession for the last one and a half years, what’s the big urgency right now? And why not just ask for them? Had they specifically asked and he refused? Is that documented? Were they not allowed to search last time they were there? Are they alleging the papers were hidden somewhere at the time – for example, in Melania’s clothing or a safe?
Are they going to allege he was going to give them to Russia, Russia, Russia, since we know he’s a Russian puppet?
This is reminding me, not for the first time, of the Dreyfus affair. No, Trump is not a Jewish army officer, and this is not France, and they didn’t publicly rip his epaulettes off – not yet, anyway. But Dreyfus was falsely accused and falsely convicted of selling military secrets to the Germans, and when it was becoming more clear that the accusations were false, the army forged evidence to implicate Dreyfus and protect its own reputation. The entire thing took twelve years to play out and intensely polarized France into pro and con sides, and made a lot of people in that country lose trust in previously-respected institutions.
Or perhaps they’re casting Trump as Julius Rosenberg, and they want to execute him? A few twitterati are hoping, anyway. After all, if you attack the king, you must kill him, right? Speaking of death penalties, New York’s Letitia James – who was elected on a platform to get Trump, among other things – may be looking for the “death penalty” for Trump’s New York business:
Former President Donald Trump may lose the “crown jewels” of the heir’s corporate empire if New York Attorney General Letitia James moves to invoke New York’s “corporate death penalty” against the Trump Organization, according to a new report.
On Wednesday, Trump announced he would refuse to answer questions in James’ civil investigation into the company during a deposition that lasted more than five hours.
The investigation focuses on whether the Trump Organization essentially kept two sets of books. He allegedly would low-ball values to avoid taxes, while high-balling values to secure loans.
“In the coming weeks or even days, the AG is expected to file a massive, long-threatened ‘enforcement action’ — essentially a multi-hundred-page lawsuit against the Trumps and his Manhattan-based business,” Business Insider reported Wednesday. “Fines and back taxes, however, may be the least of what Trump’s facing. James has signaled she will also seek the dissolution of the business itself under New York’s so-called corporate death penalty — a law that allows the AG to seek to dissolve businesses that operate ‘in a persistently fraudulent or illegal manner.’”
That article goes on to say that pleading the fifth in a civil case is considered evidence of guilt – as opposed to in a criminal case. Is that true? Not really; it’s complicated.
The only good thing about any of this is that the utter moral bankruptcy of Trump’s opponents has become clear, as well as the Orwellian hypocrisy of their rhetoric about defending democracy. It is democracy of which they are terrified, if it were to bring Trump to the presidency again and threaten their own power.
Also, the FBI or DOJ has has apparently leaked the information in the seized documents to the press. I guess the press now has a high-level security clearance. Or maybe the papers don’t mean a thing after all.
It also occurs to me that if the feds were left alone when they searched the premises last time, they could have planted documents then. Or of course, they could have planted them now. Is this a far-fetched thought? Not at all. They have already proven they will lie and deceive in order to implicate Trump. And naturally they also would ignore all of this if it weren’t Trump. If it involved a Democrat – say, Hillary Clinton – it would be just fine.