Jonathan Turley writes about the bias of jury foreman Tomeka Hart in the Roger Stone trial:
She referred to the President with a hashtag of “klanpresident” and spoke out against “Trump and the white supremacist racists.” She posted about how she and others protested outside a Trump hotel and shouted, “Shame, shame, shame!” When profanities were projected on the Trump hotel, she exclaimed on Jan. 13, 2018, “Gotta love it.” On March 24, 2019, she shared a Facebook post — no longer public — while calling attention to “the numerous indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions of people in 45’s inner-circle.”
More worrisome are her direct references to Stone, including a retweeted post, in January 2019, from Bakari Sellers, again raising racist associations and stating that “Roger Stone has y’all talking about reviewing use of force guidelines.” She also described Trump supporters such as Stone as racists and Putin cronies.
This isn’t just an ordinary political preference. This is intense interest and extreme dislike, even hatred, of a candidate and anyone associated with him. Stone, the defendant, was an associate of Trump’s. This juror could not possibly be considered fit for serving on a jury to judge Stone, whether she asserted she could be impartial or not.
Turley goes on to discuss what Hart disclosed to the judge and the court, and the answer appears to be “not much.” She appeared to be only vaguely aware of Stone and never revealed her activist and extreme views:
She never mentioned that she specifically discussed Stone’s arrest and the objections to his treatment during that arrest as well as denouncing all of the associates of Trump as a virtual criminal enterprise.
Stone’s counsel, Robert Buschel, also asked a few questions but was either entirely uninformed or utterly incompetent. Buschel only asked about Hart being a Democrat who ran for Congress. The examination by the defense amounted to less than two pages and roughly 250 words of exchange with Hart. It seems most likely that Buschel did not have a clue about Hart’s actual political activism and commentary.
According to Turley – and I heartily agree – Hart should never have been a juror in this case and her participation (as foreman, no less!) invalidates the verdict:
If this information was withheld by Hart, it raises a question about the veracity of her testimony and, more importantly, the fairness of the trial.
It certainly seems Hart had no place on the Stone jury. The Supreme Court has repeatedly declared that the “minimal standards of due process” demand “a panel of impartial, indifferent jurors.” Hart’s record suggests little that is impartial or indifferent. She was perfectly within her right to engage in such commentary and protests — but she had no right to sit in judgment of an associate of the president after her public declarations. Her participation raises serious arguments for setting aside the verdict, from the possibility of ineffective counsel to the denial of due process.
Once upon a time, this sort of bias would have been something liberals would have recognized as disqualifying. But now, since it hurt Trump and Stone, I predict that the judge, Obama appointee Amy Berman Jackson (who presided over the Manafort trial as well as the Stone trial) will not see it that way.
Note also that we would know absolutely nothing about Tomeka Hart’s bias had she not chosen to publish a spirited defense on social media of the Stone prosecutors, mentioning that she had been the foreman, and therefore giving the prosecution’s critics the opportunity to research her past social media activity. That’s when they found a motherlode of anti-Trump and even anti-Stone postings. But all of this would have remained a secret had Hart not outed herself.
Why not indict McCabe on felony false-statements charges? That is the question being pressed by incensed Trump supporters. After all, the constitutional guarantee of equal justice under the law is supposed to mean that McCabe gets the same quality of justice afforded to the sad sacks pursued with unseemly zeal by McCabe’s FBI and Robert Mueller’s prosecutors. George Papadopoulos was convicted of making a trivial false statement about the date of a meeting. Roger Stone was convicted of obstruction long after the special counsel knew there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy, even though his meanderings did not impede the investigation in any meaningful way. And in the case of Michael Flynn’s false-statements conviction, as McCabe himself acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee, even the agents who interviewed him did not believe he intentionally misled them.
I emphasize Flynn’s intent because purported lack of intent is McCabe’s principal defense, too. Even McCabe himself, to say nothing of his lawyers and his apologists in the anti-Trump network of bureaucrats-turned-pundits, cannot deny that he made false statements to FBI agents and the IG. Rather, they argue that the 21-year senior law-enforcement official did not mean to lie, that he was too distracted by his high-level responsibilities to focus on anything as mundane as a leak — even though he seemed pretty damned focused on the leak while he was orchestrating it.
The “he did not believe he intentionally misled them” defense is not just implausible; it proved unavailing on McCabe’s watch, at least in General Flynn’s case. Hence, McCabe has a back-up plan: To argue that it would be extraordinary — and thus unconstitutionally selective and retaliatory — for the Justice Department to prosecute a former official for false statements in a “mere” administrative inquiry (which the leak probe was), as opposed to a criminal investigation. Again, tell that to Flynn, with whom the FBI conducted a brace-style interview — at the White House, without his counsel present, and in blithe disregard of procedures for FBI interviews of the president’s staff — despite the absence of a sound investigative basis for doing so, and whom Mueller’s maulers squeezed into a guilty plea anyway.
Preach it, McCarthy, preach it.
In the article, McCarthy outlines a compelling case against McCabe, but adds this telling point about what would be likely to happen in any attempt to prosecute him [emphasis mine]:
That said, [Lisa] Page’s account does illuminate a problem for prosecutors: It’s tough to win a case when your witnesses are spinning for the defendant.
If you’re not already furious about McCabe’s non-prosecution and the fact that the Bureau and the deep state protects its own, take a look at this:
Again, the Journal story generated by McCabe’s leak was published on October 30, a Sunday. Late that afternoon, McCabe called the head of the FBI’s Manhattan office. Why? Well . . . to ream him out over media leaks, that’s why….
It is worth remembering McCabe’s October 30 scolding of subordinates when you think about how he later claimed that, on the very next day, he’d freely admitted to his superior, Comey, that he himself was the source of the leak. Quite the piece of work, this guy: To throw the scent off himself after carefully arranging the leak, McCabe dressed down the FBI’s two premier field offices, knowing they were completely innocent, and then pretended for months that he knew nothing about the leak.
This is the second-highest-ranking officer of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency we’re talking about, here.
McCarthy also lists further reasons the DOJ decision may have gone against charging McCabe. In addition to the aforementioned witness problem, you have the fact that “the Justice Department stood to take some hits if McCabe had been charged,” because of various types of omissions and/or improper behavior the department itself may have been guilty of that would be likely to come out in any McCabe trial, as well as the problem with DC venues and jurors who are anti-Trump (as we’ve seen in the Stone trial).
What a terrible situation. The net effect has been to undermine belief in the fairness of our justice system, for anyone who still held that belief until now.
A father reports on his second grader’s report card in Madison, Wisconsin:
In the old days, it was easy for my parents to see that I was slacking off in school. They would simply look at the report card and see five or six subjects with a letter between “A” and “F” next to them…
Yet after a hundred-plus years of the standard “A-F” grading system, many modern schools have deemed it to be antiquated…
This week, I received my second-grade daughter’s report card from the Madison Metropolitan School District, on which she was given a grade of “EX,” “M,” “DV,” or “E.”
According to the key provided, these abbreviations stand for:
“Exceeding” – Student consistently exceeds grade-level expectations for the end of the year.
“Meeting” – Student consistently meets grade-level expectations for the end of the year.
“Developing” – Student is developing understanding and is approaching grade-level expectations for the end of the year.
“Emerging” – Student begins to show initial understanding of grade-level expectations for the end of the year.
This grading scale, used district-wide, has been in place for a decade. But as you can see, every grade is dripping with optimism, presuming every child is on the road to excellence – the only thing they are being graded on is the speed at which they are attaining complete world knowledge.
I stand second to no one in my criticism of modern education and its “everyone gets a medal, everyone a winner” mentality. And I was a product of the old – and I mean old – New York City school system, which was rigorous in its adherence to tradition. And since the majority of my grade school teachers were born in the 19th Century (or seemed that way, anyway, because they looked so old to me), we’re talking a very traditional tradition.
But I also remember our report cards, which did not use the old A, B, C, D, F system. In fact, we only began to get number grades in junior high school, (seventh grade). Until then, we got grades that stood for words.
I can prove it, too, because in my OCD way I have saved all my old report cards. I don’t know why; perhaps for sentimentality’s sake. After all, they take up very little room in the files. And you never know when you might need them – witness, this post.
Here’s a photo of my very own first grade report card. It’s quite an education, as it were (blow it up bigger if you can’t read it very well). Note that the only possible grades were “Satisfactory” and “Needs Improvement”:
Even in second grade, where subjects started to come into play (“language arts,” social studies, science, and math) there wasn’t an ABC-type letter grade to be found. Now we had “SO” for “unusually high level of achievement,” “S” for “satisfactory,” “N” for “needs improvement,” and U for “unsatisfactory.” But almost no one ever got an “SO” and far fewer (virtually no one) got a “U.”
And that’s the way it went, right up to junior high.
A number of people sent me links to this article by Karlyn Borysenko entitled “After Attending a Trump Rally, I Realized Democrats Are Not Ready For 2020,” and subtitled “I’ve been a Democrat for 20 years. But this experience made me realize how out-of-touch my party is with the country at large.” And yes, of course it interests me greatly.
But Boryendko has not changed parties or political sides – not yet, anyway. She’s abandoned slavish devotion to one side, however; the Democrats.
Her act of walking away was sparked by her observation of extreme intolerance of any pro-Trump views in the online knitting community, of all things (I covered that story previously, here). But secondly (and I believe even more importantly), she decided to question some assumptions she’d had for a long time, and to actually research for herself whether or not they were true:
You see, I was one of those Democrats who considered anyone who voted for Trump a racist. I thought they were horrible (yes, even deplorable) and worked very hard to eliminate their voices from my spaces by unfriending or blocking people who spoke about their support of him, however minor their comments. I watched a lot of MSNBC, was convinced that everything he had done was horrible, that he hated anyone who wasn’t a straight white man, and that he had no redeeming qualities.
But when I witnessed the amount of hate coming from the left in this small, niche knitting community, I started to question everything. I started making a proactive effort to break my echo chamber by listening to voices I thought I would disagree with. I wanted to understand their perspective, believing it would confirm that they were filled with hate for anyone who wasn’t like them.
To me, that’s the important part of Borysenko’s story. And it’s what makes her somewhat unusual, although it’s a trait shared by most changers. I would call it the willingness to doubt one’s own assumptions and to challenge them with reality rather than shy away from such challenges. And then the next step is to accept the evidence the effort uncovers, and not rationalize it away.
I hail Borysenko, and wish her the best. This may be the beginning of a long long journey for her, a difficult but rewarding one.
The #MeToo movement has given me the willies from the very first moment I read about it. It seemed, and still seems, designed to allow unfounded accusations to be disseminated, accepted on faith, and proceed to destroy men’s lives.
Note I use the word “willies.” Being a ballet aficionado, I’m well aware of this possible derivation [emphasis mine]:
How did “the willies” get its name?
Some historians point to productions of the ballet “Giselle,” which debuted in Paris in the 1840s. In it, a young heroine falls in love with a man pretending to be someone else. In reality, he’s a scoundrel who’s already engaged to another woman. When the heroine discovers the betrayal during a passionate dance scene, she dies of a broken heart and joins the Queen of the Wilis, who is accompanied by a host of female spirits who have also been scorned. Together, these ghosts — known collectively as the Wilis — seek revenge upon men they encounter in the haunted woods by dancing them to death. To see the Wilis appear as apparitions on stage probably was enough to give viewers a little fright, something that eventually led to the common term “the willies” [source: Crabb].
Here are the Wilis, marshaling their vengeful forces prior to dancing the flawed hero of the ballet, Albrecht, to death (hint: later they come close, but don’t quite succeed). Myrtha, their queen, is ordinarily played by a tall, strong dancer with a big jump and the ability to look coldly stern:
There are the willies, and then there are the Furies, whom I mentioned in the title of this post. I’m with Camille Paglia on that:
The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote. I found the blanket credulity given to women accusers during the recent U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh positively unnerving: it was the first time since college that I truly understood the sexist design of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, whose mob of vengeful Furies is superseded by formal courts of law, where evidence is weighed.
…I agree that this entire phenomenon has “has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality,” but what it really has done is even more extreme. It hasn’t just resurrected those stereotypes; to a certain extent it has actually tended to validate them.
I say that with great sorrow and a sense of horror. And I certainly do not think that women should not be allowed to vote. But not only have I been observing this phenomenon of all-too-common irrationality in women for a long time, I’ve also observed that a small but vocal number of women say this makes women superior to men, because rationality and due process are the inventions of privileged white guys and therefore bad.
I will add that the last couple of decades have brought home to me the irrationality not just of so many women, but of so many men as well. And that seems to be increasing, too.
Hey, let’s have a heaping dose of irrationality all around. And while we’re at it, let’s destroy the lives of those men who are targeted.
Why am I writing about this again? Yesterday I read this article in Reason, that’s why. As if we needed reminding. It is impossible to adequately summarize what happened to Jonathan Kaiman at the hands of his #MeToo accusers (and many of their female and male enablers, I might add), so I’m afraid you’ll just have to read it. But I will say this: not only are the accusers’ stories just their own unsupported descriptions of sexual encounters, but even if we were to stipulate, for the sake of argument, that their descriptions are entirely accurate, they still do not constitute anything approaching a sexual violation on the part of this man.
Accusations are for filing with the proper authorities and duking it out. These days it’s no longer so easy to succeed with accusations in colleges (Kaiman’s did not involve a college setting, but many do), which used to offer every protection for the accuser and essentially none for the accused, but it’s still not all that difficult to make charges in college settings stick if they have any substance whatsoever.
But if accusations are posted for public consumption in order to get attention and sympathy for the accuser and to destroy the accused, they should be met with disdain and/or ignored. The fact that huge swaths of society not only tolerate the practice of such social destruction without evidence, but go along with the game and perform the shunning of the accused, is terrible.
Unless you are actually raped and/or threatened with a weapon or with loss of job, you are completely responsible for your own sexual decisions, including succumbing to pleading through your own desire to please and not make waves. If you want to act like an adult and have consensual sex (which the Kaiman accusations involved), then be an adult and take responsibility for yourself. And that includes your own inebriation.
Many women today – including Kaiman’s accusers – want to be treated like adults and act like adults sexually, and yet take no responsibility whatsoever for their own choices. And #MeToo all too often has a built-in contagion effect that is obvious even in the hashtag.
One example from the article, about how far such accusations have gone into the preposterous:
One woman, who had an intermittent but long-running sexual relationship with [a man named Smith], said he insisted that she wear a specific kind of eye makeup before they had sex. (Smith denied this and other allegations.) Katie Herzog of The Stranger noted that this woman later tweeted that such behavior by Smith constituted “rape.”
And there’s no protection in avoiding sex, either, because sex is unnecessary for offense to be taken by today’s Furies:
Philadelphia magazine reports that in March 2016, Harris was in Las Vegas at the annual meeting of the Society for Photographic Education. There he greeted an old friend, a female professor of photography who worked at a different institution, with a kiss on the cheek. Later that month, Fogel was at a photography conference in Houston where he participated in evaluating the portfolios of aspiring photographers. After reviewing one female photographer’s work, he offered to let her send him more, reached into his pocket for his business card, and accidentally pulled out his room key card. He recalled saying, “Here is my business card—oops, my room key,” put the key card away, and handed the photographer his business card.
An accusation followed.
Another terrible story:
In December 2017, Benny Fredriksson, then 58 and the head of a major Stockholm cultural center, became the subject of an investigation by a Swedish newspaper, which alleged that he harassed and mistreated women. He was specifically accused of trying to force a pregnant actress to get an abortion, and the Irish Times reports that a second newspaper called him a “little Hitler.” Fredriksson swiftly resigned, but the accusations continued on social media.
In March of last year, while accompanying his wife, the famed opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter, on a performing trip to Australia, Fredriksson took his own life. The backlash in Sweden against #MeToo was fierce. It turned out he had not tried to force an actress to get an abortion; it was later reported that he had expressed regret to an actress that she couldn’t appear in a stage production because she would have been eight months pregnant at the premiere. The Irish Times reports that “an official investigation dismissed the claims against him as unfounded” and that the Swedish newspaper was fined for printing unsubstantiated allegations. In an interview four months after her husband’s death, von Otter said he had resigned, even though the characterization of him was untrue, because he felt unable to defend himself. He fell into a deep depression as friends and colleagues abandoned him—out of fear, she said, that if they publicly defended him, they would be attacked themselves. She said she hopes a lesson of Fredriksson’s death is that “we’re not in the Middle Ages, we don’t pillory people, spit at them or stone them.”
Oh yes we are. And oh yes we do. As long as the “people” are men.
J. Christian Adams has been on this theme for a long, long time. His latest:
The Scales of Justice come in two versions, one for Democrats and one for Trump.
Let’s examine those Justice Department “career lawyers.”
It is now plain that “career lawyer” isn’t a euphemism for unbiased and impartial. It’s exactly the opposite. It usually means Democrat, leftist, elitist, culturally hostile to middle America and feverishly anti-Trump.
When I was at the Department of Justice, it was no different. I wrote a whole wild book about the prevailing madness, years before the country got a taste of Andrew Weissmann’s partisan biases…
Trump has now learned the details of what is going on inside one Justice Department office, the D.C. United States Attorney’s office. He also learned details about people who accepted appointments in his administration and took their jobs while holding their noses.
This was the week that Trump got his sea-legs. He campaigned on draining the swamp, and he has learned how subtle and how sophisticated the swamp is.
Meanwhile, institutionalists, including some Republicans too cowardly to be quoted by name, have gone on record as clutching their pearls at Trump’s actions. They want the bureaucrats to be unmoored to the executive branch.
The “career lawyers” at the Justice Department did not stand for election and win. The entire Department should take note. There is a unitary executive. Elections matter. The President ran against the elites who are dispensing biased, sanctimonious unequal justice in Washington D.C.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he is keeping his promises.
And of course, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Democrats, the MSM, and most of Washington DC is outraged.
[NOTE: By the way, the title I gave this post reminds me of a joke I hated in my youth: “When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.”
I first heard that joke when I was so small that I didn’t yet know the word “ajar.” I thought they were saying “when it’s a jar.” The joke is completely unfunny even when you understand it, but when you think the person is saying “when it’s a jar,” then it becomes a sort of dada-ish comment on meaninglessness.]
The Department of Justice has tapped an outside prosecutor to review the case of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Fox News has learned.
A senior Justice Department official told Fox News on Friday that Jeff Jensen, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, has been assigned to Flynn’s case.
Jensen will be working hand-in-hand with the lead prosecutor of Flynn case, Brandon Van Grack, according to the official…
Last month, Flynn and his attorney Sidney Powell moved to withdraw his guilty plea for making false statements to the FBI about his communications and conversations with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak—which stemmed from Mueller’s probe as well.
Powell, in the filing, said the move to withdraw his guilty plea was “because of the government’s bad faith, vindictiveness and breach of the plea agreement.”
“The prosecution has shown abject bad faith in pure retaliation against Mr. Flynn since he retained new counsel,” she wrote. “This can only be because, with new, unconflicted counsel, Mr. Flynn refused to lie for the prosecution.”
So, what’s going on here? It’s reported (via NBC) that the new prosecutor will be “reviewing” the Flynn case and in particular the FBI interview that’s at the center of it.
NBC makes sure to spin it in an attempt to preemptively establish that the whole thing is a cover for Trump to interfere in order to whitewash Flynn, and for the DOJ to do Trump’s bidding:
The inquiry into Flynn’s FBI interview could be aimed at several former officials Trump has repeatedly criticized publicly, including former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, people familiar with the inquiry said. They also said it could be part of an effort to make a presidential pardon of Flynn more palatable.
Whole lotta DOJ news lately.
Will any good come of this one? I try to hope, but that two-tiered system of justice that we’ve seen for years argues against it.
The Justice Department said Friday it will not pursue criminal charges against former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, after a nearly two-year-long investigation into accusations brought by the agency’s independent watchdog who claimed that he lacked “candor” when questioned about leaking to the media.
In a letter to McCabe attorney Michael Bromwich obtained by Fox News, Justice Department attorney J.P. Cooney said the investigation is now “closed.”
“We write to inform you that, after careful consideration, the Government has decided not to pursue criminal charges against your client, Andrew G. McCabe,’” Cooney wrote.
The DOJ added: “Based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the information known to the Government at this time, we consider the matter closed.”
McCabe’s attorneys stated “At long last, justice has been done in this matter.”
Ah, yes. If they didn’t have double standards they’d have no standards at all.
Prosecution on charges such as this is not for Deep Staters to receive, it is for them to give – and to give to Republicans and in particular Trump supporters. It’s really quite clear that the law was designed to get them, and not august Pooh-Bahs such as McCabe, Comey, Hillary Clinton, and the like.
The irony is a bitter one. Not unexpected, however. And perhaps that’s the saddest thing of all: we have come to expect this sort of thing. As Bonchie of Red State puts it:
Right in the middle of a national dust-up over Roger Stone supposedly deserving nine years in prison, news is coming across the wire that former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe will not face charges for blatantly lying to the FBI (something he admitted to and was fired over).
[ADDENDUM: Questions:
How much control does Barr have over a decision like this? What is DOJ protocol? Is the decision made by lower-downs in the department who have worked on the nuts and bolts of the case? Does he just sign off on it? How involved is he?
Will we ever get any kind of explanation – bogus or not – for why the decision was not to prosecute? I think I know why: they are protecting their own, and/or they don’t think they have enough evidence for a conviction. But I’m interested in their answer, and I’m also interested in whether they even think they owe the public any explanation at all. So far I’ve been unable to find one.]
It’s pretty well-established that early humans outside of Africa mated with Neanderthals. For example, through DNA testing, I learned that I have an only slightly less-than-average share of Neanderthal myself.
Now we learn that people of west African heritage have a trace of a different and unknown early hominid:
Using whole-genome data from present-day West Africans, scientists have found a small portion of genetic material that appears to come from this mysterious lineage, which is thought to have split off from the human family tree even before Neanderthals.
Today, it’s thought (although still being debated) that anatomically modern humans originated in Africa, and that once these populations migrated to Europe and Asia, they interbred with closely-related species like Neanderthals and Denosovans.
As such, modern West Africans, like populations in Yoruba and Mende, do not possess genes from either of these ancient species, but that doesn’t mean there was no intermixing. In fact, recent evidence suggests the genetic past of West Africans may contain a similarly juicy narrative.
When I was in school, things were thought to be much simpler. But I did read texts that indicated some anthropologists believed humans had bred with Neanderthals, although it was an unpopular view at the time. It appealed to me, though, and I continued to believe it might be true. Later it turned out that DNA evidence confirmed it.
I’m not a big Valentine’s Day person. For one thing, my drafted boyfriend was inducted into the army on that day in 1968. For another – and over thirty years later – my marriage broke up on that day. The latter was completely coincidental and had nothing whatsoever to do with it being Valentine’s Day.
But still.
And because of migraines I can’t eat chocolate! Ever since Christmas, after which the stores start thinking “February 14th,” I’ve had to walk the supermarket aisles loaded with holiday chocolates. I’m inured to it, though. After thirty years of being unable to eat chocolate without getting an almost instant migraine, I’ve accepted that chocolate is simply not part of the category “food” for me.
