The bigger picture on Obamagate

The New Neo Posted on by

Speculation, but interesting speculation (hat tip: AesopFan):

That satchel that Acting DNI Ric Grenell personally delivered to the Department of Justice on May 7, 2020 was far too big for just a list of the 39 Obama administration officials, including his chief of staff and ambassador to Italy. Those higher ups have been exposed as requesting the unmasking of General Flynn. But there must have been a lot more inside, and that material was voluminous to require a briefcase-sized container, and that is the key to exposing the real extent of the spy operation that President Obama carried out on his political enemies, and the unmasking of General Michael Fynn is just the tip of the iceberg.

That is the basic message of this long and fascinating post by retired naval officer J.E. Dyer at Liberty Unyielding. I urge those who take a keen interest in the subject to read the whole thing, for it is full of technical points and complexities…

The key message is that for years the Obama administration was mining the incomparable database of the National Security Agency (NSA), which captured virtually all electronic communications – emails, text messages, everything – launched into the ether. The potential for abuse is breathtaking. Everything that political enemies said to each other, except in private in-person conversations or in snail mail letters, could have been spied upon. And now it looks like staggering numbers of intercepts were monitored…

The principals who directed the spying never on their own logged requests for unmasking, at least until the very end of the Obama administration, when 39 names urgently needed access to the means to discredit and get rid of Flynn, who alone among the incoming Trump crew, had the knowledge of the intelligence community to blow up the conspiracy and reform the gargantuan spy apparatus. They were protecting the much larger spy operation that lasted for years under Obama.

I don’t know whether the above is true, but I suspect and fear it is. I think it’s possible we may find out some day. If so, I hope that happens soon, because it’s very important to know.

I have no doubt, though, that with the advances in eavesdropping and information-gathering in the last twenty years or so, these things can be done. And as often happens, if it can be done it will be done by unscrupulous people. Power is enticing and seductive, and it takes people of integrity to resist. Those who go into politics probably cannot resist that temptation unless they have strong principles against it, which is not common (especially on the left, where the ends justify the means), and they probably have no trouble at all enlisting confederates with access to the material who are ready and willing to hand it off.

I believe that this recent article by Andrew C. McCarthy, not a man ordinarily given to large conspiracy theories, may tie into the same phenomenon:

…[T]here remains a gaping hole in the story: Where is the record showing who unmasked Flynn in connection with his fateful conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak?

There isn’t one…

I suspect that’s because General Flynn’s identity was not “masked” in the first place. Instead, his December 29 call with Kislyak was likely intercepted under an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service acting in a nod-and-wink arrangement with our intelligence community.

“Unmasking” is a term of art for revealing in classified reports the names of Americans who have been “incidentally” monitored by our intelligence agencies.

Curiouser and curiouser.

In this next paragraph, McCarthy explains much the same things that Francey Hakes discussed in the Tucker Carlson video I included in an earlier post today:

If, upon reviewing intel reports, an official with national-security or foreign-relations responsibilities believes that the reporting is critical, and that the identity of the U.S. person must be known in order for our government to reap the full benefit of the intelligence, then that official may request unmasking. Decisions on such requests are made by specialists assigned to the agency that reported the intelligence in question — usually the FBI or the NSA for intelligence collected, respectively, inside or outside the United States. Our intelligence agencies, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), keep records of these requests.

That’s more or less what Hakes was saying.

McCarthy continues:

For three years, we’ve been led to believe that Flynn’s December 29 conversation with Kislyak was intercepted because the latter was “routinely” monitored…

I no longer buy this story. If it were true, there would be a record of Flynn’s unmasking. DNI Grenell has represented that the list he provided to Senators Grassley and Johnson includes all requested unmaskings of Flynn from November 8, 2016 (when Donald Trump was elected president) through the end of January 2017 (when the Trump administration had transitioned into power). Yet, it appears that not a single listed unmasking pertains to the December 29 Kislyak call…

…[W]e know that participants in that [January 5] meeting already knew about Flynn’s identity as Kislyak’s interlocutor. The exhibits attached to the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case relate that Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, knew about it no later than January 3, the day he briefed Mary McCord, who ran the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Plus, Yates recalled being surprised that Obama already knew about the Flynn–Kislyak call (and, in fact, is the one who told Yates about it). Clearly, the news had been percolating at the highest levels of the Obama administration for at least a couple of days…

McCarthy points out another interesting fact, which is that subsequently on May 8, 2017, when Lindsay Graham was questioning Clapper and Yates in the Senate, Strzok wrote to Lisa Page:

F*CK! Clapper and Yates through Graham questions are all playing into the “there should be an unmasking request/record” for incidental collection incorrect narrative.

Now, why would “incidental collection” be an incorrect narrative? McCarthy’s explanation is long and I’m only going to excerpt a little of it, but I suggest you read the whole thing. What it amounts to, though, is that the surveillance of Trump and people connected with him was massive, and began long before the waning days of the Obama administration, and was not the least bit inadvertent or incidental:

I believe there were several strands of the Trump–Russia probe, and that they trace back to 2015, around the time of Donald Trump’s entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

The CIA played a central role. The agency collaborated — I’m tempted to say colluded! — with a variety of friendly foreign intelligence services, especially NATO countries that Trump made a habit of bashing on the campaign trail…

This is not just about unmasking. It is about how pervasively the Obama administration was monitoring the Trump campaign.

I believe McCarthy may be referring to the same sort of thing to which J. E. Dyer is referring. Just now, looking at some of the comments to the McCarthy article, I see this one, which expresses my own reaction pretty well:

This stuff makes my head swim…there is no flipping way that this was done because they were concerned for “what was best for the country”. At least not the country you and I are talking about. This was all about self interest, power, control, hate and hubris.

That’s also what Victor Davis Hanson is talking about here, I believe:

[ADDENDUM: Much more here.]

Unmasking, then and now (and Joe Biden then and now)

The New Neo Posted on by

I bet you won’t be surprised to learn that the Democrats, including Joe Biden, were very concerned and upset in 2005 when John Bolton had requested unmasking 10 times within the four years he’d been Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. This is a number of requests which pales compared to the unmaskings of a single person, General Flynn, during the last few weeks of the Obama administration. And yet the latter is something that the Democrats are now trying to treat as completely normal and not even worthy of notice, curiosity, or possible investigation.

The following clip from 2005 shows none other than Joe Biden, then in the Senate, asking to know the reasons these people had been unmasked, something the present day Democrats (including Biden, of course) are pretending is an outrage to even ask, now that Republicans are asking it of them in a situation involving far more extreme use of the tactic. The hypocrisy of the Democrats would be stunning if we didn’t expect it at this point. But what is more stunning is the contrast between Biden’s demeanor, alertness, and speech patterns then and now.

This clip also contains commentary by Francey Hakes, who happens to answer some of the questions I asked about unmasking in this post from yesterday, queries about how unmasking is usually done and whether requests from political figures (such as Biden) rather than intelligence officers during the waning days of an administration, seeking to unmask conversations that happen to involve the incoming administration, are standard. No, they are most certainly not:

Matt Taibbi is alarmed at the Democrats’ trampling on liberty, but he doesn’t quite get it

The New Neo Posted on by

Taibbi’s only halfway to getting it. But it’s the second half of the mountain, the part he hasn’t climbed yet, that’s the steepest and most difficult to traverse.

Here’s Taibbi [emphasis mine]:

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.”

Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks…

Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer.

Russiagate cases were often two-level offenses: factually bogus or exaggerated, but also indicative of authoritarian practices. Democrats and Democrat-friendly pundits in the last four years have been consistently unable to register objections on either front…

…I also recognize the [COVID] crisis is also raising serious civil liberties issues, from prisoners trapped in deadly conditions to profound questions about speech and assembly, the limits to surveillance and snitching, etc. If this disease is going to be in our lives for the foreseeable future, that makes it more urgent that we talk about what these rules will be, not less — yet the party I grew up supporting seems to have lost the ability to do so, and I don’t understand why.

Please read the whole thing. Taibbi is struggling with what is known as cognitive dissonance, which is a painful thing in a person who is inclined to want the truth.

I find Taibbi’s dilemma fascinating, and I think I understand it. A mind is a difficult thing to change. When you’ve supported a party your entire life and you’re an idealist who believes it stands for certain things that matter to you, and you see that was only a pretense and in fact a lie and the party stands for the opposite and yet you see friends and colleagues turning them selves into pretzels to defend it, it’s shocking on many levels. To assimilate that knowledge – and not turn away and rationalize, as so many do – is hard enough. Taibbi has accomplished that. But then there’s the effort to understand its deeper meaning, and what it means about your own beliefs and the errors you yourself have made in perceiving what was going on.

I know about that. I’ve been there. It took me only a year or two, but then again I never was previously so deeply into politics. And yet, it was difficult and tremendously disillusioning as well as an exercise in humility, and the social consequences have been hard as well. Taibbi has a lot more visibility and a lot more to lose. I don’t know how far he’ll go with this. But I wish him well.

[NOTE: I had composed the bulk of this post in draft form before I noticed that commenter AesopFan had written:

This is a prime example of how blinders work – Taibbi can see what the Left has done to civil liberties (one of the few on that side of the aisle that does) but still claims he doesn’t understand why.

I wouldn’t call it blinders, exactly, although I suppose it’s a form of blinders. I would call it profound inner turmoil. There’s a lot of information to reject and then a whole other load of information to accept before any sort of “understanding” of such a bitter fact can come.]

I had forgotten…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that Bob Hope could dance like this. I prefer Cagney’s completely and utterly unique style, but Hope had impressive skills, too.

And they get points from me for bravery, dancing on the table like this, and so relaxed!:

This isn’t from “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” It’s from “The Seven Little Foys,” which was one of the first movies I ever saw in a movie theater. I was too young to understand it, and recall it as incredibly boring.

How unmasking works – and how it worked under Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

Hee’s how unmasking generally works:

When unmasking occurs, it must be based upon a valid reason, and only for the person who requests the unmasking; intelligence reports do not get re-disseminated with the name or statements of the U.S. person unmasked. NSA rules say that unmasking must be “necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance”, or be done with the consent of the U.S. person who would be unmasked, or be pursuant to a finding that the U.S. person is a foreign agent or terrorist, or the unmasked information includes evidence about a crime…

It’s difficult or perhaps impossible to see how the unmaskings of Flynn that occurred at the tail end of the Obama administration – when Trump had already been elected and the political officials in Obama group were on their way out – could have been justified under those rules. There was no credible evidence whatsoever (and they knew it) that Flynn was a foreign agent or terrorist, they didn’t have his consent, and there has been no indication there was anything in the calls they needed to understand in terms of understanding foreign intelligence. And by the way, most of the unmaskings of Flynn occurred some time before that Kislyak call.

More:

Unmasking is not rare or even unusual. For example, according to a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), “The number of U.S. person identities that NSA released during calendar year 2015 in response to specific requests to unmask an identity was 2,232…

Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice made requests to unmask members of the Trump campaign and transition, which she has said were apolitical requests, and only to provide context for intelligence reports. Rice was not the person who unmasked Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak, according to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. Rice has said that she did unmask Trump aides at a December 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, unrelated to Kislyak or Russia. Fox News has reported that former ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power requested 260 unmaskings during 2016, mostly toward the end of the Obama administration, which Power has denied, saying that other people requested some of the unmaskings in her name.

So again: the bulk of these unmaskings occurred before the phone call, a short time after Trump’s election but before his inauguation. In other words, during the transition. I would bet that is unprecedented, but I haven’t seen anyone discussing that and I don’t know. It’s also unclear whether this was the beginning of unmaskings of the opposition, or whether it merely represents the period that was inquired about. We don’t know what had occurred before that time period during the Obama administration vis a vis his political rivals.

I have many questions. Unmaskings are not uncommon, but are they commonly requested by people in the positions held by the list of Obama people who did it, or is it usually just by intelligence officers? By whom is it usually requested, and for what reasons? Did the Obama administration people give reasons, as they were supposed to? What were the reasons? And how unusual is it for an outgoing administration to make such requests between an election and their departure, unmasking people working in the new administration? I would guess it’s never been done before, but I don’t know and would like to know.

And then of course, how common is it for that outgoing group to leak the names of the unmasked people, and the accusations against them, to the press, as part of a campaign to undermine a successor administration that hasn’t even begun? Again, I am pretty sure this is unprecedented.

More information here:

The list released today is of 39 top Obama officials who made 53 requests to unmask Lt. Gen. Flynn’s name from intelligence reports between election day (Nov. 8, 2016) and Jan. 31, 2017. While many of the requesters were Obama political appointees who resigned by Jan. 20, 2017, some were career officers at CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies.

The most stunning thing about this list is that the vast majority of these requests were dated between Dec. 14 and 16, which was before Flynn’s Dec. 29 phone call to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. An NSA intercept of this phone call was the basis of the Jan. 24, 2017, FBI interview with Flynn when two FBI agents used this intercept to entrap Flynn into lying about the call.

FBI Director James Comey broke protocol by not informing White House lawyers that he planned to send FBI agents to meet with Flynn…

This means Flynn was targeted for unmasking at least two weeks before the Dec. 29 phone call and the vast majority of these unmasking requests did not include intercepted conversations of Flynn having allegedly inappropriate conversations with Kislyak. This may indicate Flynn and other Trump transition officials were being targeted for unmasking as part of a fishing expedition to find dirt on them to undermine Trump’s presidency.

In addition, there were only seven unmasking requests by seven officials after the Dec. 29 Flynn-Kislyak phone call – by Vice President Biden, then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Obama Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and other career officials. Since the information in this intercept leaked to the press, these seven officials are suspects for this criminal act…

Also interesting is the cluster of requests to demask Flynn’s name by Biden and others between Jan. 7 and Jan. 12, 2017, and the timing of these requests.

On Jan. 5, Biden, Comey, Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates met with Obama. In the meeting, Obama appeared to direct these officials to withhold Russia-related intelligence from the incoming Trump administration.

The next day, President-elect Trump received a misleading and incomplete briefing on the fraudulent Steele Dossier and Russian meddling in the 2016 election by Clapper, Comey, Brennan, and NSA Director Mike Rogers.

Over the next few days, there were seven high-level requests for Flynn’s name to be unmasked from NSA reporting. My guess is that this was not a coincidence and that a single intelligence official or NSC staff member suggested that these senior officials ask to see this information as part of a larger effort to target Flynn.

I think this will become clearer over time, and with the release of more information. In particular, it would be helpful to know who the leaker was. One thing of which I’m pretty certain is that the Democrats and the MSM will try to norm all of this behavior and act like it’s business as usual.

[NOTE: I’ve added a new tag: “Obamagate.”]

Liberals and liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

Liberals may be into freedom in the sense of throwing off what they consider the shackles of tradition in sexual, cultural, and religious matters, but they don’t seem to be into liberty anymore, and haven’t been for quite some time.

Commenter “Bilwick” writes:

Someone once said that it was after Red Diaper Barry’s election that “liberals” and “progressives” started changing the bumper stickers on their cars from the one saying “Question Authority” to the one that says “Obey.” The mask has pretty much stayed off all this time.

It was earlier, of course, that the actual change occurred, but the left wasn’t so up-front about it, and the rank and file liberals who follow the left whether they know it or not lagged somewhat behind. The educational system, the courts, the arts, the press, and all the other cultural forces taken over by the left managed to slowly but surely do the rest of the job until the liberals caught up with the left for the most part.

Oh, there are still some liberals who are into liberty, although fewer and fewer. I know a couple and wrote about some here:

Back when Mayor Bloomberg of New York was heavily engaged in banning Big Gulps, I had some discussions with a couple of liberal friends about it. Some were offended by what Bloomberg had done, although others were in favor. That was one of the strongest demonstrations I’ve seen of what I have come to consider a very important and somewhat invisible dividing line between those liberals who love and value liberty and those who do not. You might call them the non-statists (or perhaps the less-statists) and the statists…

I’m beginning to think the desire for liberty versus the desire to control others might just be something innate.

The sad thing is that even those liberals who love liberty are for the most part voting for people dedicated to ending it.

We are seeing that play out right now in the local COVID response and the right/left divide over how much the state should interfere – under the banner of some rather dubious science and general ignorance of what is really going on with COVID – in people’s lives to curtail their liberty. We are learning once again that, if told they must do so, a great many people will comply, at least for a while, especially in the blue states that have the strictest rules. How long this will go on is anyone’s guess.

As J.J. Sefton wrote at Ace’s today:

There’s just a torrent of unprecedented and heretofore unimaginable things going on that it’s hard to get a handle on all of it. After two months of being forced into a state of siege on the ever-more-flimsy-by-the-day pretext of public safety, our economy is in ruins and the societal/political norms that defined an honor system to prevent totalitarian rule are all but evaporated. The parallel yet closely intertwined stories of the General Tso’s Sicken and what is now officially Obama-Bidengate underscore the fact that we are a nation at a crossroads…

It warms the cockles of the heart to see Shelly Luther refuse to kneel before a hack-in-black demagogue and kiss his ring, and now 77-year-old Michigan barber Karl Manke tell Whitmer and her attack bitch Dana Nessel to FOAD. But the willingness for the citizenry of places like California, New York and Washington to just go along is frightening. Whether its Trump derangement, an ingrained Leftist mindset to trust government and fear freedom, which is the essence of American culture that they were taught to despise, and the concomitant hatred for real America which cherishes the latter and elected the former, or some combination of both, they are positively gleeful at what is happening to their fellow citizens, not realizing that it ultimately will happen to them. You can thank 50 years of brainwashing in the schools for that.

We are a house divided. That’s half of the equation required for divide and conquer. I believe we have reached the point where as some commenters are wont to quip “we are not voting our way out of this.” If Trump should G-d forbid lose in November, it will be lights out America for sure. If he wins, which I believe he will even in the face of all of this no matter who his opponent will be, things could get very ugly and very quickly. Regardless of the outcome of November, I have come to the conclusion that with very few exceptions, every branch of government, the bureaucracy and the institutions we rely on to keep us safe are so completely corrupted and beholden to the Counter-American Revolution that elections really will not matter any more. The actions of Emmet Sullivan, along with that of Obama, Comey, Brennan, Clapper and all the rest make it painfully obvious.

In late April I wrote a post entitled “Fear is an opportunity for tyranny,” in which I said this:

One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 response is how easily public officials embrace tyranny, and how many people accept it because of fear…

What’s going on? People in power like more power, particularly people on the left. Tyrants of all stripes have long used emergency powers to increase their control over the people. Sometimes those emergency powers become semi-permanent or even permanent. It certainly doesn’t surprise me that some governors are trying to stretch it out for as long as possible.

I believe that’s one of the reasons the MSM is trying to stoke fear, and has been doing so from the start. There’s plenty of fear to be had, of course, just from the basic facts of the matter without trying to increase it further. But the MSM is strongly motivated in various ways to do just that: in order to get Trump, to give petty tyrants like Whitmer more reasons to clamp down, and to increase traffic because “if it bleeds it leads.”

The real wild card in all this is how long the people are going to take it. Spring is stirring even in northern climes, and it’s fully flowering further south, and people are ready to burst forth from their own enforced isolation. Some people’s livelihoods depend on it, and a lot people feel their sanity does as well.

And some people are just tired of being told what to do without seeing sufficient reason to obey, when all they’re asking for is the freedom to go about their normal lives – or as near normal as possible, taking precautions to protect the most vulnerable.

We see these petty tyrants everywhere, particularly where Democrats are in control: Michigan, California, Washington state, New York. It’s not a pretty sight. And it’s not going to end in two weeks, either.

[NOTE: See also this.]

These itsy bitsy spiders…

The New Neo Posted on by

…do a lot more than climbing up the water spout.

They detect electrical fields and use them to – fly.

And although I’m well aware that I just used the word “fly” there to refer to the activity and not the creature, the juxtaposition of “spider” and “fly” made me think of this sweet little verse:

“Will you walk into my parlor?” said the spider to the fly;
“’Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy.
The way into my parlor is up a winding stair,
And I have many pretty things to show when you are there.”
“O no, no,” said the little fly, “to ask me is in vain,
For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again…”

In the end, of course, the fly is toast.

Which in turn makes me think of this far superior offering:

…O Oysters, come and walk with us!’
The Walrus did beseech.
A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.’

The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head —
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat —
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn’t any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more —
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore…

You know the ending. We all know the ending.

The law, Judge Sullivan, and Michael Flynn: what now?

The New Neo Posted on by

You can find a really long article on the subject here. An excerpt:

So, as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Rinaldi, it is impossible to know what was meant by “with leave of court” when it was inserted into the text of the rule proposal that became Rule 48(a) without explanation.

But the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit conclusively told us what it did NOT mean — it does not mean that Judge Sullivan has the power to go behind the reasons for the decision set forth in the DOJ Motion to Dismiss, and that he does not have the authority to substitute his view of the case for the Executive Branch’s view of the case based on four words in a procedural rule.

Here is my prediction for what Judge Sullivan will eventually do if he is forced to make a decision on the motion. He will write a long long opinion that is a one-sided work of historical revision that ignores nearly all the misconduct on the part of the investigators and prosecutors, and relies greatly on the proceedings by which Gen. Flynn was led to plead guilty. He will then comb through every scrap of paper he can find to denigrate and dismiss the rationale that has been offered by DOJ, and find that all the legal arguments offered are specious.

He will conclude by excoriating Gen. Flynn for the “conduct” underlying the charges that were brought against him — and likely for uncharged conduct involving the allegations of FARA violations (but he won’t make the mistake of referencing “treason” again), and explain why Gen. Flynn’s conduct, in Judge Sullivan’s view, was a threat to the Flag, Democracy, Apple Pie, and Hot Dogs.

But in the final paragraph he will say that, notwithstanding everything he has found to be true as reflected in his opinion, he has no choice under the law but to grant DOJ’s motion and dismiss the case.

He’ll order that his opinion be published in the Federal Supplement, with the goal being that his account will be the definitive historical account of the Gen. Flynn saga.

I don’t know what will happen next in the Flynn case. But I’m thinking perhaps a writ of mandamus:

To preserve the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers, the Department of Justice has no choice now but to seek a writ of mandamus from the D.C. Circuit Court ordering the criminal charge against Flynn dismissed and reassigning the case to another judge…

What was surprising—no, unbelievable—is what Judge Sullivan did on Wednesday: He entered an order “appoint[ing] The Honorable John Gleeson (Ret.) as amicus curiae to present arguments in opposition to the government’s Motion to Dismiss.”

This order was jaw-dropping for two reasons. First, the U.S. Constitution makes clear that the judiciary has no business second-guessing prosecutorial decisions. In fact, the very case Judge Sullivan cited for the proposition that he had the inherent authority to appoint an amicus curiae—United States v. Fokker—made clear Sullivan’s order was lawless…

The Fokker court explained that while mandamus is an extraordinary remedy, it is appropriate where the petitioner: (i) has “no other adequate means to attain the relief he desires”; (ii) “show[s] that his right to the writ is ‘clear and indisputable’”; and then “(iii) the court ‘in the exercise of its discretion, must be satisfied that the writ is appropriate under the circumstances.’”…

In analyzing the propriety of the district court’s refusal to approve the agreement, the appellate court summarized controlling principles of constitutional law: “The Executive’s primacy in criminal charging decisions is long settled. That authority stems from the Constitution’s delegation of ‘take Care’ duties, U.S. Const. art. II, § 3, and the pardon power, id. § 2, to the Executive Branch. Decisions to initiate charges, or to dismiss charges once brought, ‘lie[] at the core of the Executive’s duty to see to the faithful execution of the laws.’”…

The “leave of court” requirement, the court stressed, “has been understood to be a narrow one—’to protect a defendant against prosecutorial harassment . . . when the [g]overnment moves to dismiss an indictment over the defendant’s objection.’” Such review in that case is to guard against “a scheme of ‘prosecutorial harassment’ of the defendant through repeated efforts to bring—and then dismiss—charges.”

Fokker then concluded: “So understood, the ‘leave of court’ authority gives no power to a district court to deny a prosecutor’s Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss charges based on a disagreement with the prosecution’s exercise of charging authority…

The Fokker decision was a 2016 decision from the D.C. Circuit Court and, as such, establishes “mandatory precedent,” i.e., precedent that must be followed, by all D.C. district court judges—including Judge Sullivan…

The government should, as it did in Fokker, seek a writ of mandamus from the D.C. Circuit, directing the charge against Flynn be dismissed.

The government should also seek reassignment of the case on remand, meaning that when the case returns to the lower court for dismissal of the charge, it goes to a different judge. While “reassignment is warranted only in the ‘exceedingly rare circumstance,’” such as where a judge’s conduct is “so extreme as to display clear inability to render fair judgment,” Judge Sullivan’s selection of Judge Gleeson as his “friend of the court” reveals Judge Sullivan’s irretractable bias.

The same day Judge Sullivan named Judge Gleeson to serve in the amicus curiae role, the Washington Post ran an op-ed co-authored by Gleeson, entitled, “The Flynn case isn’t over until the judge says it’s over.”…

…[W]hat reeks is Judge Sullivan’s selection of a clearly biased “friend of the court” who appears to have already pre-judged the prosecutor’s motive and found it improper.

How can anyone defend Judge Sullivan’s action? Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Just keep repeating “Flynn’s a traitor” and “he lied to the FBI, which is a crime” and “Putin’s puppet” over and over, and you’ll find a vast audience among those who hate Trump and could not care less about the rule of law, except as a potent phrase to use against their enemies.

This case is sickening. Obamagate is sickening. The entire episode is proof – as thought we needed any more – of how much power the left has gotten and how determined they are to exercise it to get more power. It’s also a demonstration of the fact that the Gramscian march through education, the press, entertainment, the arts, and other institutions of our social and cultural life has proceeded to the degree that way too many people in the US are now on board with this travesty of justice.

Dire predictions for Georgia and Florida COVID deaths have so far not panned out

The New Neo Posted on by

This is extremely encouraging:

We were told that states ending their lockdowns and freeing the people were going to see widespread infections and increased deaths. We were told that bringing quarantines to an end would bring doom.

We were told wrong.

According to a graph by Axios, states ending the lockdown have either stalled in COVID-19 case numbers or are beginning a decline. This includes Georgia and Florida, which according to Axios are seeing double-digit declines.

“Florida’s new cases have actually declined by 14% compared to the previous week, and Georgia’s fell by 12%,” reported Axios…

The lockdowns are currently still in place in many states. According to the latest data, this is currently a useless gesture, and while rates a declining in states that are continuing lockdowns, these states may well be worse off in the long run due to economic collapse.

Why are some governors continuing to clamp down hard despite the fact that their states don’t seem to have experienced that much COVID or that many deaths from it? I can speculate – the love of control, the desire to shoot themselves in the foot in order to get Trump, fear that if they relax the rules that things will then spiral out of control and they will be blamed, putting too much faith in the modelers who have been proven wrong, and elitism because they themselves will continue to get haircuts and go to the gym.

Now, obviously, it’s not over yet – not for Georgia or Florida or any other state. The numbers can rise again. As time goes on, we’ll learn more. But right now, indications are that it’s time to re-open with cautions in place for the most vulnerable elderly and/or those with pre-existing conditions.

Remember the Hong Kong flu?

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who were alive at the time probably remember the phrase, as I do.

And that’s just about all I remember about it. I was no child, either; I was in college, going about my business, and my business regularly included large gatherings – huge classrooms, the occasional concert, meeting, a restaurant or two, and even parties.

I never considered changing a thing about my life because of that flu, and neither did anyone else I knew. It was something we heard about that was so far in the background as to be nearly meaningless to us. And yet the Hong Kong flu – named back in the days when it was okay to label viruses with their points of origin, although apparently this one may have been misnamed because it may have originated in China (so, what else is new?) – was quite deadly to much the same demographic groups as COVID and perhaps even in similar numbers per capita:

The Hong Kong flu (also known as 1968 flu pandemic was a flu pandemic whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated one million people all over the world…

The first recorded instance of the outbreak appeared on 13 July 1968 in Hong Kong. (There is a possibility that this outbreak actually began in mainland China before spreading to Hong Kong, but this is unconfirmed.) By the end of July 1968, extensive outbreaks were reported in Vietnam and Singapore. Despite the lethality of the 1957 Asian Flu in China, little improvement had been made regarding the handling of such epidemics…

By September 1968, the flu had reached India, the Philippines, northern Australia, and Europe. That same month, the virus entered California, carried by returning troops from the Vietnam War, but did not become widespread in the United States until December 1968…

In Berlin, the excessive number of deaths led to corpses being stored in subway tunnels, and in West Germany, garbage collectors had to bury the dead due to insufficient undertakers. In total, East and West Germany registered 60,000 estimated deaths. In some areas of France, half the workforce was bedridden, and manufacturing suffered large disruptions due to absenteeism. The British postal and train services were also severely disrupted…

In comparison to other pandemics of the 20th century [meaning 1918 and 1957], the Hong Kong flu yielded a low death rate. The disease was allowed to spread through the population without restrictions on economic activity, until a vaccine became available four months after it started.

The H3N2 virus returned during the following 1969/1970 flu season, resulting in a second, deadlier wave of deaths. It remains in circulation today as a strain of the seasonal flu.

A couple of especially interesting points: (1) the virus was allowed to spread unchecked in the US (2) it is now endemic; and (3) a vaccine was available in 4 months. The latter is a reflection of the fact that flu vaccines are regularly developed, so it is ordinarily much easier to come up with a vaccine for a new strain than to make and test a vaccine for a non-flu virus. But another thing of interest – to me, anyway – is that I never learned of this vaccine at the time, never thought a thing about a vaccine or getting vaccinated, and to the best of my knowledge never had a flu shot at all until perhaps eight years ago. I would guess that today’s flu shots probably contain protection for the Hong Kong flu, among others (I know that H1N1 is in there, for example).

The US death toll for Hong Kong flu from the period from July 1968 until the winter of 1969-70 is estimated at about 100,000, with most of the dead being in the over-65 group. This was in a population numbering about 201,000,000 at the time. So corrected for today’s population, the death toll would have been the equivalent of around 163,000. This is well within the range of the expected COVID deaths, and perhaps even somewhat high, although we don’t know yet. And from the way things are looking, COVID will probably take around the same range of people with or without the sort of social controls we’ve put in place in an effort to control it, as the data from Sweden appears to show.

I know that some of my readers were alive and sentient (barring a couple of lost weekends) back in 1968-1969. Was your experience similar to mine?

Perhaps you thought the Flynn case couldn’t get any worse

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, think again.

It just got a lot, lot worse.

As the pressure builds on the higher-up perpetrators of the attempted coup against Trump – Brennan, Comey, Clapper, and even to a certain extent Obama himself – the Resistance ratchets up its game.

And it’s a very serious game indeed:

A federal judge [Sullivan] is signaling that he may pursue perjury or contempt charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn over his effort to abandon an earlier guilty plea to a charge of lying to the FBI…

Sullivan said he’s also asking [a] retired judge, John Gleeson, to recommend whether Flynn should face a criminal contempt charge for perjury–apparently for declaring under oath at two different court proceedings that he was guilty of lying to the FBI, before he reversed course in January and claimed he had never lied.

I am no expert on this subject, but I have never heard of such a thing. And in particular, if a guilty plea is coerced under threat or pressure – which often happens – it is often a lie. The same with plea bargains. And everyone knows it.

Has anyone ever been charged with perjury for such a thing before? All you lawyers out there?

Not to mention that there was also a problem with the behavior of Flynn’s lawyers, who had a conflict of interest. And of course there’s the little detail that the DOJ is requesting that the case against Flynn be dismissed due to all the previous FBI and DOJ misconduct.

The judge seems unconcerned with all that. His Javert-like pursuit of his quarry Flynn makes Javert look compassionate in comparison.

Oh, and that retired judge Sullivan has appointed to help Sullivan out? He’s already on Sullivan’s side:

Last but absolutely not least, we now have some light shed on the somewhat puzzling statement by Obama in that purposely leaked phone call I wrote about the other day. Remember? Here’s what Obama said (among other things):

And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.

Aside from the familiar irony of Obama accusing the GOP of doing what he and his administration had in fact been doing – undermining the rule of law and “moving in those directions” – one statement that stood out was Obama’s odd accusation that Flynn had committed perjury. At the time I wrote:

Perjury? A first-year law student knows the difference between lying to the FBI – in a matter in which there is no evidence of any crime whatsoever, and the target is not allowed to have a lawyer or be read his rights or even informed he’s being interrogated as a target – and perjury. Obama knows it, too, so why did he use the word? He probably thinks it’s a good talking point because it sounds really bad, and he doesn’t think most people will care about the finer points.

Or maybe he’s just forgotten all the law he ever knew. But I go with: tactical lie.

I followed that with a very lengthy quote from this Jonathan Turley piece explaining both the fact that no perjury charge was involved and that there was ample precedent for the motion to dismiss under the circumstances.

It continued, though, to puzzle me that Obama had said “perjury,” and in particular in a recording that he then purposely leaked, or gave his approval to be leaked. Although he’s not the legal genius his followers seem to believe him to be, he certainly has a basic knowledge of the law and had to know the inappropriateness of the term in this case. But now it is difficult to escape the thought that Obama was signalling the next line of approach, which would be to charge Flynn with perjury, as Sullivan appears to be strongly contemplating.

See, I was thinking in a conventional manner. Obama and Sullivan were thinking outside the box. Such extremely creative use of the law is a leftist specialty.

I don’t know what will happen now. Flynn’s lawyer might file a write of mandamus:

A (writ of) mandamus is an order from a court to an inferior government official ordering the government official to properly fulfill their official duties or correct an abuse of discretion. (See, e.g. Cheney v. United States Dist. Court For D.C. (03-475) 542 U.S. 367 (2004) 334 F.3d 1096.) According to the U.S. Attorney Office, “Mandamus is an extraordinary remedy, which should only be used in exceptional circumstances of peculiar emergency or public importance.”

In the federal courts, these orders most frequently appear when a party to a suit wants to appeal a judge’s decision but is blocked by rules against interlocutory appeals. Instead of appealing directly, the party simply sues the judge, seeking a mandamus compelling the judge to correct his earlier mistake. Generally, this type of indirect appeal is only available if the party has no alternative means of seeking review.

Perhaps there are alternative means of seeking review. Or perhaps the whole sorry charade set in motion by Judge Sullivan has to play out first, with the MSM talking it up every step of the way.

As Ace says:

This is a private prosecution by a lawless former judge who has declared himself Tyrant — and if this is permitted to stand, the American experiment in Democracy is over.

But the actions of the Obama administration in refusing to accept a peaceful transition of power and trying to frame his successor have probably ended that experiment already, anyway. We are in deep and dangerous waters, and have been swimming there for quite some time.