Happy Father’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

“May we help you?” should be “Can we help you?”

The New Neo Posted on by

And the answer, apparently, is “no, we can’t.”

Regular readers know that I’ve been trying to change the URL and format of my blog to this new site, but migration of the content of the old blog to the new has been taking months and months and months. Definitely longer than I’d originally thought and planned. My search for help with the process led to the need to find a web developer willing to take the job, which turned out to be extraordinarily difficult. Not the job, but the search.

I finally found one, but he’s busy and I’ve had to wait till he has an opening for me, which should occur some time in July. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here’s one of the fun experiences I had during the long search. I think it shows something about the state of communication these days from “customer service” types.

There was a highly-recommended online group that’s been offering services for WP sites ever since WP has existed. It has lots of good ratings, and so I optimistically put in a request for help with the blog transfer task.

Almost immediately I got the following acknowledgement from them, which appeared to be a form letter [emphasis mine]:

“We wanted to acknowledge you [sic] WordPress project request and let you know it was received. We will now go about sharing this with some skilled WordPress developers so they can quote the work needed and we can get your project started…Please hang tight for a contact with someone to complete this request. If you do not hear anything in the next 24 hours, reply to this email so we can escalate your request.”

I waited about 36 hours and there was no response from anyone, so I wrote them the following: “I haven’t yet received any responses except your previous note. So I’d appreciate it if you can escalate the request. Thanks.”

And I got this back from them: “If you have not received a reply, no one is interested in the work.”

So, what on earth did that last sentence in their previous note (the one I bolded here) mean?

Curious, I sent a note to them as follows: “I was responding to this sentence in your previous email: ‘If you do not hear anything in the next 24 hours, reply to this email so we can escalate your request.”‘ I’m not sure exactly what that means and how it squares with what you just wrote. Please clarify. Thanks.”

I didn’t expect anything productive at that point, but I was intrigued by their mixed messages. I got this back from them: “No one is interested in the work. I am sorry bit [sic] we cannot force people to quote it.”

Wow, pretty harsh! So I wrote:

“That’s fine; I just didn’t understand why that sentence was in there about escalating the request if no one replies. Of course I understand you don’t force people to give a quote.”

And then I finally got this from them: “That just means to follow up. Sorry for any confusion.”

Doesn’t make much sense even with that “explanation,” does it? And if they regularly send out such a confusing message, why not change it?

I know; that would be too LOGICAL and CLEAR. And all the typos make me wonder whether they might be the same people who program the spambots.

Is Merkel on the way out?

The New Neo Posted on by

Reports are that it could be as soon as next week, and if so, it will be over immigration. The issue is a bit difficult to understand for those of us who aren’t conversant with the ins and outs of German parties and politics, but it involves how hard-line a stance to take on the so-called “migrants.” The dispute is between Merkel and her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who is also head of the CSU (Christian Social Union) Party:

If on Monday Interior Minister Host Seehofer receives the go-ahead from his party, the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), for his plan to turn back asylum-seekers on the German border, he could implement the policy right there and then. Chancellor Angela Merkel would then have no choice but to force Seehofer to resign. Granted, Seehofer’s CSU is allied with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), but the chancellor cannot succumb to the whims of her junior partner. That would be the tail wagging the dog.

And neither can the CSU dictate what an interior minister should do. Seehofer, who also heads the Bavarian party, could postpone orders to turn back asylum-seekers for two weeks. Even so, he and the CSU will keep insisting on the border policy in order to retain credibility because Seehofer has always demanded a tougher stance on asylum-seekers. He famously criticized the status quo as “the rule of injustice” in 2016 when he still served as Bavaria’s state premier. Seehofer must, therefore, continue opposing Merkel.

A coalition government in a multi-party parliamentary system is something quite different from the way things work here, but this is the sort of crisis that can be expected to occur. Merkely was forced to form a coalition government three months ago, because of her relatively weak showing in the last election, and it sounds like she may have become even weaker since then.

Bias and the IG report

The New Neo Posted on by

There is no question that many of the lead investigators in the Clinton email case and the Trump/Russia case were deeply opinionated, with strongly emotional attitudes towards the main people involved. Those opinions went in one direction only: virulently anti-Trump, and strongly desirous of her election instead.

That in and of itself should raise tremendous suspicion, because although in the FBI and DOJ the goal has traditionally been to keep one’s personal opinions out of it and to be objective and fair, human beings rarely meet that goal even if that want to (and it’s not clear how much they even want to these days). One of the better ways to overcome the problem is to have a balance of opinions on the team. That’s just common sense.

But that’s most definitely not the way it was in these investigations.

Another way to attempt to preserve whatever objectivity one can muster is to not freely air one’s pre-existing negative or positive opinions to other investigators. In other words, to keep one’s mouth shut about it and not stir the feelings up, and to avoid influencing stirring up the possibly-prejudicial opinions others on the job might hold.

But apparently many of the lead investigators in these cases (not just the now-famous Strzok and Page) felt very comfortable casually airing negative opinions about Trump and to couch them in the sort of language you might expect from foul-mouthed teenagers. No restraint whatsoever seem to have been used. And again, none of this was balanced by anyone—not a single soul—saying anything good about Trump.

Plus, they wrote quite a bit about how badly they wanted Hillary to win. And that’s even before we get to messages about possible actions they might take about Trump, such as Strzok’s “we’ll stop him” from becoming president.

Obviously, the water in which these big fish swam was so anti-Trump that they expressed such thoughts quite freely. Of course, they didn’t think the world was going to be privy to their words, but the fact that they and quite a few others continued to communicate with each other on official job-related emails and/or texts indicates a degree of comfort that is hard to fathom, but indicates that such feelings were probably so commonplace in both places of business as to be completely unremarkable.

That, in and of itself, is a strong indication that bias must have infected the workplace and informed its decisions. The fact that there is no direct evidence that it did is also unremarkable, because (as remarked by me and many others) it would have been absurd for someone to have stated or written that such-and-such an official anti-Trump decision was due to pre-existing anti-Trump feeling. Of course the agents making such decisions would never say that, and in fact my guess is that they themselves may have not even been aware of how much those feelings influenced their decisions in the matter of the emails and the collusion investigations.

Andrew C. McCarthy says it best:

Utterly biased people may have made manifestly flawed decisions, [IG Horowitz] tells us, but as long as they were not blatantly irrational decisions, we’re going to call them justifiable and move on. But were the decisions politicized? If a biased person makes a less than optimal decision, isn’t there an itty-bitty possibility that the bias clouded his judgment?

In essence, the IG answers, “Who really knows?” . . . except he says it in a way that enables the FBI to pretend he has found no evidence of bias at all. Observe this gem, from the report’s executive summary:

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions.”

Directly affected? What does that mean? Do the FBI and Obama Justice Department have to stamp the “I’m with Her” logo on Combetta’s immunity agreement before we can say bias directly affected the decision? Could bias have indirectly affected the decision?

A comparison of the decisions that were made in both investigations:

When Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP presidential race, making Trump the de facto nominee, the very first thing Strzok said upon hearing the news from Page was, “Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE” ”” i.e., “Mid Year Exam,” the code name for the Clinton caper. The best way to “stop” Trump was to free Hillary to beat him. So, the bureau simultaneously labored to close the case on her and invent a case on him.

In the blink of an eye, then-director Comey was briefing Obama’s National Security Council on Carter Page; the Obama intelligence agencies were tapping their foreign partners, targeting Trump-campaign advisers to run informants at, and internalizing the Steele dossier. While the FBI scooped up the last laptops it needed to complete the predetermined closing of the emails probe, Attorney General Lynch had her convenient tarmac chat with Bill Clinton, and the bureau conducted the perfunctory interview with Hillary ”” an interview so pointless that the FBI and Justice Department did not object to the presence of Mrs. Clinton’s co-conspirators in the room, even though the IG report concedes that this flouted elementary investigative protocols…

How do you best evaluate the FBI’s approach to the Clinton case? Well, if I may invoke that term again, common sense says you look at how the same agents handled another case which bore on the same event that informed their every decision, the 2016 election. The question is not whether every Clinton-case decision was defensible considered in isolation; it is whether the quality of justice afforded to two sides of the same continuum by the same agents at the same time was . . . the same.

It wasn’t. One was kid gloves, the other was scorched earth. The candidate they hoped would win got the former; the candidate they needed to “stop” got the latter.

The MSM and the Democrats (and I suppose the NeverTrumpers, although I’ve not read them on the subject) seize on the lack of direct evidence of bias influencing the decisions made to say that there was no bias at all. But this lack has nothing to do with there being no bias at all, and in fact applies an impossibly high standard of proof. But that point is most likely lost on most of the people to whom the MSM is speaking.

[NOTE: Other good articles to read are this, this, and this.]

The lawyerly conclusions of the IG report

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter Richard Saunders puts it succinctly:

…[T]he IG report…didn’t say there was no political bias; it said there was no documentary or testimonial evidence of political bias. I hate to be lawyerly, but that’s not the same thing as there was no political bias.

Well, I don’t hate to be lawyerly as much as Richard Saunders does, and so I will say that the distinction is an important one, and one with which many people have trouble being sympathetic to because it is so lawyerly and seemingly nitpicky. And at the risk of being even more lawyerly and nitpicky, I’ll add that it’s my understanding that what the report really concluded was that, despite evidence that actually does indicate political bias galore, there really was no evidence that the existent bias dictated the actions taken by the investigators regarding the Clinton emails.

I’m emphasizing this because I believe it’s important if a person is trying to understand the seemingly insane conclusions of the IG report. The report actually discloses reams of detailed evidence that there was tremendous bias among the investigators, and also many indicators of the appearance of bias, both in email communications and in certain departures from usual FBI protocol. However—as I pointed out yesterday—there is no smoking gun, no direct link (which would be highly unusual anyway) in which someone writes something like “I am biased against so-and-so and therefore I am doing such-and-such, which is a different approach than I would take if I weren’t so biased against this person…”

We can certainly infer, however, that the rampant anti-Trump bias that was shot through the department and the investigators led to some of their pro-Clinton actions that didn’t follow ordinary procedure. Comey himself, however, as the report points out, took a few actions that hurt Clinton as well as ones that favored her. Unlike some of the other investigators, I don’t think that we have any evidence of Comey’s bias in the form of emails, but it does seem reasonable to conclude that one of the things motivating Comey was the strong suspicion that Hillary would be the next president and also his next boss. That’s a different kind of bias—self-interest bias? But it definitely appears to have affected many of his own actions and was at least part of his reluctance to charge her. She was just too big to be charged, certainly not by Comey (who also probably wanted her to defeat Trump).

When you read the emails of so many of the people who worked on the Hillary email case, their anti-Trump bias is so obvious and so extreme that it’s almost impossible to believe it didn’t affect their actions. But the IG stopped short of saying that’s what in fact happened in the legal sense.

What does an IG do, and what was IG Horowitz charged with doing, after all? He is the IG of the DOJ, charged with investigating that department and appointed by President Obama and confirmed in 2012. So he is an Obama appointee, not a Trump appointee, although of course he is supposed to be completely objective.

Here’s what the IG of the DOJ does:

[The] Justice Department inspector general position was created by statute in 1989, providing an internal watchdog for the department.

Its mission, as its website states, is to “detect and deter waste, fraud, and misconduct in DOJ programs and personnel, and to promote economy and efficiency in those programs.” The office Horowitz heads has 450 employees nation-wide, many of them special agents who carry a badge and a gun…

The office is designed to be independent and accountable by having the IG serve an indefinite term and requiring that it report to Congress and the Attorney General…

While the inspector general lacks prosecutorial powers, he can identify possible criminal behavior and refer it for prosecution.

So the IG cannot prosecute, an IG can only describe. He/she also can identify possible criminal behaviors and make recommendations about that. But none of the allegations about the FBI’s behavior (we’re not talking about Hillary’s behavior; we’re talking about the FBI’s behavior in their investigation of Hillary’s behavior) involve possible criminal matters at all. So the IG’s role appears to be limited here (if I understand this correctly) to writing up the report and describing the situation.

It has indeed done that, citing many instances of irregularity, and of expressed personal animus and bias that could easily lead a person to conclude that the irregularities were the result of the bias. But it cannot conclude as a matter of law that bias was the causative factor, without a smoking gun.

So, what is the remedy for this sort of egregious bias within an agency—and I have no trouble believing it’s rampant, and not just in the FBI and DOJ? The situation seems overwhelming, and short of each new president firing everyone and replacing them with new appointees—impractical, just about impossible really, and with a result every bit as bad (or maybe worse) as the situation we have now—what can be done?

Paul Manafort heads to jail

The New Neo Posted on by

Manafort’s bail has been revoked:

Paul Manafort was sent to jail Friday by a federal judge who said she couldn’t turn a blind eye to claims that he attempted to tamper with witnesses, adding pressure on President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager to cooperate with a U.S. probe of Russian election meddling.

U.S. authorities immediately took Manafort into custody and escorted him out of a packed courtroom, where his wife looked on during the hearing…

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington revoked Manafort’s bail, saying she had no choice but to lock him up because she couldn’t stop him from contacting people.

Is this unusual in cases of white-collar crime allegations such as Manafort’s? I don’t know, and so far I haven’t seen anything that indicates an answer. What I do know is this:

Jailing Manafort gives Special Counsel Robert Mueller more leverage as Manafort weighs whether to cooperate and spill any secrets he knows about Trump and the campaign. Confronting possible criminal charges in New York, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen may have a similar choice ahead of him.

There is no question in my mind that Trump is the real quarry and Manafort an instrument to get to that quarry. In addition, of course, Manafort himself is not a savory character and may indeed be guilty of a host of things that have nothing to do with Trump.

In pressuring a person in this way to spill the beans on someone else (usually not a president, however; I can’t think of any precedent for that except for Susan McDougal, who was jailed for contempt for not answering questions about Bill Clinton in the Whitewater investigation) you run the risk of two things. The first is that they have no beans to spill. The second is that they will lie to save their own skins. For some prosecutors, that latter is a feature rather than a bug.

Some tweets related to the IG’s report

The New Neo Posted on by

A sampler:

This entire episode brings up the question of whether people can put aside that sort of intense bias when they’re doing a job directly related to that bias. My opinion is that it’s a very rare ability. It’s not possible to have a staff of entirely unpolitical people in these jobs; most people (and certainly most lawyers) have political opinions and biases. The problem is that in the case of the group doing the investigating, it seems as though they were uniformly on one side of the political spectrum: the Democratic side. This is true of lawyers in general, by the way, and of people in the employ of the federal government.

The IG’s report and the Trump-hating FBI agents

The New Neo Posted on by

Another aspect of the IG report released today concerns the behavior of the FBI—in particular, certain agents—in dealing with the Clinton email investigation:

The bureau also said it accepts findings “that certain text messages, instant messages and statements, along with a failure to consistently apply DoJ and FBI interview policies, were inappropriate and created an appearance that political bias might have improperly influenced investigative actions or decisions.”

It certainly does create that appearance, big time. But as I wrote in my previous post today on the subject of the IG report, what could a smoking gun possibly look like? If there’s the appearance of bias, and that bias cannot be explained in any other way, can we not conclude that bias caused the strange behavior? Well, not as a matter of law. We can conclude it in our minds, but it doesn’t carry the force of law. Without that, it’s just an inference we draw—although IMHO a very logical one that is highly likely to be true.

Here is a particularly troubling piece of evidence:

…[I]nvestigators found that Peter Strzok, who served as a lead investigator on both the Trump-Russia and Clinton email investigations, vowed he would “stop” Trump from becoming president in an August 2016 text message to his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page wrote to Strzok.

“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded.

Strzok said the message “was intended to reassure Page that Trump would not be elected, not to suggest that he would do something to impact the investigation,” according to the report.

So, did the IG believe Strzok’s self-serving and absurd description of what he wrote? Do people usually write “we’ll stop it” when they actually mean “it will just happen of its own accord?” No, they do not. But apparently the IG report was not able to tie that message of Strzok’s into any act of his in his official capacity. In other words, the political bias is crystal clear, but unless there’s something that ties it directly and unequivocally into an official act, there’s nothing the IG will do about it.

And here’s an excellent, excellent question:

I think we know the answer.

Also, my guess—and it’s just a guess—is that if Strzok and/or Page actually did do something to stop Trump from becoming president, they were careful enough to cover their tracks, even though they left record of their intent in these emails, which they never never expected to see the light of day. They were careless, but not that careless, and they’re not stupid people. If there really was some conspiracy, either between the two of them or among a larger group as well, I doubt very much we will ever find hard evidence of it.

The IG’s report on the Clinton email investigation has been released…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and it’s 568 pages long.

Who’s going to read that? Not even bloggers like me, unless they’re gluttons for punishment or unusually OCD. So we’ll have to rely on summaries, reports, social media, pundits, and the like. I eagerly await Andrew C. McCarthy’s take.

Right now, though, I want to mention that I don’t think you’ve ever seen a post on this blog about a report coming out that predicts the report will make a significant difference, will deeply implicate someone important in government (enough to cause an actual criminal prosecution, that is), or will cause something really fundamental to change. Oh, maybe I wrote something like that many years ago, although I don’t think I did. But those days are gone, if they ever existed. The IRS scandal in particular underlined that fact; the abuses were clear and egregious and nothing ever happened that meant much of anything in terms of a redress or punishment.

So I’ve been expecting nothing special for this one. And my impression is that’s what we’ve got, although there are some fascinating disclosures.

The gist of the report appears to be that Comey and company acted very strangely, in a way that seems unprecedented and certainly could easily give a person the idea that there was some pre-existing political agenda and bias, but no evidence was found that any bias contributed directly to those actions. That is, we can infer political bias from their odd behavior, but we can’t prove it (although we can’t explain it in any other way, either).

So all the IG can do is shrug at this point and issue tons of verbiage.

At least, that’s what I glean from various articles I’ve read (see this, for example, as well as this and this, and I’m sure many more will be forthcoming).

Think about it. Not only does the IG not want to rock the boat too much, but what would you imagine that such “evidence” would consist of and how on earth could political bias be proven to affect the legal decisions made? Short of a memo or recording in which Comey calls his staff together and makes a speech sounding something like this?: We all know that we are liberal Democrats and leftists who would dearly love for Hillary Clinton to become our next president, so despite the fact that we realize she’s guilty as the day is long, I hereby direct you to absolve her of guilt in order for her to be elected, so do we all pledge today…

Needless to say, that sort of evidence will not be found. And short of that, the IG (Horowitz) refuses to draw any conclusions about the reasons for Comey’s “departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms.” And what was that “departure” to which the IG is referring? It seems to have been the public statement Comey made about Hillary that exonerated her from criminal prosecution while still saying she mishandled classified information.

Of course, in a 500-plus-word document, there’s a lot more than that, and we’re just beginning to digest it.

[ADDENDUM: See also this from William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, and this at the Federalist. And then there’s this from Ben Shapiro and this from Trey Gowdy.]