NBC does an Emily Litella on the “Trump’s lawyer was wiretapped” story

The New Neo Posted on by

That video is one of my favorites, and I’ve had occasion to use it over and over—and over and over—in the 13 years I’ve been blogging. And just about always, the reference is to something the MSM has done.

This time it’s the story in the post right below this one, that the feds wiretapped Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, and even listened in on one of his calls with Trump. When I wrote that post I expressed some skepticism about the report’s truth, and based that on a quote by Giuliani (who’s knowledgeable about the governing law), my own recollections (admittedly ancient) from my law school career, mistrust of the MSM, and a gut feeling.

NBC must have been pleased as punch to break this story, but they probably weren’t quite as pleased to retract—I mean “correct” it just a few hours later:

NBC News issued an on-air correction to their bombshell story Thursday reporting that a federal wiretap was placed on Michael Cohen’s phone. NBC said federal authorities were “monitoring” phone calls of President Trump’s lawyer, but not listening to them as previously reported. Authorities obtained a log of Cohen’s phone calls, known as a “pen register,” NBC quoted three senior U.S. officials as saying.

I happen to have been in my car doing errands this afternoon, and I also happen to have been doing something unusual at the same time—listening to talk radio for a few minutes. It was Howie Carr, who’s often very sardonically funny, and he’d just been saying that maybe it was a pen register instead of a wiretap, when Bam! The correction came in.

He mentioned that when he was a young reporter he had to cover the local police beat, and that’s where he learned about things like wiretaps vs. pen registers. But young reporters today are “journalists,” and most of them have no idea about the world outside of journalism, and therefore they don’t know when they should be smelling something fishy.

Nor, perhaps, do they care, as long as they get the clicks or the views.

I’m not sure how old Tom Winter—who broke the story and then had to correct it—is. But his LinkedIn site indicates someone around forty or early forties. That’s old enough to know better, but his background doesn’t seem to include covering a police beat as a reporter, or covering anything as a print reporter at all. It all seems to be broadcast news.

He describes himself this way:

I am an energetic, aggressive, responsible, and driven journalist. Specializing in breaking news, creativity in live production, and knowledgeable of the business of broadcasting.

“Specializing in breaking news”—that means speed is of the essence. “Aggressive” and “driven”—likewise. “Responsible”? Not so much, I’m afraid. Why didn’t he interview those “three senior U. S. officials” first, not later?

But I’m not going to be too hard on Tom Winter. He’s just a person who came up in an environment that values speed rather than accuracy, and that’s so focused these days on getting Trump that it’s “driven” to break any story that might reflect badly on him. Winter’s just one of the crowd, and his bosses probably don’t care. In fact, this story may have been purposely aired before it was fully checked, because it was sure to get a lot of publicity and readers.

As a blogger, I have to write very very quickly. I don’t have access to sources, either, except for open sources. I try to be accurate, careful, and cautious—I’ve learned that I must be very very cautious.

I’ve made a few mistakes so far, and I’ll probably make more, but considering everything I think my track record of accuracy vs. skepticism is quite good. But it galls me that the MSM still finds it necessary to hold themselves out as so much more trustworthy than mere bloggers. I wonder how many people believe that these days.

Reports are that the feds tapped Michael Cohen’s phone…

The New Neo Posted on by

[See UPDATE above.]

…and that at least one call with President Trump was recorded.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders referred questions about the wiretap to the President’s outside counsel.

One of Trump’s attorneys, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, told The Daily Beast that he doesn’t believe the reports of a wiretap, adding if it did turn out to be accurate, the wiretaps would be “totally illegal.”

“Us lawyers have talked about it, we don’t believe it’s true,” Giuliani told the publication. “We think it’s going to turn out to be untrue because it would be totally illegal. You can’t wiretap a lawyer, you certainly can’t wiretap his client who’s not involved in the investigation.”

That’s why I said “reports are.”

I have no idea whether this is true or not. So many things reported by the MSM have turned out to be untrue. If true, it’s unprecendented (as far as I know) to tap a president’s personal lawyer’s phone and record calls with that president.

But a lot of unprecedented things have been happening lately, haven’t they? It’s lawfare, Jake.

Oh, and the anti-Trump group are saying that of course, since it’s so difficult to get such an order, that must mean that the crime they were investigating was really awful, because they had to follow all these highly stringent safeguards.

Like with the FISA court and the Steele dossier.

More thoughtcrime

The New Neo Posted on by

It started with the judicial decisions that put a stay on Trump’s “Muslim ban”-that-was-not-a-Muslim-ban because the courts decided his real intent—based on some much earlier campaign statements—was to institute an actual Muslim ban.

I wrote back then:

In other related news, the legal reasoning several judges used to invalidate Trump’s immigration EOs””that his campaign statements were extremely relevant and indicated his supposedly discriminatory intent in issuing the orders as president””leads inevitably to preposterous conclusions such as these:

ACLU lawyer Omar Jadwat, arguing today before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, told the court that President Trump’s travel order “could be constitutional” if it had been written by Hillary Clinton”¦

The last part of the audio is rather funny. Jadwat, asked whether the order on its face is valid, says No. Why? “I don’t think so, Your Honor, because the order is completely unprecedented.” To which one of the Fourth Circuit judges replies, with astonishment that seems mostly genuine: “So the first order on anything is invalid?”

In his post, John Hinderaker calls that kind of legal argument “lawless nonsense.” But such lawless nonsense follows directly from the judicial decisions handed down against Trump’s EO. As the rulings were issued it became clear””because of the liberal judges’ reliance on Trump’s supposed thoughtcrime, as evidenced in some of his campaign statements””that no subsequent EO of Trump’s on immigration that involved any majority Muslim country would ever be held constitutional by these judges, no matter how carefully and fairly drafted. Trump had committed the original sin during the campaign, and all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten that little hand.

In other words, the order itself was probably perfectly fine, but it was Trump’s prior campaign statements that made the judges suspicious of it. Thoughtcrime.

So now Robert Mueller is intent on finding more Trumpian thoughtcrime [emphasis mine]:

A president should not be subjected to prosecutorial scrutiny over poor judgment, venality, bad taste, or policy disputes. Absent concrete evidence that the president has committed a serious crime, the checks on the president should be Congress and the ballot box ”” and the civil courts, to the extent that individuals are harmed by abusive executive action. Otherwise, a special-counsel investigation ”” especially one staffed by the president’s political opponents ”” is apt to become a thinly veiled political scheme, enabling the losers to relitigate the election and obstruct the president from pursuing the agenda on which he ran.

That is what we are now witnessing…

The list of [Mueller’s questions for Trump] elucidates that Mueller is pursuing the legally suspect theory that legitimate exercises of presidential prerogatives can become prosecutable obstruction crimes if undertaken with an arguably corrupt motive. This theory is specious on at least two grounds.

First, it would empower a subordinate executive official (an unelected bureaucrat who serves at the president’s pleasure) to second-guess the chief executive’s every action and judgment ”” not just to investigate a patent, serious crime but to question what the president was thinking even when his actions were within his constitutional authority. The president is answerable to peer branches and to voters, but not down his chain of command. If an order is lawful, it is not the captain’s place to question the general’s motives.

Second, the corrupt-motive theory is factually meritless as applied to Trump. Whatever pressure Trump may have brought to bear regarding Flynn’s investigation, it had zero impact. Comey has testified that the FBI disregarded Trump’s comments. The Flynn investigation proceeded without a hitch, and Mueller ultimately charged and convicted him. Trump could have ordered the investigation to be shut down, but he let it continue…

We have, at most, a politicized, hyper-technical claim of obstruction that rests on a suspect legal theory and a dearth of evidence that anyone was impeded in the slightest. Those are frivolous grounds for an investigation that compromises the president’s capacity to govern. The criminal law inquires into intent when actions patently violate criminal statutes; its purpose is not to manufacture crime by speculating about the intent behind apparently lawful actions.

But even before the Mueller questions made it clear that that manufacturing crime on Trump’s part is what Mueller is trying to do, the courts already were manufacturing—if not a crime, then a claim of unconstitutionality based on the speculative intent behind apparently lawful actions. So, that horse has already left the barn, unless a SCOTUS decision puts it firmly back in again. And as far as I know, the Supreme Court has never ruled on the merits of that aspect of the lower courts’ decisions.

Collusion: getting the dossier word out

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the things about the dossier/collusion imbroglio is that its complexity makes it difficult (or at least labor-intensive) for people to follow. I doubt that most people take the trouble to do so, and therefore the MSM has the opportunity to shape perceptions through slanted and simplistic headlines.

But here’s a succinct summary (hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin):

CNN has never disclosed the close relationship between Evan Perez, one of the reporters on the Jan. 10, 2017 story, and his former Wall Street Journal colleagues who went on to start Fusion GPS, including the company’s founder Glenn Simpson. Nor did the Merriman Smith prize committee acknowledge how the dossier on which the leading lights of the news business have again staked their institutional credibility was disseminated to the public.

That story is now coming into focus with the recent release of seven government documents that together detail a working partnership between spy agencies and the press that helped a political attack meme go viral, even though the evidence on which it was based was demonstrably false. While this type of relationship””let’s call it collusion””may be routine in Third World countries, it does not bode well for the health of the American press, or our democratic institutions.

No it does not. But if this is happening, it’s best we learn about it.

…[T]housands of articles on the Trump-Russia collusion story have been spoon-fed to a pliant digital press by cabals of political operatives and ex-spooks. Lies, innuendo, wild conspiracy theorizing, and the insistent assumption of guilt have replaced old-fashioned rules of sourcing, objectivity, and basic plausibility. While the social cost of this radical departure from these century-old norms is likely to be high, it has acquired two main forms of justification, the twin pillars of the new press.

The first reason, popular on both the left and among the Never Trump coterie on the right, is the assertion that Trump is a dangerous fascist who is on the verge of overthrowing the rule of law in America, an emergency that, if real, might indeed call for extreme measures, like throwing the principles of evidence-based reporting out the window. The problem with this argument being that however obvious and galling the man’s flaws are, no evidence for the thesis that Donald Trump intends to do away with Congress and the courts and rule by his own Trumpian fiat exists, at least not on planet earth. The assertion that such evidence does exist is the province of lunatics, and of people who find it useful to goose them on social media, or take their money.

But powerful people looking to “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil” nearly always justify their activities by saying they are dealing with a desperate emergency that requires desperate measures.

Not your father’s Boy Scouts

The New Neo Posted on by

A new name, a new policy: “Scouts BSA”:

The parent organization will remain the Boy Scouts of America, and the Cub Scouts ”” its program for 7- to 10-year-olds ”” will keep its title as well.

But the Boy Scouts ”” the program for 11- to 17-year-olds ”” will now be Scouts BSA.

The organization has already started admitting girls into the Cub Scouts, and Scouts BSA begins accepting girls next year.

Surbaugh predicted that both boys and girls in Scouts BSA would refer to themselves simply as scouts, rather than adding “boy” or “girl” as a modifier.

As far as I can tell, the reasons aren’t just the usual PC stuff, although of course that’s operating—as it seems to be everywhere. Are there any unisex enclaves available anymore? But behind this move also seems to be the fact that both Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts have been losing membership in recent years. Hardest hit (potentially, anyway) by this Boy Scout rebranding is the Girl Scouts, as one might expect.

Given the choice of a co-ed experience or an all-girls’ experience, I’m not sure what girls (or their parents) will choose. When I was a kid, of course, there was no such thing, and I wouldn’t have wanted it, particularly at an early age. By the time I was a teenager my scouting days were long past me. To tell the truth, the only reason I ever had joined—first at the Brownie level, then as a Girl Scout—was that just about all my friends were members, plus the uniforms.

But mostly, the uniforms. I confess it. We used to meet once a week after classes—at school, not at a parent’s house—and we got to wear our uniforms to school all day. My uniform made me feel very very snazzy. The rest of it I remember as a total bore, except the songs we sang. I was not really Scout material.

The uniforms have changed considerably, but this is what we wore:

I never got up to sash level.

Maxine Waters tells Kanye West to shut up

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, not in so many words. But that’s exactly what she’s saying—and in doing so she comes close to calling him “boy” or perhaps “stupid.” Imagine if a white person had said this:

“Kanye West is a very creative young man who has presented some of the most revolutionary material in the African-American community,” she replied. “But we also think that sometimes Kanye West talks out of turn and perhaps sometimes he needs some assistance in helping him to formulate some of his thoughts.”

She said West should think about the impact of his words and “maybe not have so much to say.”

“We don’t think that he actually means to do harm,” she added, “but we’re not sure he really understands the impact of what he’s saying, at the time that he’s saying it and how that weighs on, particularly the African American community ”” and for young people in general. … And I think maybe he should think twice about politics, and maybe not have so much to say.”

Physician, heal thyself.

I actually think that West has thought at least twice about politics. And I really do think that he clearly “understands the impact of what he’s saying.” At least, the potential impact.

And I think Waters understands it, too, and is absolutely terrified that “the African American community—and young people in general” might start thinking a bit differently and questioning leaders like Waters.

Interesting times; interesting times.

[Hat tip: Juliette Akinyi Ochieng (baldilocks).]

[NOTE: Apparently, Trump has been mentioned in quite a few hip/hop songs for many years, even prior to his presidential campaign:

Trump’s name first appeared in hip hop lyrics during the 1980s when the business mogul became an icon of the ultra rich. Among the earliest mentions of Trump in rap lyrics was the Beastie Boys’ 1989 track “Johnny Ryall”, in which they pit Donald Trump alongside his homeless alter-ego, Donald Tramp.

While many rappers praise Trump’s wealth, usually comparing their own financial aspirations or success to that of the billionaire businessman, others have used their music as a platform to criticize Trump’s practices and politics….

ESPN’s political site FiveThirtyEight documented that between 1989 and 2014, 19% of song lyrics about Trump were negative while 60% were positive.

Later the mentions were more frequently negative, as one might imagine.]

On those bags of chopped, washed, mixed lettuce

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m so old I can remember when you had to wash and dry lettuce by hand. What a pain in the neck that was.

Then came a fabulous invention: the salad spinner. Salad spinners may seem pretty primitive to you younguns, but I can assure you that when they first came out they seemed like a marvelous advance.

Then, wonder of wonders, came bagged and washed lettuce mixes of all types. What convenience!

But it turns out that all is not wonderful with those little baggies, after all:

“Mass-produced chopped, bagged lettuce that gets shipped around the US amplifies the risk of poisoning,” [Marler, a food safety attorney] said.

Instead of shipping heads of lettuce or large carrot sticks that people wash, we chop them and mix them up in processing, then package them in plastic bags. In that process, Marler said, “The bacteria has a chance to grow. And a lot of people get sick.”

This prepackaging makes it harder to find the cause of a food poisoning outbreak. Different lettuces grown at different farms get mixed into bags that are distributed at supermarkets and restaurants all over the country, so food safety officials need to search for the common link among suppliers.

“When it gets processed, you might have four to five farms supplying the processor on any day. So was it farmer one, two, three, or four that was contaminated?” Marler asked. It also means that when something goes awry in a batch, it can cause a very widespread problem ”” like the one we’re seeing now [with romaine].

…“I think the [question] is: Is the convenience worth the risk?”

That indeed is the question.

E. coli is dangerous and can even kill. That said, it is very rare for a person to die from it. For example, so far in the recent romaine lettuce outbreak no deaths have been reported. I don’t eat romaine lettuce ordinarily, but there’s nothing special about romaine that predisposes it to the problem, so avoiding romaine is not the solution, except temporarily. I probably won’t be going back to the old rip-soak-and-spin method any time soon, though.

Juror in Cosby trial says Cosby’s 2005 deposition on Quaaludes sealed the deal [Part I]

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I feel like I might be belaboring this Cosby situation, since I already wrote a post describing some of the miscarriages of justice I noticed about the Cosby trial. But I continue to learn new things about that trial that bother me, and so I’ve written this 2-parter to describe two of them. Whether Cosby is guilty or innocent (and on the whole I think he’s probably guilty), I don’t think he got a fair trial, and I find that very disturbing.]

This is interesting:

[Cosby juror] Harrison Snyder said in an interview aired Monday on ABC’s Good Morning America that Cosby’s deposition ”” in which he admitted giving women drugs to have sex with them ”” was the evidence that made him believe Cosby was guilty [of assaulting Constand]…

The 22-year-old said it “wasn’t an open-and-shut case” but that he had no doubt the jury made the right decision in convicting Cosby Thursday on three counts of aggravated indecent assault.

Why was that 2005 deposition allowed into evidence in the first place in the criminal trial? This article from a month ago indicates the judge originally seemed to be leaning against it. But the testimony was allowed, and in the articles I’ve found about that decision (for example, this one) I haven’t seen much explanation of the judge’s reasoning behind it.

What was the 2005 deposition about? Remember as you read this that the recent criminal trial and the 2005 civil trial were both about an act alleged to have occurred in 2004, although the questions in the deposition and the act or acts admitted to therein occurred during the 1970s [emphasis mine]:

Cosby apparently obtained quaaludes [legally] through a prescription, the AP reported.

In the deposition, which stemmed from a sexual abuse case against Cosby filed by a former Temple University employee [Constand], Cosby was asked by a lawyer, “When you got the quaaludes [in the 1970s], was it in your mind that you were going to use these quaaludes for young women that you wanted to have sex with?” Cosby answered, “Yes.”…

“There is no acknowledgement that he gave the quaalude to someone underage, or to a woman who wasn’t consenting,” Brafman told TIME. “Quaalude was the love drug of choice in those years. Doctors were lawfully prescribing it in those years.”…

Quaaludes, the brand name for methaqualone, were a popular sleeping pill in the 1960s and were used in the 1970s and ’80s as a club drug, particularly to help people come off of a cocaine high…In 1984 President Ronald Reagan signed a law banning the production of the drug, making it illegal. Cosby’s admission concerns a period during the 1970s, when quaaludes would have been legal with a prescription.

Philip Jenkins, a professor of history at Baylor University and the author of Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, who spoke generally about the use of quaaludes in the ’70s and not specifically about how Bill Cosby may have used them, said that drug was indeed believed to be an aphrodisiac that consenting adults could use to have sex. “Quaaludes were something that was meant to send you to sleep,” Jenkins told TIME. “But it was also supposed to be the world’s greatest aphrodisiac. It was meant to knock you out, but also give you an overpowering sense of sexual urge.”

Cosby has said that the pills he gave Constand were Benadryl, by the way, and Constand has claimed the pills were blue in color. But quaaludes apparently never came in blue.

A bit more detail about Cosby’s actual testimony in the 2005 deposition can be found here:

In the civil deposition, Cosby acknowledged obtaining seven different prescriptions for Quaaludes during the 1970s, and said he’d used them with a woman named Theresa at the Las Vegas Hilton sometime during that decade.

“Did you ever give the Quaaludes to any other female but Theresa?” Constand attorney Dolores Troiani asked him during the 2005 deposition.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Did you ever give any of those young women Quaaludes without their knowledge?” Troiani asked.

“I misunderstood. Woman, not women. Just her,” he responded.

So, he admitted to using quaaludes with one woman and contemplating their use with others in the 70s. He never answered the question about consent because his lawyer objected to the question and the objection was apparently sustained. Here is Therese’s (that’s the proper spelling) description of what happened [emphasis mine]:

Therese Serignese, now 57, was 19 (and known by her maiden name, Therese Picking) and standing with her younger brother and sister outside of a gift shop of the Las Vegas Hilton in 1976 when, she says, a man approached her from behind, slowly slipped his left arm around her shoulder, and said in a teasingly playful voice, “Will you marry me?”

She says she turned to face Cosby, the hotel’s headline act.

He offered her ”“ and only her ”“ a free ticket to his show, she says. And when she was escorted backstage afterward to the green room, she remembers feeling that she was meant to stay as the 10 or so other people there made their goodbyes. Alone with the entertainer, she claims he approached her on a couch, held out his hand, “and he had two pills there, and a glass of water, and he told me to take them,” she tells PEOPLE.

The pills, she says, were Quaaludes. “He identified what they were; that’s how I knew,” she says. “At that point I didn’t know what to do, so I just obeyed. I just did it.”

She then remembers having intercourse without having given consent.

If Therese Serignese is telling the truth (and let’s say she is) there is no excuse for Cosby’s behavior. He was 42 and she 19, and he was predatory and exploitative of her youth and inexperience. Was it rape? I would say there’s a strong case for it.

But as far as her consent to just the pill-taking goes (not the sex, but the pill-taking), she did give consent, even by her own admission. I wonder—I really wonder—whether that detail was ever introduced into the recent criminal trial.

The fact that a juror such as Snyder was influenced to believe Cosby was guilty by Cosby’s admissions in that deposition shows why that testimony should most likely have been excluded, in my opinion. I’ve seen no indication that the deposition dealt with the question of consent to the pills, which was very important. The other party in that incident with the admitted use of quaaludes (Ms. Serignese) was apparently not questioned during the criminal trial on that issue (or on any other issue). I don’t know how much testimony was allowed in the criminal trial about the fact that quaaludes were commonly used as party drugs back in the 1970s, but it seems to me that that should make their use back then irrelevant to an incident alleged to have occurred around thirty years later. A juror such as Snyder, who is 22 years old, would have had no context in which to place the 1970s acts described in the deposition, and I wonder whether he was given any such context.

I don’t know if this entire situation troubles you, but it troubles me. And—as I indicated in my previous post—this sort of thing disturbs me whether or not Bill Cosby is guilty. I happen to think that the evidence on the whole indicates that he is guilty, but from what I know so far (without having been on the jury and heard all the evidence, of course) I would say his guilt has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And yet he was convicted, apparently because of evidence like that deposition, which seems to have made the difference for at least one juror.

[Part II is coming soon. It concerns an agreement that may or may not have been made with Cosby in that civil trial, a deal that would have barred his deposition from being used in a criminal trial.]

Egad

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know what to make of this, but it certainly caught my attention:

In a passing statement, North Korean officials said they wanted their regime to be a “normal country” and brought up the possibility of a “McDonalds-style” US investment.

Are millennials edging away from the Democrats?

The New Neo Posted on by

If this poll is any indication, the answer is “yes.”

That doesn’t mean they’re going over to the Dark Side—i.e. the GOP. But more of them are in the undecided camp, and might at some point end up flipping their votes:

The online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters ages 18 to 34 shows their support for Democrats over Republicans for Congress slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two years, to 46 percent overall. And they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.

Although nearly two of three young voters polled said they do not like Republican President Donald Trump, their distaste for him does not necessarily extend to all Republicans or translate directly into votes for Democratic congressional candidates.

This is mainly among white millennials, but of course as we’ve seen with the recent furor over Candace Owens and Kanye West, the future may hold a possibility that some (I doubt very many, but some) black millennials will be starting to wonder, too.