Comey, Cohen, Dershowitz, and Scooter Libby: the rule of law

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m very very tired of writing about James Comey. And yet there’s something (or many things) morbidly fascinating about him, now that he’s been unleashed on his book promotion tour and now that his memos have seen the light of day. It’s not just his strange affect, but it’s also the substance of what he says that keeps bringing my attention back to him despite myself.

I wonder just how representative Comey is of the psyche and thought processes of people in high places these days in Washington. He’s arrogant without a particle of self-awareness as to how he’s coming across, maximally self-righteous, and seemingly unaware of the basic facts of the legal system or the Constitution.

It’s that last bit that I find most surprising. He’s a lawyer, and a very experienced one at that. Of course, he may be well aware of those basic facts and just think his audience—the American people—is unaware, and that he can successfully play off our ignorance. At any rate, these statements are the sort of thing I’m talking about:

Former FBI Director James Comey said on Tuesday that President Trump’s pardon of Lewis “Scooter” Libby is an “attack on the rule of law,” and insisted there was no reason to doubt his 2007 conviction.

“There’s a reason George W. Bush, for whom Scooter Libby worked, refused to pardon him after looking at all the facts in the case,” Comey said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“It was an overwhelming case. There’s no reason that’s consistent with justice to pardon him, and so it’s an attack on the rule of law, in my view.”

Comey can criticize Trump’s pardon of Libby all he wants, of course. Among other things, he probably takes it personally, since Comey was the guy who appointed the special counsel who made the case against Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald. There were many irregularities about Libby’s conviction:

There is indeed a reason Bush didn’t pardon him and it had nothing to do with Libby’s prosecution and conviction being fair or just. It had everything to do with politics and Bush simply not wanting to face the backlash. Instead he commuted his sentence entirely…

…[A] key witness against Mr. Libby recanted her testimony recently (2015) after finding out that the persecution had improperly withheld information from her. Never mind that the original leak was found before the special counsel (Fitzgerald) even began his investigation.

Perjury traps are the speciality of special counsels and the predominant way they hang scalps in the absence of any real crime…

But that’s just icing on the pardon cake; they matter, but they don’t matter in terms of whether Trump’s pardon was an attack on “the rule of law.” Comey probably sees it as an attack on himself—at least, indirectly—and perhaps he thinks “the rule of law, c’est moi.”

But the rule of law relevant to presidential pardons is the Constitution of the United States, which grants very broad powers to presidents in pardoning federal offenses other than impeachment, as the courts have consistently held:

The power to pardon is one of the least limited powers granted to the President in the Constitution. The only limits mentioned in the Constitution are that pardons are limited to offenses against the United States (i.e., not civil or state cases), and that they cannot affect an impeachment process…

The scope of the pardon power remains quite broad, almost plenary. As Justice Stephen Field wrote in Ex parte Garland (1867), “If granted before conviction, it prevents any of the penalties and disabilities consequent upon conviction from attaching [thereto]; if granted after conviction, it removes the penalties and disabilities, and restores him to all his civil rights; it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity….A pardon reaches both the punishment prescribed for the offence and the guilt of the offender….so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offence.” A pardon is valid whether accepted or not, because its purposes are primarily public. It is an official act. According to United States v. Klein (1871), Congress cannot limit the President’s grant of an amnesty or pardon, but it can grant other or further amnesties itself.

Surely lawyer and ex-FBI head Comey is aware of all of this operating rule of law. And if he’s not, he should be. If he doesn’t like Trump’s pardon of Libby, he can criticize it, but in no way does it violate or attack the rule of law—in fact, it follows it. If Comey thinks the presidential pardon power should be more limited, he is free to spearhead a movement to amend the Constitution—according to the rule of law.

In researching this post, I came across a curious article by WaPo columnist Richard Cohen. Cohen is a liberal who can’t stand Trump, but back in July of 2013, when the article was written, he made it clear in discussing Comey’s nomination to be head of the FBI that he wasn’t the least bit keen on Comey either. The reason? The Scooter Libby case. Keep in mind as you read this that Cohen is a liberal, as I said:

…[Comey] authorized his friend, the Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, to investigate who leaked the name of Valerie Plame. She was the CIA operative who suggested sending her husband, a diplomat, to Africa to see if Saddam Hussein was really buying uranium there. Plame’s name was originally published in The Washington Post in a column by Robert Novak. It was hardly noticed.

This, though, turned out to be the mother of all leak investigations. A gaggle of reporters were implicated and threatened with contempt. One reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, went to jail for 85 days. ”˜Her jailing was a classic example of a prosecutor running amok. Fitzgerald already knew the source of the original leak. Indeed, much of Washington knew it was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Fitzgerald persisted nonetheless.

Comey was Fitzgerald’s boss. He should have reined him in. He did nothing of the sort. In fact, there is ample evidence that Fitzgerald was a prosecutor after Comey’s own heart. Comey, too, is a hard-charger. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page compiled an impressive list of Comey’s excesses, including the prosecution of two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee under the 1917 Espionage Act. The case was dropped, but not before both men lost their jobs, a whole lot of money and, I would suspect, a whole lot of sleep.

Prosecutors have enormous power. A mere inquiry can change a life, even wreck it. FBI directors have even more power…

Comey has exercised his power in disturbing ways.

Of course, now that Comey is pitted against Trump, I doubt Cohen would take Trump’s side, although I can’t find anything he’s written on that subject recently. But fellow-liberal Alan Dershowitz is almost literally sickened by Comey these days, because Dershowitz actually cares about the rule of law:

[Dershowitz] called [Comey’s] book “gossipy,” “scandalous and shameful.”

“This is a man who is revenge-driven, who is prepared to leak through a law professor at Columbia, who is prepared to disclose confidential conversations he had with the president-elect and the president of the United States. He is exactly the wrong person to have headed one of the most important law enforcement agencies in the United States,” Dershowitz said, denouncing the former FBI chief.

“This sends a horrible message to FBI agents and law enforcement people about leaking and about confidences and trying to keep emotion out of law enforcement and politics out of law enforcement,” he added…

“For [Comey] to start speculating on that kind of nonsense and rubbish and not to disclose when he spoke to the president, as you said, that this information was paid for by a political opponent,” he said about the way Comey handled disclosing the infamous ‘Trump dossier’ to the president.

“I used to have a good feeling about Comey,” Dershowitz continued. “I now only have very, very strong negative feelings about him and he just enhances the suspicions that I think so many Americans now have about law enforcement and we ought to be trusting law enforcement.”

It is also somewhat ironic that the prosecution of Scooter Libby was prompted by a leak (by Armitage rather than Libby), but who’s counting? Certainly not Comey, leaker extraordinaire.

Update on thenewneo.com

The New Neo Posted on by

Just want to let you all know that I have succeeded in finding a web developer who will help me make the transfer. I’ll skip the lengthy saga of how hard it was to find such a person, and just say that now I really do think it will happen in the next couple of weeks.

Hopefully.

I will let you know when the time is getting closer.

How many federal crimes have you committed today?

The New Neo Posted on by

You’re (Probably) a Federal Criminal:

While ubiquitous criminality has not undermined the criminal law’s moral force, it has changed the identity of those who make the law, in the practical sense. Since most people have committed at least one crime carrying serious consequences, police and prosecutors choose who’ll actually suffer for their crimes. Under the best of circumstances, most targets will be unlucky schmoes who happen to catch the prosecutors’ attention or people the prosecutors or the public think are particularly “bad.” At worst, a ubiquitous criminal law becomes a loaded gun in the hands of any malevolent prosecutor or aspiring tyrant.

It’s enough to make a libertarian out of you.

The leaked Comey “I am not a leaker” memos

The New Neo Posted on by

He’s not a leaker, although of course he leaked.

He’s also not a weasel. We know that, because he tells us so himself, and he said it to Trump, too [you can find the memo texts at the link]:

[Comey] also lashed out at leakers and called the leaks terrible. He told Trump that he doesn’t “do sneaky things” or leak or “weasel moves.”

Memo to self: whenever anyone says what he/she is not, be on alert for that exact thing. As Shakespeare had a “Hamlet” character say: the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Despite Comey’s giving the memos to his buddy Daniel C. Richman (law professor at Columbia) to give to the NY Times (an act that successfully began the Mueller investigation), it took a while to get the memos released to Congress. Now that they are out there, the predictable response from the MSM is to spin them in favor of Comey and against Trump.

What the right has to say makes sense to me—for example, this by Mollie Hemingway and several from Powerline (see this and this). The latter link contains the statement on the memos made by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. Here are some excerpts:

Former Director Comey’s memos show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated. The memos also made clear the ”˜cloud’ President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier.

The memos also show former Director Comey never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened. …

The memos also make certain what has become increasingly clear of late: former Director Comey has at least two different standards in his interactions with others. He chose not to memorialize conversations with President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, Secretary Clinton, Andrew McCabe or others, but he immediately began to memorialize conversations with President Trump….

These memos also lay bare the notion that former Director Comey is not motivated by animus. …

The memos show Comey was blind to biases within the FBI and had terrible judgment with respect to his deputy Andrew McCabe. On multiple occasions he, in his own words, defended the character of McCabe after President Trump questioned McCabe.

…Finally, former Director Comey leaked at least one of these memos for the stated purpose of spurring the appointment of a Special Counsel, yet he took no steps to spur the appointment of a Special Counsel when he had significant concerns about the objectivity of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

As we have consistently said, rather than making a criminal case for obstruction or interference with an ongoing investigation, these memos would be Defense Exhibit A should such a charge be made.

It is easy to see from the coverage that the release of the memos hasn’t done a thing to change things for the left. The narrative marches on, and this extraordinary lawsuit by the DNC (in the SDNY, a court with which we’ve become familiar) charging just about everyone on earth—including, of course, Trump, Russia, and Wikileaks—of conspiring to disrupt the 2016 campaign is part of it.

On Election Eve 2016, the results were not only a shock to the left but an outrage that must be undone. Nothing will keep them from trying to accomplish this, and they will use every arrow in their quiver to do so.

[NOTE: One-sided memos made in the absence of any independent corroboration are inherently suspect. They are a favored method of the FBI, however. Any credibility they might have depends on the integrity of the person making such a memo. Comey has a dog in this race—his own protection and the destruction of Trump (which I guess might be considered two dogs)—and I wonder why we should trust anything he says or writes, whatever it might be.

Let me add that, even if a person is trying to tell the truth in such a memo and give a faithful re-creation of the words of each party, it is well-nigh impossible to give a true account. That’s what recordings are for. Memory is flawed and tends to be self-serving and distorted; very few people are able to recall conversations with great accuracy.]

Food fashions

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I noticed this amusing comment from “Fractal Rabbit” in the pasta-cooking thread:

Sadly, I’d eat a spaghetti sandwich everyday if I could get away with it.

That is, if my blood sugar could get away with it.

Trying to imagine the taste of a spaghetti sandwich put me in mind of Crisco sandwiches.

Yes, Crisco sandwiches were a Real Thing, which I wrote about in one of my earliest blog posts, reproduced here because I doubt any of you were readers back then.]

I was surprised at the depth of feeling evidenced in the recent Crisco cookie wars (if you are unaware of what I’m referring to, see here). I hope we have reached the point where we can now call a truce by stating that the real difference between the two sides appears to be one of dunkers vs. non-dunkers. Simply put, those who dunk cookies prefer them to be made with Crisco; those who don’t, don’t.

But the whole cookie discussion started me thinking about Crisco itself. This is unusual; Crisco, like Spam, is something I don’t ordinarily think about. We didn’t use either one all that much in our house when I was growing up, even though it was the Fifties–except, of course, for the obligatory piecrust (made with Crisco, that is, not Spam). And meditating on Crisco made me think of a very odd but strangely fascinating book I once read.

The book is called Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Written by Laura Shapiro, it’s a history of the “Scientific Cooking” movement, in which a group of women of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s tried to revolutionize American cooking, introducing the idea of order and form as paramount considerations. Sounds rather dull, but I found the book surprisingly riveting.

It turns out that these ladies were trying to tame food and civilize it. The goal was to make it an esthetic and refined experience, as far from its “animal” roots as possible, and devoid of any “low” and ethnic influences–such as, for example, that tiny detail known to us as taste (if you are of a certain age, like me, and you wonder why the food of your youth was so uniformly bland, these ladies share some of the blame). Color was elevated to a matter of extreme importance, and white was the very best color of all.

It’s hard to imagine exactly what this entailed in practice, so to get an idea to what lengths the advocates were willing to go, here’s an excerpt from the book:

Color-coordinated meals enjoyed a surge of popularity…Mrs. Lincoln once shared with her readers the description of a green-and-white luncheon created by a subscriber. Grapefruit, lightly covered with white frosting and pistachio nuts, opened the meal; cream of pea soup with whipped cream followed; and the main course was boiled chicken with banana sauce, accompanied by macaroni, creamed spinach, potato balls, and parsley. Green-and-white ices and cakes completed the picture…Mrs. Rorer had a special fondness for the all-white meal, which she didn’t mind going to some lengths to achieve. Cream soups, cream sauces, boiled poultry, and white fish dominated her dinners, with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and angel cake for dessert.

I don’t know about you, but this is my idea of revolting. And where does Crisco come in? In 1911, to be exact–as the makers of Crisco inform us, having thoughtfully provided us with a timeline on the Crisco website. Crisco was the quintessential white, pure food, the dream come true of the scientific cooking movement. Leached of taste, smell, and the ability to spoil, it was lauded and embraced by these women.

Here is Perfection Salad on the subject of the introduction of Crisco:

Crisco had been tested extensively in the laboratory ever since its discovery…Now it was ready for the public: “Dip out a spoonful and look at it. You will like its very appearance, for it is a pure cream white, with a fresh, pleasant aroma….Crisco never varies…[it] is put up in immaculate packages, perfectly protected from dust and store odors. No hands ever touch it…”

Some early Crisco recipes:

Caramel Sweet Potatoes could be glazed with brown sugar and Crisco; stuffed onions could be filled with bread crumbs and Crisco; sandwiches could be spread with Crisco mixed with an egg yolk and seasoned rather highly with Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and vinegar; and finally, a pure and tasteless white sauce could be prepared by melting two tablespoons of Crisco, adding two tablespoons of flour, and stirring in a cup of milk.

I do believe I have finally found the source for the recipes used by the chefs (I use the word advisedly) in the dining hall at my college dorms.

[ADDENDUM: It probably goes without saying that the whole thing was irredeemably racist. White food, indeed!]

More Jordan Peterson: on “equality” and where it leads

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many wonderful Jordan Peterson videos it’s hard to choose just one (or watch just one; they’re like potato chips).

But I think this is especially fine:

I’ll add that, having watched quite a bit of Peterson speaking without notes, it seems to me that one of the keys to his presentation (besides a great deal of knowledge and the ability to express it in language both clear and articulate) is his intensely sharp focus and marshaling of his energy to the task at hand and the question at hand.

It is something the listener can feel on a gut level, along with a sense of Peterson’s sincerity and urgency. I believe these qualities of clarity, knowledge, sincerity, and urgency are the main reasons for Peterson’s great popularity among people who usually aren’t glued to their seats when professors of philosophy opine.

[NOTE: By the way, on the subject of the kulaks and the Ukrainian famine (Holodomor), there’s a great deal of information available. The famine had many causes, but the war on the kulaks was certainly prominent among them:

[Stalin’s war on the kulaks] was formalized in a resolution, “On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization”, on January 30, 1930. The kulaks were divided into three categories: those to be shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police; those to be sent to Siberia, North, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, after confiscation of their property; and those to be evicted from their houses and used in labour colonies within their own districts…

Some researchers found that the famine of 1932”“1933 followed the assault on Ukrainian national culture that started in 1928. The events of 1932”“1933 in Ukraine were seen by the Soviet Communist leaders as an instrument against Ukrainian self-determination. At the 12th Congress of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CP(b)U), Moscow-appointed leader Pavel Postyshev declared that “1933 was the year of the defeat of Ukrainian nationalist counter-revolution.” This “defeat” encompassed not just the physical extermination of a significant portion of the Ukrainian peasantry, but also the mass imprisonment or execution of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, and artists.

By the end of the 1930s, approximately four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite had been eliminated. Some, like Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovy, committed suicide.

Liberty and equality of outcome (whether a truly desired policy, or a fake front to appeal to the “masses”) are always at war. They are inherently at war. Equality of opportunity is the only type of equality that can coexist with liberty and in fact foster it.]

According to Dershowitz…

The New Neo Posted on by

…(as quoted in Politico, anyway; I couldn’t find the origins of the quote):

“That’s what [prosecutors will] threaten [Cohen] with: life imprisonment,” said Alan Dershowitz, the liberal lawyer and frequent Trump defender who met with the president and his staff over two days at the White House last week. “They’re going to threaten him with a long prison term and try to turn him into a canary that sings.”

I have little doubt that they plan to threaten Cohen with every penalty they can come up with, and more. That is one of the main reasons they are investigating him: to get him to implicate Trump. Of course, like the word of a jailhouse snitch, that sort of testimony would be at least somewhat suspect, but that’s a small matter (or no matter at all) to prosecutors compared with the prize of snagging the Great Orange-Gold Whale named Trump.

It also serves the purpose I mentioned yesterday: scaring other people off from helping Trump or serving him in any capacity at all.

It’s a twofer for partisan prosecutors, you might say.

But life imprisonment? I was unaware that murder was one of the raps they’re trying to pin on Cohen, although I suppose at this point nothing would surprise me. But if Dershowitz actually uttered that quote, I’m assuming he didn’t mean a life sentence per se, and that he meant instead that “life” would be the sum of the sentences for all the charges they’d bring against him, with the sentences not to be served concurrently.

And remember, they wouldn’t be expecting to actually convict him, nor would it be necessary to do so—merely to terrify him.

Nine ways you’re cooking pasta wrong

The New Neo Posted on by

Nine ways? That’s a lot of ways.

I figured I was committing all nine errors. But it turns out that I’m only committing one: using too small a pot.

And I was already well aware that I often use too small a pot, and yet I do it anyway. I do it because (a) it’s much faster to boil a smaller amount of water, and I’m usually in a hurry and hungry (b) my smaller pots are right out in the open, hanging from hooks, whereas the very big ones are much more annoying to haul out; and (3) I just feel like it, so there.

But who on earth thinks things like number 8, “You think pasta is just for cold weather”? Bizarre. However, I do know that there are people who live by maxim number 9, “You throw out the leftovers.” I know several people (not just one—several—and they don’t live together) who have a thing against leftovers.

Hey, I know people who don’t like to mix food. These are adults, too. By “mix food,” I mean they don’t like stews or soups, for example. But it’s more extreme than that. Everything has to be simple and unitary. A piece of meat, next to (but not touching) a pile of mashed potatoes, next to (but not touching) a mound of green beans. That sort of thing.

And I know other people who eat that way, only minus the veggies. And yes, these are fully-grown adults.

As our present POTUS would say: sad.

[NOTE: Then again, Trump’s actual diet has been said to be horrendous (fast food, mainly), but it’s also been reported that a few months ago after his medical checkup he reformed and now is into soups and salads.]

The ups and downs of the fight against blog spam

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m always interested in the spam cycles on the blog—which I assume merely reflect the spam cycles on WordPress and its anti-spam plugins. By “spam-cycles” I don’t mean anything to do with email, I’m taking about the bots (or whatever they’re called) that plague the comments sections of blogs. They’re programmed into being by people, I assume, but then they’re automatically generated in enormous numbers and come with enormous frequency. They will completely take over comments if there are no defenses in place against them.

Their purpose is to increase the rankings of the sites that send them, in line with the Google algorithms that determine these things. They probably have other purposes too, but I forget what they are and I don’t feel like investing the time to look it up right now. There was a period when this blog got many thousands per day that were captured in the spam filter—and I mean something like ten thousand or so per day, which I would need to delete two or three times a day or they would start to gum up the works.

Then quite suddenly the volume went down to hundreds per day. Apparently, WordPress and the plugins (sounds like a 50s rock group) was making headway against them. That lasted for quite some time, maybe a year.

Then it got even better. Maybe twenty a day, and I could go for ages without even needing to clear the spam file.

And then, just as suddenly, about two days ago the number zoomed up to close to a thousand a day. This is still very manageable—after all, the vast majority never see the light of day, and it’s easy and only takes a moment to get rid of the whole folder each day. But I noticed that the spam is almost all coming from one particular site that specializes in proxy IP numbers.

It seems that this one site—like a rogue virus—has managed to find a way to elude whatever defenses WordPress and the WordPress plugins have set up so far, defenses that are adequate to almost all the other viruses. I look forward to seeing how long it takes WordPress to marshal its defenses again and defeat (temporarily) the spambot.

Southwest Flight 1380

The New Neo Posted on by

Heroic passengers, heroic pilot. Unfortunately, one woman died.

“There’s a ring around the engine that’s meant to contain the engine pieces when this happens,” said John Goglia, a former NTSB member. “In this case it didn’t. That’s going to be a big focal point for the NTSB ”” why didn’t (the ring) do its job?”

UPDATE: For more on the pilot, and for interviews with passengers, go here.

More on the Cohen investigation from Andrew C. McCarthy

The New Neo Posted on by

I previously linked to Andrew McCarthy’s take on the Cohen searches, and I added this:

For 20 years McCarthy worked as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, which is the office involved here, and so he’s inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume there probably was a serious crime they were investigating that would justify the search. I’m not at all convinced, but I respect McCarthy enough to point out his article.

Now McCarthy has written another article on what might be going on with the Cohen case, and as usual he has a very interesting and somewhat unique perspective. The gist of what he says is that the seizure of Cohen’s attorney-client communications was in connection with an already-ongoing investigation into his business dealings that apparently had little to do with his connection to Trump. Therefore, McCarthy continues to believe there’s a “there” there, but that the “there” may not involve Trump at all:

…[P]rosecutors say Cohen has been under investigation for months. The probe involves a range of crimes, “many of which have nothing to do with his work as an attorney, but rather relate to Cohen’s own business dealings,” the government explained.

Consequently, even before the raids, the court authorized the FBI and prosecutors to search various email accounts maintained by Cohen. While the government reports that “zero emails were exchanged [by Cohen] with President Trump,” the existence of this monitoring means prosecutors long ago had to implement procedures to safeguard the A-C privilege.

However, (and this is me talking, not McCarthy) does anyone actually think that the investigation of Cohen is some sort of coincidence unrelated to Trump? Of course not. One of the main messages of his prosecution appears to be that it’s dangerous to work for Trump, and I believe this message is very intentional in nature. An investigation of Cohen is meant to have what in the law biz is called “a chilling effect” on the desire to associate with or assist Trump, and whether or not Cohen is ever found guilty of a crime is secondary to that goal, in my opinion.

McCarthy has also said he believes that the SDNY (the office involved in the prosecution, for which McCarthy previously worked for many years) is on the up and up and would not prosecute Cohen for political reasons. As I wrote earlier, I’m not at all convinced of that. But now McCarthy himself has pointed out a problem with his earlier theory:

The worst aspect of yesterday’s hearing was the revelation that Cohen claims Sean Hannity as one of his clients. I say this as a proud SDNY alum who has assured people that the Cohen investigation is surely not political, and as a longtime admirer of Kimba Wood, who is a very solid federal judge…

When, for whatever reason, these matters become relevant to a criminal investigation, the common practice is for prosecutors to issue a grand-jury subpoena, directing the lawyer to identify clients or fee arrangements. Grand-jury proceedings are secret. In this manner, the government can proceed with its investigation but the lawyer’s clients are not publicly embarrassed or slimed with innuendo. Moreover, the client can be given notice and an opportunity to be heard by the court, in order to make any argument he may have against being identified, particularly to the public…

Moreover, the A-C privilege belongs to the client, not the attorney. The law is supposed to protect the client, not indulge the lawyer. While the press has made this seem nefarious, lawyers ”” and especially lawyers who’ve gotten crosswise with the law ”” never want to reveal the identities of their clients…

…[I]t is difficult to see what happened in court as anything other than a gratuitous shot at Hannity, which Trump partisans will naturally take as a sign that the investigation is political. The unnecessary disclosure put Hannity in the position of having to explain himself publicly, to assure people that he is not involved in embarrassing or criminal episodes for which he needed to retain a “fixer.” (In fact, he explains that he and Cohen may have had informal legal discussions but never a formal A-C relationship.)

I don’t think the idea that this is “a sign that the investigation is political” is limited to “Trump partisans.” I think it’s obvious that it is political.

As for Kimba Wood, I can’t say I’ve followed her judicial career since the 90s when she was nominated for AG by Bill Clinton and had to withdraw because of repercussions from what was known as Nannygate, even though Wood herself had done nothing illegal. It could be argued that her nomination by Clinton constitutes a conflict of interest, but I think it’s a very weak argument. If that were the case, all federal judges would be unable to rule on any case that affected the person who nominated them, or that person’s rivals. That would bring the system to a grinding halt, and although that’s what some people would like, it ain’t gonna happen.