Brit Hume gives his colleagues in the media a professional courtesy they don’t deserve

The New Neo Posted on by

Brit Hume ponders:

Asked about Schiff’s comments, Hume replied, “What he says flies in the face, of course, of the IG report but it also flies in the face of the much derided Devin Nunes memo that grew out of the Nunes-led House Intelligence Committee investigation…and the whole Trump-Russia affair.” He added, “For Schiff now to claim, when he not only saw what Nunes said but published a memo of his own rebutting it, that he didn’t know about those abuses is preposterous!”…

“Do you think he’ll get called on the carpet by anybody who has been following this story for two years?” Bream asked.

“Well, one of the wonders, to me, of modern media is the failure of my colleagues in this business to see through this guy Schiff,” Hume said. “He has been dishonest repeatedly. He made extravagant claims about the amount of evidence he had of Russia collusion, evidence that it turned out that not even the Mueller team with all of its investigative powers did not discover and that he, Schiff, never specified. Of course the report came out and basically blew up this whole Russia collusion theory.

“Now comes this whole question of FISA abuse and he’s still telling whoppers about that. It’s amazing that he isn’t called out.

I don’t think Hume really considers that his colleagues “fail to see through” Schiff. He’s basically calling them fools rather than knaves, but I think he actually knows what’s going on. He’s just too polite to say it.

The vast majority of the members of the MSM are not reporters or journalists or truth-seekers. They are propagandists for the left. They went into journalism to spread the partisan word, and they are adept at pushing and giving credence to whatever they think will help the cause, whether it’s true or not, and ignoring or trying to discredit that which doesn’t help the cause, whether it’s true or not. If they push something that turns out to be untrue and are exposed as having supported a liar, they are as loathe to admit it as the liar is. They usually just go on to focus on the next propaganda point.

Judge in Flynn case accuses Flynn’s lawyer

The New Neo Posted on by

From the intrepid Jonathan Turley:

It is bad enough when a judge refuses to let out your client from a plea deal but it is worse when he then suggests that his lawyer is a plagiarist to boot. That however is what former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and his counsel, Sidney Powell, faced in the 92 page order of U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan…

[The following quotes are from Sullivan’s order.]

“In a footnote, Mr. Flynn’s brief merely provides a hyperlink to the “excellent briefing by Amicus [sic] in support of the Petition for Writ of Certiorari in Brown v. United States.” Def.’s Br., ECF No. 109 at 16 n.22.

“The District of Columbia Rules of Professional Conduct apply to the proceedings in this Court. See LCrR 57.26. Rule8.4(c) provides that “[i]t is professional misconduct for a lawyer to . . . [e]ngage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.” D.C. Rules of Prof’l Conduct R.8.4(c); see In re Ayeni, 822 A.2d 420, 421 (D.C. 2003) (per curiam) (lawyer’s plagiarized brief violated Rule 8.4(c)).“[C]itation to authority is absolutely required when language is borrowed.”United States v. Bowen, 194 F. App’x 393, 402 n.3(6th Cir. 2006);accordLCrR 47(a). “The [C]ourt expects counsel to fully comply with this [C]ourt’s rules and submit work product befitting of pleadings [and briefs] in a federal court.”Kilburn v. Republic of Iran, 441 F. Supp. 2d 74, 77 n.2 (D.D.C.2006).”

[End of Sullivan quote; back to Turley.]

Wait. Powell cited and had a hyperlink to the source of that material, but it warrants a section accusing her of plagiarism and ethical violations?…

Powell says that “the plagiarism accusation makes no sense.” She maintains that she used her own prior briefings and a brief written by a friend who was in fact cited.

There appears to be some sort of intense animosity that Sullivan feels towards Powell. As Paul Mirengoff of Powerline writes:

But in the electronic age, the hyperlink is attribution. The source of Powell’s language was there for anyone to see with just one click.

Powell clearly wasn’t trying to deceive anyone into thinking that the language originated with her. Even if one believes she should have made the attribution on the face of her brief rather then through a hyperlink, Sullivan’s suggestion that she “engage[d] in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” is ludicrous.

…Sullivan’s accusation…smacks of personal hostility.

Hard to come to any other conclusion.

It’s impeachment-lite time

The New Neo Posted on by

Some coverage here as well as here.

Pelosi quote of the day; “He gave us no choice.”

That’s funny on a lot of levels. First there’s the obvious one, which is Pelosi’s fake pose (probably perceived even by impeachment supporters to be fake) that her reluctant hand was forced by Trump and his terrible terrible activities (like, for example, drawing breath as president).

But the only-slightly-less-obvious reason it’s funny is that it is true, because by doing well as president, and gaining support rather than losing it, Trump has put the fear into the Democrats that they won’t be able to find anyone to beat him in the 2020 election. And if they can’t beat him, the specter of four more years of Trump as president fills them with such dread and fulminating hatred that their only alternative, as they see it, is to impeach him.

So in a sense it is true that he gave them no choice.

One question is: why would Pelosi put her vulnerable representatives from Trump-friendly districts at such risk? After all, Trump won’t be removed. Doesn’t impeachment put her majority at risk, too, if Democrats end up losing those seats? She does have the choice of allowing enough of them to vote against impeachment to give her a chance of preserving that majority in 2020, I suppose, although it would be very risky for 2020 (and it would also make the impeachment margin very small as well as bipartisan only for “nay”).

But I think there’s another reason. These Democrats must vote to impeach, or they face primary challenges from their extreme left wing in 2020. Isn’t that how AOC got elected, through a primary challenge against a guy who’d been in office for ages? The representatives from swing districts may be in a lose/lose position. If they vote for impeachment, they lose moderate support. If they vote against it, they get primaried by the left, perhaps successfully, and then not only do they lose their seats but the Democrats may lose those seats because the majority of voters in each of these districts won’t support far left candidates.

The FISA court comes out of the closet

The New Neo Posted on by

Or the woodwork. Or the shadows. Or wherever they usually hide and do their secretive business.

Ever since the FISA application abuse by the FBI surfaced – and I’m talking about long before the Horowitz report, back during the days of the dueling Nunes and Schiff reports – people on the right kept asking: where are the FISA judges? Why aren’t they speaking out about this egregious deception wrought on them?

Well, one reason is that they rarely speak out. Another, I suppose, is that they were waiting for the official word, and Horowitz’s report and testimony is the official word.

And so they give the FBI a tongue-lashing, the full text of which can be found here. Judge Rosemary Collyer is the author:

It makes it clear that the FISA judges don’t like being lied to:

The court is demanding that there be reforms and giving the FBI until January 10 to propose how they intend to correct the issues and stop the abuse.

The court explained how, in order to get such a warrant, the FBI has to show probable cause that the person in question to be surveilled is an agent of a foreign power, not just “based on activities protected by the First Amendment.” The court notes that the FBI has to swear to the truth of the facts submitted.

The court noted its role is to act as a check on the executive branch/FBI possible misuse of power and to protect Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, and because these are “ex parte” proceedings (meaning only the FBI or the surveilling party, not the surveilled is involved), it’s all the more important that the FBI adhere to their duty of “candor.”

I guess that’s a stern set of demands, according to the FISA judges. But to me and many others it seems highly inadequate. The entire structure of the FISA court – secretive, and without a chance for the target to defend his/herself – seems ripe for abuse. And if a system that exerts enormous power depends on the utter integrity of its participants and is performed in secret (which describes the FISA process), then watch out. That system will be abused.

I’m with Gregg Jarrett on this:

Comey: what did I know? I was just the FBI director [Part 1]

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’ll probably post Part 2 tomorrow.]

The interview Comey gave to Chris Wallace on Sunday was a study in evasion and deception. I could take it sentence by sentence and spend many hours analyzing each one, but I’m not going to do that. I’m probably giving it more time than it deserves to even write this post, but Comey engenders a kind of repugnance and yet fascination in me, and his interview just cries out for a fisking.

You can follow along. Here’s the transcript, and here’s the video.

First, a word about Chris Wallace. He straddles a fine line here between hard-hitting and letting Comey off the hook. He repeatedly points out the contradictions in what Comey has said versus what Horowitz has said about the FBI investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane, and sometimes Wallace even hammers home the discrepancies. And yet when Comey fails to answer his points or answers them in an evasive way, and Wallace could ask certain rather obvious follow-up questions that would nail him even further, Wallace sometimes doesn’t do so.

Perhaps he’s pressed for time. Perhaps he thinks Comey’s evasions speak for themselves. Or perhaps he’s reluctant to go too hard on Comey.

One general observation I have about Comey and the way he deals with his different stories at different times is to think tactically but remain almost completely in the moment. It’s as though he comes up with a new approach depending on the attack and the amount of information in the public domain, and sees no need for internal consistency on his part.

For example, when the Horowitz Report first came out, Comey said it vindicated him and the FBI, and that “those who smeared the FBI are due for an accounting…The FBI fulfilled its mission — protecting the American people and upholding the U.S. Constitution.” Then, just a few days later – and only because Horowitz explicitly testified to Congress that the report didn’t vindicate anyone connected with the FBI probe – Comey suddenly (and as far as I can tell, for the very first time) admits that mistakes were made. But only by his “sloppy” underlings, and that his only mistake was to trust them too much.

So one of my own questions to Comey (one Wallace doesn’t ask) would be: did you even bother to read the report before you wrote your “vindication” op-ed?

Now let’s take some quotes from the Wallace interview.

“James Comey: Well, maybe it turns upon how we understand the word [“vindicate”].

But “vindicate” is not some term of art, nor is it an arcane legal phrase. It’s a perfectly good English word that most people understand. It means “to show something to have been right or true, or to show someone to be free from guilt or blame.” Comey is not an idiot, but he must think his listeners are. Or perhaps he just can’t think of any other defense.

Comey again: “But [Horowitz] also found things that we were never accused of, which is real sloppiness, and that’s concerning.”

It’s almost risible, isn’t it? But Comey isn’t joking. No one accused the FBI of mere “sloppiness” I did a search of Horowitz’s testimony and the word does not seem to appear. I haven’t searched the report, but I very much doubt it’s in there either. “Sloppiness” is quite the euphemism for errors of the scope, frequency, and magnitude the report details. “Sloppiness” indicates carelessness, like failing to spell a word correctly, or leaving out a small and unimportant fact. Leaving out exculpatory evidence over and over? That’s so basic a violation that the word “sloppiness” becomes an absurdity. Saying Carter Page was not a source for US intelligence when the original document said he was a source? That could be described by a lot of words, but “sloppy” is not one of them.

When Wallace doesn’t buy Comey’s answer, and mentions the 17 violations, that’s when Comey admits “wrongdoing.” His “confession” goes like this:

“I was wrong. I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It’s incredibly hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those. Because he’s right. There was real sloppiness…”

Notice that here Comey persists in labeling it “sloppiness.” And the buck certainly doesn’t stop at Comey’s desk. In fact, apparently no details of the investigation ever even reached his desk, according to Comey. He was some sort of remote figurehead, uninvolved in the running of an operation against the candidate for president of the Republican Party – as though this was a routine process that didn’t need his expertise or supervision. He signed those FISA warrants knowing nothing about what was in them, apparently.

Or so he says.

Yeah, right. Apparently Comey believes that “fool” is a much better thing to claim to be than “knave.” It’s really quite astounding. And although Wallace rightly says “But you make it sound like you’re a bystander, an eyewitness. You were the director of the FBI while a lot of this was going on, sir,” Comey just basically repeats his first answer, and Wallace then goes on to the next point.

What about a follow-up like: “Were you usually in the habit of signing off on request after request that you knew nothing about?” Or “Then why have you been claiming for this whole time, till now, that everything was completely on the up-and-up with the FISA requests? How could you claim that if you knew almost nothing about them? Why didn’t you admit long ago that you were totally disengaged from the process and that you signed off on requests about which you were completely ignorant?”

[To be continued…]

Bad news for General Flynn

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to me that General Flynn got bad tactical advice from the lawyers handling his appeal. This is the result:

Judge Sullivan had all but invited Flynn to withdraw his plea. He was accordingly unimpressed by the merits of Flynn’s various post-plea demands for documents and related motions. The opinion notes in several places that General Flynn does not dispute the falsity of the statements that form the basis of the charge against him. See, for example, opinion pages 32-34. Judge Sullivan emphasizes that Flynn had much of the requested information in hand when he chose to plead guilty. Assuming he was deprived of information he now seeks, Judge Sullivan concludes, the remedy would be trial rather than dismissal.

In other words, the judge says that if Flynn had wanted the kind of redress he sought, he should have withdrawn his plea and asked for a new trial. Because he did not do that, his request is denied.

This doesn’t seem to have much to do with the merits of the case. I don’t know whether Flynn is allowed to withdraw his plea now and ask for a retrial. Perhaps Trump will ultimately pardon him. And it does seem quite extraordinary that Flynn’s crime was to supposedly lie to the FBI and yet the FBI has covered itself with shame lately.

Schumer and impeachment, now and then

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the drawbacks of serving for a long time in public life is that we have the ability to compare a politician’s previous statements to his/her present ones. Sometimes it goes like this, if your name is Chuck Schumer, and you once were speaking of the Senate impeachment trial of Democrat Bill Clinton, and now you’re talking about the Senate impeachment trial of Republican Donald Trump:

McConnell had a reply:

“The Senate is meant to act as judge and jury, to hear a trial, not to re-run the entire fact-finding investigation because angry partisans rushed sloppily through it,” he said on the Senate floor.

Ouch.

Snowstorm, power outage

The New Neo Posted on by

Fun day so far. There’s a snowstorm and a power outage where I live. Plus, I had to take a friend back and forth from the hospital for a procedure. And so right now I’m in a hospital waiting room, connected to the internet. Isn’t modern life great?

So your intrepid blogger will be posting something today besides this little missive. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 6:15 PM: Back home, power on.

If I were still a Democrat and I listened to Comey’s interview yesterday with Chris Wallace, what would I think?

The New Neo Posted on by

I plan to fisk James Comey’s interview with Chris Wallace later today or perhaps tomorrow, but right now I want to say something else about it.

I couldn’t actually watch Comey or listen to the whole interview. That’s probably a subset of the fact that I generally prefer to read transcripts rather than watch/listen to such things, simply to save time as well as the better to ponder certain statements. And in this case I did read the whole thing. I like to watch some excerpts, though, in order to get a sense of affect and demeanor, which can be very important. So I watched some of Comey’s interview, too, although I feel a sense of revulsion when I watch him.

Certain people do that to me. It doesn’t always conform to whether they’re on “my side” politically or not – for example, John Kerry made my flesh crawl even way back in the 70s, when I was a Democrat. And so when I watched Comey I wondered what I would think of him and his interview if I were still a Democrat. Would his oozing self-righteous fake-humble arrogance still strike me that way? Would it seem as though he was lying through his teeth with every word, including “and” and “the”?

I can’t know for sure, but I believe I would still be mortified, embarrassed, and angry that I was lied to by this self-serving shifty buck-passing liar. I wonder how many Democrats feel that way, though.

Of course, a person has to know some facts about the FBI investigation in question, as well as Comey’s previous claims, to see where he’s lying and how much he’s lying. I don’t know how many people follow such things, but my guess is that the majority follow them at least somewhat. I also don’t think people generally like buck-passing from the head of an organization such as the FBI, and that’s what Comey attempted to do over and over in that interview.

Comey makes me think of Iago:

Iago is one of Shakespeare’s most sinister villains, often considered such because of the unique trust that Othello places in him, which he betrays while maintaining his reputation for honesty and dedication…

Iago is a Machiavellian schemer and manipulator, as he is often referred to as “honest Iago”, displaying his skill at deceiving other characters so that not only do they not suspect him, but they count on him as the person most likely to be truthful.

Shakespearean critic A. C. Bradley said that “evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the evil character of Iago”…

Bradley writes that Iago “illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts concerning evil, which seem to have impressed Shakespeare the most”, the first being that “the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism becomes possible to them”, with the second being “that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect”.

You may disagree that Comey has “exceptional intellect,” but he’s certainly an intelligent man, and a willful one.

Obama: if women ruled the world

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Obama:

If women ran every country in the world there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former US President Barack Obama has said.

Speaking in Singapore, he said women aren’t perfect, but are “indisputably better” than men.

I wonder whether Obama ever was involved in an organization run by women. I have been, several times, and my experience of such groups has been that they have involved incompetence and pettiness. Does that mean that always happens? I don’t know, but I can hereby say that in my life, men have been far better at running things.

And I’m a woman, in case you can’t see the photo for some reason. I don’t hate women – some of my best friends are, and all that – but I’ll tell you one huge pet peeve of mine: anyone saying that if women ran the world it would be a better place. I see zero evidence of that. I bring you as Exhibits A and B, Theresa May and Angela Merkel (then again, Margaret Thatcher was pretty good at “running” the UK – although I suppose Obama wouldn’t agree).

In fact, over the years I have often challenged people who tell me that if women ran things it would be better. The people who have said that to me have usually been women – but as Obama has demonstrated, the speakers are sometime men. I usually begin my response by mentioning my own experience, and asking them if they have ever been employed by or volunteered in or dealt with an agency or group run by women, and how did it go? The answer is rarely “really, really well.”

But I don’t like to generalize about what women would do in positions of power vs. what men would do. I think I was careful not to do so here, either, or in those discussions. I speak of my own experience not to say that it would always be the case that such organizations are a mess, but to say that my experience certainly disproves the idea that women necessarily are better at this sort of thing than men.

In fact, generalizing about such things is a subset of generalizing about what a particular person – an individual – would do based on his or her membership in a group, be it sex or race or religion or anything else. I hate such generalizing and try to evaluate each person on his or her own character and accomplishments. That used to be the thing we strove for in this country, remember? It’s not all that popular an approach now, is it?

Obama also said most of the problems in the world came from old people, mostly men, holding onto positions of power. Ha ha! He really must not like Joe Biden, I guess – or Bernie Sanders, or Mike Bloomberg. We already know he doesn’t like Trump.

And of course, Obama himself is starting to verge on – old. He’s 58, which to me is still a youngish person, but in a year and a half he’ll turn 60, which is starting to get up there.

Of course, Obama’s not clinging to power, bitterly or otherwise. Right? Right? Or perhaps he’s paving the way for his wife Michelle’s entry into the fray? I’ve never seen her as inclined in that direction, but I suppose anything’s possible in this 2020 campaign, with its terrible Democratic field.