But my question is: how would they know?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Flynn case issues
Way back in 1996, when the Trump presidency was in the two-decades-distant future, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had this to say:
The prospect remains that an overzealous prosecutor or investigator — aware that a person has committed some suspicious acts, but unable to make a criminal case — will create a crime by surprising the suspect, asking about those acts, and receiving a false denial…
…[Law’s] encompassing formulation arms Government agents with authority not simply to apprehend lawbreakers, but to generate felonies, crimes of a kind that only a Government officer could prompt.
She certainly was correct. But I wonder what she’d be saying now.
At any rate, we’re in the situation in which government officials are creating crimes (or alleged crimes) that would otherwise not occur, and using them for political destruction.
No more taxpayer-funded settlements for sexual harassment claims against members of Congress
In the light of allegations from the left that Trump’s payments to Stormy Daniels vie Michael Cohen constituted a campaign law violation, this news is deeply ironic:
Now Congress has agreed on a bill that members of Congress will be responsible for their own settlements instead of the tax payer. As of now, “settlements are paid through taxpayer-funded accounts members use to pay for office salaries and expenses.”
Hmmm—wouldn’t all of this be campaign finance violations, if Trump’s was?
Just about everyone I’ve read on the subject of this bill applauds the change. It makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, why should taxpayers foot the bill for the sexual indiscretions of the powerful members of Congress?
No reason except—except—there’s the problem of the power of false accusations What percentage of accusations are valid and what percentage false I do not know, but I do know that false allegations can crush someone politically and financially. I believe that was probably at least part of the reason for the establishment of the Congressional slush fund in the first place. Without it, I fear that the prospect of financial and personal ruin for a politician when facing such allegations constitutes even greater motivation to make them.
In the real world of politics and of business and of life in general, payments are often made in settlements of the sort even when claims are baseless. Payments do not constitute recognition of guilt. With the slush fund, the payments made constituted a motivation for false accusations, and without the slush fund, the same is true. But without the fund, the prospect of ruin for a politician is greater whether the accusations are true or whether they are false.
Maybe some commenter who knows more than I do about how this would work can see a flaw in my reasoning. I’d like for the new bill to solve the problem, but I just don’t see it doing so at all.
More here:
The legislation would hold members of Congress personally liable for awards and settlements that stem from acts of harassment and related retaliation they personally commit. There would also be a preliminary review of the merits of the claim by a hearing officer. Those elements, some of which already apply to House members, would also apply to members who have left Congress.
“We are shifting the balance of power to more clearly protect the victim and create a more level operating place,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D., Calif.), who has been one of the biggest advocates for the reforms on Capitol Hill.
Who are these “hearing officers” and what standards will they be using? We already know what happened on campuses. I’m not a big one for special protection for members of Congress, and I certainly am aware that sexual harassment is a big problem in politics. But I’m also aware of the potential for false allegations, and the many motives to make them: politics, revenge, money, fifteen minutes of fame, he/said she/said misunderstandings, and there are probably some others I’ve left out.
The Weekly Standard is no more
Before I had my political change, I wasn’t particularly aware of which periodicals and newspapers were on the right. I knew of a couple—the WSJ and the Manchester Union Leader, for example. I knew who William F. Buckley was from TV rather than print, and maybe if you’d said “National Review” to me I could have identified it as being on the right. But then again, maybe not.
And that was about it.
One of the consequences of my political change was that I became familiar with the political stance of different media outlets—newspapers, magazines, and TV stations—to which I’d previously not paid all that much attention. The Weekly Standard was one, as well as National Review and Commentary, which I thought of as the Big Three of non-newspaper print journalism on the right.
Two are still standing, in one form or another. One just bit the dust: the Weekly Standard. Most commentators seem to think it’s because it fell into a very deep and monomaniacal NeverTrump hole, much deeper than either of the others. But I noticed its decline even before that, although I can’t put my finger on exactly when it began. However, I also think the fact that it ultimately turned into a bunch of Captain Ahabs pursuing the Trump White Whale probably hastened its demise.
Prior to that, however, the Weekly Standard had long been kind to me, as was Bill Kristol. So although my own connection with them ended several years ago, I have a soft spot in my heart for them (my favorite piece of the ones I wrote for them is this).
I don’t think the end of the magazine is a good sign for the right. But I admit I stopped reading the publication years ago, not just because I didn’t agree with them—although I definitely have often disagreed with them—but because they became one-note, uninteresting, and unedifying.
Ocasio-Cortez for president…
Hey, why not? What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, and if she’s not old enough—and she’s not—it’s time to “fix” the Constitution. Writes Yglesias:
The constitutional prohibition on people under the age of 35 serving as president is just one of these weird lacuna that was handed down to us from the 18th century but that nobody would seriously propose creating today if not for status quo bias. Realistically, most people that young would simply have a hard time winning an election. But if you can pull it off, you should be allowed. And I kind of think she should run for president.
Yglesias acknowledges that it’s difficult to do the “fixing” via constitutional amendment. But he thinks we should try, so that hosts of young people who’ve never done much of anything in life except be students should get to head a country.
I wonder, though, why Yglesias is so keen on Ocasio-Cortez herself running. Does he think she would win? Does he hope she would win? Wouldn’t it be nice if she actually took some sort of office first? The new Congress hasn’t even been sworn in yet.
At least Obama had had a career as state senator and a couple of years as US senator before becoming president. And although Donald Trump never held office prior to becoming president, no one can deny that he had a long long career being in charge of many things in the business world.
However, it’s no surprise that Yglesias would champion the cause of youth doing whatever it wants in terms of running for office with no restrictions. A Harvard alum who majored in philosophy, Yglesias began his own career as a blogger while still a college undergrad. And he’s done nothing but write ever since. He’s now reached the advanced age of 37, making him almost geriatric—and able to run for president under the present rules.
But there’s more. Yglesias went further in a tweet than he did in his Vox article:
AOC should run for president and dare the Supreme Court to stop her imo. https://t.co/TSviLpL1qJ
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 12, 2018
And of course Ocasio-Cortez—about whom one can say many things, but one of them wouldn’t be that she’s too humble—had already weighed in on the topic:
PHOTOG: “You can’t even run for president for another six years.”
AOC: “No, not for a long time. Thank God. Although we’ve been joking that because the Equal Rights Amendment hasn’t been passed yet, the Constitution technically says he cannot run unless he’s 35. … So what we’ll do is we’ll force the Republican Party to pass the Equal Rights Amendment by threatening to run for president.”
PHOTOG: “That is awesome. All the people who say a literal interpretation of the Constitution is the only thing you should be paying attention to.”
AOC: “Exactly, all those Constitutionalists, I will keep vigilance.”
— NOTE: The Constitution does not say “he”. It says “any person.”
That exchange appears to be some sort of joke by Ocasio-Cortez. But I have little doubt that if she thought there was a chance of her running she would do so. Ocasio-Cortez is a potent combination of overwhelming ego, attractive physicality, ignorant youth, and doctrinaire ends-justify-means leftism, and if she ever did have much power I believe she would happily and enthusiastically take her administration in the direction of Venezuela’s Chavez or worse.
How Michael Flynn was set up by the FBI
Here’s how lawfare works when the FBI wants to get you:
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who arranged the bureau’s interview with then-national security adviser Michael Flynn at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017 — the interview that ultimately led to Flynn’s guilty plea on one count of making false statements — suggested Flynn not have a lawyer present at the session, according to newly-filed court documents. In addition, FBI officials, along with the two agents who interviewed Flynn, decided specifically not to warn him that there would be penalties for making false statements because the agents wanted to ensure that Flynn was “relaxed” during the session.
The new information, drawn from McCabe’s account of events plus the FBI agents’ writeup of the interview — the so-called 302 report — is contained in a sentencing memo filed Tuesday by Flynn’s defense team…
In one striking detail, footnotes in the Flynn memo say the 302 report cited was dated Aug. 22, 2017 — nearly seven months after the Flynn interview. It is not clear why the report would be written so long after the interview itself.
The stench of FBI misconduct is pretty strong.
By the way, in case you don’t know what I meant by the word “lawfare” in that first sentence, here’s the definition:
Lawfare is a form of war consisting of the use of the legal system against an enemy, such as by damaging or delegitimizing them, tying up their time or winning a public relations victory.
There are many forms the war against Donald Trump has been taking, but lawfare is a very big part of it. The objectives are many: incarceration at some future date, and/or removal from office, and/or disgrace, and/or loss of support from Republicans, and/or electoral loss for Trump and/or Republicans in general, and/or sowing fear in the hearts of anyone who might be tempted to work for the Trump administration.
Any weapon in the legal arsenal is favored and approved, but the following have been especially in evidence lately: interviews leading to the charge of what’s called “process” crimes (such as lying to the FBI, a crime caused by the investigation itself even though no underlying crime has occurred to justify the investigation); and charging Trump officials and/or associates with crimes that are ordinarily either not considered crimes or not charged as such (see this).
The primary goal is not to convict the likes of Flynn or even the far less sympathetic figures of Cohen or Manafort. They are merely collateral damage along the way. The real aim is to get them to turn on Trump and offer red-meat information (even false information) that will help to impeach or otherwise harm him politically.
I’ve been writing about this sort of thing a great deal lately, and it’s not just because of Trump. It’s because this sort of lawfare against political opponents harms us all, both actually and potentially. It’s one of the main ways a country goes down the tubes. “The ends don’t justify the means” is a saying that’s often been violated, and that violation seems to me to be happening more and more and more in this country as time goes on, and is being justified by an increasing number of people.
[ADDENDUM: See also this article for further information on the dates of the FBI’s 302 reports on the Flynn interview.]
Mark Levin on the SDNY case against Trump for campaign violations
Here’s the law, according to Mark Levin. But there’s no guarantee whatsoever that the rule of law will prevail, when partisan politics are involved (which is just about all the time, lately).
Levin makes five main points. The first is this:
A sitting president CANNOT be indicted. That’s official DOJ policy since 1973.
And yet, “policy’ can be changed if the desire is strong enough. This is one reason, however, why it was probably quite important to Trump to get someone as AG who would be a stronger force than Sessions ever was.
Levin’s second point:
SDNY is NOT expert in campaign finance violations and neither is the Clinton appointed district judge. They rarely handle campaign finance cases. The left-wing media and politicians are regurgitating what the prosecutors have merely filed in their own self-serving brief. The media and others intentionally refuse to look at the actual rules and context. They refuse to even question what these prosecutors have thrown together.
Of course. Why would the MSM question something that makes Trump sound bad?
Point three:
The actual campaign rules and context do NOT include Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) or infinite other contracts, payments, arrangements, acts of a private nature, etc. as campaign contributions. This is normal human behavior and was never intended to be regulated or reported. SDNY is dead wrong.
Ordinarily these things are standard operating procedure, and certainly Trump would have been well within his rights (and Cohen too, for that matter) in thinking the payments were not a legal problem.
Point four:
[SDNY prosecutors] knew they couldn’t charge a sitting president. Thus, they convict the president in the press, not only an extreme act of professional misconduct but a violation of the very purpose of the DOJ memos banning the indictment of a sitting president while effectively indicting him in the court of public opinion, and watch as untold numbers of media personalities and former members of the SDNY, among others, use this dirty work to predict or demand the president’s indictment and/or impeachment.
That’s something I’ve written about before, most recently here. Many others have made the same point, which is rather obvious actually.
Levin’s fifth point:
As for impeachment, NDAs involving wholly private matters occurring before the president was even a candidate and completely unrelated to his office cannot legitimately trigger the Constitution’s impeachment clause. Indeed, they could not be more irrelevant. The history of the clause and its ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ language make it crystal clear that the office and the president’s duties are not affected in any conceivable way by these earlier private contracts.
True but irrelevant. Members of the House can impeach a president for anything it wants and call the offense a “high crime and misdemeanor,” as long as they’ve got the votes for it.
The fanatics of food
When a link to this Atlantic article came to me through Pocket (which thinks it knows what I might like to read and is often right on the money), the title put me off. It’s called “Eating Toward Immortality,” and since not a single one of us is the least bit immortal, what could that title possibly mean?
But the futility of trying to eat as though diet could make a person immortal is pretty much the point of the piece (which is oldish; it’s from February of 2017). But its futility doesn’t stop the effort from being intense:
Today’s token foods of health may seem tainted or passé tomorrow, and within diet culture, there are contradictory ideologies: what is safe and clean to one is filth and decadence to another. Legumes and grains are wholesome, life-giving staples to many vegan eaters, while they represent the corrupting influences of agriculture on the state of nature to those who prefer a meat-heavy, grain-free Paleo diet.
Nutrition science itself is a self-correcting series of refutations. There is no certain path to purity and blamelessness through food. The only common thread between competing dietary ideologies is the belief that by adhering to them, one can escape the human condition, and become a purer, less animal, kind of being.
This is why arguments about diet get so vicious, so quickly. You are not merely disputing facts, you are pitting your wild gamble to avoid death against someone else’s. You are poking at their life raft. But if their diet proves to be the One True Diet, yours must not be. If they are right, you are wrong. This is why diet culture seems so religious. People adhere to a dietary faith in the hope they will be saved. That if they’re good enough, pure enough in their eating, they can keep illness and mortality at bay. And the pursuit of life everlasting always requires a leap of faith.
To eat without restriction, on the other hand, is to risk being unclean, and to beat your own uncertain path. It is admitting your mortality, your limitations and messiness as a biological creature, while accepting the freedoms and pleasures of eating, and taking responsibility for choosing them.
Now that we have so much abundance, many of us have come to feel bad about that abundance and those choices. We are exhorted to make not just good choices or better choices, but the perfect choices for health and for the environment, without even knowing what the best choices would be, and often denying ourselves the delectable pleasures that beckon from every grocery shelf, every magazine, and every street.
Another Christmas market terrorist attack
This time it’s in Strasbourg, but the m.o. is very familiar:
At least two people have been killed and several others injured as a suspected extremist opened fire near the iconic Christmas market in Strasbourg.
Extremist=Islamicist terrorist.
…[T]wo people were killed in the attack and one was left brain-dead. Twelve were wounded, six seriously.
The gunman remained at large and was being hunted by police after being injured in an exchange of gunfire with a soldier before reportedly escaping in a hijacked taxi.
The suspect is another “known wolf,” a homegrown one (born in Strasbourg) named Cherif Chekatt:
The 29-year-old Chekatt has a lengthy criminal record with 27 offenses and has previously served jail time in France, Germany, and Switzerland.
Chekatt was radicalized in prison and was monitored by French intelligence services since his release in late 2015 on suspicion he was a religious extremist, the AP reported, citing a French interior ministry official…
Witnesses told police the suspect yelled “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) as he fired into the crowd near the Christmas market shortly before 8 p.m. local time (2 p.m. ET).
The pattern is the same as in the past. The only variations on the theme seem to be whether the terrorists are citizens or recent arrivals.
Michael Cohen sentenced to 3 years
The fixer couldn’t fix it for himself:
Before leveling his sentence, Judge William Pauley said “Cohen pled guilt to a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct” and “lost his moral compass,” adding that “as a lawyer, Mr. Cohen should have known better.”
That’s a little bit humorous, considering the reputation lawyers have for moral compasses.
The “smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct” that the judge references doesn’t seem all that varied to me, as smorgasbords go: tax evasion, making false statements to a financial institution, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress.
Before [the] ruling was issued, Cohen had pleaded for leniency, accusing President Trump – his former boss – of causing him to “follow a path of darkness rather than light” and “cover up his dirty deeds.” Cohen’s attorney, Guy Petrillo, argued that Cohen “came forward to offer evidence against the most powerful person in the country.”
Without Trump, Cohen no doubt would have stayed pure as the driven snow. And I wouldn’t exactly say that Cohen “came forward.” I seem to recall a fairly forceful series of moves by law enforcement to seize his records and then squeeze him to implicate that supposedly “most powerful person in the country” in crimes that could then be used to impeach him.
Although Cohen wasn’t forthcoming with the much-sought-after unequivocally-smoking gun, the legal case against Cohen may have yielded enough ammunition to allow for an impeachment vote in the House. Of course, now that it’s controlled by Democrats, the Cohen case really wasn’t needed, since impeachment is one of those “where there’s a will, there’s a way” processes.
As for Cohen’s helpfulness:
Cohen “didn’t come anywhere close to assisting this office in an investigation,” Roos [a prosecutor with the Southern District of New York] told the court, adding, “the charges portray a pattern of deception, of brazenness and of greed.”
That doesn’t indicate that we should have a lot of trust in Cohen’s veracity, does it? The case against Trump for the Stormy Daniels payments rests mostly, as far as I can tell, on Cohen’s word (plus some very convoluted and suspect legal theories). The court is saying Cohen’s word is meaningless and/or untrustworthy. But if they ever try to convict Trump of campaign finance violations (which they can’t do until he leaves office, and a statute of limitations kicks in if he is re-elected), they’ve already discredited their own star witness.
For now, anyway.
And lest we forget:
If the SDNY is right, how come none of the members of Congress have been charged with felonies by the United States attorney in D.C.? They use tax dollars to buy silence, which was approved by the Ethics Committee. Essentially, there’s a slush fund of tax dollars. They were active members of Congress. The deals were made while they were public officials.
The weakness of Theresa May’s position…
[See UPDATE at end of post.]
…is described here:
Only days ago, May had to withdraw a vote on her Brexit Withdrawal Agreement from Parliament because it was universally recognized that she would lose it. Bear in mind that this vote was to confirm her signal achievement, which she has spent the last two years negotiating and promoting, undistracted by any significant success or even aspiration on other issues. Moreover, she is opposed on it by four-fifths of Tory supporters in the country on it. Her attempt to salvage the Withdrawal Agreement internationally by a tour of European capitals since Monday has been a complete failure. And Tories in Parliament are in disarray and semi-rebellion. It should be curtains for May.
And yet she may win the vote and hang on, considerably weakened. The results of the vote should be available soon, at which point I plan to update this post.
UPDATE 4:20 PM:
May lives to fight another day. Here’s how the vote went:
[The 200 to 117 vote] buys her time: The Prime Minister’s victory protects her from another leadership challenge from within her own party for 12 months.
But the result will not offer any assurances to the Prime Minister’s supporters that she is able to get her all-important Brexit deal through the UK’s Parliament.
In that first article, written before the vote, the author points out:
Yet as Tory MPs go into the committee room to cast their votes tonight, she is a firm favorite to survive. That may surprise you, but it’s happened before. When John Major called a confidence vote on himself in order to quell widespread discontent on the Tory benches, commentators warned that he was a deadweight on Tory hopes of reelection and that MPs who backed him would be turkeys voting for Christmas. But the turkeys voted for Christmas nonetheless, and Christmas promptly arrived in the form of Tony Blair’s 1997 Labour landslide, which cut the number of Tory turkeys in Parliament down to a low of 197. That experience does not seem to be deterring May’s supporters, however.
So this could ultimately backfire on the Tories.
The Nebra sky disk and a rather unusual plea bargain
I’d never heard of the Nebra sky disk before, but it’s really quite lovely. 1600 BC is the approximate date of its construction, and I can see why it was originally thought to be a forgery. But it’s not:
The disk, two bronze swords, two hatchets, a chisel, and fragments of spiral bracelets were discovered in 1999 by Henry Westphal and Mario Renner while they were treasure-hunting with a metal detector. Archaeological artifacts are the property of the state in Saxony-Anhalt. The hunters were operating without a license and knew their activity constituted looting and was illegal. They damaged the disk with their spade and destroyed parts of the site. The next day, Westphal and Renner sold the entire hoard for 31,000 DM to a dealer in Cologne. The hoard changed hands within Germany over the next two years, being sold for up to a million DM. By 2001 knowledge of its existence had become public. In February 2002 the state archaeologist Harald Meller acquired the disk in a police-led sting operation in Basel from a couple who had put it on the black market for 700,000 DM. The original finders were eventually traced. In a plea bargain, they led police and archaeologists to the discovery site. Archaeologists opened a dig at the site and uncovered evidence that supports the looters’ claims. There are traces of bronze artifacts in the ground, and the soil at the site matches soil samples found clinging to the artifacts. The disk and its accompanying finds are now held at the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle.
The two looters received sentences of four months and ten months, respectively, from a Naumburg court in September 2003. They appealed, but the appeals court raised their sentences to six and twelve months, respectively.
Here’s the disk:
