“But the Mueller report doesn’t exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice”

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the talking point from the Democrats right now. And to be blunt, it’s a crock.

It very much reminds me of the “Kavanaugh didn’t prove he didn’t molest Christine Blasey Ford” mutterings of outraged Democrats after the attack on Kavanaugh fell though. But you can’t prove a negative. In law, there’s either evidence to sustain a charge or no evidence. Exoneration only can occur if you’re talking about something on the order of obtaining a video of the real perpetrator murdering the victim, or the fingerprints on the murder weapon being analyzed and found to belong to an entirely different person than the accused.

That sort of exonerating evidence simply is not possible in a case like this. And those who use the “it doesn’t exonerate him” reasoning as a talking point know full well it’s the case, and that what they’re saying is an aburdity. They just hope their intended audience can’t figure that out.

I wrote all of the above a moment ago, and just now I heard this from Rudy Giuliani. The whole thing is well worth listening to, but note what he says starting at around 9:50 (I’m putting it on a page that requires a click to get to it, because the video is one of those autoplay things that I detest): Continue reading →

Barr’s statement on the Mueller investigation

The New Neo Posted on by

Summary of Barr’s summary:

No further indictments recommended, no non-public indictments.

“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

No conclusion by Mueller one way or the other as to obstruction of justice. But Barr and Rosenstein find no evidence to support charge of obstruction of justice.

That should be it, lights out on the accusations that have followed Trump like a shadow for his entire presidency.

But of course for the left it’s mere fodder for more innuendos and more investigations.

This is the part of Barr’s letter to which the left will desperately cling in order to salvage some shred of their original hopes and dreams re the investigation and Trump’s contemplated and eagerly-anticipated downfall:

In making this determination, we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference,” and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction. Generally speaking, to obtain and sustain an obstruction conviction, the government would need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person, acting with corrupt intent, engaged in obstructive conduct with a sufficient nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding. In cataloguing the President’s actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct, had a nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent, each of which, under the Department’s principles of federal prosecution guiding charging decisions, would need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to establish an obstruction-of justice.

Trump tweets:

All the Tonys and Marias

The New Neo Posted on by

Of all the marvelous songs in the marvelous “West Side Story,” perhaps the most famous is “Maria.” Although it’s a great great song, it’s not my absolute favorite from the show, although I’d be hard-pressed to name my favorite because there are so many contenders.

“Maria” is not an easy song to sing, either. I’ve seen good singers struggle with it. Some of them are opera singers, who like to give “Maria” a go and often sound very beautiful.

But to me the greatest performer of the song was the original, Larry Kert. You may never have heard of him because they deemed him too old for the movie and instead chose (the to me forgettable) Richard Beymer, who had to be dubbed.

Fortunately, through the magic of YouTube, we have a film of the leads from the original stage version, although this was apparently made about ten years later, in 1967. I won’t bore you once again with why I almost always prefer stage musicals to movie versions, but the staged “West Side Story” certainly falls into that group, although the movie version is one of the better efforts at the genre.

Here you see Kert and Carol Lawrence, the original Maria. First you will see Kert singing “Maria” and then the duet “Tonight.” Give him a moment, just wait till he gets to his upper register. I like this version not only because the original cast album was the one I knew in childhood, but because I think his less-operatic tone is both beautiful and more believable as Tony (unfortunately, the sound quality of the clip is a tiny bit funky):

Here’s Richard Beymer lip syncing in the movie. The dubbing is done pretty well,, but it still bothers me. Dubbing never looks quite right; the breath and force doesn’t match the sound somehow. A lot of people love this version, though, so I’m presenting it to you:

Here’s an exceedingly beautiful concert operatic version by Julian Ovenden. I prefer Kert, but I very much admire this, too. What a tone! I think it’s the best operatic version I’ve found so far:

Andrew C. McCarthy on full disclosure of the whole thing

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: expat.}

Andrew C. McCarthy writes (and please read the whole thing):

Trump antagonists [are now] clamoring for full disclosure of the special counsel’s final report. Mind you, when skeptics of the Trump-Russia investigation asked what the criminal predicate for it was, and on what basis the Obama administration had decided to monitor the opposition party’s presidential campaign, we were admonished about the wages of disclosure — the compromise of precious defense secrets, of deep-cover intelligence sources and methods. Why, to ask for such information was to be an insurrectionist seeking to destroy the FBI, the Justice Department, and the rule of law itself. Now, though, it’s only the uncharged president of the United States at issue, so disclose away!

Well, if we’re going to have disclosure, fine. But let’s have full disclosure: Mueller’s report in addition to the FISA applications; the memoranda pertinent to the opening and continuation of the investigation; the testimony in secret hearings; the scope memorandum Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein issued on August 2, 2017, after failing to cite a crime when he appointed Mueller — let’s have all of it…

The Justice Department and FBI did not need a special counsel to conduct a counterintelligence investigation of Russia, or a criminal investigation of, say, Michael Flynn or Paul Manafort…The president is not above the law, and if there is evidence that he committed a crime, he should be investigated. But there has to be evidence that he committed a crime.

There wasn’t…

In sum, we have endured a two-year ordeal in which the president of the United States was forced to govern under a cloud of suspicion — suspicion of being a traitor, of scheming with a foreign adversary to steal an election. This happened because the Obama administration — which opened the probe of the Trump campaign, and which opted to use foreign counterintelligence spying powers rather than give Trump a defensive briefing about suspected Russian infiltration of his campaign — methodically forced its suspicions about Trump into the public domain.

It is not just that FISA warrants were sought on the basis of the Steele dossier, an uncorroborated Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed that the Obama Justice Department and FBI well knew was being peddled to the media at the same time. There was a patently premeditated stream of intelligence leaks depicting a corrupt Trump-Russia arrangement.

After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, Obama, after doing virtually nothing about Russian aggression for most of eight years, suddenly made a show of issuing sanctions, seizing Russian assets, and expelling Russian operatives. He then rushed the completion of an intelligence assessment that would ordinarily have taken months to complete, so that it would be issued on his watch; and presto: The public was told not only that Russia interfered in the campaign, but that Russia did so because Putin was trying to get Trump elected…

The intelligence assessment provided Obama’s intelligence agencies with a pretext to brief President-elect Trump on the Steele dossier. That, in turn, gave the media — previously skittish about the dossier’s sensational, unverified allegations — exactly the news hook they needed to publish it. Weeks later, as the FBI continued relying on the unverified Steele dossier in FISA-warrant applications, the FBI director, in public testimony, not only disclosed the existence of a classified counterintelligence investigation but gratuitously added that Trump’s campaign was a subject of the probe and that an assessment would be made of whether any crimes were committed — signaling to the world that Trump was a suspect in what would be, if proved, one of the most heinous crimes in American history. Then, finally, more leaks to the media triggered the appointment of a special counsel in the absence of actual evidence that the president had committed a crime.

You want disclosure? Me too. But let’s see all of it.

If you’re in the habit of sending articles to friends who might not agree with you politically, and if you have any friends open to reading such things, this piece of McCarthy’s might be a good one to send them.

After Mueller: what now?

The New Neo Posted on by

I just published a post that reflects my belief that the left and other Trump-haters (as opposed to mere Trump-critics) won’t be able to stop going down the road they’ve been on ever since Trump became president.

But there is another way they could go, at least theoretically:

I think trout will swim down Great Ormond Street (see reference) before those who’ve been beating and beating this drum will ever admit to wrongdoing or even error. But I guess we’ll see. In the meantime we have:

As for those who actually perpetrated the mess, those in the FBI and DOJ and Steele and others instrumental in spinning the web of intrigue, they should pay in some way but will they? The American public has been steeped in outrages, like the metaphorical frog in boiling water, and perhaps it has grown indifferent to such things. However:

Now, Mueller’s investigations leave one major mission unfinished: meting out justice to the intelligence, congressional, FBI and DOJ officials who appear to have used a political dirty trick to falsely weave an unproven narrative of Russia collusion.

Unverified political opposition research never should be treated as actionable intelligence or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) evidence, as it was in this case.

Just hours before Mueller’s report arrived, new evidence emerged of just how egregious the FBI acted in the early days of the Russia probe.

Fox News’s brilliant reporter Catherine Herridge obtained new text messages Friday showing Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and his chief lawyer, Lisa Page, were discussing credibility issues and “bias” about a key human source whose work was to support the FISA warrant used to first spy on the Trump campaign in October 2016.

Those credibility issues likely were hidden from the judges who approved the warrant of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page). As I have reported, the FBI also possesses emails showing concerns with the evidence it was going to use to support the FISA warrant.

The article goes on to list some of the other important failures to disclose in the application for the FISA warrant, which is required to disclose any exculpatory evidence and yet did not. Then:

Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.

An upcoming DOJ inspector general’s report should trigger the beginning of that accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials.

I wouldn’t suggest sitting on a hot stove till that happens, though.

I keep wondering what the political fallout of this will be. Will it cause a significant number of voters who still trust the media and the Democrats to turn on either or both? I simply don’t know. I will say that I’ve long been impressed (and I don’t mean that in a good way) by the ability of most people to stick to their beliefs in the face of what would seem overwhelming evidence that they need to make a change.

The never-ending Mueller investigation ends, but once the needle goes in…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it never comes out.

The Russian collusion allegations have gone on about as long as the Trump presidency, the Mueller investigation nearly as long. These things, and the hopes they both reflect and engender, have sustained the left and never-Trumpers of all parties for a long long time. They are like a drug, and as with any drug, one can become addicted or at least dependent.

An addiction begins to end when the drug is withdrawn, but the addict can and often does substitute another. Democrats have been preparing the new drug, much like the old one: Congressional investigations. And if the Mueller report isn’t released to the public they will say there is something (or perhaps many things) that is being hidden, something important. If it is released to the public they will comb through it, much as they did with Sarah Palin’s garbage, looking for a smoking gun (mixed metaphor, I know) or at least a faint whiff of smoke. No doubt they will find something to feed their habit.

They don’t just believe Trump is guilty; they know he’s guilty. And if he’s guilty, what difference does it make if he was framed? And if the frame doesn’t work, keep looking for the real crime they absolutely know is there. And if they can’t find it, try another game of innuendo and smear. They are doing noble work.

Yes, I know that some are operating even more cynically than that. This latter group doesn’t believe Trump is really guilty of anything except some marital infidelities, having a big mouth, winning an election he should have lost, and trying to dismantle the structure they’re carefully built up for a long long time. But there are a goodly number who are convinced, even now, that Trump is the most uniquely evil man to ever hold the presidency, right up there with the demonic tyrants of history, and must be stopped.

Nope, no emergency at all

The New Neo Posted on by

At the border:

Deportation officers are cutting loose more than 1,000 illegal immigrant family members a day, setting them free into border states as the surge of migrations overwhelms the government’s ability to handle them, officials revealed Thursday.

Over the last three months, about 107,000 family members were caught at the border and then released, with ankle monitoring devices or check-in schedules and the often vain hope that they will show up for their court hearings and deportation.

Worse yet, officials say, they have had to pull deportation officers off duty in prisons and jails, where they were arresting criminal migrants, and deployed them to the border to help the Border Patrol release all the families.

“The current crisis that is occurring at the southwest border, the numbers that we collectively as a nation are seeing … is absolutely unprecedented,” said Nathalie R. Asher, acting executive associate director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation division.

I suppose that those who advocate for illegal immigrants will find these statistics non-alarming, perhaps even pleasing. I don’t think the majority of Americans—and that includes legal Hispanic immigrants—would be any too pleased about the same developments. But I’m not at all sure the news will reach most of them.

And if it does, the left has an answer:

Immigrant advocates suggested the releases were intended to sow confusion at the border and further President Donald Trump’s argument that there is a national emergency there.

“They are doing this deliberately so they can release a ton of people at once and create chaos,” said Efren Olivares, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, which sent lawyers to the McAllen bus station to monitor developments. “The government is trying to do this.”

The election of 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I don’t have a crystal ball, and I’m not going to predict a winner. Hey, I don’t even know which Democrat is likely to be the nominee. And a lot can happen in the world between now and Election Day 2020.

But I will say this: if Trump ends up being re-elected, the Democrats will go stark raving mad. I know, I know; you think they already have, but believe me you ain’t seen nothing yet compared to what would be likely to happen if Trump wins a second term.

And if he were to win a second term by winning in the Electoral College and losing the popular vote once again, the Democrats will go stark raving mad squared.

I will make another prediction: Democrats will do what they can, legal and/or illegal, to make sure that Trump loses by such huge margins in blue states and blue cities, that even if he wins the Electoral College he will lose the popular vote and give them a talking point for abolishing the Electoral College.

We were very fortunate in 2004 that it wasn’t a repeat of 2000 and all the fallout from the fact that in 2000 not only did Bush win without winning the popular vote, but the Electoral College votes were balanced on a razor-thin edge that required SCOTUS intervention. In 2004, Bush won not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote, and although the election was close it was not so close as to be disputed in any real way.

The closer that elections are—and many in recent years have been exceedingly close—and the more often a Republican wins without the popular vote, the more motivation there is for the Democrats to advocate abolition of the Electoral College (see this). It’s not rocket science; it’s logical.

And since for the most part the Democrats control the voting in our biggest cities—not only because they have such large margins in those cities but because the entire apparatus of each city is set up by Democrats—if they want to skew things even further towards larger Democratic majorities through their rules about voting, or if they want to conveniently “find” more votes if they need them, or to allow vote “harvesting” and the like, they can do it fairly easily because of that control. And the more that votes in blue cities in blue states get skewed towards more and more votes for Democrats, the more the popular vote will swell for the Democratic presidential candidate without the Electoral College being affected, and the more likely it will be that even if the Republican nominee wins in the Electoral College, he or she will lose the popular vote. This would give the Democrats talking points galore for its abolition.

Musings on the Electoral College

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “titan28” wrote:

It’s depressing that so many Republicans don’t understand the brilliance behind the electoral college mechanism in voting for a chief executive. The Founders at no time believed in the wisdom of direct democracy. The electoral college was and remains an excellent hedge.

And commenter “Art Deco” wrote in response:

There’s nothing brilliant about it. It was a compromise between competing plans. It’s a convention and that’s all.

In the rest of the comment, Art Deco is not advocating its abolition. However, I take issue with the idea expressed in the part I’ve excerpted. Compromises are not necessarily “conventions and that’s all.” The second does not follow inevitably from the first. Most compromises “between competing plans” contain elements of each plan, and these different plans have principles/visions/philosophies behind them. What’s more, compromises are not ordinarily just “two from Column A and two from Column B,” a pastiche of unrelated elements with no guiding principle behind that pastiche and the balance achieved (or not achieved, as the case may be).

In the case of the Electoral College, the compromise was between (among other things) the populist democrats (small d) and the federalist republicans (small r). It preserves the importance of states as entities, while giving states different weights, mostly but not entirely according to population. That’s a summary, of course, and there are a lot of other elements present today that differ from those the Founders were contending with—-such as, for instance, back then there was the need of the North to make sure the South’s disproportionate number of slaves didn’t give the South more power, and also voting was limited to white male property-owners. Federalism was also preserved more than it is today by the fact that senators were not chosen by popular vote.

Anyway, the Electoral College compromise was hardly meaningless, and abolishing it would mean that one side—the populist democracy side vs. the republic side—-has won. This would almost certainly have large consequences.

As Kevin D. Williamson wrote yesterday in National Review:

The American order is complex — it is much more sophisticated than “democracy,” which assumes that nothing stands between the individual and the national state except aggregation, that might (defined as 50 percent + 1) makes right. The American order is based on the idea that the United States consists of many different kinds of people in many different kinds of communities, and that each of these has interests that are legitimate even when they conflict with the equally legitimate interests of other communities. The densely populous urban mode of life is not the only mode of life, and the people of the urban areas are not entitled by their greater numbers to dominate their fellow citizens in the less populous rural areas.

The basic units of the United States are, as the name suggests, the several states. The states created the federal government, not the other way around. The states are not administrative subdivisions of the federal government, which is their instrument, not their master. In this, the United States is fundamentally different from countries such as the United Kingdom and Japan, which have unitary national governments under which provincial distinctions are largely irrelevant.

In our system, the states matter. Under the Democrats’ vision, some states matter: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio, which, without the institutions of federalism, have among them the numbers and the power to effectively dominate the rest of the country.

At the time of the Founding, the people of the smaller states did not desire to enter into a union in which they and their interests would be dominated by the larger ones. The people of the smaller states still do not wish to be politically dominated by the larger ones. For that reason, the interests of the states as such — not mere aggregates of voters — are taken into consideration. The Senate, as originally organized, existed to preserve the interests of the states as such against the opportunism and predation of the more populous House of Representatives — and against the ambitions of the executive, too. Turning the Senate into an inflated version of the House was one of the progressives’ first great victories against the Constitution of the United States and an important step toward the sort of mass democracy that our constitutional order is explicitly designed to prevent.

I wonder how many American voters these days are aware of any of this. And if the answer is “not too many,” that’s no accident. It behooves the left not to teach these things, or to only teach them as though the history was merely an effort by white men to screw everybody else.

Changing the rules of the American political game

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats have long been intent on trying to make sure that Republicans never win another election. Rather than figuring out how to do this through argument or through amassing a solid record of accomplishments, they have figured out that the best way to do this is to change the rules.

Change the rules about immigration, illegal immigration, and/or who can vote and at what age and how they must prove eligibility, so that voter demographics favor Democrats more and more strongly. Abolish the Electoral College. And my current favorite, that oldie-but-goodie pack the Supreme Court:

…[S]everal presidential candidates are calling for an increase in the size of the Supreme Court. Nine justices are too few, apparently. In a proposal that seems straight out of the writers’ room at “The West Wing,” Beto O’Rourke wants the court apportioned by party, with five Democrats and five Republicans, and an extra five chosen by the 10 partisan ones.

Does anyone believe even for a nanosecond that if Hillary Clinton had been elected and had gotten to appoint the last two SCOTUS justices, that the Democrats would be floating that particular notion?

The Electoral College is unlikely to be abolished in the conventional way because of the large number of states that would have to agree. But some states have figured out a way around that, or at least they think they’re getting around it. The mechanism would be the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a dull (probably purposefully so) name for a fairly radical idea:

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome. As of March 2019, it has been adopted by twelve states and the District of Columbia. Together, they have 181 electoral votes, which is 33.6% of the Electoral College and 67.0% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.

Interestingly enough, the vast majority of voters of both parties seem to favor the abolition of the EC:

A 2007 poll found that 72% favored replacing the Electoral College with a direct election, including 78% of Democrats, 60% of Republicans, and 73% of independent voters. Gallup polls dating back to 1944 have shown a consistent majority of the public supporting a direct vote.

It’s not even a recent trend, so we really can’t attribute the idea to modern education. I think the reason for these poll findings is that the benefits of the EC are difficult to see (although I think they are strong enough that it should be kept) and the populist emotional reaction to it is much more readily provoked.

I also think it’s one of those “be careful what you wish for, Democrats” things. It would be kind of funny if the mainly Democratic states which have enacted this law find that, in some election or other, their electoral votes end up being cast for a Republican even though the state has voted for the Democrat.

The Democrats are no longer proposing any of this rule-changing in a subtle manner. They tested the waters, and for whatever reason they now believe that playing to their leftist base is the way to go. My guess is that this leftist base has become the majority of the party, and the benefits to be gained by such enormous and transformative rule changes are judged by Democrats to be well worth any risk entailed in showing just how radical they have become.

However, one of the results of these proposals by Democrats is that they have solidified the right and even some of the middle in opposition against them. For example:

I am a middle-of-the-road Republican who voted for Trump with the utmost reluctance in 2016. He sure wasn’t perfect. He was no Cicero, either––though he can give a decent speech when the chips are down. He had a few extra skeletons rattling in his closet, especially compared to colorless non-entities like Jeb. So yeah, I was queasy about voting for an ex-registered-Democrat-from-New-York-and-possible-liberal-now-turned-Republican.

Was I worried? Hell, yeah! Was I depressed? You bet. But, really, what options were there?…So I swallowed hard, took a leap of faith, and pulled the lever for the Donald.

That was then. This is now:

This gets us to the next installment of “Friday the 13th,” a.k.a. the Democratic presidential candidates. Kamala Harris, you say? You seriously want me to vote for Kamala Harris? And you say that Cory “Spartacus” Booker is just like Kamala, only better and balder? Are you kidding me? Pete Buttigieg? Ask me again when I stop laughing.

Bernie? Really? This grumpy near-octogenarian “public service” millionaire with three mansions is running for the presidency of the wrong country. All his best ideas have already been put into practice––in Venezuela…

Did someone say Warren? Warren, the first Cherokee candidate — that Warren? Doesn’t she now want reparations not just for African-Americans, but also for Native Americans? Where, oh where, is that lever to pull for Trump?…

…[W]e’ve got the triumvirate that truly runs the Democratic Party now––Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib. I see this nutterfest, and let me tell you, dear Democrats: I am motivated as hell. If ever given a choice (in this election or in other ones) between Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, Pelosi, Warren, Harris, Booker, Biden, Sanders, or Trump, I will take Trump any day of the week.

I am a highly motivated Trump voter because the Democrats have motivated me up to my eyeballs. I have never been more motivated in my life, because the Democrats are terrifying me. I am locked, cocked, and ready to rock in that voting booth. I just wish I didn’t have to wait 20 months.