The surprising heroes of the Kavanaugh fight

The New Neo Posted on by

So far we have:

Lindsey Graham
Mitch McConnell
Susan Collins

Collins was the goat until yesterday. But her speech made her the hero. I wonder whether she wrote it herself, and when. It sounded like it took a while to compose, and if so, then she’s been thinking “yes” on Kavanaugh for quite some time. I didn’t agree with everything she said—for example, I am much harder on Ford. But I think it was an excellent speech nonetheless, and all the more powerful for her being a woman from a blue-ish state, and for having a reputation as one of the most moderate people in the Senate.

Graham—well, Graham may have surprised even himself in this fight. But ever since I saw him speak at a small venue during the 2016 campaign, I’ve been impressed by his very well-developed sense of humor, which was on full display that day, and his sharp mind.

Ever since the Garland nomination it’s been clear that McConnell is very serious about getting people on the right on the Court. Very. But for years, people on the right have been criticizing him as an establishment squish, no different and no better than the Democrats. Not true, although he has his faults.

I said “surprising,” so I didn’t put Trump in there because his defense of Kavanaugh is unsurprising, although it certainly was necessary. And Kavanaugh himself perhaps should be listed, except that since we hardly knew him before this, we can’t be too surprised.

That’s not a trio that conservatives usually praise. But that’s the way this one played out, strangely enough. The Democrats’ conduct was so egregiously horrific that even those predisposed to reach across the aisle (Graham, Collins) felt as though their hands had been slapped, and they didn’t like it one little bit.

Of course, the fat lady has not sung yet.

What was the role of Monica McLean?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”]

Quite a few commenters have referenced stories circulating about the role of Christine Blasey Ford’s lifelong chum Monica McLean in this entire mess. McLean is a lawyer who spent a great deal of her working life with the FBI, and the person named by Ford’s ex-boyfriend as the friend Ford helped take a polygraph long ago (something McLean has denied).

I have no idea what the extent of McLean’s role in the anti-Kavanaugh campaign has been, but here’s an article summarizing the speculations and allegations.

In addition, I read this today about the testimony of Leland Keyser, another high school friend of Ford’s, during the latest FBI investigation of Kavanaugh [emphasis mine]:

Ford identified Leland Ingham Keyser, a former classmate, as having attended a house party Maryland in the early 1980s, in which she accused Kavanaugh of pinning her to a bed, attempting to remove her clothes and putting his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.

Keyser originally said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 23 she “does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present.” After Kavanaugh and Ford testified in front of the committee last week, Keyser wrote a letter to the committee dated Sept. 29 that said she did not refute Ford’s claims, but “is unable to corroborate it because she has no recollection of the incident in question,” according to CNN.

Keyser told the investigators that she was — as the Journal notes — urged to clarify her statement by Monica McLean, a former FBI agent and friend of Ford’s, the paper reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

McLean’s lawyer denied his client tried to influence Keyser to change her account, calling it “absolutely false.”…

A person close to the former classmates told the Journal she believed mutual friends of both Ford and Keyser – including McLean – simply reached out to Keyser to warn her that her statement was being used by Republicans as vindication for Kavanagh and if she felt she needed to clarify what she meant, she should. The person said the mutual friends did not “pressure” Keyser.

Well, at least not pressure-pressure.

Keyser may turn out to be the unsung heroine here. Even if these “mutual friends” were indeed just “reaching out” to Keyser to helpfully point out what she couldn’t possibly have known—and what should be irrelevant anyway—which is that her statements helped the Republican cause. Well, d—uh.

[NOTE: And then there’s this article which, if true, indicates that Christine Ford blindsided her BFF Leland Keyser and never warned her in advance that she would be naming her as witness. What’s more, they haven’t been good friends for years. Again, I’m not sure this is true, but if so, it certainly explains Ford’s viperish demeanor when questioned about Keyser, the affect I highlighted in this previous post, with video. I will add that I really don’t know how anyone could watch that segment and still be utterly convinced of Ford’s sincerity and truthfulness. To me, it was a big red flag about both.]

Cloture vote: 51-49

The New Neo Posted on by

Thanks to Harry Reid, the Democrats couldn’t filibuster.

Although you might say the last three weeks have been one long filibuster of sorts, of an especially pernicious kind.

At any rate, cloture was invoked this morning with 51 aye votes and 49 nay. Murkowski and Manchin were the only senators not voting along party lines, with Murkowski voting “no” and Manchin “yes.” This does not necessarily reflect the final vote, and I trust none of them, but it’s a promising sign.

The word on Senator Daines, who will be attending his daughter’s wedding on Saturday, is that somehow they’ll figure out a way to hold the vote at a time when he can be in the Senate, if needed.

I obviously hope that Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed and can put this nightmare behind him to whatever extent possible (perhaps Clarence Thomas can give him some advice on that). I hope that Christine Ford goes back to her surfing and her number-crunching and leaves the rest of us alone. I hope that Julie Swetnick is investigated and prosecuted if it can be proven she deliberately lied. I give kudos to the friends of both Christine Ford and Brett Kavanaugh who continued to say that nothing of the sort described by Ford ever came to their awareness, and didn’t bow to Democratic pressure whatever their party preference (and I believe that some of them are themselves Democrats).

And I hope that vast swaths of the American public has learned what kind of people the Democrats in Congress are, now that their masks have slipped even more.

I note that if Manchin votes “yes” in the final vote it will be because he sees that he must do so in order to have a chance of being re-elected. I see the other red state Democrats may have given up on their re-election chances, perhaps because the polls showed them losing even before the Kavanaugh brouhaha.

This has been one of the most depressing political events in America in my lifetime. My one consolation is that it seems to have done the impossible, at least temporarily: unite the GOP. It’s also made Lindsey Graham a hero in the eyes of those on the right who previously despised him, and gotten Bret Stephens to praise President Trump.

I doubt that those three achievements were the Democrats’ goals when Senator Feinstein first dropped Christine Blasey Ford’s letter on the world.

Speaking from experience: Carlson and Dershowitz on false accusations

The New Neo Posted on by

Alan Dershowitz doesn’t think anyone should go easy on Julie Swetnick if it turns out she lied and knew she was lying:

DERSHOWITZ: If you have information suggesting it’s false, and any reasonable lawyer hearing her on television says you can’t any longer accept what’s in that affidavit, she has to be investigated independently of the background check, criminally investigated to see if she deliberately and willfully, with or without the aid of anybody else, made a decision just to frame somebody for something that he had nothing to do with.

The evidence seems to suggest they never knew each other, they were years apart, they were operating in different circles. It wouldn’t surprise me if an FBI investigation proved they never met each other. And if that turns out to be the fact, she belongs in a court of law, being prosecuted with a presumption of innocence–

CARLSON: Yes.

DERSHOWITZ: –defender (ph). But if the evidence shows that she committed perjury, prison.

CARLSON: Wow.

DERSHOWITZ: You know why, because–

CARLSON: I do know why.

DERSHOWITZ: –it’s important to protect people against being raped, but it’s so important to protect people against being deliberately and willfully, falsely accused of rape. That is a very, very serious crime and we tend not to pay as much attention to false — deliberately false. I’m not talking about people make–

CARLSON: Oh I understand.

DERSHOWITZ: (inaudible). But deliberately false frame-ups of rape have to be taken seriously.

CARLSON: And they’re not, I happen to know.

Dershowitz continues to be one of the few—one of the very few—Democrats who applies what he calls (in that same interview) the “shoe on the other foot test”:

This is all about partisanship. If the opposite was happening, and if it was the Democrats who were putting up candidate, everybody would behave in the opposite way. And so it is partisanship and I think the framers of our Constitution never intended the confirmation process to look anything like this.

You may have noticed that at the end of that interview Tucker Carlson said “I happen to know.” What’s he referring to? He described it this way in November of 2017:

Not every accuser is telling the truth. I learned this the hard way a number of years ago when I was accused of felony rape by a woman I had literally never even seen.

She was a certified public accountant in Indiana and upstanding member of her community and also apparently delusional. Her claims were grotesque but they were highly specific. The assault she said took place in the back room of a restaurant in Louisville on a specific day at around 10:30 p.m.
She included loads of graphic and horrifying detail. It was stomach- turning.

And, yet, none of it, one of it was true. I spent the next two months trying to stay out of jail. I couldn’t tell my children because I knew they would be ashamed. I couldn’t tell my employer because I knew I would be fired immediately. I spoke only to lawyers and I paid them spent a fortune. I took a polygraph exam from the former head polygrapher at the FBI. I never stopped worrying that the charges would become public and destroy my life.

Everyone accused of sex offense did something wrong. Everybody knows that.

And I knew no one would believe otherwise.

And Dershowitz? Well, he might have talked about his own experience. Here’s what happened (from April of 2016):

A defamation case against high-profile attorney and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has been settled after two lawyers admitted it was a “mistake” to accuse him of having sex with a minor, their client.

In a statement issued on Friday, Paul G. Cassell and Bradley J. Edwards, lawyers for Virginia Roberts, the woman who alleged she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz and others, said they “acknowledge that it was a mistake to have filed sexual misconduct accusations against Dershowitz.”

“The sexual misconduct accusations made in all public filings…are hereby withdrawn. Dershowitz also withdraws his accusations that Edwards and Cassell acted unethically,” the statement reads,

Last January, Dershowitz filed a sworn statement in which he denied having sex with an underage girl while visiting the island of financier Jeffrey Epstein. Dershowitz was also accused of having sex with a minor on Epstein’s private plane. In that filing, Dershowitz said Jane Doe #3—later identified by Buckingham Palace officials as Roberts—was not on the plane or the island at the same time as him.

In a separate lawsuit, Cassell and Edwards sued Dershowitz for defamation after Dershowitz claimed the two attorneys failed to perform their due diligence when claiming their client, Roberts, was forced to have sex with Dershowitz.

“Edwards and Cassell vigorously denied the contention that they had acted improperly and asserted that it defamed them,” said a joint statement from Edwards, Cassell and Dershowitz, issued on Friday. “Dershowitz countersued Edwards and Cassell, alleging they had falsely accused him of sexual contact with Roberts—a claim he vigorously denied and that Dershowitz asserted defamed him.”

“I am pleased that the litigation has concluded,” Dershowitz said in a statement on Friday.

Did you remember that that little incident had happened to Dershowitz? I did, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t remember it. The reason is that none of it took place in the Senate with every media outlet riveted on the proceedings.

Dershowitz was also much more fortunate than Brett Kavanaugh in that the accusations against him were handled by the legal system. Same for Tucker Carlson, it seems. Brett Kavanaugh didn’t have that luxury in his own “job interview”-kangaroo-court-Kafkaesque trial-that-wasn’t-a-trial.

And now, finally, we get answers to the burning questions of our time

The New Neo Posted on by

See this:

The guy who created the Devil’s Triangle drinking game calls himself the “founder” of it in the yearbook, and a guy going to different college than Kavanaugh sent a sworn letter to the FBI states that Kavanaugh’s friend from high school taught him the Devil’s Triangle game, and it is in fact just quarters with three glasses.

Also, an old joke book about farts says that “boof” means “fart.”

One bit I think Sexton missed — Charles Lane, Washington Post reporter, and “Chuck” from the movie Shattered Glass — knew Chris “Squi” Garrett in high school, and says he does in fact say “fffffFUCK you.”

And so yeah, “fffffFourth of July” is just a reference to the way Garrett said the f-word.

I’m not going to bother to do any in-depth (as it were) research on this, but to the best of my recollection the whole idea that the terms meant something extremely R-rated came from none other than that fountain of truth and rectitude, Michael Avenatti. I wondered why everybody and his brother in the Democratic Party seemed to be adopting the arguments of that particular scumbag as though he was some sort of unimpeachable source, but I supposed they were just following the lead of party eminences, who were doing ye olde pig-f***ing thing again.

And here is Avenatti’s tweet about it, from September 23,which I think may be the origin of the charges:

By the way, my very first post about the Kavanaugh allegations, which I published when Feinstein dropped them in the eleventh hour and we didn’t even know the name of the accuser yet, was the one entitled “Dianne Feinstein accuses Brett Kavanaugh of having f***ed a pig in high school.” I don’t usually start out with that sort of tone, and none of the more salacious accusations had been launched yet, but it was already obvious what they were trying to do and that they were more than willing to go as low as they felt they needed to go in order to do it.

And that has turned out to be extremely low indeed.

The real collusion

The New Neo Posted on by

This:

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign…

It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump,” a knowledgeable source told me.

[ADDENDUM: I’m not sure where to put this doxxing story, but it’s horrific.]

[ADDENDUM II: More Lindsey Graham, here.]

“Key Republicans happy with report”

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, if they’re happy, I’m happy.

Happiness is relative, of course. I won’t be happy till Kavanaugh is voted in, which is not even remotely certain to occur. There have been so many ups and downs (mostly downs) in this case so far that I cannot trust any of the “key” players (the vulnerable Democrats and the GOP wafflers, that is) to do the right thing.

It’s interesting that Heitkamp, vulnerable Democrat of North Dakota, has apparently announced that she’s a “no.” It had been speculated that she might be a “yes” because polls had shown she might lose her seat because of a “no” vote. Her “no” decision (if it holds, which I’m assuming it will) indicates to me that she either doesn’t think it will cause her to lose in November, thinks she will lose no matter what in November, and that in any case she considers blocking Kavanaugh worth the loss for her. If the latter, she may know that she will have a nice cushy life afterwards; the Democrats will certainly take care of her. Taking one for the team isn’t really that arduous; maybe she’s tired of the Senate anyway (I could hardly blame her) and wants a change.

I noticed today that Steven Hayward at Powerline has written a post entitled “Let us now praise Democratic Party incompetence.” In it, he writes:

Amidst the justified outrage at the Democratic Party’s actions in the Kavanaugh nomination fight, let us step back for a moment and revel for a bit in the sheer political incompetence of Democrats.

He then goes on to list as demonstrations of that incompetence several reasons, chief among them the fact that the Democrats have lost voter support in the midterms as a result. I hope that Hayward is correct about all of this and maybe he is. But it strikes me that this is not an example of incompetence on their part—it’s an example of a choice.

Democrats are fighting a political war in the short term and would dearly like to win. But I think this Kavanaugh ploy was a gamble of theirs, and they are betting on the following: (1) they may be winning the cultural war, which is the long war compared to the short-term political war in the election of 2018, and (2) a very key part of that long war for the Democrats involves the courts. They rightly see the bulk of their power as residing there, and that power isn’t quite as subject to the vagaries of election years, particularly in the Supreme Court, where justices are appointed for life.

The Democrats are terrified of a conservative Court. The last time SCOTUS was conservative was before FDR, and that’s a long time ago. Not only have Democrats made a lot of strides because of Court decisions, but it may just be the main vehicle for the strides they have made. The Court is the branch of government least subject to the voters’ will. The voters cannot turn the justices out by voting against them. Impeachment is very very difficult because it requires such a huge majority in the Senate.

Simply put, the Court is the Democrats’ most powerful governmental weapon over time. They may feel that they simply cannot afford to let it go, and be willing to sacrifice short term goals to accomplish that. Hopefully, it will not work this time, but I think the idea that it will work is why they have pulled out all the stops on this one.

The fat lady has not sung.

In the piece by Steven Hayward, he quotes today’s article by Bret Stephens in the NY Times. You may recall that Stephens is a rabid NeverTrumper who has written he would rather Hillary Clinton had won. But this is what Stephens wrote today:

For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it. I’m reluctant to admit it and astonished to say it . . .

I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I’m grateful because ferocious and even crass obstinacy has its uses in life, and never more so than in the face of sly moral bullying. I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger.

That is quite extraordinary. The transparent hypocrisy, viciousness, and injustice of the Kavanaugh attack (and recall that Kavanaugh is a moderate conservative formerly allied with the Bush family) seems to have brought the likes of Brett Stephens into the pro-Trump camp, at least temporarily. I don’t know whether he’ll be turning back, but eyes once opened can be difficult to close. The Kavanaugh attack has offended a lot of moderate Republicans on a very deep level, and they see the Democrats as a ruthless enemy whereas before they may have seen them as part of a genteel game.

This is no game.

The UN court, the US, and Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

This headline made me chuckle: “UN court tells US to ease Iran sanctions in blow for Trump.”

Why would anyone care what the UN says, or consider this a “blow”?

More:

It remains unclear whether the judgment will be anything more than symbolic because both Washington and Tehran have ignored ICJ decisions in the past.

To the propagandists who wrote that Agence France Presse piece I’m quoting: no, it doesn’t remain “unclear.”

More:

The judges at the court in The Hague ruled unanimously that the sanctions on some goods breached a 1955 “Treaty of Amity” between Iran and the US that predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

Those judges at The Hague; always making with the jokes.

Pompeo’s response was to terminate the 1955 treaty.

If you want to learn my general opinion of international law, please see this post I wrote back in 2005. Excerpt:

Why were we able to hold the Nuremberg trials, and to sentence Nazi war criminals and afterwards carry out the sentences? Quite simply, it is because we had won the war. That is what gave us jurisdiction, and that is what gave us the actual men to put in the actual docks. If we had attempted to put them on trial before that, it would have been merely a form of propagandist theater, a way to label them as war criminals but not to actually do anything about it. We would have lacked jurisdiction, one of the major elements of any case. Simply declaring that we had jurisdiction would not have made it so–except in our own minds, for propaganda purposes.

So, what of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, set up to try war criminals? It only has jurisdiction over those countries who consent to give it jurisdiction, because it has no natural territory (the Hague, after all, is rather small, as is the Netherlands) which it governs. Furthermore, it makes rulings only with the consent of the signatories, since it has no method of enforcement in the face of defiance (the order part of law and order). Therefore, the Hague court is merely a propaganda machine, albeit one with a large worldwide audience. As such, it can (and most definitely will), be used for propaganda purposes–to further a certain agenda or agendas, such as focusing on the actions of the US allies in the Iraq War. It would go after the US too, of course, if we had signed onto the Court, but we have not done so.

The Times is now accusing Trump of tax fraud

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no surprise that the NY Times has obtained Donald Trump’s tax records, no doubt from some brave member of the The Resistance.

At least, the paper claims to have obtained them, and I’m going to assume that is the case.

Here’s the article, and a few excerpts:

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found.

Trying to interpret through the fog of the usual Times propaganda, I come up with this: Trump and the entire family set up a tax shelter of some sort, on the advice of attorneys and/or accountants. This was way back when the tax rate was much much higher, and complicated tax shelters were standard for anyone with a large amount of money.

And the fact that the IRS didn’t offer any “resistance” (interesting and revealing word, no?) means what? My guess is that the IRS always looked at the Trump tax return pretty carefully, as they do the returns of most mega-rich people with complex holdings and earnings, and the IRS decided the shelter was legal.

One of Trump’s attorneys has issued this statement:

The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Mr. Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”

Mr. Harder sought to distance Mr. Trump from the tax strategies used by his family, saying the president had delegated those tasks to relatives and tax professionals. “President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters,” he said. “The affairs were handled by other Trump family members who were not experts themselves and therefore relied entirely upon the aforementioned licensed professionals to ensure full compliance with the law.”

According to this article, the letter concludes with this sentence:

Should the Times state or imply that President Trump participated in fraud, tax evasion, or any other crime, it will be exposing itself to substantial liability and damages for defamation.

The Times is feeding its readers what they want. And it feels fully protected by Sullivan, which gave news outlets license to say virtually anything they want about a public figure they hate.

Christine Ford and truth

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not going to write much about Ford’s ex-boyfriend’s letter—the one that indicates she’s been telling many lies during her testimony—for the simple reasons that (a) others have done so quite thoroughly, and (b) I’m not sure that he’s telling the truth, although I hope we can find out soon. I also refer you to this article about her front doors. Make of it what you will.

But Rachel Mitchell’s report had already shed a lot of light on the inconsistencies, evasions, and in some cases lies (that flying to the hearing was not possible for her, due to her phobia about flying) that Ford has already told. These problems are important and material, not tangential. They cast doubt on her basic story and they indicate manipulative motives (quite possibly of the politically oriented variety) as well.

Initially I felt that Ford at least thought she was telling the truth, and that she probably had a distorted and/or “recovered” memory. Now quite a bit of doubt has been shed on that theory, as well, to be replaced by the very real possibility that she made it up out of the whole cloth, or certainly knew that Kavanaugh was not involved in whatever incident she may have experienced.

Another thing I haven’t seen too much discussion about is that Mark Judge had already provided her with all the information she needed to formulate an untrue accusation, if that’s in fact what she did. He went to school with Kavanaugh, and wrote a book about his (Judge’s) own drinking problems as a young man. I haven’t read the book, but it’s in the public domain and Ford had full access to it. Did she ever read it? That in itself would not be proof of anything much, because she might have read it with the completely innocent motive of reading a memoir by someone who grew up around the same time as she did and within the same milieu, and whom she knew at least slightly.

However, I’d love to know if she read it and when she read it. Did she read it at all? If so, was it not too long before she told her therapist about the Kavanaugh incident in 2012? Was it between then and the letter she wrote to her House representative that started this whole nasty mess?