Inflation climbed at the fastest pace in 40 years across the economy, driven in large part by higher energy prices themselves driven in large part by Joe Biden’s energy policy toward Russia and inability to use obsequiousness get OPEC to pump more oil (while leasing less federal land for oil and gas drilling than any president since the end of World War II.) The last time inflation reached over nine percent was 1981 when Ronald Reagan took over from Jimmy Carter. Fueling the inflationary jump was the energy index, which rose 7.5 percent compared to a year ago and contributed nearly half of the overall increase in inflation. That index includes prices for fuel, oil, gasoline and electricity, and it’s up 41.6 percent for the year, the largest 12-month increase since April 1980 under President Jimmy Carter. The consumer price index was 9.1 percent higher earlier this summer than last. There are fears sources of strength in the economy — like the labor market and consumer spending — won’t be enough to fend off another recession. Yet the Fed may need to work more forcefully to slow the economy by raising interest rates, which the central bank has done multiple times this year already. Biden called on Americans to sacrifice, especially at the gas pump, to help win the war against Putin in Ukraine.
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Archive of "Biden" Category
The Political Assassination of Donald Trump: Shots Fired
Democrats remain terrified of Donald Trump and will continue to do their worst to keep him from the ballot, where he has beaten them before. Political assassination attempts stretch from the near-comical to the deadly serious.
The most current attempt harkens back to one of the earlier ones. A handful of lawyers discovered the 14th Amendment, hidden away in plain sight inside the Constitution, actually was designed to drive Trump from the ballot. The Amendment, Article 3, states government officials who supported insurrection against the United States were not eligible for future office. Now despite that this was written to address the question of what to do with Confederate officials following the Civil War, modern lawyers have decided: a) Trump made a speech on January 6 as part of an insurrection and so b) his name cannot appear on any state ballot. Left undiscussed is who the hell are “they” to determine J6 was an actual insurrection on scale with the Civil War and not some naughty MAGA cosplay with absolutely zero chance of altering the election results, and the fact that Article 1 of the same Amendment mentions due process, of which the current legal thinking includes none.
This all reminds of the early Trump days citing of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, basically saying a president could not accept gifts from foreign countries (full disclosure: one of the worst Emoluments violators was eighth President Martin Van Buren, no relation.) The thinking way back in 2016 was the Founders had this scenario in mind: Trump owns some foreign hotels. Foreign people stay there. Some of the foreigners were government officials. Some tiny portion of each stay went into Donald’s pocket. Shazam! He was guilty of accepting official foreign gifts and violating the Emoluments Clause.
But that was all small change; the real money on getting rid of Trump before he was even sworn in, or handicapping his administration if he took office, was Russiagate. It was all the rage in 2016 and beyond — Trump colluded with the Russians because they had a tape of him with prostitutes doing Golden Showers. Or because he wanted to build a hotel in Moscow, one or the other. There was proof everywhere and Robert Mueller’s corpse was shocked back to life to investigate it all ahead of an impeachment-lynching party. In the end the whole thing was made up. A multi-year effort involving the three-letter agencies FBI, CIA, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS was based on tall tales from anonymous sources sifted into the zeitgeist by a former MI6 operative named Chris Steele. Oh, right, and Steele was paid entirely by the Clinton campaign.
The next swing at the piñata came from some little scab of a Lieutenant Colonel on the National Security Council, and some punks at the State Department, known as Impeachment 1.0. Using a cutout “whistleblower,” the cabal alleged Trump temporarily withheld arms from the Ukraine (before it became our 51st state under Joe Biden) until Kiev investigated and turned over the dirt on the Biden family. It turned out Trump did indeed temporarily withhold arms from the Ukraine (before it became our 51st state under Joe Biden) hoping Kiev would investigate and turn over the dirt on the Biden family. This is known as “foreign policy” or an “investigation.” Somehow the impeachment hinged on one transcripted phone call by Trump, so the evidence was not even in question, just how stupid the interpretation could be. Nothing stuck and the process failed to remove Trump from office.
After all that there was Impeachment 2.0 which had something to do with January 6, wasn’t finished until Trump had already left office, and did not matter because, significantly for the 14th Amendment crowd, Trump was not convicted of incitement or insurrection.
The broader problem is short of simply shooting Trump in the head, the guy never seems to go down. Every effort, and there were many, failed to get him off the ballot in 2016, cripple his administration, or drive him from the White House. Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020 and that should have ended the matter. Trump should have taken his seat on The View and all these efforts to depose him should have faded into political history. The specific problem is that Trump never stopped running for president, and now must finally be stopped. The plan this time is to use the judiciary to achieve what it looks like the ballot box cannot, literally locking Trump in jail in hopes that from behind bars he cannot become president. There are five current efforts.
First up is Stormy Daniels again. Somehow a partisan prosecutor in a fully Democratic district managed to squeeze 34 felony counts out of this, centered on falsifying business records, which Trump is accused of doing to cover up the hush money payments to Daniels. Now leaving aside there is nothing illegal per se about “hush money,” (people receive payments all the time as part of nondisclosure agreements) this attempt to throw Trump in jail will rely on witnesses as pristine as Stormy herself, followed by stand-up guys like Michael Cohen. If the jury is at least close to fair when seated, the case has little chance of jailing Trump.
Second in line is a civil defamation case financial judgement. Four months after a jury found that Donald Trump defamed advice columnist Jean Carroll, a judge ruled still more of the ex-president’s comments about her were libelous. The decision means an upcoming second trial will concern only how much more he has to pay her. No possibility of jail time.
Next is the so-called Mar-a-Lago documents case. This centers on the former president endangering national security by mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Additionally, the case looks at how Trump obstructed FBI efforts to take back the documents. It will delve into the minutia of the classification system, and likely invoke the Supreme Court to decide how much leeway a former president has in declassifying documents. It is no small matter, legal-issue wise, as it affects not only Trump but every president to come (Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton also unlawfully had classified documents in their possession outside of the office but we don’t seem to care much about these cases.) Classification cases cases which don’t involve major espionage or spillage are usually settled by fines, as may be this one, unless the government can make a big deal about the obstruction part. A lot depends on proving Trump knew he was doing something wrong, mens rea, a tough ask with a fella like Trump who talks pretty. The matter is unlikely to result in jail time.
The Georgia election interference case, like Impeachment 1.0, seems to hinge on a single phone call, in this instance an ambiguous request by Trump to an election official to find him some more votes. Ambiguous in the sense that one reading is Trump requesting some sort of recount, while another is he is demanding the official create votes by some nefarious means. Another case of a partisan Democratic prosecutor in a fully Democratic district showing how her predecessors once rigged trials by choosing all-white juries. The new feature here is the prosecutor has come up with not only 13 felony counts against Trump himself stemming from a single incident, but also charged 18 associates, including Rudy Giuliani (once America’s mayor, how fast the looks fade) with various crimes. The implication is one of those people will turn evidence on Trump to save their own skin. The problem is that the Georgia case did not have any successful interfering; Trump still lost the state. That means the whole thing is going to bog down in conspiracy accusations — boring — and fail to capture public attention. Trump’s lawyers are also actively seeking a change of venue to get the case to more neutral jury selection territory. If they succeed, the chances of success against Trump seem slim. A guilty conclusion with some sort of fine seems likely.
The prosecution which has the greatest potential of shaping the next part of the Trump story is also likely to be the first major case heard, in March 2024, regarding Trump’s role in the events of January 6. At stake is not only a good portion of Trump’s political future, but also very serious questions about the First Amendment. What can someone legally say and do after losing an election? Of all the charges, incitement is not on the list, though it looks in part as if Trump is being held responsible for the actions of the mob. The charges focus again on conspiracy, though this time the stakes are very high, conspiracy to defraud the United States and its voters, practically a hanging offense. The J6 mob (and Trump) had no chance of overturning the 2020 election, so in some ways conspiracy is a thin thread to suspend the whole affair from. On the other hand, it may be easy to prove, especially if Mike Pence or another senior official turned evidence in their depositions and testified against Trump. The seriousness of the matter points towards jail time, as has been the case with all the other J6 defendants. It may not be the future of our democracy at stake, but it is certainly a good shot at the future of Donald Trump if the prosecution can wrap things up before the election.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump and Kryptonite
As of summer 2023 we have in America reached an amazing place politically: the Republican front-runner and very possibly the next re-president of the United States, Donald Trump, is campaigning while basically on bail in four different jurisdictions. And nobody in America cares much. Actually, Americans sort of care, but not in any way that makes more sense than not caring. In the words of another pundit, “cheer, scream, or shrug… and sip a banana republic daquiri.”
Americans, depending on their beliefs, expect and would be satisfied if Trump was either in a jail cell or the Oval Office as of January 2025. Painting with a broad brush, for Republicans, they are convinced the charges against Trump are Third World-style political warfare waged by Democrats and mean little. Democrats see Trump as a Great Satan and view the charges as the last, best (after two impeachments and Mueller) hope for our democracy. Despite accomplishing fairly little as president (the Supreme Court appointments, though impactful, were basically luck, and no LBTQ concentration camps were opened or nuclear wars started) another four years of Trump will either save us or destroy us. Friends, there is little gray area out there, and even less appetite for the reality of the cases against Trump.
So maybe it is not such a surprise that 38 percent of us feel “exhaustion” over the possibility of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. Some 52 percent feel either sadness or fear, or both, over the prospect. There is one area where a significant share of each party finds common ground: the belief that the country is headed toward failure. Overall, 37 percent of registered voters say the problems are so bad that we are in danger of failing as a nation, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. Some 56 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said we are in danger of such failure. Around 20 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they feel the same way.
In the face of all this, the challenge for the judicial system to preserve faith in our democracy comes in several ways.
For example, how clear and “obvious” are the charges in each instance? There is a ever-growing distrust in public institutions, whether the government in general for failing to respond to public demands for more or less abortion rights, or the electoral system as a whole, or in this specific case, whether the judicial system can respond to what some perceive as unfair charges against Donald Trump. And make no mistake, each side sees a kind of unfairness in play; Republicans by and large see the charges as attempts to drive Trump out of the election or cripple him as a candidate while Democrats see the charges as a whole as the best of bad options, charging defamation when the real crime is rape, charging conspiracy when the real crime is the attempted overthrow of our democratic system.
Prosecutors must make the charges plain and of the “make sense” type, with no “ambitious charging.” Everything must be able to be explained and pass the sniff test to all but the most hardened opponents, whether they agree or not. This will be especially challenging for the thought crimes, the claimed conspiracies, whether Trump is somehow still guilty of something even though he not only did not overthrow the government and reverse the election, but that he had no realistic pathway to doing so. People will remember the impeachments beta, the Mueller Report, which came close to charging Trump with obstruction of an investigation which actually cleared him and found no predicate crime. The defense will try and muddle the waters and leave the public with a sense that Trump did nothing wrong really but the system was set up to get him somehow (not a hard case to make in several of the total of 90-some counts.) The more prosecutorial creativity (example, use of RICO in Georgia) and the more attempts to squeeze events into legal boxes they don’t quite fit in, the more challenge for the system to find a balance in explaining what is happening for the public to digest. Walking the public through the the minefield of ambiguity over classification in the Mar-a-Lago case is an example. Anything that is seen as partisan (conspiracy to do this, conspiracy to do that) fails the democracy in a mighty way.
Can the judicial system keep the language neutral? The most obvious partisan tells come from the language used, calling January 6 an insurrection for example. The judicial system should stick itself to neutral language and press both sides to do the same, perhaps agreeing to some terminology. Falling into the media trap of weaponizing the language is a real danger. Trump must be prosecuted based on what he did, not who he is. Acts must be on-their-face criminal, or they will be seen as political, Trump convicted of something, anything, just because he’s Trump and we need to send him to jail because all the other kryptonite failed. It’s a big ask; already the judge in his J6 trial has called those events a “mob attack” on “the very foundation of our democracy” and branded Trump’s claim the 2020 election was stolen a conspiracy theory.
Venue is important, and the system must show the flexibility to move cases to neutral venues when possible. Trying a case in a place like Manhattan or Fulton County, Georgia risks appearing to be the equivalent of an all-white jury in a 1950’s racial case. The jury pool in both states swings decidedly Democrat. Yet even then Salon decries the fact that a non-rigged jury might ruin the plan to convict Trump; “one MAGA juror can ruin it all,” they write. Both venues feature a local Democratic prosecutor (Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis) in a one-party jurisdiction. Would the indictments even have come down elsewhere?
Lastly, can the judicial system be seen as “timely?” Most everyone agrees the judicial system is failing on timing. Prosecutors in one batch of charges stemming from the events of January 6 want the trial to start at the beginning of the new year, ridiculously early for a case that has already produced 11.5 million pages of discovery (“Even assuming we could begin reviewing the documents today, we would need to proceed at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection,” a Trump lawyer wrote. “That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.” Can it all be relevant?) Lawyers for Trump instead asked a judge to push back the proceeding until April 2026, nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election and some five years after the fact when Trump will either be immune one way or another as president, or a regular on Dancing with the Stars having failed at the polls. Both political sides walk away sure the game is rigged. The other cases against Trump face similar demands to begin very soon or for lengthy delays.
They’re right in a way over at MSNBC, democracy is indeed on trial, but not in the way most people who say that mean. Instead, what is on trial is our judicial system as it struggles to answer the cornerstone question here: can the system rise above partisanship, even when partisanship is the intent of one side or both, and produce results which however reluctantly will be considered fair by the majority of Americans? A “no” answer risks further shattering of public trust in our institutions, and further polarization of our politics, if not violence. It may just be that it is not whether you win or lose in this battle, but how the game is played.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Dissent Channel, Afghanistan and Confidentiality
Something quite significant in U.S. diplomatic history is going to take place — a State Department Dissent Channel message, concerning the evacuation and withdrawal from Afghanistan, is going to be shared with Members of Congress.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul announced his panel investigating the final days of American presence in Afghanistan will view the Dissent Channel cable. McCaul threatened to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt if he did not provide him access to the diplomatic cable, which came from a confidential “dissent channel” that allowed State Department officials to discuss views which may be different from administration policy.
It is believed the July 2021 cable discussed concerns from the rank-and-file diplomatic staff not fully shared by senior embassy executives and management about the upcoming American pullout from the country, warning the U.S.-backed Afghan government could fall. The cable specifically advised an earlier withdrawal date than that ultimately chosen by the Biden Administration, and may have addressed the decision to conduct the entire evacuation from a single civilian airport in Kabul.
So what is the Dissent Channel and why is this particular cable so important?
The Dissent Channel was set up in 1971 during the Vietnam War era as a way for foreign service officers and civil servants at State (as well as United States Agency for International Development, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the former United States Information Agency) to raise concerns with senior management about the direction of U.S. foreign policy, without fear of retribution. The cables (formal, official State internal communications are still referred to as “cables” harking back to early diplomatic days when telegrams were used to communicate between Washington and embassies abroad) are sent to the State Department’s policy planning director, who distributes them to the secretary of state and other top officials, who must respond within 30 to 60 days. There are typically about five to ten each year. “Discouragement of, or penalties for use of, the Dissent Channel are impermissible,” according to the State Department internal regulations.
Use of the Channel covers the scope of diplomatic mission. Historical messages include a dissent over the executive branch’s decision to “initiate no steps to discipline a military unit that took action at My Lai” in Vietnam and the “systematic use of electrical torture, beatings, and in some cases, murder, of men, women, and children by military units in Vietnam.” These actions by U.S. soldiers were “atrocities too similar to those of Nazis.” Another dissent was over the “hypocritical” U.S. support of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, bemoaning that the U.S. missed a “unique opportunity to intervene for once on the right repeat right side” of history. One older atypical dissent cable complained about having to arrange female companionship in Honduras for a visiting U.S. congressman. In the words of one now-declassified cable, “The Dissent Channel can be a mechanism for unclogging the Department’s constipated paper flow” related to employee dissent against current foreign policy actions.
What the Channel does is one thing; who gets to see it is another. Until now, dissent messages have generally been regarded as something sacrosanct not to shown to outsiders and not to be leaked. “Release and public circulation of Dissent Channel messages,” State wrote to one inquirer,” would inhibit the willingness of Department personnel to avail themselves of the Dissent Channel to express their views freely.” The messages were first withheld from the rest of government (and the public) by State under the rules which created the system, and later under the Freedom of Information Act’s (FOIA) “predecisional” Exemption 5, until the 2016 FOIA Improvement Act amendments made it illegal for agencies to use this exemption after 25 years. So sharing the Afghan dissent cable with Members of Congress, especially so soon after the administration’s evacuation policy failed in Afghanistan, is a very big deal at the State Department.
One publicized exception to how closely held dissent messages are took place in 2017 when nearly a thousand State Department Foreign Service Officers signed a five page dissent message opposing President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” which prohibited seven additional Muslim nationalities from entering the U.S., aka “The Muslim Ban.” As a result of an anti-Trump contingent inside generally liberal and mostly Democratic-leaning State, the message was leaked in its entirety. Even more against precedent, Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer issued an extraordinary public rebuke to the diplomats: “These career bureaucrats have a problem with it? They should either get with the program or they can go.”
An almost-leak (a State Department official provided a draft, though the final version was not published, to The New York Times) took place in 2016 during the Trump-Clinton presidential election, after 51 Foreign Service Officers criticized the Obama administration via the Dissent Channel for failing to do enough to protect civilians in Syria in what was widely seen as an endorsement of Candidate Hillary’s pseudo-promise to put U.S. boots on the ground in Syria. Other Trump-era dissent cables not shared outside the Department called for consultations on Trump’s removal from office, and rebuked the secretary of state for not forcefully condemning the president over January 6.
To fully understand what the Dissent Channel is requires a better understanding of the State Department culture, academic in nature but frighteningly risk adverse. The academic side reflects the Department’s modern origins as being made up of those who were “male, pale, and Yale” where the tradition of loyal opposition holds sway. But it is the risk adverse side of State that tells how important internally revealing the Afghan cable is. Dissent messages are signed, no anonymous ones allowed, and while Secretary Blinken has promised to not show the names of those who signed the Afghan cable to Congress, State senior management will know exactly who wrote what.
In addition, Dissent Channel messages must still be cleared for transmission to the secretary of state in Washington at post, though there is no requirement everyone agree with the contents per se (authorization does not imply concurrence.) So one’s colleagues know who wrote what, potential dynamite in an organization where dissent is otherwise not encouraged and corridor reputation plays a deciding role in promotions and future assignments. It is a significant step to write or sign a dissent cable and despite the regulations’ admonishment that use of the Dissent Channel not be discouraged by supervisors, it is discouraged.
Nobody in Embassy Kabul who signed that dissent message, basically telling their boss the ambassador and the Biden Administration they were wrong, expected to have their opinions shown to Congress; quite the opposite. Blinken, by sharing the cable with Congress, is breaking faith with his institution and with his front line workers in a uncollegial way only imagined by them during the Trump administration. Once upon a time something like that would have called for dissent.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Disinformation, 1984-2023
Orwell, again. 1984 was prescient on so many concepts that it seems it was written for the Biden era. Underlying it all is the concept of disinformation, the root of propaganda and mind control. So it is in 2023. Just ask FBI Director Chris Wray. Or Facebook.
George Orwell’s novel explores the concept of disinformation and its role in controlling and manipulating society. Orwell presents a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime, led by the Party and its figurehead Big Brother, exerts complete control over its citizens’ lives, including their thinking. The Party employs a variety of techniques to disseminate disinformation and maintain its power. One of the most prominent examples is the concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed to restrict and manipulate thought by reducing the range of expressible ideas. Newspeak aims to replace words and concepts that could challenge or criticize the Party’s ideology, effectively controlling the way people think and communicate (unhomed, misspoke, LGBQTIAXYZ+, nati0nalist, terrorist.)
Orwell also introduces the concept of doublethink, which refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept them both as true. This psychological manipulation technique allows the Party to control the minds of its citizens and make them believe in false information or embrace contradictory ideas without questioning (masks which do not prevent disease transmission are still mandatory.) The Party in 1984 alters historical records and disseminates false information through the Ministry of Truth. This manipulation of historical events and facts aims to control the collective memory of the society in a post-truth era, ensuring that the Party’s version of reality remains unquestioned (war in Ukraine, Iraq, El Salvador, Vietnam, all to protect our freedom at home.)
Through these portrayals, Orwell highlights the dangers of disinformation and its potential to distort truth, manipulate public opinion, and maintain oppressive systems of power. The novel serves as a warning about the importance of critical thinking, independent thought, and the preservation of objective truth in the face of disinformation and propaganda.
Disinformation is bad. But replacing disinformation with censorship and/or replacement with other disinformation is worse. 1984 closed down the marketplace of ideas. So for 2023.
In 2023 America the medium is social media and the Ministry of Truth is the Executive Branch, primarily the FBI. Topics the FBI at one point labeled disinformation and sought to censor in the name of protecting Americans from disinformation include but are not limited to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid lab leak theory, the efficiency and value to society of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, speech about election integrity and the 2020 presidential election, the security of voting by mail, even parody accounts mocking the president (about Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter.)
When asked before Congress to define disinformation, FBI Director Christopher Wray could not do it, even though it is the basis for the FBI’s campaign to censor Americans. It’s a made up term with no fixed meaning. That gives it its power, like “terrorism” was used a decade or so earlier. Remember “domestic terrorism”? That stretched to cover everything from white power advocates to J6 marchers to BLM protestors to Moms for Liberty. It just can’t be all those things all the time but it can be all those things at different times, as needed. The term “hate speech” is another flexible tool of enforcement and is why efforts to codify banning hate speech under the First Amendment must be resisted so strongly. Same for QAnon. We’ve heard about QAnon for years now but still can’t figure out if it even exists. To read the MSM, you would think it is the most powerful and sinister thing one can imagine yet seems to be imaginary, another Cthulhu. Do they have an office, an email address, a lair somewhere?
In simple words: the government is using social media companies as proxies to censor the contrary thoughts of Americans, all under the guise of correcting misinformation and in direct contrivance of the First Amendment.
How bad does it get? As part of its 2023 investigation into the federal government’s role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the House Committee on the Judiciary issued a subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent of Google and YouTube. Documents obtained revealed the FBI, on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence service, requested and, in some cases, directed, the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online about the war in Ukraine.
Another tool of thought control is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was supposed to be used to spy on foreigners but has been improperly used against thousands of Americans. Over 100,000 Americans were spied on in 2022, down from three million in 2021.
Does it sound familiar? An amorphous threat is pounded into the heads of Americans (Communism and Red Scares, Covid, terrorism, disinformation) and in its name nearly anything is justified, including in the most recent battle for freedom, censorship. The wrapper is that it is all for our own protection (Biden himself accused social-media companies of “killing people,” the more modern version of the terrorism-era’s “blood on their hands”) with the government assuming the role of knowing what is right and correct for Americans to know. The target in name is always some Ruskie-type foreigner, but in reality morphs to be censorship of our citizens ourselves (stained as “pro-Putin.”) Yet Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the government asked Facebook to suppress true information. He said during the Covid era the scientific establishment within the government asked “for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”
Under President Joe Biden, the government has undertaken “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge in Missouri v. Biden. The case exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and its federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike. The White House is appealing and attained a stay, hoping to retain this powerful tool of thought control right out of 1984. A victory for censorship of Americans and their thoughts could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Some Leftover Questions for Hunter Biden
About two years ago during a debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden dismissed his son’s laptop emails as disinformation, maybe from Russia. After becoming president, Joe said his son Hunter was innocent, and most recently, even after Hunter pleaded guilty to tax evasion and weapons charges, said he was proud of his son. So in terms of leftover questions, let’s start with: which part are you proud of, Joe? The video evidence of his crack use? The video evidence of his cavorting with prostitutes? The tax evasion charges, or was it the weapons charge, where Hunter lied to obtain a handgun? Well, it is pride month after all…
Joking aside, the easy-sleazy plea deal Hunter accepted (which has him do no jail time in lieu of probation) leaves begging several important questions about exactly what Hunter (and Joe, and Jim, Joe’s brother) were doing in return for millions of dollars in consulting fees. Tax evasion seems just the beginning, but let’s get very specific. For the most part, unless noted with a URL, incidents below are drawn from Hunter’s email and laptop documents (we published a dive into the laptop’s contents online in December 2020, and a deeper dive in our print edition.)
The reason we have to ask all these sticky questions is because half of Americans — including a third of Democrats — think Hunter got favorable treatment from federal prosecutors after he agreed to a sweetheart plea deal.
So Hunter, you joined the Burisma board at a salary of $83,000 a month with no obvious work duties. What was your actual job at Burisma? We ask because on April 16, 2014, while Papa Joe was vice president, he met with your business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Joe travelled to Ukraine to lobby for increased fracking. Burisma was one of the few companies licensed to frack in Ukraine. Burisma made hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukraine’s new policy. Burisma paid more than $4,000,000 for your and Archer’s board memberships, including at least $1,450,000 wired directly to your accounts.
While you and Archer were serving on Burisma’s board, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was investigating Burisma and its owner. In his official position as vice president, Biden demanded Ukraine fire Shokin, and threatened to withdraw $1 billion in U.S. military aid if it did not do so. Shokin was fired.
While serving on the Burisma board, you and Archer sought meetings with senior State Department officials, including then-Secretary of State John Kerry and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. What did you guys chat about? The reason we ask is because whatever your job description read, your value to Burisma was your perceived access to the Executive Branch. Papa Joe was at least a passive participant in the scheme, maybe more than that.
Your laptop shows you, through a number of front companies, accepted money from foreign firms and moved that money to the U.S. where it was parceled out to other entities, including Joe’s brother Jim. Some of it then went back to foreign hands. It all smells bad — multi-million dollar transfers to LLCs without employees, residences used as business addresses, legal tricks from Cyprus to the British Virgin Islands. Can you explain why your fees traveled such circuitous routes? What did you pay Brother Jim for, and why did he appear to kickback some of the money you paid him?
What is this money al about, Hunter? in 2014, you received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow. Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her company received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor.
But let’s move on to China, Russia and Ukraine are so depressing. The majority of the contents of your laptop are a jumbled record of your international business ventures. Outstanding in the haystack are a large number of wire transfers to and from your clients (but no evidence of what “work” you performed for those clients. Hmm.) Those with traceable addresses appear to be mostly anonymous shell companies run out of lawyers’ offices, with no employees and fuzzy public paper trails. One typical one involved $259,845 traveling on April 2, 2018 from your Hudson West III in New York to a numbered bank account held by Cathay Bank in Asia. Hudson West was created by Hunter Biden’s own law firm, Owasco, with several Chinese nationals, including a Jianming Ye associate, Gong Wendong. Ye Jianming is chairman of CEFC China Energy, who reportedly had close ties to both the Chinese government and the PLA. He’s been arrested in China on corruption charges.
Hunter, in August 2018 you also returned $100k back to CEFC in China via its own New York subsidiary LLC, Hudson West V, whose listed address was on Foxwood Road, in New York state. That address is not a business office but instead a single family home worth over $5 million. It looks like the place has new owners, but phone records suggest two people lived there when you were in business, including Gong Wendong. Money appeared to move from physical China to virtual Hunter back to virtual China in the U.S., starting and ending in accounts tied to Gong Wendong after touching base with Hunter, a potential indicator of laundering. Chinese money in China changed into Chinese money in America. Caution is needed; while what looks like American money laundering at first glance may indeed be so, or could be designed to hide the cash from the Chinese government while staying inside American law, a quasi-illegal service you possibly supplied. Is that what you were really up to, fee-for-service to the Chinese? Enquiring minds and all that, you know.
The Foxwood address also appears on millions of dollars worth of bank transfers among Cathay Bank, CEFC, and multiple semi-anonymous LLCs and hedge funds. One single transfer alone to Hudson West III on August 8, 2017 represented the movement of $5 million from Northern Capital International, which appears to be a Chinese government-owned import-export front company. What was that all about?
In addition, the house on Foxwood was the mailing address for a secured VISA card in the name of your company, Hudson West III. The card is funded by someone unnamed through Cathay Bank for $99,000 and guaranteed by someone’s checking account held by Cathay worth $450,000. Shared users of the card are you, Hunter, and Gong Wendong. The card was opened as CEFC secured a stake in a Russian state-owned energy company. Biden and others subsequently used the credit card to purchase extravagant items, including airline tickets and things at Apple stores, pharmacies, hotels, and restaurants. A Senate report characterized these transactions as “potential financial criminal activity.” Putting money on a secured VISA card in lieu of a direct wire transfer may be seen by some as an attempt to obscure the source of the money and thus allow you not to claim it as income but you didn’t do that, did you Hunter?
Jim Biden, Joe’s brother, was also an authorized user of the credit card. Jim over the years has been a nightclub owner, insurance broker, political consultant, and investor. When he ran into financial trouble having triple mortgaged his home, he was bailed out via loans from Joe and you, Hunter, and by a series of Joe’s donors. Jim also received a loan of $500k from John Hynansky, a Ukrainian-American businessman and longtime donor to Joe Biden’s campaigns. This all was in 2015, at the same time the then-vice president oversaw U.S. policy toward the country. As a senator, Joe Biden made use of a private jet owned by Hynansky’s son.
That will leave undigested the bigger tale of President Joe Biden, who ran in part on an anti-corruption platform following the Trump family escapades. While Joe Biden says he regrets meeting with the Burisma official, he did indeed take the meeting as VP. It’s always easier to apologize when caught than seek permission in advance in Joe’s world. Is that what your dad always says, Hunter?
A 2017 email chain involving Hunter brokering an ultimately failed deal for a new venture with old friend CEFC, the Chinese energy company, described a 10 percent set-aside for the “big guy,” whom former Hunter Biden partner Tony Bobulinski publicly identified as Joe Biden. Joe also took Hunter to China with him in December 2013 on Air Force 2, and met with Chinese leaders while Hunter tried to make deals on his own. It was Joe’s donors and pals who bailed out brother Jim over the years with sweetheart loans.
There is a lot more but you get the picture. A lot of appearance of improprietous malarkey from a senior statesman like your dad who should have known better. In places like China and the Ukraine, where corruption is endemic, it is assumed the sons of powerful men have access to their father. You traded on those assumptions for millions of dollars, and Papa Joe stood by understanding what was happening. Every father wants to help his son, and we can imagine you went to his dad time after time, pleading for just one more little favor to get you past your sordid past.
Joe Biden said of Hunter, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” So Hunter, help us out. Explain.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Leave Trump Alone (Because It Does not Matter)
The narrative is set. Everything between now and November 2024, absent an actual alien intervention, is filler material.
Trump will ride his narrative to the polls, campaigning even if in hand cuffs and an ankle monitor. He is, he will make clear, the victim of a Democratic plot to weaponize “justice,” dating back to 2016 when Hillary was let off scot-free for her email shenanigans, followed by the FBI’s concocted Russiagate, two impeachments, and now a carousel of indictments. His opponent is Joe Biden, older than Yoda but presenting more like Jar Jar, crooked in cahoots with his scum bag son to hard suck bribe money out of eastern Europe. Sleepy Joe’s narrative is to count on the same FBI going after Trump with both barrels to shuffle its feet investigating him and Hunter through the election, with a final surge under the slogan “Oh who cares, I’m not Trump!” to wrap things up. It’s all a rich tapestry.
The problem is it is compelling; there is a lot of truth underneath the showmanship. There was David Petraeus, Obama’s CIA Director, who leaked secret docs to his girlfriend, and Sandy Berger, Clinton’s NSA Director, who stole secret docs. But it was Hillary who did get away with it all, at the FBI’s discretion (so much for one law for everyone) what Trump has been accused of in Mar-a-Lago. Hillary Clinton maintained an unsecured private email server which processed classified material on a daily basis. Her server held at least 110 known messages containing classified information, including e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level, the highest level of civilian classification. The FBI found classified intelligence improperly stored and transmitted on Clinton’s server “was compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.”
Clinton and her team destroyed tens of thousands of emails, evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries which potentially held evidence — obstruction as clear as it comes. She operated the server out of her home kitchen despite the presence of the Secret Service on property who failed to report it. A server in a closet is not as dramatic a visual as boxes of classified stored in a shower room, but justice is supposed to be blind. More recently, what of Mike Pence and Joe Biden, both of whom have escaped indictment so far on similar charges of mishandling classified information. Trump voters know if the FBI is going to take a similar fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, it is partial and political. No matter which candidate wins and loses, DOJ’s credibility is tanked.
The Stormy Daniels case, and the guilty finding in the Jean Carroll defamation case, reek of politics. Neither case would have seen daylight outside of Democratic hive New York, and neither could have held up outside a partisan justice system that permits it to ignore Jeffrey Epstein’s death in custody or a city in a crime tornado (New York in the past year reduced 52 percent of all felony charges to misdemeanors, opposite of what was done to Trump) while aggressively allowing the system to pursue a decades-old rape case of dubious propriety.
Witch hunt meet Hunter. New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg ran for office on the promise to prosecute Trump. He fulfilled a campaign promise and paid off his George Soros-connected backers. Bragg, in the words of law professor Jonathan Turley, had a “very public, almost Hamlet-like process where he debated whether he could do this bootstrapping theory [bumping misdemeanors up to felonies in the Stormy case.] He stopped it for a while and was pressured to go forward with it. All of that smacks more of politics than prosecutorial discretion.”
Calling it all a witch hunt is just a starting point. The point here is not innocence; it is whether the justice system is going to take fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, risking being seen as partial and political. No matter which candidate wins or loses, credibility is tanked.
Still to come (at the least) are whatever judicial actions will emerge from the Special Prosecutor over Trump’s role in January 6, and legal action over the 2020 Georgia vote count (with another Democratic openly anti-Trump prosecutor.) Trump jokes in his stump speech nowadays every time he flies over a Blue State he gets another subpoena. He could easily head into the Republican convention to accept the nomination with multiple convictions and/or indictments on his shoulders. It won’t matter. The justice system is going to take fact sets and ignore some while aggressively pursuing others, partial and political plain as day. No matter which candidate wins, credibility is tanked. It grinds that most of the serious charges against Trump are under the hoary Espionage Act, seen by many as reviving the now-discredited trope Trump was a Russian agent.
Mostly overlooked for now is how much of the apparent evidence against Trump at Mar-a-Lago came from his own attorneys. Attorney-client privilege is recognized as one of the cornerstones of fairness in our system. In the Trump case, the Justice Department used the one major exception to privilege, when the communication is intended to further a criminal or fraudulent act, to compel Trump’s lawyers to give evidence against their own client. Justice asserted Trump lied to his own team about having no more classified documents, and that this constituted a crime of fraud and maybe obstruction, and thus privilege is not available and Trump’s lawyer can be made to testify against his client. The crime or fraud exception to attorney-client privilege itself has a long history, dating back to English common law. In the United States, the crime or fraud exception was first recognized by the Supreme Court in the 1840 case of United States v. Privileged Communications. But Trump’s supporters are unlikely to read deeply into the case law; all they’ll see is what looks like strong-arm tactics by the Department of Justice. No matter which candidate wins and loses, DOJ’s credibility is tanked.
The thing is no one has to work very hard to convince Trump supporters of the truth of what he is saying, that he is the victim. Trump support remained unmoved by the many investigations that plagued his presidency. Even during peak crises, views of him were static. Post-presidency polls continued the trend. Public opinion of Trump remains remarkably stable, despite his unprecedented legal challenges, and about half of Americans do not see his behavior as disqualifying, sharper if you divide along partisan lines. When asked if Trump’s legal troubles would impact their views of him, two-thirds of his supporters said it would not make a difference. That’s a committed bunch. Perhaps just as important, 57 percent of voters, including one-third of Democrats, said the indictment in New York earlier this year was politically motivated.
No one can say who will win in November 2024, but one loser is certain, faith in the rule of law by a large number of Americans. They will leave the polls certain the system was bent to “get” Trump, either saddened by the fall of blind justice or saddened that it did not work and Trump remined a powerful figure with a large movement behind him, either in or out of the Oval Office.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A War Like No Other in Ukraine
Joe Biden created for the U.S. a war like no other, one where others die and the U.S. simply sits back and pays the bills on a gargantuan scale. No attempts are made at diplomacy by the Americans, and the diplomatic efforts of others like the Chinese are dismissed as evil attempts to gain influence in the area (similar for Chinese diplomatic work in the Yemen war.) Biden is coming close to achieving 1984‘s goal of perpetual warfare while only putting a handful of American lives at risk. He has learned lessons from the Cold War, and already put them into play. Can we call it the Biden Doctrine yet?
Biden’s strategy is clear enough now after well more than a year of conflict; what he has been sending to Ukraine jumped from helmets and uniforms to F-16s in only 15 months and shows no signs of stopping. The problem is U.S. weapons are never enough for victory and always “just enough” to allow the battle to go on until then next round. If the Ukrainians think they are playing the U.S. for suckers for free arms they best check who is really paying for everything, in blood.
Putin is playing this game himself in a way, careful not to introduce anything too powerful, such as strategic bombers, and upset the balance and offer Biden the chance to intervene in the war directly (one can hear old man Biden on TV now, explaining American airstrikes are needed to prevent a genocide, the go-to excuse he learned at Obama’s knee.) That’s what the current escalation holds, airpower. Ukraine will find even with the promise of the F-16 it can’t acquire aircraft and train up pilots fast enough (minimum training time is 18-24 months), and next will be begging the U.S. to serve as its air force. As it is the planes are likely to be based out of Poland and Romania, suggesting NATO will pick up the high-skilled tasks of maintaining and repairing them. Left unclear is the NATO role in required aerial refueling to keep the planes over the battlefield. F-16s aside, a spin off bonus to all these weapons gifts is that the vast majority of transfers to date have been “presidential drawdowns.” This means the U.S. sends used or older weapons to Ukraine, after which the Pentagon can use the Congressionally-authorized funds to replenish their stocks by purchasing new arms. The irony that war machines once in Iraq are now on the ground in Ukraine can’t be missed.
The U.S. strategy seems based on creating a ghastly tie of sorts, two sides lined up across a field shooting at each other until one side called it quits for the day. Same as in 1865, same as in 1914, but the new factor is today those armies face off across those fields with 21st-century HIMARS artillery, machine guns, and other tools of killing far more effective than a musket. It is unsustainable, literally chewing up men, albeit not Americans. The question meanwhile of how many more Ukrainians have to die is answered privately by Joe Biden as “potentially all of them.” Anything else requires you to cynically believe Biden thinks he can simply purchase victory,
Up until now this has all been the Cold War playbook. Fighting to the last Afghan was a strategy perfected in Soviet-held Afghanistan in the 1980s. Yet what is different is the scale — since Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States sent over $37 billion worth of military aid to support Kiev’s war effort, the single largest arms transfer in U.S. history and one with no signs of stopping. A single F-16 costs up to $350 million a copy if bought with weapons, maintenance equipment, and spare parts kits.
Yet despite the similarities to Cold War Strategy 101, some lessons have been learned over the intervening years. One of America’s fail-points throughout the Cold War and the War on Terror was the use of puppet governments largely imposed or direly supported by American money and muscle. Because these governments lacked the support of the people (see Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan) they were non-starters with the lifespan of fruit flies. Ukraine is different; the puppet government is the government, beholden to the U.S. for its very survival but more or less supported directly by the people for now.
The other lesson learned has to do with nation building, or rebuilding or reconstruction, whatever the vast post-war expenditures will be called in this conflict. No more straight-up governmental efforts as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This time it will be all private enterprise. “It is obvious that American business can become the locomotive that will once again push forward global economic growth,” President Zelensky said, boasting that BlackRock, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, and others “have already become part of our Ukrainian way.”
The NYT calls Ukraine “the world’s largest construction site” and predicts projects there in the multi-billions, as high in some estimates as $750 billion. It will be, says the Times, a “gold rush: the reconstruction of Ukraine once the war is over. Russia is stepping up its offensive heading into the second year of the war, but already the staggering rebuilding task is evident. Hundreds of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and factories have been obliterated along with critical energy facilities and miles of roads, rail tracks and seaports. The profound human tragedy is unavoidably also a huge economic opportunity.” Earlier this year JP Morgan and Zelensky signed a memorandum of understanding stipulating Morgan would assist Ukraine in its reconstruction.
And maybe those large American companies have learned the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the billions spent, much money was wasted on dead ends and much was siphoned off due to corruption. But success or failure, the contractors always got paid in our Wars of Terror. With that in mind, more than 300 companies from 22 countries signed up for a Rebuild Ukraine exhibition and conference in Warsaw. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a standing-room-only crowd packed Ukraine House to discuss investment opportunities.
The eventual gold rush in rebuilding makes for an interesting addendum to the Biden strategy of fighting to the last Ukrainian. The more that is destroyed the more that needs to be rebuilt, and the potential for more money to pour into U.S. companies smart enough to wait by the trough for the killing to subside. But why wait? Drones operated by Danish companies have already mapped every bombed-out structure in the Mykolaiv Oblast region, with an eye toward using the data to help decide what reconstruction contracts should be issued.
So let’s put some lipstick on this pig of a strategy and call it the Biden Doctrine. Part I is to limit direct U.S. combat involvement while fanning the flames for others. Part II is to provide massive amounts of arms to enable a fight to the last local person. Part III is to transform the home government into a puppet instead of creating an unpopular one afresh. Part IV is to turn the reconstruction process into a profit center for American companies. How long the war lasts and how many die are cynically not part of the strategy. The off ramp in Ukraine, a diplomatic outcome that resets the map to pre-invasion 2022 levels, is clear enough to Washington. The Biden administration seems content, shamefully, not to call forcefully for diplomatic efforts but instead to bleed out the Russians as if this was Afghanistan 1980, albeit in the heart of Europe.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Indictments over Classified. Not Biden, and Not Pence. So Why Trump?
Donald Trump is the first president in history to be indicted for Federal crimes, in this case a series of eight charges each with multiple counts totaling 37 centering on his taking highly classified materials with him to Mar-a-Lago from the White House in January 2021. The charges also implicate Trump and a close aide, Waltine Nauta, in a conspiracy to hide the documents in whole or in part from the National Archives (NARA), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and his own legal team, and making false statements along those same lines.
Hundreds of documents are of concern, classified at the highest levels with origins at CIA, NSA, and elsewhere in the intelligence community. While leaks and speculation prior to the unsealing of the indictment suggested this was a routine Espionage Act case, i.e., you have possession of some classified documents and thus must be guilty, the indictment lays out a damming parallel set of evidence for obstruction, including a suggestion that Trump was prepared to have his lawyers shred some of the offending documents.
Though Biden’s handling of classified remains an active investigation, Mike Pence was recently absolved of any criminal intent in his own mishandling of secret paper. Many people believe the same result will come of the Biden case. What makes Trump’s case so materially different that the Special Prosecutor is prepared to throw the book at him and his aide?
The key seems to be the egregiousness of Trump’s actions coupled with his attempt to cover up his actions. Lawyers call it an “aggravating factor,” making clear the charged actions were not accidental. It looks like they may have it.
The indictment shows in great detail efforts Trump made to conceal the documents both from NARA and the DOJ, and from members of his own legal team. Dozens of boxes containing mementos and paperwork from his administration were assembled by Trump over his four years in the White House. These included, all mixed together, everything from newspaper clippings to notes from Kim Jong Un to highly secretive war plans aimed at Iran. These boxes were transported to Mar-a-Lago by commercial means, itself a violation of numerous security regulations. Within Mar-a-Lago the documents were not always kept under lock and key, at one point being piled on the stage in one of the ballrooms (a photo of this is included with the indictment; another included photo shows boxes spilling classified documents onto the floor of a storage room, and a third showing the boxes in a shower room.) There is evidence to suggest Trump instructed his staff to better hide some of the documents from his own lawyers when they undertook a search in response to a NARA subpoena, and then again ahead of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. This may have led to Trump losing two lawyers just hours after being indicted, as Jim Trusty and John Rowley announced they’d resigned.
Further under the heading of egregiousness, the indictment suggests a tape recording exists of one of at least two instances where Trump showed off the documents to people without security clearances. In the tape Trump admits the document at hand is classified, and in a schoolboy-like way says he should not be showing it to a writer, a publisher, and two Trump staffers. Trump acknowledging that he knew a document in his possession was still classified stands at odds with his public claims that he had declassified all the materials he took and likely removes this defense strategy from the upcoming trial.
The indictment further claims Trump obstructed the investigation into his handling of classified materials in a number of ways, to include telling his attorneys to claim he did not have the documents subpoenaed, directing his aide Nauta to move boxes to conceal them from his own lawyers, and then from the FBI/DOJ and then from the grand jury, suggesting his lawyer destroy some of the documents, claiming he was cooperating fully when he was actively concealing documents from disclosure, and submitting a false certification that all requested document had been submitted. Nauta is listed as a co-conspirator on most of those allegations, with phone records and internal surveillance tapes connecting statements made and actions taken by the two men.
Trump also appears to have used the boxes moving like a shell game to hide information from Christina Bobb, who was serving as the formal custodian of records. The indictment makes clear she did not know the statements in her attestation that everything had been turned over to the DOJ were false, and she has not been charged.
The indictment also claims Trump helped to pack boxes at the White House, which rebuts a common defense in these sorts of cases, that the retention of documents was a clerical error by staff and not intentional.
While understanding the contents of the indictment give only one side of the story and that Trump will defend himself when the case comes to trial likely in the spring, the evidence available seems significant. Trump clearly possessed classified documents outside proper storage areas, and “injury to the United States,” a requirement of the law, should be fairly easy to prove given the dramatic nature of some of the documents and the casual manner in which Trump handled them, to include showing off war plans to a writer and publisher. This part of the case follows standard lines in an Espionage Act prosecution. Trump’s actions appear to go well beyond anything Mike Pence did with his classified or anything that Biden has so far been accused of.
However, it is the charges of obstruction which are most significant in this case. One of the key elements of obstruction is proving a state of guilty mind — mens rea — and that will be the crux of the actual prosecution based on the Mar-a-Lago documents. What was Trump thinking at the time, in other words, did he have specific intent to obstruct some investigation? A jury might find Trump’s actions alone speak to intent, his active attempts to hide physical boxes of documents from first his lawyers and then investigators, for example.
But the joker in the deck is Waltine Nauta, Trump’s close aide who is charged alongside Trump on the obstruction and lying allegations. Nauta faces potentially decades in jail, serious time. It appears his being charged may be an attempt to get him to testify directly to Trump’s intent and state of mind, by recalling actual instructions and conversations. If Nauta accepts some sort of plea deal in return for such testimony, it is hard to see a jury letting Donald Trump off on these charges. But where things go after that, politics-wise, is anybody’s guess at this early stage.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Final Durham Report: Democracy’s Horror Show
Hillary knew. She knew her campaign paid for Russian disinformation (including the alleged pee tape accusations) to be washed through a report by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. She knew the information was false but could potentially allow her to win the election. Hillary lied to the FBI about all this, and lied to the American public. Such was her appetite.
The FBI knew. They knew none of the information in the Steele Report could be corroborated, and they knew most of it was false. They turned a blind eye, purposefully and with the intent to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election, to basic investigative and tradecraft rules to use the corrupt information to surveil the Trump campaign via the FISA court. When Trump won the election anyway, the FBI continued to use this information to assault the loyalty and viability of President Trump and ultimately tried to use the information via the Robert Mueller investigation to impeach or indict Trump.
Only one person went to jail for all this, a minor player named Kevin Clinesmith for provided false info to the FISA court. No changes are planned for the FBI. No charges are to be brought against Hillary Clinton. The Deep State came within an eyelash of bringing down an unwanted president as surely as they are believed to have done in Dallas ’63. Words were the weapon this time, not bullets.
These are the conclusions of the final Durham Report released last week. The report was written by former Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was chosen in 2019 to examine the FBI probe known as “Operation Crossfire Hurricane.” Durham provides the only comprehensive review of what came to be called Russiagate, and shows how close to the edge our democracy came to falling into the abyss at the hands of the Deep State. It all sounds dramatic, as those terms have been bandied about so often and in so many contexts they may have lost some of their meaning. But make no mistake about it — the FBI tried to shape the 2016 election and failing, tried to run Trump out of office. If you thought the “Hunter Biden Letter,” the one signed by dozens of intelligence professionals calling the Biden Diaries potential Russian disinformation was just wrong, you should find the conclusions of the Durham report a horror show.
There was nothing true in the Steele Report, for example, this key paragraph: “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and feared.”
The FBI had no intelligence about Trump or others associated with the Trump campaign being in contact with Russian intelligence beyond Steele. Despite being unvetted and uncorroborated and coming from a single source with direct political ties to Trump’s opponent, the FBI used such accusations to justify a full-spectrum surveillance operation against the Trump campaign, the first known such operation in American history. The FBI omitted the fact from its FISA application that Carter Page was in fact not a Russian agent but a paid source for the CIA who had been vetted by the Agency as loyal and reliable. They just lied and even when the lie could not be ignored the FBI lied more times to keep the surveillance application alive before the FISA court.
Durham found investigators “ignored exculpatory evidence, put too much stock in information provided by Trump’s political opponents, and carried out surveillance without genuinely believing there was probable cause to do so.” “Throughout the duration of Crossfire Hurricane, facts and circumstances that were inconsistent with the premise that Trump and/or persons associated with the Trump campaign were involved in a collusive or conspiratorial relationship with the Russian government were ignored or simply assessed away,” Durham wrote. The FBI acted “without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power.”
It could not be more clear. The FBI knew what it was doing was wrong and did it anyway because the ends, defeating Trump, appeared to justify the means. No surprise, that has been the slogan behind every democratic election U.S. intelligence agencies have overthrown overseas, so why not follow the same logic when the tools of war came home to attempt to drive the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton.
We now know that almost all of the disinformation in the Steele Report came from one man, Igor Danchenko (whom the FBI had until 2011 investigated as a Russian spy.) Danchenko also fed disinfo to a Clinton supporter and registered foreign agent for Russia, Charles Dolan (who was known to but never interviewed by the FBI) to pass on the Steele to further obscure its origin. But according to the Durham report “The failure to identify the primary sub-source [Danchenko] early in the investigation’s pursuit of FISA authority prevented the FBI from properly examining the possibility that some or much of the non-open source information contained in Steele’s reporting was Russian disinformation (that wittingly or unwittingly was passed along to Steele), or that the reporting was otherwise not credible.”
Everyone knew. The Durham Report confirms on August 3, 2016, the Russiagate allegations were briefed to President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and FBI Director James Comey by CIA Director John Brennan at an Oval Office meeting. None of the men briefed, and none of the agencies involved, did anything to intercede in the FBI’s efforts alongside the Clinton Campaign to manufacture collusion between Trump and Russia. Indeed, everyone allowed the falsehoods to linger into the Mueller Report and when that document concluded publicly there was no collusion between Trump and the Kremlin, pivot the same pile of falsehoods to claim Trump somehow obstructed an investigation which actually exonerated him, concluding without indictment as it did.
As for the FBI, the Durham report brutally tells us “the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law.” That they “displayed, at best, a cavalier attitude towards accuracy and completeness.” That the Bureau “disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and re-examination… there were clear opportunities to have avoided the mistakes and to have prevented the damage resulting from their embrace of seriously flawed information that they failed to analyze and assess properly.” And that “senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities.” That “important aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane matter were seriously deficient.” The Report concludes “although recognizing that in hindsight much is clearer, much of this also seems to have been clear at the time.” As for recommendations, the Report states “more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of “Protect[ing]the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.”
Without the help of the FBI Russiagate would have been nothing but a flimsy Clinton campaign scam. Thus the Durham Report offers one over-arching implied conclusion: Be skeptical of the FBI and watch accusations of collusion and foreign interference closely around the 2024 election. Treason is indeed a twisty path.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
I’m Disgusted with the Trump Indictment
The sheer pleasure ordinary Democrats, never mind MSM personnel, got from seeing Donald Trump in court was disgusting. The “Ah, jeez, why not?” reaction when it was announced he would not be paraded as a captured curiosity, a circus freak, through a perp walk. The t-shirts that wouldn’t be made out of his mug shot, all the disappointment leavened with the glee that years of investigations finally yielded Trump in court facing criminal charges, the fruition of #TheResistance. To hear MSNBC, you’d think we were days away from the Orange Man being thrown into a van with no windows for his last ride upstate, the Orange tan and orange jumpsuit, with Orange is the New Black jokes echoing behind him, the last things he hears before being violated in the prison showers while multitudes cheer.
I’d seen all this before, in post-military dictatorship Korea where prosecuting one’s political enemies is a popular blood sport. Former President Roh Moo-hyun faced corruption allegations after leaving office in 2008, but he died by suicide before he could face trial. Former President Park Geun-hye was impeached and removed from office in 2017, and she was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges of bribery and abuse of power. Former Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam were investigated for corruption after leaving office. Overall, whether a former South Korean president goes to jail after their term depends on various factors, occasionally such as the evidence against them, and more significantly, the political climate surrounding them. That’s no rule of law, it is revenge. That’s the new America you’re cheering for?
And yet for all the schadenfreude turned up to 11, we’re left staring blankly at the TV and asking: is this all there is? After eight years of intense judicial and media scrutiny, after two impeachments, the January 6 coven of elders committee, Russiagate and even after the state of New York and the House finally did get his tax documents, this is it? The Teflon Don is going down over… falsification of business records? Never mind the 34 counts, that’s just stacking, an old DA trick to turn one “crime” into many and make things look more dramatic. It just seem impossible that after all this there is no debt to Putin, no tax scam, no KGB handler, just a bookkeeping error. And spare us the “Al Capone went to jail over tax returns.” Capone was a known mobster, a murderer, a man who left a long string of broken bodies alongside his wholly criminal business (and he only served eight years.) Trump may have committed a bookkeeping error. He’ll pay a fine at worst.
When you blow away the smoke, Trump is charged with only one minor crime. That stems from the allegation that money Trump paid to his lawyer Michael Cohen (continuing the call him a “fixer” just prolongs the awful Godfather references and is sooooo 2021) to in turn legally buy silence from Stormy Daniels, and for Karen McDougal’s and other stories. Trump supposedly purposely mislabeled this legally spent money as “legal fees.” The indictment instead claims it a violation of business records law because the primary purpose was to influence an election. The supposition by the DA that that was true allowed him to upgrade a misdemeanor, false business records, into multiple felony accusations. Backing all this up is the word of disbarred felon Michael Cohen, and former National Inquirer honcho David Pecker (you just can’t make this stuff up, folks) both of whom are going to swear it is all true. That Pecker supposedly was granted immunity to testify and Cohen himself has multiple law suits and a huge chip on his shoulder pending against Trump has nothing to do with nuthin’.
The problem is DA Alvin Bragg (who actually ran for his office on the promise of prosecuting Trump for… something… and is now paying off his promise to his backers) has to win the case, and that is going to be as legally tough as the case itself is legally soft.
In short, the DA has to prove a crime not even charged (the unspecified campaign finance laws, or maybe something to do with taxes, the so-called “core crime”), show a misdemeanor for everyone else is actually a felony if you’re Trump, demonstrate Trump’s criminal state of mind when this all happened (intent to defraud… who? The Trump Organization?) and do all that based primarily on the testimony of Michael Cohen and a pseudo-journalist named Pecker. Otherwise, Trump is acquitted. And while the news is chock full of articles on the threat to our democracy if Trump is found guilty, no one has been saying much about how he will be empowered if he wins. It is said if you go after the king, you should not miss.There is nothing in this case which will stop Trump from running for president, even if somehow found guilty or even serving time. His affair with Stormy, which may be offensive to some voters, has sadly been part of the public conversation around Trump for years. If the standards being applied in New York hold, then while this is the first indictment of a former president it will not be the last. Every local prosecutor in the country will now feel that he has a green light to criminally investigate and prosecute presidents after they leave office (remember Jim Garrison and the JFK assassination.) Perhaps over the Hunter Biden case?Could things get to the point where the “rule of law” misinterpreted as a “rule of revenge” means a Republican candidate will need to stay out of blue states to avoid prosecution and vice-versa for Dems? Trump went to New York and surrendered himself voluntarily; imagine if he had stayed in Florida and fought any extradition attempt to force him to Manhattan. Democrats salivating over the charges against Trump will feel differently when a prominent Dem ends up on the receiving end of a similar effort by any of the thousands of prosecutors elected to local office, eager to make their bones by taking down a president of the other party. Now imagine an ageing Joe Biden a virtual prisoner of a Democratic safehouse in Delaware.It is easy to brush this off as exaggeration, but Trump’s opponents react to his provocations and grandstanding by escalating the erosion of legal norms (see the Mueller investigation, and the impeachments.) Ask Mitt Romney, who said “The prosecutor’s overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents and damages the public’s faith in our justice system.” And don’t forget Alvin Bragg’s predecessor had almost a year to bring this case after Trump left office, but did not do so, and the Department of Justice also declined. Historians will call this all the Bragg Rule.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Clarence Thomas Takes One for the Court
Did Clarence Thomas do anything wrong in accepting gifts from a wealthy Republican, or is Thomas the victim of years of pent-up anger at the Supreme Court by Democrats? Yes.
According to an investigation by ProPublica, for more than 20 years Justice Thomas received lavish and expensive gifts, including trips on a private yacht and a private jet, from Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and real estate developer with a long record of support for Republican politicians. Under the ethic regulations which guide Supreme Court justices, it is not clear that Thomas had to report any of this (Thomas says the guidance he received affirmed he did not need to report any of the gifts as his angel, Crow, had no business before the Court and the trips were “personal hospitality,” a gift from a friend.)
ProPublica asserts that the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 required Thomas to report these gifts. This is most probably untrue. People do not report generally “personal hospitality,” such as Thomas’s vacations. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that the Judicial Conference issued new guidelines saying free trips and air travel must now be reported. This was announced as a change in policy, meaning disclosure was not required in the past but would be in the future. It is as simple as that: The rules did not require reporting of trips in the past, but going forward they do.
So it appears while Thomas did not break the letter of these regulations, he certainly skirted the edge of what we’ll call propriety, the appearance of being on Harlan Crow’s extended payroll. For a guy who has lived so long in Democratic crosshairs it seemed an unwise thing for Thomas to do, even if legal. One theme of government ethics classes is you don’t have to demonstrate actual impropriety, you must avoid even the possible appearance of impropriety. Accepting lavish travel perks? Operating you own email server? Just not what regular Feds do, whether legal or not.
Thomas’ long war with the Left started with his confirmation hearings in 1991 after his nomination by President George H.W. Bush. Anita Hill, who worked for Thomas at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thomas sexually harassed her during that time. Her testimony ignited a national conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace and the treatment of women in the legal profession. It introduced many Americans to the vocabulary of pornography long before Bill Clinton soiled the waters (small world: Senator Joe Biden was the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversaw the confirmation process. Biden has faced criticism for his sexist handling of Hill’s testimony and for not allowing three other female witnesses to testify during the hearings.)
As a jurist criticism of Thomas has focused on three points. Many liberals disagree with Justice Thomas’s conservative judicial philosophy, which emphasizes originalism and strict interpretation of the Constitution. They argue that this approach leads to narrow interpretations of individual rights and protections, particularly for marginalized groups. Similarly, liberals criticize Justice Thomas for his opposition to affirmative action and other civil rights policies. They argue that his views on these issues are harmful to communities of color. Lastly, Thomas is known for being one of the least vocal members of the Supreme Court, rarely asking questions during oral arguments or engaging in public discourse about his opinions. Some liberals argue that this lack of engagement is problematic and makes it difficult to understand his reasoning on key issues. There are accusations he often has made up his mind along ideological lines before even hearing a case.
Thomas has more recently become a lightening rod for everything Democrats have come to hate about the Supreme Court, as the Court shifted rightward and decisions like Roe v. Wade went against standard liberal thinking. They see Thomas’ “corruption” as emblematic of the Court’s outsize power due to lifetime appointments, isolation from traditional Constitutional checks and balances, and virtual immunity from public pressure, making it a magnet for corruption and influence-peddling. They see Harlan Crow as having purchased direct access to one of the most influential and powerful men in America and argue that while Crow may not have a specific issue in front of the Court, he holds a generic interest in right wing causes and thus has bought himself a sympathetic judge for his broader Conservative agenda.
Things only got worse when it was discovered that Thomas’ spouse Ginni donated to Republican causes and sent texts cheering on the protests of January 6. A woman with political thoughts of her own! Nonetheless, Thomas is a man with a target on his back.
The only real check and balance on Supreme Court justices is formal impeachment and removal from the bench, so it not surprising at the first sign of impropriety Democrats like AOC have immediately called for Thomas to be impeached. It won’t happen; the standards for impeachment are high, whether what Thomas did actually qualifies is far from clear, and a partisan Congress will never go along. Only one Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached, Samuel Chase, in 1804 for alleged political bias in his judicial conduct. The Senate held a trial, but ultimately acquitted Chase of all charges. No other Supreme Court justice has been impeached since then. Justice Abe Fortas did resign over 50 years ago over money issues, ahead of a likely try at impeachment.
Some have already gone further than the expected calls for hearings and investigations. The New Republic writes “The Democrats need to destroy Clarence Thomas’s reputation. They’ll never successfully impeach him. But so what? Make him a metaphor for every insidious thing the far right has done to this country.” The magazine went on to call him the “single worst Supreme Court justice of all time. Clarence Thomas is an embarrassment to the Supreme Court and the country, and the worship of this man on the right is one of the greatest symbols of their contempt for standards, the law, precedent, and democracy.”
The hyperbole gives it away — all of this is another tempest to fill in the dead space between Orange Man Bad stories. Thomas should not be proud of his actions, but nor should he face impeachment, never mind some sort of public drawing and quartering of his reputation, over what he did. Clarence Thomas is taking one for the Court.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Third World Politics: Details of the Trump Indictment
The rule of law, which seems so precious to holier-than-thou Democrats these days, depends above all on one thing: a belief among the majority of us that while no one is above the law, the law will also be applied fairly to all those it does affect. Whether you loathe Trump or love him, you know this: what is happening now in Manhattan is unfair and inconsistent with a nation that once prided itself on believing in the rule of law. Who is still a believer today?
The previously sealed indictment shows Donald Trump was charged with 34 felony counts for falsification of business records, the only crime actually charged. The falsification of business records is normally prosecuted in New York as a misdemeanor. But Bragg’s office apparently bumped up all the charges to felonies on the grounds that the conduct was intended to conceal another underlying crime, violating election finance law (“with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.”) There is more smoke than fire; no wonder the DA wanted to keep this mess sealed as long as possible and the judge won’t allow cameras in the courtroom. But specifically, how is this unfair?
Overcharging and stacking charges. Two basic prosecutorial transgressions. If anything, Trump should have been charged with a simple misdemeanor, the so-called falsification of business records for his seemingly characterizing money legally paid to Stormy Daniels and others as part of a nondisclosure agreement as “legal expenses” as well as payments to the National Enquirer to “catch and kill” a story about Trump’s alleged affair with Karen McDougal and other stories.
The overall case has no victim of Trump’s “crime,” and is basically a tempest over bookkeeping. Bumping all this up to felony charges based solely on Bragg’s supposition that the error was made with the intent to cheat on campaign finance laws is just overcharging, trying to make this all seem more important than it is.
Stacking, the second basic prosecutorial transgression, refers to a DA’s attempt to break one “crime” into as many pieces as he can (34 counts, one for each check cut to lawyer Michael Cohen allegedly for Stormy, et al) to also exaggerate the importance of it all and justify the felony upgrade.
Ignoring precedent cases to “get him.” Alvin Bragg ran for office on prosecuting Trump. He is fulfilling a campaign promise and paying off his backers. Bragg, in the words of law professor Jonathan Turley, had a “very public, almost Hamlet-like process where he debated whether he could do this bootstrapping theory [bumping misdemeanors up to felonies.] He stopped it for a while and was pressured to go forward with it. All of that smacks more of politics than prosecutorial discretion.” Indeed, if Bragg were to have looked fairly at precedent he would have run right into the John Edwards case. Edwards, a former United States Senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, was indicted in 2011 on charges of violating campaign finance laws during his 2008 presidential campaign. The charges stemmed from allegations Edwards used nearly $1 million in illegal campaign contributions to conceal an extramarital affair during his campaign.
The government alleged Edwards received money from two wealthy donors and used it to support his mistress and their child in return for their silence. The government claimed this constituted a violation of campaign finance laws, which limit the amount of money that individuals can contribute to a campaign and require that such contributions be disclosed. Edwards maintained the payments were gifts and not campaign contributions, and therefore not subject to campaign finance laws. A jury acquitted Edwards on one count of violating campaign finance laws and deadlocked on the remaining five counts. The government ultimately decided not to retry Edwards.
Creating New Political Precedent. If this is all they found in years of obsession with destroying this man, he must be the cleanest person to ever hold office. As former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson observed decades ago about unfairness, “It is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it; it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books or putting investigators to work to pin some offense on him,” something that is inherently unfair.
The law applied equally. For the nation’s sake any action against Trump must preserve what is left of faith in the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or risk civil disenfranchisement if not outright civil unrest. To do this, someone will have to address the case of Hillary Clinton, who maintained an unsecured private email server processing classified material. Clinton destroyed tens of thousands of emails, potential evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries. She operated the server out of her New York (!) kitchen. Her purpose in doing all this appeared to have been avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests (a crime with the intent to commit another crime) ahead of her 2016 presidential run. The Hillary campaign and the DNC also did something naughty in paying for the Steele dossier as “legal expenses” and not campaign expenditures, and got off with only an Election Commission fine for their bookkeeping “error.”
In addition, those who claim Trump’s indictment is not unfair will also have to account for the fact that Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 were not found to have violated campaign finance laws and no charges were even levied. During the 2008 campaign donors were able to make contributions using fictitious names, such as “Mickey Mouse” and “Donald Duck,” and the campaign was criticized for not doing enough to prevent fraudulent donations. Another controversy involved the Obama campaign’s use of untraceable prepaid credit cards, which raised concerns about the possibility of illegal foreign contributions. No charges were ever filed.
Unequal prosecution. This concern extends past presidential politics. On Sunday, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy tweeted “DA Alvin Bragg is abusing his office to target President Trump while he’s reduced a majority of felonies [in NYC], including violent crimes, to misdemeanors. He has different rules for political opponents.” The DA’s tactics have led to a surge in crimes committed in Manhattan as prosecutions have fallen. Bragg claims equity demands he selectively prosecute; Bragg reduced 52 percent of all felony charges to misdemeanors, opposite of what he did to Trump.
The Future. If the standards being applied in New York hold, then while this is the first indictment of a former president it will not be the last. Every local prosecutor in the country will now feel that he has a green light to criminally investigate and prosecute presidents after they leave office. Democrats salivating over the charges against Trump will feel differently when a prominent Dem ends up on the receiving end of a similar effort by any of the thousands of prosecutors elected to local office, eager to make their bones by taking down a president of the United States (remember Jim Garrison and the JFK assassination.) Perhaps over the Hunter Biden case? Could things get to the point where the rule of law means a Republican candidate will need to stay out of blue states to avoid prosecution and vice-versa? Trump went to New York and surrendered himself voluntarily; imagine if he had stayed in Florida and fought any extradition attempt to force him to Manhattan. Now imagine an ageing Joe Biden a virtual prisoner of a Democratic safehouse in Delaware. Historians would have to call it the Bragg Rule.
If you’re curious about how that might work, just have a look at post-military dictatorship Korea where prosecuting one’s political enemies is a popular blood sport. Former President Roh Moo-hyun faced corruption allegations after leaving office in 2008, but he died by suicide before he could face trial. Former President Park Geun-hye was impeached and removed from office in 2017, and she was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges of bribery and abuse of power. Former Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam were investigated for corruption after leaving office, but they were not convicted. Overall, whether a former South Korean president goes to jail after their term depends on various factors, such as the evidence against them, and more significantly, the political climate. Is this America’s future? Ask Alvin Bragg.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump Indicted
What would you have done if you were Alvin Bragg? Would you have indicted Donald Trump? Or would you have walked away, concerned about accusations you as a Democrat were playing politics, and more concerned the indictment would somehow help the man you are trying to take down? You don’t play with such fire around a guy like Trump casually.
At Bragg’s insistence, Trump was indicted by a Manhattan Grand Jury on Thursday. The actual charges will not be announced until Trump is arraigned before a judge, likely in about a week. The charges will however be based around Stormy Daniels, who allegedly had sex with Trump in 2006, which he denies, and which she and Michael Cohen once also denied. She then took money in 2016 to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) to keep silent. She willfully violated the NDA to revive her career and profit selling her story to the National Enquirer. Meanwhile, when faced with jail time for all sorts of dirty deeds, Trump’s now disbarred former lawyer Michael Cohen, a felon himself, violated attorney-client privilege to claim on his word the NDA payoffs were actually complex technical violations of New York business records law (a misdemeanor) and Federal campaign finance law (potentially a felony.) If this all sounds complicated, it’s because it is. No wonder even the Washington Post labeled this a “zombie case.” It is also the weakest case in the universe of legal troubles around Trump.
But there is a bigger question: if you were Bragg, can you win? Will voters object to a district attorney in New York trying to play kingmaker in the 2024 election, prosecuting a Federal case locally in Manhattan? Candidate Trump, surrounded by an aura of legal invincibility, is already earning partisan points claiming he is the victim of banana republic politics, and this indictment will allow him to claim he was right all along. Trump will fire both barrels, one aimed at Bragg, the other likely at Biden (who he will accuse of playing a role.) He was already the victim of partisan use of justice, as the FBI did try to influence both the 2016 election (with Russiagate) and the 2020 (by deep-sixing Hunter Biden’s laptop claiming falsely it was Russian misinformation) and now is taking a swing at 2024 with the Mar-a-Lago documents. If public opinion moves further to Trump’s side, Alvin Bragg through his indictment just reelected Trump to the White House as a sympathy candidate. CIA spooks, no strangers to manipulating elections abroad, call that blowback, and it is a real threat in this instance.
For the nation’s sake any action against Trump must preserve what is left of faith in the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or risk civil disenfranchisement if not outright civil unrest. Bragg will have to address the case involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who maintained an unsecured private email server which processed classified material. Her server held e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level which included the names of CIA and NSA employees. Clinton and her team destroyed tens of thousands of emails, potential evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries. She operated the server out of her New York (!) home kitchen despite the presence of the Secret Service on property who failed to report it. Her purpose in doing all this appeared to have been avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests during her tenure as SecState ahead of her 2016 presidential run. The Hillary campaign and the DNC also did something naughty in paying for the Steele dossier as “legal expenses” and not campaign expenditures, and got off with only an Election Commission fine.
In addition, those who claim Trump’s indictment is not political in nature will also have to account for the non-actions against the Obama campaign. Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 were not found to have violated campaign finance laws and no charges were even levied. During the 2008 campaign donors were able to make contributions using fictitious names, such as “Mickey Mouse” and “Donald Duck,” and the campaign was criticized for not doing enough to prevent fraudulent donations. Another controversy involved the Obama campaign’s use of untraceable prepaid credit cards, which raised concerns about the possibility of illegal foreign contributions. No charges were ever filed.
There is also the case of John Edwards. Edwards, a former United States Senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, was indicted in 2011, on charges of violating campaign finance laws during his 2008 presidential campaign. The charges stemmed from allegations Edwards used nearly $1 million in illegal campaign contributions to conceal an extramarital affair during his campaign. Sound familiar?
Specifically, the government alleged Edwards received money from two wealthy donors and used it to support his mistress and their child in return for their silence. The government claimed this constituted a violation of campaign finance laws, which limit the amount of money that individuals can contribute to a campaign and require that such contributions be disclosed. Edwards maintained the payments were gifts and not campaign contributions, and therefore not subject to campaign finance laws. A jury acquitted Edwards on one count of violating campaign finance laws and deadlocked on the remaining five counts. The government ultimately decided not to retry Edwards.
The other fear which should have held Bragg back is that business records mismanagement and even campaign finance violations are typically dealt with either via administrative penalties and fines (Trump will not go to jail for any of this.) Most of the laws Trump may have broken require some sort of intent to do wrong. In other words, Trump would have had to have taken the steps with Stormy not just for ego or his presidential library or as some crude souvenir of virility but with the specific intent to commit harm. Proving a state of guilty mind — mens rea — will be the crux of any actual prosecution. What was Trump thinking at the time. “It should be clear,” says the New York Law Journal, “Cohen’s plea, obtained under pressure and with the ultimate aim of developing a case against the president, cannot in and of itself establish whether Trump had the requisite mental state.” If DA Bragg has other key witnesses beyond Stormy and Cohen he has not signaled as such.
The final questions are probably the most important: Bragg knows what the law says. If knowing the chances of a serious conviction are slight, why would he take the case to court? Then again, if knowing the chances for a serious conviction are slight, why would he have gone to the Grand Jury at all, his predecessor and the Department of Justice having passed on this case. No one is above the law, but that includes politics not trumping clean hands jurisprudence as well.
If Bragg successfully navigates the politics, if he proves his case in court, then what? Trump’s “crimes” are minor. Could Bragg call Trump having to pay a fine or even do some sort of community service during the 2024 campaign a win? It seems petty, as even a conviction would not disqualify Trump’s bid for the White House (Eugene Debs ran for president while locked up.) Controversy is home turf for Trump; he is clearly again the center of attention and the dominant figure in his party. It sure seems Trump wins politically big-picture whether he wins or loses at court. If you were Alvin Bragg, how would you answer accusations of the weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Iran’s Foreign Policy: A Complex Landscape
The Nation asked of President Joe Biden “Is America back?” If it is, what is its signature accomplishment, the marker that Pax Americana or something similar worthy of Latin, is back?
Certainly nothing here at home. Gas flutters at record levels, as much as $5 a gallon in places with all the side effects of higher grocery prices and supply chain missteps. Employment-wise, jobs of some sort are there but lack in quality and salary such that many people find unemployment a better deal than underemployment.
Abroad Biden stretched NATO to its threads by threatening Ukrainian membership in the alliance, and ignoring objections to the alliance’s expansion across Russia’s political spectrum, contributing to an invasion few thought would happen and no one in the West outside of Washington wanted. The result is increasingly divided “allies” and massive expenses in arms and lives without much of a defined endgame. This foreign policy disaster-in-progress stands next to Biden’s other signature foreign policy action, withdrawal from Afghanistan in a haphazard way such that it displayed America’s confusion and fugue state more than its power. The world outside the Beltway seems well aware the outcome of more than 20 years of war and occupation is to return the country to its pre-September 11 state of medieval feudalism even if we chose not to talk much about it here at home.
That’s not much to run on for the second term Biden all but announced his candidacy for in his State of the Union address. Hopes to make better progress here at home are dependent mostly on factors outside America’s control, to include the price of oil (thanks to a Saudi Arabia who brushed back Biden) and any return of Covid. Biden needs and might just be able to find a way to make peace with Iran, however, and score a major foreign policy victory, the kind of typical second term action he could pack into the end of his first term. The world might just forgive some sins (the return of U.S.. forces to Somalia and the endless war in Yemen the U.S. supports, for example) if it sees somnolent American diplomacy dragged out of the closet after six years and put back to use. America’d be back.
The obstacles to some sort of agreement with Iran are formidable. Iran’s own foreign policy goals are nearly as mixed up as America’s, with the country’s leaders pursuing a complex and often contradictory set of objectives. From supporting armed groups in the Middle East to engaging in negotiations with the West, Iran’s approach to foreign affairs has been shaped by a variety of factors, including its history, ideology, and geopolitical interests. To achieve any sort of agreement, Biden would have to navigate all of the above.
One of the most notable aspects of Iran’s foreign policy is its support for armed groups in the region. Iran has long been accused of backing militant organizations, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, as part of its efforts to project power and influence beyond its borders. This has led to increased tensions with Iran’s neighbors, particularly Israel, and has fueled concerns about the country’s intentions in the region. Iran controls Iraq (another American foreign policy blunder, about half of which was under Biden’s vice-watch) and complicates Syria and Yemen. But the complexity of the problem just adds to the value to a solution if it can be found.
Another key aspect of Iran’s foreign policy is its relationship with the West, a fork in the road Biden has the most influence on. The country has been under international sanctions for decades, with the United States and its allies seeking to pressure Iran to limit its nuclear program and curb its support for armed groups (how’s that sanctions regime been working out?) After negotiations with the West during the end state Obama administration, including the 2015 nuclear deal, lifted some of the sanctions in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, the deal went south, the United States reimposed most sanctions, and Iran has responded by resuming some of its nuclear activities, leading to fears of a wider conflict.
Iran’s foreign policy is shaped by its self-understanding it is a major player in the Middle East, something the U.S. has been very slow to acknowledge. The country has long sought to be a regional power, and has used its military, economic, and political leverage to advance its interests in the region, most notably securing a client state in Iraq. This has led to increased tensions with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, which view Iran as a major threat to their security. But wouldn’t it be a nice gesture to the Saudi’s, who raised oil prices and refuse to crank up production to match that lost in the Ukraine war, to see the U.S. sit down with one of its adversaries?
So what would it take for Biden to make some sort of deal with Iran?
Sanctions relief: Iran would likely seek relief from the economic sanctions that have been imposed on the country, while the U.S. would want to ensure that any sanctions relief is conditional and proportional to Iran’s compliance with the terms of the deal. This is tricky business, but was more or less done in 2015 and is the actual stuff of diplomacy. The economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other countries have had a significant impact on Iran’s economy, reducing its ability to access the global financial system, sell oil, and purchase from other countries. This has led to a shortage of foreign currency, inflation, and a decline in living standards for many Iranians. Biden would have to make clear Iran can choose to be a threshold nuclear power and suffer indefinitely for it, or rejoin the global system and profit from it.
Nuclear restrictions: Both sides would need to agree on the extent to which Iran’s nuclear program should be restricted and monitored, including limitations on uranium enrichment and the size of its nuclear stockpile. Again, mostly taken care of in 2015. Biden would need to fend off Israel entreaties to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities rather than trust Tehran to disarm them. Iran at the negotiation table would likely demand some sort of pullback of Israeli nukes from the Gulf.
Timelines: A clear timeline for lifting sanctions and implementing restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program is important to avoid stalling the agreement.
Verification mechanisms: Both sides would need to agree on the mechanisms for verifying compliance with the terms of the deal, including regular inspections and monitoring.
Regional involvement: As the situation in the Middle East is complex, regional actors, such as the Gulf countries, would need to be involved in the negotiations and have their concerns addressed. This is likely the most difficult part of the deal, bringing the regional actors into line, something a weakened America may not have the diplomatic cojones to make happen. Yemen however is a possible bargaining chip in several directions, and lessening the nuclear threat overall in the Gulf remains a goal worth pursuing.
The outcome of any potential negotiations will depend on a number of factors, including Iran’s willingness to engage in constructive talks, the level of sanctions relief and other incentives the U.S. is willing to provide, and the international community’s support (particularly a reluctant Saudi Arabia and an even more reluctant Israel) for the negotiations.
The U.S. and Iran have had a complicated relationship and there have been significant obstacles to reaching a nuclear agreement in the past. However, Biden has expressed a willingness to re-engage with Iran and revive the 2015 nuclear deal. He has also indicated that his administration is open to diplomatic efforts to address concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and other issues a la carte. For a president looking to take big issue success into the next election, it just might be worth a chance.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A 2022 to Remember, Ukraine Edition
Looking back at 2022, at what did and did not happen, really tells us what was important, hindsight and all that.
Things that Did Not Happen in 2022
Joe Biden did not explain why the U.S. is at war in Ukraine.
Any nuclear war.
Regime change in Russia.
Ukraine winning the war.
The Russians running out of missiles, men and tires.
No American diplomacy has been tried to conclude the war in Ukraine.
Things That Did Happen in 2022
Among the things causing the greatest pain are the highest gas prices ever recorded in the United States, topping $5 a gallon across the country at one point. Gas purchases on their own may make up only a relatively small portion of most families’ budgets, but the spike in gas, oil and diesel prices has left businesses with higher costs that will force them to raise prices on their customers and pull back on new investments. It risks a slowdown in consumer spending, as households cut back on other expenditures. Energy is so crucial to the functioning of the economy broadly that the price increases bring along higher prices in many other sectors, only adding to inflation. Meanwhile, U.S.-imposed energy sanctions have played to Russia’s favor economically as oil prices rose. Things may come to a head as winter sets in in Germany and that natural gas from Russia is missed. But that is a domestic German problem the U.S. is likely to simply poo-poo away (once economic powerhouse and U.S. competitor Germany showed its first negative foreign trade imbalance since 1991, a nice bonus for America.) Things got so loose that “someone” needed to blow up the Nordstrom 2 pipeline to make the point with Germany that it may have to do without Russian energy to maintain the fiction sanctions will bring an end to war.
There can be no denying the greatest rise in food prices since May 1979, during the Carter administration. The biggest price rises were in the most basic of goods: egg prices soared 39.8 percent, flour 23.3 percent, milk rose 17 percent and the price of bread jumped 16.2 percent. Chicken prices jumped 16.6 percent, while meat rose over six percent. Fruits and vegetables together are up 9.4 percent. Overall, grocery prices jumped 13.5 percent. And don’t look for relief eating out; restaurant menu prices increased 7.7 percent. Eating at home is the answer, even though rent is up over seven percent. Why is everything so expensive? Food prices are affected by global events, such as the war in Ukraine, which affects the costs of wheat and other core commodities. Prices are biting above their weight because of the largest decline in real wages in four decades, since, you guessed it, the Carter days.
Declines across the stock market have affected not only those who invest or passively hold stock in 401(k)s but the parent companies they work for and shop with. This time last year, January 3, the first day of market trading in 2022, looked like just another day in a stock rally that began when Barack Obama was still president. The S&P 500 hit a record high. Tesla rose 13.5 percent and came close to its own all-time peak. That day turned out to be the end of a market that for over a decade had gone mostly in one direction, the S&P 500 rising more than 600 percent since March 2009. The S&P 500 began the year’s final trading session of the year almost 20 percent below where it was at peak. The year overall was the worst annual performance since when the housing crisis in 2008 took down the market. Central banks drove markets this year because of inflation, which was also pushed by energy prices and massive spending in Ukraine.
There’s some good news to add to the economic dullness and dismalness. NPR reports 70 percent of Americans polled support continuing a range of economic and military assistance to Ukraine. Those polled also supported the statement “that they might have to pay higher gas and food prices if we continue to assist Ukraine,” and said “we should stick with Ukraine for as long as it takes rather than urge them to cede some territory to create a cease-fire.” And the Blackrock investment firm has agreed to help rebuild Ukraine after peace breaks out. Blackrock already coordinates Ukrainian investment in the U.S.
Oh, and there’s more that happened in 2022 to remember. Many large cities experienced their worst crime waves since the 1990s. Covid remains a part of life. The southern border is a mess. Diseases of despair, suicide, alcohol, and drug overdoses have driven a drop in our life expectancy. But we’re not gonna blame all that on Biden, too?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What is Title 42?
Title 42 is a clause of a 1944 Public Health Services Law which allows the U.S. government to prevent the entry into the country of individuals during certain public health emergencies, in this case asylum seekers who are sent to wait out their years of processing in Mexico, not in the United States, during Covid.
But to really understand Title 42 you have to understand what is happening at the southern border and what has happened with asylum claims. At play are potentially millions of aliens flooding into the United States. America’s asylum laws, meant to help the most vulnerable, have instead become a clogged backdoor for routine economic migrants. Title 42 was a very small step by the Trump administration toward restoring asylum to its correct role in American immigration policy. Biden seeks to go back to the “everybody in” system with all the consequences.
Asylum recognizes a person persecuted by his own country can be offered residence and protection by another country. The actual conditions vary considerably across the globe (the U.S. considers female genital mutilation grounds for asylum while in many nations it is a desired practice). But in most cases, asylum is offered to people who face a well-founded fear of persecution if sent home on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition of those five protected grounds have also varied greatly based on shifts in American domestic politics. Since 1994, for example, LGBT status has been, and remained under Trump, a possible claim to asylum. Domestic violence was granted consideration as grounds under the Obama administration, only to be rolled back under Trump.
But the reality of 2022 is the asylum system evolved into a cheater’s backdoor, a pseudo-legal path to immigration not otherwise available to economic migrants. They lack either the skills for working visas or the ties to qualify for legal immigration under America’s family reunification system. So they walk to the border and ask for asylum, taking advantage of previous administrations’ look-the-other-way “solution” to their ever-growing numbers. Affirmative asylum claims, made at ports of entry, jumped 35 percent pre-Covid.
It worked — for them. A Honduran on the border who says he simply came for a job is sent back almost immediately. However, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case. Since detaining asylum seekers and their families while the processes play out is expensive and politically distasteful (kids in cages!) until recently most asylum seekers were instead released into American society to wait out their cases. They then became eligible for work authorization when their cases extended past 150 days. The number of pending cases pre-Covid was 325,277, more than 50 times higher than in 2010.
Eventual asylum approval rates for all nationalities over the past decade average only 28 percent. Yet even after they’re denied, applicants can either refile as defensive asylum claims or disappear into the vast underground of illegals. Simply making a claim to asylum is often enough to live and work in America. Trump tried to change that with Title 42. Basically due to the possibility of flooding the country with Covid-positive asylum seekers, the threat of disease was invoked as a reason/excuse to keep the asylum seekers out of the U.S. while their cases drag on and on. Some asylum seekers and their families were detained at the border as a deterrent rather than released into society. But public outcry over caged families and the massive costs in housing and feeding sent the Trump people looking for another way to implement Title 42.
The change was for the Trump administration to negotiate for asylum seekers to wait out their processing times not in American society or an American detention facility, but in Mexico, through a program called the Migrant Protection Protocols. People at the border make their asylum claims, and are then nudged a step backward to wait for an answer in Mexico. The Department of Homeland Security also established an agreement with Mexico to accept all Venezuelan nationals who cross the border seeking U.S. asylum.
Title 42 stopped some 2.4 million would-be immigrants. The Biden administration now seeks to return to the old pre-Trump system, whereas asylum seekers would generally be set free inside the U.S. to go somewhere and wait out their processing. Nascent implementations of this system fell flat; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) estimates they already “lost” 150,000 migrants due to Biden admin’s lack of processing. These people are simply at large and likely forever will be within American society. As David Frum wrote approvingly at the time, “if liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.”
Biden’s administration tried to end the Title 42 policy this past April in court, but a Louisiana judge ruled proper administrative protocol must be followed to formally lift the program. Lower courts then issued a stay on ending Title 42 until December 21, extended now by the Supreme Court, and traffic backed up at El Paso and other prominent crossing points. Meanwhile, for those who are crossing now, the expulsion of migrants has continued while the protracted legal battle plays out among the government, migrants represented by the ACLU, and now, a group of 19 GOP-led states seeking to intervene in the case.
The states have argued that they will suffer “irreparable harm” if Title 42 ends and migrants stay in the U.S. for longer periods of time. Between 9,000 and 14,000 people are expected to cross the southern border each day after Title 42 ends (border crossings are now at around 7,000 a day.) The coalition of GOP attorneys general requested the court push back the Dec. 21 end date pending deliberations on an appeal. Migrants are waiting in Mexico, hoping Title 42 will be overturned and they can cross and stay in America. The final decision will likely lie with the Supreme Court.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Classified for You, Not Me
Without double-standards would we have any standards for classified information left at all?
President Biden said Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn in November his lawyers found classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank. Biden’s lawyers discovered a cache of classified documents as they packed up his former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The tone of the MSM seems to be boys will be boys, and since Biden is being so cooperative with classification authorities after being caught red-handed and after being allowed to hide the story until post-midterms, maybe this has nothing in common with Trump’s cache of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Or Hillary’s cache on her private e-mail server. Could there be a double-standard?
Biden had some/several/a bunch of classified documents while Trump had thousands so that’s different. Yes, on Sesame Street four is bigger than three, but with classified documents it is not a meaningful difference. The law is clear each document is a violation, and there are no discounts for having under a certain number. One classified document is enough to seek indictment. But let’s not forget about Hillary, who was allowed not only to carry over 33,000 subpoenaed documents in the form of emails out of secure spaces on her server, but to delete them. Imagine if Biden reported he and his team simply deleted whatever they had found, never mind if Trump had had a bonfire.
Biden’s documents were safe inside a locked closet. Classification law is extremely clear how documents must be stored, specifying for example, how many minutes a safe is expected to withstand against an attempt to cut it open. In the case of the Secure Compartmentalized Information (SCI) level docs Biden, Trump, and Hillary held, details are written into law and regulation as to what type of room, with what type of door, they are to be stored in. “Closet” does not find the definition whether it is at Biden’s place, Mar-a-Lago or Hillary’s home housing her email server.
Nobody saw the documents. Maybe it wasn’t to standard, but they were kept under lock and key. No blood, no foul. Sez who? The reason all those laws and regs regarding classified exist are to safeguard the documents absolutely, so instead of arguing whether the cleaning crew would have had access to them or not, one can say “U.S. Marines guard these documents in the equivalent of a bank vault deep inside the White House 24/7, that’s who sez so. With Hillary, the question of illicit access begs for a starting point, because the end point, an unclassified, insecure out-of-the-box email server connected to the internet itself meant any hacker with moderate skills, including those assigned to attack her official trips to China and Russia, presumably had full access.
Biden’s documents were just old briefing notes, nothing so important. If the documents were labeled Top Secret or SCI when created then that was their classification, no matter what we think of the contents today. The law is clear arguing the level of classification after getting caught is not a viable strategy, and retroactive classification is not an option. “The documents were not important even though they were classified” is simply not a defense after getting caught. It sounds a lot like the infamous “nuclear weapons” docs Trump had were briefing documents as well. News reports state the nuclear documents dealt with the capabilities of one specific country, and thus were likely part of Biden’s broader briefing package ahead of meeting that nation’s leader, or ahead of weighing in on what U.S. opinion might be on an issue concerning nuclear weapons proliferation.
Biden cooperated with the Justice Department and National Archives and Trump Didn’t. It is almost always taken into account at sentencing whether the perp cooperated with law enforcement, and sometimes a reduced sentence is in order. But there is nothing in the law (any law) which says if you cooperate after getting caught whatever you did was not a crime. And again look at Hillary — her response to accusations was to electronically shred (Bleachbit) all the documents in her possession and then destroy the hardware they had been stored on. And no brownie points to a MSM who seem to be trying to present Biden’s cooperation as sign of responsibility — after the fact, of course.
Maybe some of the documents were not clearly marked classified. This one is included for historical purposes because Hillary made such a claim; Biden and Trump have not. Documents are given a classification based on their content and the sources of that content. The marking itself (e.g., Secret) just sums up what there is to say about the content itself. If you remove the Secret moniker by retyping things (as appears the case with Hillary) or just tearing off that part of the document, it does not change the classification.
A matter of trust. Apparently the Justice Department is just going to take Biden’s word that all is well, and all the classified has been found. Something along the same lines with Hillary. Trump of course saw his own home raided by the FBI, armed with automatic weapons, in a frantic search for more evidence, and the alleged documents splayed on the floor and photographed like TV drama crime scene evidence. In the Biden and Hillary cases, it appears the lust for evidence is not quite as strong. We’ll note the Biden documents were found the day before the midterm elections, when the story would have been political dynamite, and held until two months later when they were presented as a nothing burger. Why did the Biden Justice Department hold the news so long? Why did they wait until Republicans announced a possible Church-style investigation to show how cleanish everyone’s hands are, cooperating and all?
Fun Fact. Presidents are allowed to declassify any document while in office, and Trump has issued a disputed claim that before leaving office he declassified all the documents the FBI found when it searched Mar-a-Lago in August. The same privilege of broad declassification does not apply universally to Vice Presidents (Biden’s classified documents are from his time as VP) or Secretaries of State.
The next move lies with Attorney General Merrick Garland, who will decide what if anything is to be done about Joe Biden improperly storing highly classified documents at a think tank while holding no public office. Garland’s predecessor filed no charges against Hillary. Garland himself appointed a Special Prosecutor for the Trump case. Arguments the Biden and Trump cases are different ignore that those differences seem to have no meaning in the law itself and are superficial, appearing to be a big deal to those uninformed as to how classification works, a false unequivalency. Transparency? Timeliness? Garland seems oblivious to the concerns of the newly-elected Republican Congress that a full-on witch hunt is in play to defeat Candidate Trump prior to any election, using the criminal justice system to defeat Trump when the electoral system will not.
Given the real, lawfully meaningful similarity among the three cases, where will the standards of justice fall this time? As a nation of laws, need we test so often who is above the law? The point is that if the FBI is going to take a similar fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, it is partial and political. Any further action against Trump must address why Hillary was not searched and prosecuted herself, and if so, why not Biden as well. Fair is fair, after all.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Exposure: Why Mishandling Classified Material Matters
Hillary versus Trump versus Biden. All three kept classified information at their homes. Who wins the battle to have likely done the most damage to national security?
In the end when dealing with the damage done by mishandling classified information it comes down to exposure; who saw it, what was it, when was it seen, and for how long?
The “who” part is clear enough; a document left inadvertently on a desk top in an embassy guarded by Marines might not be seen by anyone. A document left on a park bench and seized by the local police risks direct exposure to the host country intelligence services if not sale to the highest bidder depending on the locale. But never underestimate cleaning staff; spies love ’em. In what other capacity are likely locals allowed to rummage through an embassy at night, picking through the trash, and moving things around on desks to um, dust?
The “what” and how much of it is the real stuff of James Bond. At times “what” is in the eye of the beholder. The Secretary of State’s daily list of telephone calls to make is always highly classified. It might matter very little to a Russian spy that the Secretary is calling the leader of Cyprus on Wednesday but matter an awful lot to the leader of nearby Greece. That is why intelligence services often horsetrade, buying and selling info they pick up along the way about other countries for info they need about theirs.
The “when” aspect is also important as many documents are correctly classified at one point in their history but lose value over time. One classic example is a convoy notification; it matters a lot who knows tomorrow at midnight the convoy will set forth. It matters a whole lot less a month later after everybody in town saw the convoy arrive. “How Long” can matter as well, as the longer a document is exposed the more chances someone unauthorized has to see it.
So those are the ground rules, on to Hillary versus Trump versus Biden!
“Who” between Trump and Biden seems a toss-up, given that as far as we know both kept classified in locked closets (we’ll turn to Hillary and her server below.) An investigator would want to know who had keys to that lock, and if possible, who used them when. What controls if any were in place to prevent duplicates from being made? What kind of lock was used? Was it pickable? Would cleaning staff or painters called in have had time alone to work the lock? Were there any video or access logs that might show the staff spent an inordinate amount of time near the closets? We know nothing about this regarding Trump’s and Biden’s closets. One might also want to get into who packed the boxes containing classified info, on whose orders, and how much exposure did they get en route to those naughty closets. Did the information sit in an unguarded truck stop overnight in 2010? Who would have known? “Who” is more than a name, it is a line of dominoes.
We have a starting on “what” material may have been compromised, and it is not good. Hillary, Trump, and Biden mis-stored information at at least the SCI level (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information, above Top Secret.) SCI means not only is the document classified, even seeing it is restricted to a specific list of people such that merely holding a full Top Secret clearance is not enough. We can say the documents included some real secrets as of their drafting.
Next of concern is the raw number of documents potentially exposed. In Trump’s case we have a decent tally, thanks to the Department of Justice. The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from Trump in January included more than 150 classified. With the raid, the government recovered over 300 classified documents from Trump. This worked out to over 700 pages of classified material and “special access program materials,” especially clandestine stuff that might include info on the source itself, the gold star of intelligence gathering. If you learn who the spy is inside your own organization you can shoot him, arrest him, find other spies in his ring, or turn him into a double agent to feed bogus information back to your adversary.
Our contest is a bit unfair to Trump, as inventories of what was found at Mar-a-Lago are online for all to see while the Biden media has been very cagey on how many document have been found, using phrases like “several” and “a few dozen.” We’ll have to wait until Biden’s home is raided or the Special Counsel concludes his investigation to know for sure.
In Hillary’s case just coming to a raw number is very hard, as she destroyed her server before it could be placed into evidence. Because her stash was email the secret files were also not all in their original paper cover folders boldly marked Top Secret with bright yellow borders, as in Trump’s case. Hillary also stripped the classification markings off many documents in the process of transferring them from the State Department’s classified network to her own homebrew server setup.
Nonetheless, according to the FBI, from the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information Top Secret at the time they were sent, with some labeled as “special access program materials.” Some 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the messages were sent, suggesting they were drafts in progress, in the process of being edited before a classification was ultimately assigned.
The “what” is a toss-up for now. Little information exists on specifically what each document trove held, though the WaPo claims one of Trump’s docs detailed a foreign country’s nuclear capability (ironically, the leak from DOJ revealing the document’s contents suggests things were more secure at Mar-a-Lago than after the search) giving him a slight lead in this category. Clinton discussed Top Secret CIA drone info and approved drone strikes via Blackberry.
We do have a winner in the “when” category, albeit via an odd path. Biden’s classified materials date back to his Vice Presidency, and we don’t know when they were moved out of secure storage, so the material goes possibly back to 2009. That’s potentially 14 years of the paper hanging around waiting for someone to discover and make nefarious use of it. In Trump’s case, he left the White House in January 2021 and the classified was pulled out of Mar-a-Lago no later than August 2022, only some 20 months of hiding for no more than four years of material.
Investigations are ongoing in both cases but there is no evidence to date that anyone unauthorized saw the classified documents. We know that after classified was id’ed inside Mar-a-Lago by the National Archives, DOJ asked Trump to provide a better lock, which he did, and later to turn over surveillance tapes of the storage room, which he did. But the clearest evidence of non-exposure is the lack of urgency on the part of all concerned to bust up Trump’s place. Claims he retained classified documents from the White House began circulating even as he moved out in January 2021. The first public evidence of classified in Mar-a-Lago waited until January 2022 when the initial docs were seized, and the recent search warrant tailed that by eight months. If the FBI thought classified material was in imminent danger from one of America’s adversaries they might have acted with a bit more alacrity.
The real money-maker in the classified world is exposure, and here we finally have a clear leader. Hillary wins in that her exposure of classified emails was done consistently over a period of years in real-time. Her server was connected to the internet, meaning for a moderately clever adversary there was literally a wire between her computer with its classified information and the Kremlin. Her server held at least 110 known messages containing classified information, including e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level, the highest level of civilian classification, that included the names of CIA and NSA employees. The FBI found classified intelligence improperly stored and transmitted on Clinton’s server may have been “compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.” How could anyone have gained access to the credentials? Clinton’s security certificate was issued by GoDaddy.
We have a winner. Whether anyone unauthorized got a look at Trump’s or Biden’s stash remains unclear, but we know for near-certain Hillary’s was compromised. And by compromised we mean every email the Secretary of State sent wide open and read, an intelligence officer’s dream. Hillary had no physical security on her server, her server was enabled for logging in via web browser, smartphone, Blackberry, and tablet, and she communicated with it on 19 trips abroad including to Russia and China. It would have taken the Russians zero seconds to see she was using an unclassified server, and half a tick or two to hack (hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact) into it. Extremely valuable to the adversary were the drafts, documents in progress, a literal chance to look over Clinton’s shoulder as she made policy concerning their country.
No search warrant was exercised to seize the server and Hillary’s word was taken when she said there was no chance of compromise. So enjoy the bread and circuses around two old men with irresponsible staffs and or irresponsible ambitions who got caught with classified information improperly stored. The real damage had already been done years earlier by Hillary, who escaped any penalty, not even the embarrassment of a Special Prosecutor.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Goodbye 2022 (and beyond!)
Nobody is going to miss 2022. With the won’t-die pandemic, inflation at home and economic troubles abroad, plus the war in Ukraine, it has not been a happy 12 months. Nevertheless, with the year 2022 behind us, it is time for some housecleaning. Here are four memes we really should bury and not have to hear about again.
The internet changed everything/The internet promotes democracy globally. Nope, it turns out the internet was a big grift and we were allowed to play with its full potential only for a few years until the big guys wanted it back for their own. Though the grift of free speech and a marketplace of idea took place in full view of us all, it was fully bitter and disappointing to see Twitter was never what we thought of it. From early days Twitter was manipulated by a small group of people to favor one set of ideas and either discredit another or simply make them go away. Now it happened that that small group of people had green hair and eyebrow pierces unfavored more liberal ideas, but that is just a technicality, like saying the thugs who monitor the web in North Korea favor North Korean ideas. It means missing the real point, of censorship, of favoring one way of thinking.
The internet available to people in more liberal countries and the internet available to people in more totalitarian places are rapidly converging, not in the specific ideas they display but in the one-sided way they display them. It matters less each day that a powerful group of people in the United States control what we see or that a powerful group of people in China control what folks there see. The point is control itself, not specific content. And double-plus good for those who imagine folks in China yearning to swap their government-controlled media for America’s corporate controlled media. Same chicken but some eggs have brown shells instead of white. Ain’t nobody being empowered or standing up without permission no matter what it looks like in small-scale from the outside to glib commentators.
Countries with a McDonald’s don’t make war on one another. It was ever-so journalistic NYT columnist Tom Friedman who coined the phrase. He wrote the benefits of economic integration reduce the policy choices open to governments, making war—which disrupts that integration—so unattractive as to be practically unthinkable, part of all that end of history stuff that was once the vogue for the hive mind. The concept was built around everyone wanting to be more like us. Well, you can’t get fries with that idea in Kiev or Moscow or in Warsaw today, it is as dead as the broader idea it embodied, that war had become obsolete. In fact, reality suggests it all can work in the opposite as Europe’s dependence (e.g., vulnerability) on Russian energy gave Putin one more weapon to consider as he planned his invasion of the Ukraine.
Same for what Richard Haass of the Council of Foreign Relations calls integration, which has driven decades of Western policy and basically controlled the State Department, with its many offices for education exchange, cultural stuff and women’s issues. This strategy, too, rested on the belief that economic ties – along with cultural, academic, and other exchanges – would drive political developments, rather than vice versa, leading to the emergence of a more open, market-oriented world automatically more moderate in its foreign policy. The idea didn’t win the Cold War with jazz, movie stars, and public speakers, and it did not do much for us in 2022. Educational exchange, the grand savior of U.S.-China relations also near-collapsed in 2022, a victim of lop-sidedness, as well Covid, and misuse by the intelligence agencies.
And we might as well lump in sanctions here as a dead and done policy option. Sanctions do not create meaningful changes in policy behavior. Sanctions in the case of Russia have accomplished less than nothing, as the limited availability of energy out of Russia had actually driven up the prices and resulted in a net gain in income. Most of the world had no interest in isolating Russia diplomatically and economically. Multilateralism, another thing that was supposed to have been dead, remains alive and allows Russia to sell its energy to China and India, much of it for re-export to the countries in Europe (and Japan) where it was originally intended. It is almost embarrassing to have to include a 2022 version of sanctions here as an example, given how decades of sanctions have failed to effect the situation in pre-Ukraine Russia, never mind China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere.
You have to be at war to be at war. Not unique to 2022 but exemplified by it are the new forms of warfare-but-not-war the United States has pioneered. Is the U.S. at war in Ukraine, for example? Once upon a time that would have meant an act of Congress, a declaration of war, to answer the question in the affirmative. But who among us would say the U.S. is not just a little bit “at war” in Ukraine? The conflict continues to exist solely because of a growing in amount and complexity in the weapons available to Ukraine. American advisors in the form of Special Forces and CIA paramilitaries are on the ground, alongside American combat “volunteers.” No major decisions take place without Washington’s say so, and no form of conflict resolution will take place without Washington’s say so. But it’s not war, right?
Same elsewhere, where U.S. weapons animate the conflicts with Yemen and Syria, and U.S. assistance runs like code in the background of the Israeli-Iran power struggle across the Gulf. Sure sounds like war.
U.S. leadership is near dead. Anybody see any American leadership exercised globally (never mind internally) over Covid? Any international, coordinated responses? Nope. Instead every country made up its own rules, bought its vaccines from its own political partners and allowed/banned travel in line with its national economics. The recent gathering of world leaders in Egypt to address climate change accomplished as little as previous meetings other than to prolong John Kerry’s 15 minutes of fame past their due date with all the grace of milk spoiling. American whining to expand NATO eastward is met with sighs of fatigue. Lastly as far as leadership is concerned there is Ukraine, where each U.S. pronouncement and weapons dump is met with increasing silence out of France and Germany. The U.S. appears resigned to “lead” around little Poland to accomplish its aims. Best to just retire the phrase for now and hope things go better in 2023.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Immigration by the Numbers
Numbers can be boring. When discussing immigration blur the lines between sweet old auntie and that bum lapping at the public trough. So let’s look at Mr. Jimenez from Ecuador and Mr. Singh from India, alongside some numbers. Both want to come to the U.S., one for illegal work, one to take his family to New York on a vacation.
Mr. Jimenez will enter across the Southern Border near El Paso. Many people do, and certainly most illegals. In 2022 there were only 330,037 legal immigrants to the U.S. (LPRs, green card holders.) Meanwhile, over 2.75 million “migrant encounters” occurred along the southwest border since Joe Biden took office. In the Rio Grande Valley sector alone, roughly 10,000 encounters with illegal immigrants occur every week. Those number are expected to rise after December 21 as Title 42, a Trump-era legal speedbump to immigration, expires and more people can apply for asylum from inside the U.S. without waiting first in Mexico. Mr. Jimenez will be an illegal, i.e., not have a U.S. immigrant visa or Green Card. He’ll be in that clump of 2.75 million. As a comparison, historically, the peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country.
“United States Border Patrol had lost operational control of our southern border. They can’t contain what they have now,” former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Tom Homan said. The Texas Department of Public Safety says of the 371,000 criminal aliens booked into local jails through May 31, 2022, 255,000 were charged with more than 424,000 criminal offenses. These include more than 700 homicide charges, 51,000 assault charges, and 52,000 drug charges.
The crime rates aren’t the only problem; the amount of money taxpayers spend for illegal immigrants to call Texas home averages approximately $850 million a year. Texans pay an average of about $152 million a year to house illegal aliens, between $62 million and $90 million to include illegals in Texas’ emergency Medicaid program, and up to $717 million for hospitals to provide uncompensated medical care. Now to be fair immigrants don’t create such a large cost for taxpayers because they’re lazy. Immigrants, legal or illegal, are just regular people trying to make it through the day. But their relatively low level of education means the kinds of jobs they can get don’t pay much. That in a best case scenario means they pay relatively little in taxes and use more in government services.
These costs are because people in the Biden administration and those who support it believe aliens have a right to enter the U.S. and taking that right away with a wall or a visa regulation is not who we are. Joe Biden called it part of “securing our values as a nation of immigrants.” He’s claimed reducing immigration has been an “unrelenting assault on our values.” Immigration, says Biden, “is essential to who we are as a nation, our core values, and our aspirations for our future.”
The problem is Mr. Singh from India. Mr. Singh does not want to work in America, does not seek uncompensated medical care or Medicaid. He wants to visit New York on a tourist visa, eschewing the wet walk in at El Paso for a First Class ticket landing him at JFK. He wants to do things the legal way.
Indians hoping to head the U.S. for vacations are now faced with huge delays in obtaining the interviews needed to be granted a visa. According to the State Department, the wait time in early December for one of these interviews at the American Embassy in New Delhi was 999 calendar days. In Hyderabad, it was 780. In Mumbai, it’s 999. Nothing is higher than 999 days, so one suspects the real toll is in the thousands, and a note warns “These are estimates only and do not guarantee the availability of an appointment.” A non-sarcastic reminder states “Please schedule a regular visa appointment well in advance.” Ironically if Mr. Singh were to fly into Mexico City and seek a U.S. visa interview there, he’d still face a 702 day wait. And by the way, the fee for that visa, should it eventually be issued, is a cool $160 per person.
According to the National Travel and Tourism Office, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, pre-Covid India was the country’s 10th biggest tourism market, and fifth biggest spender. The study estimates the U.S. is potentially missing out on $1.6 billion in tourism revenue from Indian tourists alone who opt to go elsewhere in 2023. “To date, we have not seen the desire at the State Department to get this issue addressed,” the study concludes. Not so — the State Department says it has actually begun an IG campaign encouraging Indians to apply for even visas more called the “12 Days of Visas” based on a jaunty Christmas theme. The backup plan is to train diplomats’ spouses and adult children already in-country to do the visas.So Joe Biden, time to put up or shut up. If unfettered immigration is part of our national fabric, either deploy the resources needed to properly process visas in India and around the world, or plug the holes along the southern border to greatly slow the rate of illegal immigrants. Trying to have it both ways only leaves the United States looking like a hypocrite on immigration, and that’s not who we are, right?.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Whither Ukraine
From the moment Russian troops crossed into Ukraine, there were only two possible outcomes: Ukraine reaches a diplomatic solution which resets its physical eastern border (i.e., Russia annexes much of eastern Ukraine to the Dnieper River, and establishes a land bridge to Crimea) and firmly reestablishes its geopolitical role as buffer state between NATO and Russia; or, via battlefield losses and diplomacy Russia retreats to its original February starting point (albeit inside the Ukraine in areas like Donbas) and Ukraine firmly reestablishes its geopolitical role as buffer state between NATO and Russia.
As of Day 237 (October 17) despite much noise about nuclear war and regime change, those are still the only realistic outcomes. Diplomacy is necessary and diplomacy is sufficient to resolve the crisis in Ukraine. Until all parties realize that and sit down, the increasingly bloody and efficient meatgrinder will continue. The current status of the war — WWII style 20th century conquering of territory by creeping land advances with 21st century weaponry — cannot continue indefinitely.
Vladimir Putin’s goal in his invasion has never been something quick and has never included Kiev. It has always been to widen the speed bump Ukraine is between Russia and NATO. This problem for Putin is ever more acute as NATO builds up strength in Poland. While powerless to negotiate for itself at the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was promised NATO would not expand eastward, a lie, and now Poland is sacrosanct NATO territory, as blessed as Paris, Berlin, or London as untouchable by foreign invasion.
The Russian countermove (and there is always a countermove, these guys play chess, remember) is to widen the border with Ukraine and make it strategically impossible for NATO to cross in force. The war would be fought with NATO on Ukrainian territory. The idea that the Soviet Union was tricked in 1989-90 is at the heart of Russia’s confrontation with the west in Ukraine and no conclusion to that fight will take place without acknowledgment on the ground. That’s why any plan to drive Russia back to pre-February 2022 borders would be a fight to the end and an impossible victory for Ukraine no matter how much U.S. weaponry they are gifted.
So Russia wants the eastern portion of Ukraine (east of the Dnieper River) as buffer ground. It wants Crimea and maybe Odessa as staging grounds to drive northward into NATO’s invading flank if things ever come to that. The invasion of Ukraine is survival-level action in Putin’s mind, and a settling of an old score from 1989, and it is impossible to imagine him having taken the inevitable step of starting the invasion that he would back off without achieving results. It is not a matter of “face” as portrayed in the Western press but one of literal life-or-death in the ongoing struggle with NATO. There is no trust after 1989 in Putin’s calculus. Imagine North Korea asking to renegotiate the location of the DMZ southward at this point.
A quick word about the non-use of nuclear weapons. Putin’s plan depends on fighting Ukraine, and thus the U.S. by proxy, not direct conflict with the militarily superior United States and whole of NATO. Despite all the tough talk, Ukraine is not a member of NATO and is unlikely to be a member in the near future, and so the only way to assuredly bring America into the fight on the ground or tactically, air strikes, is a nuclear weapon. That opens the door for anything; until that mushroom cloud, Russia and the U.S. are a married couple having an argument, saying anything but limiting themselves to angry words and the occasional thrown dish. Set off that nuke and it is like one partner escalated from late nights out with the boys to a full-on affair and at that point all the rules are thrown away. Anything can happen, and Putin’s plan cannot withstand “anything” in the form of U.S. direct intervention. Hence, no nukes. And Biden should tell Kiev to stop bombing the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to try and force the nuclear card. Absent something like that, Putin’ll fight conventionally.
Sanctions don’t matter, they never have. From Day One U.S.-imposed energy sanctions have played to Russia’s favor economically as oil prices rise. Things may come to a head in a month or two as winter sets in in Germany and that natural gas from Russia is missed but that is a domestic German problem the U.S. is likely to simply poo-poo away (once economic powerhouse and U.S. competitor Germany showed its first negative foreign trade imbalance since 1991, a nice bonus for America.) Things got so loose that someone needed to blow up the Nordstrom 2 pipeline to make the point with Germany that it may have to do without Russian energy to maintain the fiction sanctions will bring an end to this war. Sanctions are a Potemkin mirage for the American public, not a restraint on Russia. There is no regime change coming in Moscow as there is no one with the power to pull it off who would want anything to change.
Putin’s call for diplomacy will occur only if the costs continue to mount on his side under his form of warfare. Here Putin faces a weakness, his chosen style of warfare. WWI was essentially a play on 18th century warfare where the two sides lined up across a field and shot at each other until one side call it quits. But WWI saw armies face off across those fields but with 20th century artillery, machine guns, and other tools of killing far more effective than an 18th century musket. It was unsustainable, literally chewing up men and eventually simply wore out both sides. Fresh troops from the U.S. gave the advantage to the British/French side at the crucial end game of WWI, but if the U.S. had stayed home in 1917 the war would have been militarily a ghastly tie.
See the plan yet? Putin knows nothing short of a NATO strike can dislodge him from eastern Ukraine and thus has no incentive to leave. Putin has from the first shots calibrated his invasion not to give the U.S. a reason to join in. That’s why the tit-for-tat on weaponry used is so near comical; Russian fires missiles on Ukrainian cities, Ukraine demands anti-missile weapons from the U.S. America can salvage its self-proclaimed role as defender of the Ukraine simply with these arms fulfillment packages, along with a few special forces and the CIA paramilitaries. Where is are the Russian strategic bombers? Where is the global war on Ukrainian shipping? Where are the efforts to close Ukraine’s western border with Poland? Where is the gargantuan Red Army NATO expected to roar into western Europe for 40 years? The conquest of Ukraine being treated as a small unit exercise tells us much.
None of this is any great secret. The off ramp in Ukraine, one of the two possible outcomes, is clear enough to Washington. The Biden administration seems content, however, shamefully not to call for diplomatic efforts but instead to bleed out the Russians as if this was Afghanistan 1980 all over again, all the while looking tough and soaking up whatever positive biparty electoral feelings are due for “war time” president Joe Biden. As with Afghanistan in 1980, the U.S. seems ready to fight until the last local falls (supplying them just enough weaponry to avoid losing) before facing the inevitable negotiated ending, a shameful position then and a shameful one now. A multipolar, spheres-of-influence world has returned, acknowledge it with diplomacy and stop the killing.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Leticia James’ Desperate Hail Mary Lawsuit Against Trump
No one is above the law, but some actions are beneath it. Just ask Leticia James, the New York Attorney General who filed a $250 million civil suit against Donald Trump, what may turn out to be the last gasp of a multi-year effort to criminalize the electoral process in America. As she prepares for trial in early 2023, let’s see what she has to go on.
During her 2018 campaign for attorney general, James declared: “Trump should be charged with obstructing justice (in connection with Russiagate.) I believe that the president of these United States can be indicted for criminal offenses and we would join with law enforcement and other attorneys general across the nation in removing this president from office.”
James tweeted the campaign endorsement from Rep. Maxine Waters when that still mattered that James would be an attorney general who “who will investigate Trump” and promised that “the president of the United States has to worry about three things; Mueller, Cohen, and Tish James.” For the record, Robert Mueller has retired to the dark side of the moon after his investigation proved nothing (though there are still those who believe, as there are people who enjoy circus geeks, and the Venn diagram of the two groups is a circle), Michael Cohen is a convicted felon lucky to be called as a guest once a month on the Howard Stern Show, and of course Tish. In her 2018 election night victory speech, James boasted: “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings….” and before taking office repeated her threat to target Trump world: “We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well.”
She even pulled Trump into her victory speech, saying her win “was about that man in the White House who can’t go a day without threatening our fundamental rights.” All of that sounds like she had it in for Trump; had an attorney general ever said such things about a private citizen not named Trump it would be likely grounds all by itself for dismissal for bias. That said, Trump sued James last year seeking to halt her investigation, alleging it was “baseless” and motivated solely by her desire to harass a political opponent. A judge dismissed the suit in May.
Tish does deserve a few points for being the last one standing. In an unprecedented sweep over the last five years, Congress tried to impeach Trump twice. The FBI tried to indict for espionage itself. The Southern District of New York (the Feds, DOJ) could not find anything to indict Trump on after he left office. Same for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Only Tish was able to drop paper on Trump’s desk out of all those smart lawyers and cops.
Remember things started with Trump as a literal Russian intelligence officer, the actual Manchurian candidate, what would have been the most noteworthy political story of American history, had it been true. Tish as the last in line cannot be that choosey. Her law suit, a civil case which means there is no threat of jail time, alleges, inter alia, Trump overvalued some of his real estate to obtain loans and then undervalued the same real estate to pay lower property taxes on it. This is so common in the New York real estate world that these disputes are not even typically handled by a court, instead adjudicated through a tax commission grievance process. The result is typically a levy or a fine if the owner is found to have manipulated prices egregiously.
To prove the same as a civil case and then demand significant penalties ($250 million and Trump can no longer do business in New York state) is a big ask. Even The New York Times had to admit James will have a hard time proving the case: “Property valuations are often subjective, and… all his loans are either current or were paid off, some before they were due.” Factors that can legitimately affect properties’ stated value include potential for future income, the view from their upper floors, zoning laws and proposed changes, and the like. If Deutsche thinks they got the deal right and is not suing, who is the attorney general protecting here?
The presumed victims in James’ suit aren’t Mom and Pop customers Trump defrauded, big league contractors he stiffed, or shareholders he lied to. The victims are banks (primarily Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s largest) and insurance companies that supposedly undercharged Trump for loans and insurance policies, all because Trump told them his properties were more valuable than they actually were. Boo hoo.
See the government doesn’t usually sue on behalf of big businesses that have their own well-staffed legal departments; it is a huge tell against James that Deutsche is not suing anyone. Financial firms rely to some extent on customers self-reported data. But they also do their own due diligence on what real estate collateral is worth for the explicit purpose of assuring they don’t commit money based on a deal they’ll lose out on. It works the same way with less zeros when you apply for a home mortgage. The bank does not write a check with no questions asked. Instead, it does a credit check, sends out an appraiser to value the property, gets insurance on everything, and prices the loan according to the risk it believes it is taking. Trump could make whatever claims he wanted to about his properties at Mar-a-Lago and 40 Wall, but no one was really listening. You know, trust but verify.
Oh right, some of the deals were already verified, such as Trump’s sale of rights to the Old Post Office in Washington, DC., whose sale at its Trump-stated value was approved by Joe Biden’s General Services Administration, though Tish includes that sale in her lawsuit. None of Trump’s creditors lost money on any of his loans. Every one is paid off or current in being paid off. There were no allegations of an actual crime by anyone in law enforcement or the private sector. Instead, James started an investigation hoping to find a crime. By making this a civil suit she avoids the higher standards of proof and grand jury proceedings if this was a criminal case.
It is no small surprise that Tish is up for reelection as Attorney General in November, and so that after waiting almost her entire term in office now files this lawsuit against Donald Trump, following through on her earlier campaign promises to “get him.” James is also fund raising off the lawsuit, writing to campaign supporters: “These men think they can rattle me and scare me off my path, but the truth is, they have only reaffirmed why I went into this work in the first place.”
It is extremely likely if James loses in November (polls show she is currently in a dead solid tie with her Republican opponent) that her successor will drop the suit entirely, the way the Manhattan DA’s office gave up on Trump when the top job changed hands. Should she win again, Tish will spend the next few years of taxpayer money fending off motions from Trump to dismiss, to change venue, and most of all over seating an impartial jury. Trump could easily move the case out of liberal Manhattan to bright red upstate New York, where he beat Joe Biden in 2020, stalling until the 2024 election is over and one way or another none of this will ever matter again.
And small world, Tish may even then have one more stop on her legal adventure tour — concerns over past prosecutorial abuse of power led to the creation in 2021 of the New York Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct, designed to hold prosecutors “to the highest ethical standards in the exercise of their duties.”
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Will Putin Nuke Ukraine?
To understand why the conventional nuclear paradigm suggests Putin will not use nuclear (chemical, biological…) weapons in Ukraine, you need only ask why should he?
The Biden arguments (“Don’t. Don’t. Don’t is Joey’s message to Moscow) are that Putin is irrational, a mad man of sorts, pressed into a corner facing imminent defeat in Ukraine and with that the likelihood of regime change. Except nothing could be further from the truth. Go ahead, name one irrational act, one mad man-level policy decision Putin has made. No, no, quite the opposite. He is not facing “defeat” in the Ukraine as territory trades hands, and can retreat to stable pre-invasion lines in the Donbas and elsewhere with little more than egg on his face, nothing close to defeat (if you’re interested in what defeat looks like, see Kabul 1989 or 2021.) As for regime change, Putin owes nothing to whatever Russian public opinion exists around him, and his pals in power, the so-called oligarchs, have, minus a yacht or two, plundered mightily off sanctions, which have driven up prices for Russian energy exports.
The primary reason to avoid a nuclear escalation is that it would bring the U.S. or some subset of NATO into the Ukrainian war zone, and this is something Putin would fear, and indeed depending on how much force is applied, could lead to a full-on “defeat” in Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO have been preparing to fight the Soviet Union on the plains of Ukraine for some 70 years (the fall of the Soviet Union, terrorism, Iraq, etc., not withstanding) and the 19th artillery duels that characterize the current conflict would be replaced by endless U.S. precision air strikes. Imagine American A-10s, or even B-52s practically at the edge of space, tearing into those long Russian columns. About the last thing Putin wants is to fight NATO directly over chunks of the Ukraine instead of by (weaker) proxy.
With those arguments dismissed, we look to the battlefield to see the role a nuclear escalation would play. Looking back at the historical use of nuclear weapons (solely by the United States of course) Putin has roughly four options.
— One would be a demonstration nuke, say a sea-level low-yield blast outside Odessa designed to rattle the windows, shut off the lights, but otherwise do little harm. As the U.S. concluded in late WWII, demonstrations translate into proving you lack resolve, not that you are committed to nuclear war. Plus the mere use of the nuke pulls the U.S. into the conflict with nothing gained by Russia.
— Second would be a nuclear attack against a large concentration of Ukrainian troops. Apart from irradiating the territory he hopes to conquer, Putin could achieve something similar, close enough for government work, with an extreme massing of artillery and airpower. A big boom to clear a path, but without the U.S. coming in as an aftereffect. Why go nuclear when the same outcome is available via conventional weapons?
— Third would be a leadership decapitation strike based on good intelligence that would eliminate President Zelensky. This one a) presumes near-perfect intel (see the American’s failure trying the same gag at the start of two Gulf Wars, shock and awe, which missed Saddam despite all of the resources of the United States) b) that the same could not be accomplished with massed artillery and most importantly c) that Zelensky is really the one-man Washington-Churchill-Patton the western media portrays him as and his loss would have the impact the western media believes it would. If a Zelensky deputy rises from the literal ashes and demands revenge from the people, the gambit fails, maybe even backfires.
— Last would be the destruction of a Ukrainian city, causing mass civilian casualties and creating nuclear terror to force a swift surrender, the same as with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the other Japanese cities which would have fallen if surrender had not happened fast enough. Despite the firebombing of Tokyo (never mind Coventry and Dresden) WWII proved to America nothing raises terror like the use of nuclear weapons. Skin melted in Coventry same as at Hiroshima (which used to be known as Ground Zero until a one and only successful air strike hit America) but it is Hiroshima we remember most. In Ukraine this would be intended less as a Strangelovian exchange than a tactical escalation.
The problem with option four, the nuclear destruction of Kiev, or of the western city of Lviv (to destroy the supply chain providing arms through Poland) is world opinion. By the time the U.S. destroyed two Japanese cities’ worth of women and children the world was weary, weary with war itself and weary of earlier atrocities. Compared with the Holocaust, Nanjing, and the firebombing, the nuclear end of WWII allowed the U.S. to get away with it by taking place within the context of horrific violence. Nothing such is a factor in 2022; Putin was after all the aggressor in this latest fight and there is no Auschwitz to distract. And as much as Putin is less dependent on world opinion than say the U.S., he is dependent. He needs India and most of all China to see him as a good enough guy to buy and resell his oil and gas. If anything would drive Germany to suck it up and endure a frigid winter without Russian energy it would be such an atomic attack on Ukrainian civilians.
President Biden has made it clear any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences.” But his administration has remained publicly ambiguous about what those consequences would be. The key element would be to press Putin to back down, not to force him to double down. For example, a nuclear demonstration explosion by Russia could see the U.S. sinking another Russian ship in the Black Sea and the tit-for-tat might be complete. But a more robust American response, say the carpet bombing of a Russian field division, might only press the Russians to try again.
For risk of escalation, Biden should not respond to nukes with nukes. The risk is too great. Neither Putin nor Biden should be the one history books record as the man alongside Harry Truman neck deep in WWII to use nuclear weapons. Having come of political age during the Cold War, Biden should know better than to talk loosely of nuclear weapons, as should Putin. It is crudely reassuring the people who see the greatest possibility of nuclear combat are the MSM hoping to generate clicks and views off the increase in tensions, not the two men who know in their bellies nothing in the Ukraine is worth it.
At some point in every war gamed scenario where one side does not just call STOP the lizard brains take over and one thing leads to another until someone starts wondering in Washington and Moscow if they’ll live to see their kids go off to school Monday morning. We are already playing a lower-level game of chicken with the Russians in Ukraine and should not look to opportunities to really see who swerves first should come that threatened nightfall.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Ashley Biden Problem
It used to be called the “New York Times Problem.” It asks at what point does the First Amendment stop protecting journalists against the receipt of stolen property, particularly classified documents. It stems originally from the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War stolen by Daniel Ellsberg and handed over to the Times and later others. The government sought prison time for reporters and editors but failed. What once threatened the New York Times has now been turned directly against Project Veritas, Ashley Biden’s diary, and perhaps Julian Assange.
The goal out of the tangled case outlined below is to create two standards for applying the 1A, one for journalists and one for “journalists” ostensibly based on skill and reputation but in reality based on politics. It is a direct challenge to freedom of the press by Biden’s DOJ.
In June 2020, a woman and a man moved into a Delray Beach, Florida house where Ashley Biden, President Joe Biden’s daughter, previously resided and where she’d left several items, including a diary. The diary mentioned, among other things, “inappropriate” showers taken together by daughter Ashley and Joe (whom Hunter Biden at one point appeared elsewhere to refer to as “Pedo Pete.”) Potentially important stuff, though the woman who found them failed to interest the Trump campaign. She then tried Project Veritas. Veritas paid for the diary holder to meet with their staffers in New York, inspected the diary and paid for it, only to ultimately decide not to publish it. Veritas turned the diary over to law enforcement as unverified (the diary was eventually published by a less-well known site.)
Though Veritas never published the diary, the New York Times Problem came into play — does the 1A protect media outlets who receive or even pay for stolen property, i.e., the Pentagon Papers and Ashley Biden’s diary? Obviously taking in stolen goods, say a diamond watch or purloined car, is a crime. But with snatched or stolen documents of public interest, in steps the First Amendment, which has been held to protect journalists in these cases. This is also why the New York Times Problem has more recently been called the Julian Assange Problem in that Assange never stole any documents himself — that was Chelsea Manning — and only published what he was handed. Any prosecution of Assange would be as a publisher, a clear rub against the 1A and the key issue in any trial that someday may be held.
That’s where the Veritas case should have ended, with the feds doing nothing. Plenty of stolen documents (there is also the open question about whether finding Biden’s diary left behind in an rental house constitutes theft at all) are published all the time by American media outlets, including Trump’s tax returns in the Times and Edward Snowden’s bombastic NSA source materials in the Washington Post. It is an essential part of a free press and protected by the 1A.
But DOJ did not stop with Veritas, who after all did not even publish any of the allegedly stolen documents. The FBI instead conducted a predawn search in November 2021 against Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe’s home and similar raids on two associates to take possession of their cell phones and journalistic notes. The raid warrants cited concerns over the stolen Biden diary. In response, University of Minnesota law professor Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said “I’m not a big fan of Project Veritas, but this is just over the top. I hope they [the FBI] get a serious reprimand from the court because I think this is just wrong.”
O’Keefe’s lawyers complained the raid unfairly denied him the legal protections afforded to journalists. “The Department of Justice’s use of a search warrant to seize a reporter’s notes and work product violates decades of established Supreme Court precedent,” O’Keefe’s lawyer wrote. The search also appears to violate the Privacy Protection Act, prohibiting searches and seizures of “any work product materials possessed by a person [person is undefined which gets around the issue of who is a “journalist”] reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication.”
Court papers provided to the Project Veritas founder when his phones were seized indicate that his devices were taken as part of an investigation that prosecutors are conducting into potential conspiracy to traffic stolen goods across state lines — the Biden diary. This should send chills through First Amendment advocates because the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that media outlets cannot be held liable for publishing information that may have been obtained illegally, as long as they themselves obtained the material legally.
The Supreme Court case in question is 2001’s Bartnicki v. Vopper. A person intercepted and recorded a cell phone conversation between a union negotiator and the union president. Vopper, a radio commentator, played a tape of the intercepted conversation on his public affairs talk show. Petitioners filed a damages suit under wiretapping laws, alleging their conversation had been surreptitiously intercepted by an unknown person and the radio station repeatedly published the conversation even though they had reason to know that it had been illegally intercepted. The court ultimately held the First Amendment protected the disclosures and the radio station did not violate the law. “A stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern,” concluded Justice John Paul Stevens in Bartnicki v. Vopper. So why not the same with Project Veritas?
Loose in the Veritas case is a charging Department of Justice, who said the two people who tried to sell Veritas the diary were guilty of moving stolen property across state lines. More importantly the DOJ a) got the two to plead guilty to moving stolen property and b) contended Veritas paid them $40,000 and told them to go back into the house and look for more Ashley Biden materials (Veritas says they did not do this.) The latter point is key, because the protections of Bartnicki v. Vopper require the media to be passive. It cannot help “steal” things to later publish. FYI, the latter could form the bulk of any prosecution against Julian Assange, i.e., the claim he assisted Chelsea Manning by providing technical advice in stealing (“procurement”) all the classified documents she did. Such assistance, as alleged in the Veritas case, could eliminate the 1A protections (see Peavy v. WFAA-TV.)
What does it all mean? Project Veritas is being punished for practicing journalism and its 1A rights are being violated. Veritas met with sources who had obtained Ashley Biden’s diary. It was irrelevant whether they did so legally. Veritas’ journalists’ homes were searched, its sources charged with an interstate federal crime, and Veritas itself is being set up for procuring “stolen” material. If DOJ is successful in its efforts, this would see a double-standard emerge for the New York Times Problem, one liberal standard that allows major new outlets like the Times and Post the freedom to publish stolen documents and one more conservative which restricts that type of publishing when the outlet is more amateur and less well know, like Veritas.
As James O’Keefe’s lawyer stated a“ journalist’s lawful receipt of material later alleged to be stolen is routine, commonplace, and protected by the First Amendment.” This all has the makings of a clear First Amendment violation by the Biden Administration and in light of the pending case against Julian Assange, also has long-reaching consequences.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
I Can’t Sleep
When I try to sleep at night, I can’t relax. I blearily turn on the TV. But I can’t change the channel. My TV is telling me I am going to die, maybe by Covid (they say there’s a new variant, you know, called Monkeypox), maybe by climate change because it is likely already too late. Before I drown I’ll be hungry because supply chains don’t work anymore, and inflation is stripping away my purchasing power, and some sort of fascist coup will happen and I’ll probably have to wear all gray clothes all the time like in the dystopian movies. Then there are the TV diseases, bowel disorders and skin problems that medicines I can’t afford might fix except side effects can include blindness, paralysis, saying thingstoofasttounderstandanditallisjustablur of fear. It doesn’t matter I can’t pick out the words, I know what it means. If only I had that medicine maybe I’d be happy like the people in the commercials, going to farmer’s markets with my racially diverse group of great pals.
The rhetoric of emergency, crisis, and imminent doom has always been part of American life. We have not been happy for some 75 years. We were happy for a short time after we defeated Hitler, but then we spent three generations certain we would die in a nuclear fireball because behind Hitler were Communists who wanted to invade us, right up the beaches of San Diego, even when for a while we were the apex predator on the planet with the world’s only atomic bomb. We beat the Communists but our happiness was short-lived because of the terrorists and right after we beat them there was Putin, hiding and waiting to ruin the Olympics again.I have always been afraid. But I also realized that the ever-increasing speed of fear has never so dominated American life since about 11 p.m. on November 8, 2016, when it became clear Donald Trump would win the presidency. The stakes grew daily; never mind Putin, a Russian agent was in the very Oval Office. There he was giving away secrets, there he was jeopardizing the security of Asia by holding peace talks and hands with Kim Jong Un, then the terrorists were almost back because he was going to pull out of Afghanistan too soon after 20 years. Covid. George Floyd. Elections. Democracy itself was to end on January 6. Barack Obama said at the 2020 Democratic Convention we must vote Democrat out of fear of losing our democracy. Everyday I had new things to be afraid of, Oathkeepers and Boogaloo Bois, not enough beds, and not enough ventilators. The tension of constant crisis defined the years, every day it seemed to reach a breaking point only to be topped again the next morning.Then I thought maybe we had a chance. Normalcy, in the person of perhaps the most established and, well, normal politician of the last few generations, seemed to have returned. I felt like I was almost given permission to exhale.But no, the crisis had only deepened. The seemingly impossible had happened: the brief occupation of the citadel of American democracy by a mob out of control was not over. It was in fact, I was told, the seminal event of our generation, perhaps the end of the American Experiment itself. The TV says this is mostly the fault of Trump, whom the TV people seem very certain is still in charge of everything. If only a Democrat could get into the White House and start fixing things so I might see my grandchildren again at my show trial after they turn me in for thought crimes. Donald Trump — the ghost of elections past and, perhaps, yet to come — still commands constant and breathless coverage, from cable news to late night. The fraternity of coronavirus variants — alpha, delta, omicron — is like the list of hurricane names: catchy but menacing, perfect for tweets and news scrolls. I am told the upcoming elections, if Republicans do well, will not be fair, and that decades of civil rights work and legislation are meaningless now because the Senate still has the filibuster and Joe Manchin. It seems every story is reported with a flashlight held under the announcer’s chin.I tried to figure out if I had gone insane. The arguments are so stupid, it was like arguing a horse is not an orange. I left the room for five minutes and returned to see the U.S. was semi-at war for war over another country’s problems which isn’t America. What, are there Kurds now in Ukraine we have to die for? I couldn’t find any debate, anybody asking why we were starting down the road to another war, only that I should get scared again of the Russian Bear taking over Europe. See, because Neville Chamberlain misread Hitler, forever after any attempts at peace are called appeasement. That’s why I’m told war between China and Taiwan is imminent and the U.S. has to be ready to water the rice paddies of Asia again with American blood. Meanwhile, in the face of lurking Covid, living in daily fear of terrorism seems almost nostalgic.Dammit, somebody said if we elected Anybody But Trump things would be OK. Instead it seems worse than ever. Fear as a policy has yielded a nuclear arms race which nearly destroyed the world, the lost decade of freedoms sacrificed to protection from terrorism, and the hundreds of thousands dead in pointless revenge wars. Now comes the wasted spring, summer, autumns, and winters of Covid overreaction, destroying the economy and breaking the spirit of people, followed by inflation and five buck gas. So forgive me when I am not sure I should fear for our democracy as much as I fear for our sanity.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The DNI Two-Step and Trump
If you play poker with a guy named Doc often enough you learn to watch his hands carefully when it’s his turn to hold the deck. Same when the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the Intelligence Community (IC), and the FBI sit down at the table with the American people.
The game right now is will he or won’t he; will Attorney General Merrick Garland indict Donald Trump over something to do with classified information held at Mar-a-Lago? Everyone is holding their cards tight to the vest, but the deal just passed to the DNI and the game is about to get serious. Stakes are high; in the pot is the presidency of the United States.
DNI Avril Haines said that DNI “will lead an Intelligence Community assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents” including those seized. She said the DNI was aiming not to interfere with the ongoing criminal investigation, to which everyone at the table had better shout “bull.” A review of potential risk means the DNI can show a pair of twos and claim they are kings. The DNI’s whole point is to interfere with the investigation, same as they did with Hunter’s laptop, Russiagate, and the Clinton server before that. The IC is as much a part of our elections now as it ever was in any other banana republic.
It works like this: using classified methods in secret to look at classified documents the DNI will come to conclusions about what might happen to the security of the United States if those documents were to fall into “the wrong hands,” i.e., the hands of their choosing and certainly a worst-case scenario.
Without revealing the documents’ contents or why those contents are so important, the DNI gets to say how bad things would be and your role as the public is to believe them and vote accordingly. Since it is a worst-case scenario game, the DNI will no doubt — without any evidence anyone but Trump saw the docs — proclaim nearly the end of the world, that pair of kings. The goal of course would most certainly be to influence the investigation or, more precisely, influence the public opinion outcome. It’s a remake of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment (another form of make it say what you want it to say document) which claimed, without evidence, that Vladimir Putin wanted to put Trump in the Oval Office. Or the 2020 IC letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Right now the DOJ has very little to prosecute on, basically that Trump held on to some (maybe) classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Did anyone see them? Was there any chance a foreign adversary got a peek? DOJ needs more than simple possession (albeit a crime) to go after a once and perhaps future president and may not have it. The docs may never have left lock and key. Mar-a-Lago surveillance tapes may not show Boris Badenov walking in and out of frame; enter the IC.
The DNI document review itself will of course not be made pubic. In discussing which sources and methods might have been damaged it will need to be more highly classified than the original documents. We’ll never see the Review. But better than the entire document, we’ll all see the leaks, the little snippets meant to take down Trump that will inevitably leach into the New York Times and Washington Post. The IC will provide the ammunition, in carefully measured amounts, DOJ needs to make the unclassified case to the public the classified stuff they’ll never see is a big, big deal.
Conspiracy theory? Ask yourself how crime scene-like photos have already leaked from the Mar-a-Lago investigation as compared to say, the Jeffery Epstein case. Imagine a crime scene-like photo of children’s underwear strewn across the floor, stuff investigators allegedly found in Epstein’s desk. DOJ and Trump have been bickering about these documents nearly since he left office; why was the spectacular raid held just weeks ahead of the midterms?
This is by now a familiar song. Remember the role the IC played in the 2020 election in making sure Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents would not influence Americans. As the New York Post broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files contained potential evidence of a pay-for-play scenario involving then-candidate Joe Biden just ahead of the presidential election, almost in real time more than 50 former senior IC officials signed a letter dutifully published by Politico claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The signers said their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.” Small world — the U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter, including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper, directed America’s IC while Biden was vice president.
The letter was an act of evil brilliance, the weaponization of opinion. It played off cultivated prejudices from 2016 that the Russians manipulated American elections. In fact, most of the signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had played key roles in misdirecting public opinion around the DNC-server hack and later the whole of Russiagate. Among the establishment, the meme quickly became into “the laptop is fake.”
The major difference in this case was the establishment’s willingness to actively block information. With the letter as “proof” the laptop was disinformation, the media took the handoff. Twitter locked the New York Post‘s account after the Post refused to obey Twitter’s orders to delete its own truthful reporting. Twitter even banned links to the story in direct messages. Facebook announced it would not allow discussion of the issue pending a “fact check,” which never came. Establishment media outlets labeled the laptop fake, social media blocked the news, and the public basically fell in line and voted for Joe without knowing squat about what he and his son Hunter had been up to. Many still do not.
More recent information exposes the IC plan in greater detail, to include the FBI specifically approaching Facebook and Twitter to tell them not to allow the story. Claims of not interfering with the election were fully false, with a cover up until when it seems not to matter anymore, to boot. Like the whole of Russiagate, it was all made up, and the IC worked hand-in-glove with the Democratic media to hide information. Hunter Biden’s laptop had the potential to change the outcome of the 2020 election, and everyone knew it.
So be careful when the inevitable DNI/IC leaks about how serious the whole Mar-a-Lago affair is show up. Now, after all that you wanna play another hand of poker with these guys? Sure, let old Doc here deal you in, sucker…
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Biden Foreign Policy Update: Ukraine, China, and More
What is Joe Biden’s foreign policy? It’s a trick question, because he has no actual policy, no plan, no careful set of chess moves a step ahead of his adversary. America suffers for it.
Biden’s foreign policy initially began and ended in Afghanistan, and the disastrous withdrawal that left refugees strew around the globe, problem children still being sorted out. There were years, then months, then weeks, then days to plan the NEO — the noncombatant evacuation order — and plenty of planning books for one sitting on desks in places like Seoul.
Still the basic mistakes were made, including reducing the evacuation from several well-guarded sites (particularly American military bases being closed down) to a single semi-open civilian site at Kabul airport to allow the mobs and the enemy to concentrate, failing to negotiate an end strategy with the adversary (as was done in Vietnam and Iraq; basically let us evacuate peacefully and the place is yours a day later), having no system to prioritize boarding, and not pre-negotiating landing rights in neighbor countries that were to be used as staging areas. Instead, Biden simply sat on his hands while troops on the ground did their best to ad hoc a strategy of evacuating those who Darwin got over the fenceline. Add in breaking the cardinal rule of all NEOs, leave no American citizens behind. Biden’s follow-up to the evacuation has been to pretend it never really happened and not talk about it. America’s reputation, meh.
That leaves the multidimensional foreign policy mess in Ukraine, Biden’s other big foreign policy move. What is the Biden policy, what is it intended to achieve for U.S. interests, and what is its end game? No one can really answer those questions, a sign of real problems, particularly the lack of an end game other than childish “the other side goes home before we do.”
Biden’s failure in Ukraine is based on several fallacies. Primarily was his belief “allies” in Western Europe would band together behind the leadership of the U.S. to, well, do something against Russia. Nobody wanted actual war between say Germany and Russia, so the idea was western European allies would send weapons and participate in sanctions and this would cause Russia to withdraw. In the early days, more than six month ago now, the goal was whispered to be the fall of Putin, regime change with possibly even a new pro-western leader in Moscow, another “end of history” moment since the west squandered the first one trying to make Russia into a capitalist franchise. How’s that McD’s in Red Square we worked so hard for doing anyway?
Euro-enthusiasm was damp to begin with, perhaps for having seen a dozen American foreign policy adventures that required their urgent support turn to mud (Afghanistan was the freshest international effort to fail, preceeded by the famous Coalition of the Willing in Iraq War III of 2003) and so predictably within weeks the arms flow became mostly All-America after some token gifts of aircraft and armor from the Danes, et al. U.S. Special Forces were on the ground in Ukraine soon enough, the CIA active alongside them, and the escalation in both amount of material and sophistication of weaponry running full steam. Ukraine on the ground very quickly devolved from a NATO effort into an American one. Again.
But the biggest failure of Biden foreign policy in Ukraine was with sanctions, those economic pressure points that were to make the price of continued war too high for Putin to bear. Fears Putin would “cut off” western Europe’s gas turned out to be a joke. European gas and oil were instead simply rerouted to Paris and Berlin via Chinese and Indian resellers, and at higher prices than prewar to boot. U.S. sanctions have actually aided Russia. Though Russia’s energy exports fell by volume, Russia’s export prices have been on average around 60 percent higher than last year. About the only people actually sanctioned so far were American consumers, who paid $5.00 a gallon for gas in the spring and early summer, some dumb enough to even believe they were helping Ukraine via their small sacrifice. Europe may get their chance to help defeat Putin as energy prices may rise by 400 percent mid-winter.
France and Germany evolved the ability to talk tough and do little of substance, making quite an event out of the end of Russian energy exports via ship while quietly lapping at the pipelines like drunkards. And what demand does not fix supply steps in for. The EU reduced direct imports of Russian crude oil by 18 percent but thanks to Russian re-exporters India and others, that has little-to-no net change in Russia’s overall oil export volumes. China, too, has helped make up for the EU shortfall, re-exporting into the global market as the largest single buyer of Russian energy. Japan holds that title for as yet unsanctioned Russia coal exports. Even the U.S. itself helps out, buying unsanctioned highly refined oil products from the Netherlands and India that most certainly were made at least in part from Russia crude. It turns out Biden was unaware how hard it is to simply turn off Russian energy exports.
China imported more Russian gas in 2022 then any previous year. In the first six months of 2022, according to Chinese customs data, China bought a total of 2.35 million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG), valued at $2.16 billion, from Russia, an increase of 28 percent year-on-year, with the value surging by 182 percent. This meant Russia surpassed Indonesia and the United States to become China’s fourth-largest supplier of LNG. Bad enough news if China was using the LNG itself to grow its economy but the LNG is being resold to Europe as a sanctions buster. As reported by the Financial Times, “Europe’s fears of gas shortages heading into winter may have been circumvented, thanks to an unexpected white knight: China.” They further note “the world’s largest buyer of liquefied natural gas is reselling some of its surplus LNG cargoes due to weak energy demand at home. This has provided the spot market with an ample supply that Europe has tapped, despite the higher prices.” Maybe no one has told Joe the bad news.
So where are Biden’s allies? The EU (…China, India, Africa, and Japan) may at times talk a great game but are hamstrung by its own energy needs. Joe Biden’s foreign policy response? To travel to Saudi Arabia to bargain away any remaining American self-respect for oil. The UN meantime saw 35 key abstentions, including much of Africa, on a symbolic get-out-of-Ukraine resolution. The head of the African Union explicitly called for the lifting of sanctions on Russia. Brazil and Mexico refuse to condemn Russia. Biden stands nearly alone claiming the liberal world order is at risk. And, um, the G-7 announced they agreed on a plan to impose a set price on Russian oil, literally not that that matters since the resell market is where the action is.
Meanwhile, as Biden makes plans to send additional sticks and stones to Ukraine, Beijing recently announced plans to waive debt owed by 17 African countries. China plans to invest a further $300 billion in the continent. China’s continues to make inroads into the “Lithium Triangle,” Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, which account for 56 percent of the world’s lithium supply. Over the years, China has acquired a number of mines in the three countries. In the space of two years, between 2018 and 2020, China invested $16 billion on mining projects there. In an effort to further capture a monopoly in the lithium market, China is also investing in Zimbabwe, home to Africa’s largest lithium reserves, injecting $300 million into its Arcadia Lithium Mine. Elsewhere, the Solomon Islands’ new security pact with Beijing could lead to a Chinese naval base being constructed off Australia.
Meanwhile, Biden’s foreign policy expenditures involve sending $1.1 billion in arms sales to Taiwan, and spending some $54 billion on aid to Ukraine (also, the water is not drinkable in Jackson, Mississippi.) Of that expenditure to Ukraine, only half a billion is allotted to diplomacy, the rest for weapons and military and economic aid. Biden may eventually come to understand slathering money on Ukraine and antagonizing China over Taiwan have both a practical cost, and an opportunity cost. But until then, what’s next, Joe?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Nancy Pelosi Sends You Mixed Messages From WWIII
As most of America forgets Nancy Pelosi’s stirring up of tensions in East Asia last week, it is important to double-back to review what messages where actually sent by each entity involved in the spat.
Japan, who welcomed Pelosi as a conqueror following her visit to Taipei, found about half of the Chinese missiles fired over and around Taiwan as “punishment” actually landed in Japanese-claimed waters around small islands in the Pacific Ocean east of Taiwan. Japan, which sent a message of undiluted support for Pelosi’s Taiwan Adventure, found itself the recipient of a message of its own. Left undiscussed were that those islands themselves are a point of ownership contention among Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines. But the main message is clear enough: Japan no longer has a foreign policy of its own, and is de facto an American military protectorate alongside Guam and Saipan, a model for the Philippines of the future past.
Taiwan reassured itself it is a beloved American vassal state with a visit from mom, much like a child of divorced parents who blames himself for the breakup. Minor politician and likely lame duck Nancy Pelosi went for the low hanging fruit by seeking to anger China greatly at little cost. With a constituency about one-third Chinese American back home, Pelosi has made a career out of appearing on the scene to criticize China, after Tiananmen, at various Olympiads, over Hong Kong, and hey, why do we need a specific reason 2022 edition. Knowing the way the Chinese often over-value symbolic acts, she committed one at the expense of Joe Biden and the United States, forcing Biden to get off his couch and dispatch an aircraft carrier to demonstrate he still held the majority of testosterones in the relationship. Taiwan, of course, ate up all the attention and President Tsai the chance to play at center stage for a day or two. Imagine daddy competing with mommy to give the best unnecessary present in that post-divorce race for affection — a personal visit versus your own carrier strike group for a few days. Who loves you more?
South Korea alone sent a message of strength among the nations involved in Nancy Pelosi’s magical mystery tour. Little covered in the U.S. media, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol skipped an in-person meeting with Pelosi in lieu of a phone call due to his being on “summer vacation” in his nation’s capital, Seoul, minutes from Pelosi’s hotel. Never mind Pelosi was the first sitting speaker to visit South Korea since Dennis Hastert stopped by Seoul in 2002. All she got was a meet with her counterpart, Kim Jin Pyo, the speaker of the National Assembly, and an agreement to support both governments’ efforts to achieve denuclearization and blah blah blah blah on the peninsula. Pelosi got the message and did not mention Taiwan once in her remarks.
Korea’s actions also drive home a big unspoken story, that all of East Asia and beyond has to figure out a dual foreign policy, one toward the U.S.-China-Taiwan scruffle, and one toward China proper, the most populous nation on earth, with a massive military, and a contender for most economically powerful country of the next decade. South Korea alone seems to understand this, snubbing Pelosi as a way of reminding the United States long after its showboating politicians go home and forget, it still has to make its way alone in a scary neighborhood. Seoul, well aware North Korea’s only substantive diplomatic relationship is with Beijing, held to the clearest and most on-point messaging of last week. It was thus no surprise that only days after Pelosi returned home top South Korean and Chinese diplomats, Foreign Ministers Park Jin and Wang Yi, pledged to develop closer relations and maintain stable industrial supply chains at a time of deepening rivalry between Beijing and Washington.
Though nowhere near as forceful in their presentation as South Korea, both Singapore and Malaysia asked Pelosi not to go to Taiwan, saying that it would force them to choose between the U.S. and China.
Despite some skillful diplomacy, China still sent a mixed message of weakness in its over-reaction and strength in its ability to throw together a coordinated response that managed to suggest it could blockade Taiwan, attack U.S. assets at sea with missiles from the Mainland, and tweak Japan, all at the same time. Extra points for its domestic propaganda campaign that, with exciting video, looked like a joint Tom Cruise-Tom Clancy production. The situation is a far cry from the 1995-1996 crisis in the Taiwan Strait, when a visit by Lee Teng Hui, who would become Taiwan’s first democratically-elected president, to his alma mater Cornell University, sparked real tensions between the US and China.
The Pelosi affair was also a chance for China to practice large scale drills which under normal circumstances would likely be seen as too provacative, a nice bonus. It may even result in a new normal, more aggressive military actions in the gray zones as hardliners in Beijing are able to point to what they got away with as signs they might have gotten away with even more militarily. As one laughing nationalist in Beijing put it when he was interviewed last week, “Thanks Comrade Pelosi”!
The U.S. message came off as uncoordinated and too confused to be called weak. Joe Biden made some remarks from his Covid sick bed, and Antony Blinken did the same rumbling around Asia himself. For all his gaffes in the past (three times making the same mistake is nearly a new policy in some minds) claiming the U.S. had some sort of obligation to defend Taiwan, Biden and his spokespeople stuck right to the script, John Kirby of the National Security Council even making headlines for his non-news reassurance to Beijing the U.S. does not support Taiwan independence. Biden for his part sent the message to China loud and clear that U.S. domestic politics mattered to him (and Nancy) a lot more than whatever China thought. Shock and awe this was not.
The American media’s message was it cannot understand world events past a second grade level, and has the attention span of a two-year-old. All the complexities of East Asia get compressed into a Super Bowl scenario, Big Blue versus Big Red, Eagle versus Dragon, in a caged death match in the Taiwan Strait. China’s carefully moderated military sparring is exaggerated into headlines worrying about a new world war, and her thrusts around Taiwan morph into “attacks surrounding the island nation” and a drill which can become a blockade at any moment. Left out of the discussion is how many military lives were put at risk due to accidents and mistakes by Pelosi’s stunting.
Also left out is what a lousy blockade surrounding the island makes for; Taiwan has no ports on its cliff face east coast and sees the majority of its commerce come from China itself. Beijing might best mine Hong Kong harbor if it wanted to hurt Taiwan economically. Meanwhile, the massive cottage industry in American think tanks and academia which regularly rises to predict imminent war over Taiwan settled back down, waiting no doubt for the rough and ready speech about reunification coming this November with the 20th Party Conference in Beijing. Will they go to war!?!?! Does Xi have a timetable in mind????
As for that short attention span, Pelosi hadn’t unpacked and done a wash at home when the media pivoted away, leaving the last of Chinese military tantrum last week to finish in a kind of void. Until next time…
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
They Need the Indictment to Beat Trump 2024
Get it yet? The point of the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the J6 hearings is aimed at one man. Nope, not Donald Trump, Merrick Garland. It is aimed at one end: get Garland to indict Trump for something and failing that, to indict the highest ranking person near Trump in hopes it will rub off on the near-certain-to-be Candidate.
The reason for this is that nothing else worked. Democrats pointed the full national security apparatus at Trump, with the FBI doing yeoman-like duty, and turned Robert Mueller loose with unlimited resources for a full year to find something Russian to indict Trump on, going as far as to suggest he obstructed an investigation which found him innocent. Alice in Wonderland stuff, that. After wading through reams of FBI investigative malfeasance to include but not limited to lying to get FISA warrants and accepting an obviously wholly-fictitious dossier as fact for months, Mueller could not find a single issue worthy of bringing to an actual court. So Democrats impeached Trump, twice, one of which was little more than a policy difference over a Ukraine few outside the DC Bubble cared about then but sure as hell do now. The aggressive Southern District of New York (SDNY) was unleashed on Trump’s finances and real estate work, given a grand jury to take testimony, and still came up with nothing indictable. And that is leaving aside the reality the IRS has had Trump’s full tax records for decades of audits and again came up with nothing indictable.
Dems’ whole remaining strategy for 2024 is to make people believe Trump does not support America’s democracy. Propaganda/journalism/TV hearings failed to sway many minds. To succeed it’s going to require something real, an actual court finding Trump actually guilty of an actual crime that meets the expectations set after flinging around words like treason and sedition like angry monkeys. Some goofy tax problem in a state court or empty process crime will not be enough. It is hard to imagine Trump taking with him some classified documents will be enough, despite the high-profile raid on Mar-a-Lago.
With the Democratic midterm massacre scheduled for November, Dems know they now have about 12 weeks left to indict Trump or someone near him. Republicans are already drooling over the prospect of shutting down the FBI and the J6 Headline Committee Machine and opening their own investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden’s financial tomfoolery in Ukraine and China. So it is now or never for the Last Man Who Can Trump Trump, Merrick Garland.
Garland seems a rare person in 21st century Washington, a man with a moral compass. Appointed Attorney General by Joe Biden, many Dems expected Garland to be an angry beast of a prosecutor. After all, the only reason he does not now sit on the Supreme Court (he might have saved Roe!) after being nominated at the end of the Obama administration was Republicans refused to allow him a Senate hearing. The unfairness of it all is supposed to be eating at him, and he should be out of blood to take down the Republicans once and for all by slashing Trump at the knees.
Garland instead seems lost in a kind of Jeffersonian Zen state, promising to follow the law and respect the civil liberties of all. In an interview’s worth of softball questions on NBC Nightly News, Garland sounded more like Mr. Rogers than a prosecutor atop his fiery pulpit. Yes, the DOJ is investigating Trump, et al, alongside the J6 Committee. Yes, it’s a criminal investigation, that’s what DOJ does. No, he has not decided to prosecute because all the information is not in. No, it doesn’t matter Trump is a former and maybe future president, the law is blind to that. Listeners were left waiting for him to say “And now anything else troubling you, young fella?”
The problem is despite all the cries about democracy under attack, there seems little to indict Trump over, and Garland seems to sense that. The original Great Dem Hope, incitement (often expressed as treason or sedition by pundits) is not mentioned much anymore. Among other problems, incitement requires a showing of intent — that the speaker wanted the crowd in this case to attack the Capitol not just protest there — and no witness has come up with anything remotely applicable and Trump’s own words fall far short. The idea that Trump spoke and the mob rioted seems attractive on TV (one thing followed another so they must be related, right?) but does not meet any legal test worthy of actual indictment. Merrick Garland knows that, even if Liz Cheney pretends she does not. The J6 people can pitch a criminal referral but that changes nothing for the man who has to actually decide if there is anything legally actionable he can take to court. It’s the gap on display between no standards and very high ones. It is very unclear anything Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago would rise to the level of indictment after he blames staff and the movers for inadvertently packing the wrong stuff.
What will be left for Garland is some sort of charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States. This would have to take the form of persons planning to set in motion some sort of process which would have negated or at least scrambled the results of the 2020 election sufficiently that Trump could have claimed a victory and see what happens next. Garland is under huge pressure from the Democratic left, who know their time in power is numbered in weeks, to squish and squeeze the goofy rhetoric Trump’s lawyers were spouting into an indictment along those lines.
This indictment, if it comes at all, will probably not include Trump who, like any client, is not responsible for what his lawyers (or the movers) said or did. Instead, Trump lawyers John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark will likely bear the brunt of any legal opinions rendered, while the press and Dems try to drag the stain off them on to Trump. Both men recently were aggressively served with search warrants. Both men came up with complex schemes to negate the 2020 election, with no chance of success, just to placate their client, Trump. Eastman mumbled about old election law to “spin a yarn” the vice president might be able to exclude state-certified electoral votes based on speculative vote-fraud suspicions. Clark said even though the Justice Department found no evidence of voter fraud the fact that it was still investigating while Trump’s campaign claimed other election irregularities could be used to nudge contested states into auditing their elections.
If Garland is pressed to indict Eastman and Clark, he’ll face accusations that his jurisprudence is politically motivated. He’ll also face practical problems such as seating an unbiased jury. But if he thinks the cases will lead him to Trump, he’ll hit a stone wall. Trump’s conversations and interactions with his lawyers — the stuff that can reveal intent and state of mind — are protected by both attorney-client privilege and by executive privilege. The latter will also cover nearly every official who directly interacted with Trump. Garland could easily find himself facing a Supreme Court fight over the limits of such privilege which would run past 2024.
As for the work of the lawyer’s themselves and their possible indictment, Orwell would call what they might be accused of thought crimes. The legal advice was frivolous. It had no connection to the riots. It was never acted on. It is unclear what impact the opinions made anywhere, even their impact on Trump himself. In any normal world drafting a legal memo is hardly a crime. Yet they may yet prove just barely enough to bring an indictment against Trump’s lawyers and minimally satisfy the Democrats’ blood lust. The last hope is their indictment will stick to Trump and that — that — will dog him into defeat where everything short of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue has not. Call it a long shot.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Much Ado About Nancy Pelosi and China
China policy seems to be made by, and written about by, adults who were often beaten up on the school playground. They retain the language of bullying, and weaknesses, and standing up, and the fantasy that something would sweep in and save them from losing another days’ lunch money (maybe an aircraft carrier group?) That these people are now in control of the media, if not the House, does nothing good for anyone, especially anyone located on either side of the Taiwan Strait. American seems dumb enough to play at this game; is Beijing also?
By now we all know Nancy Pelosi, likely with only a couple of months left as Speaker of the House, decided to spend her summer vacation stirring up the entire Pacific theater for what appears to be largely her own ego. Just days after RIMPAC 2022 concluded (China sure knew the U.S. just wrapped up the largest live fire exercise of the year in the Pacific, involved a dozen nations and hundreds of ships and planes all aimed at the “Blue” team defeating the “Red” team across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. While the NYT editorial team was putting ice on their fat lips over in the Ron Burgundy Lounge, Beijing sure saw RIMPAC and Pelosi as part of the same) bully Pelosi shoved Joe Biden into a mud puddle and said she was going to Taipei. For those worried about “showing weakness,” mark this: Biden was too weak to tell a member of his own party to stay out of trouble when he was sick with Covid, sick with inflation, and digging an ever deeper hole in Ukraine, another war with no endgame but wait for the other side to win.
There was no great need for anyone to visit Taiwan this week. There was no crisis brewing, no event requiring anyone to stand with Taipei, support its democracy, or start wearing colored masks, not that the arrival of a lame duck Speaker would accomplish that or anything else in an quick show and tell. Nope, this mess was created by a Nancy Pelosi who wanted to show off, made worse by Joe Biden being too weak to stop her, and then exacerbated all to heck by China infusing much meaning into something that could have been shrugged off as having very little to say for itself.
Remember the advice your mom gave you on bullies? Ignore them and they’d go away? Imagine China listening to their mom on this one and announcing “We heard Nancy was going to Taipei. Neither Nancy nor Taipei are particularly important to the soon-to-be greatest economy in the world, so we’ll ignore them both.” If pressed for comment Beijing could add “But we hope Nancy chokes on her dinner” and leave it at that.
But while Nancy the Bully imagined she was standing up to Beijing the Bully, pretty soon everyone had to stand with, show up, not back down. So you have the New York Times, no stranger to losing its lunch money while being pantsed on the playground, saying “Bullies often seek tests of strengths to probe for signs of weakness. And they always read efforts at conciliation as evidence of capitulation.” The Times even quotes Sun Tzu (note to China watchers: if a pundit who does not read Chinese quotes Sun Tzu, duck, some b.s. is coming your way.) “If Beijing,” the Times continued, “had gotten its way over something as seemingly minor as Pelosi’s visit, it would not have been merely a symbolic victory in a diplomatic sideshow. It would have changed the rules of the game. Rather than avert a diplomatic crisis, it would have hastened a strategic disaster: the further isolation of a democratic U.S. ally and key economic partner as a prelude to surrender, war or both.”
So there you have it. We just barely avoided a strategic disaster, a game changer, a mere preclude to surrender or war… or both! Good golly, lucky for us Nancy landed the plane safely in Taipei.
It is time for some seriousness. China is not going to war with Taiwan. After all the smoke clears and overflights are tallied, China did only one substantive thing to punish Taiwan: China halted Taiwanese snack imports (including biscuits and pastries ahead of moon cake season) just before Pelosi’s arrival. That seems, Sun Tzu’s admonishment to try small steps before large ones aside, not something akin to war or surrender, and something unlikely to lead to violence. It actually really does not matter. Like Nancy.
Need we walk through the other 99 percent of what is going on between Taiwan and China? Between 1991 and March 2020 Taiwan’s investment in China totaled $188.5 billion, more than China’s investment in the United States. In 2019, the value of cross-strait trade was $149.2 billion. China applied in September to join the new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. A week later, with no opposition voiced by Beijing, Taiwan applied to join as well. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner. “One country, two systems” has not only kept the peace for decades, it has proven darn profitable for both sides. As Deng Xiao Ping said of this type of modus vivendi, “who cares what color a cat is as long as it catches mice.” China might one day seek to buy Taiwan, but until then what incentive would it have to drop bombs on one of its best customers? Heck, they even invited Taiwan to the Beijing Olympics Nancy Pelosi protested.
An attack on Taiwan would likely see a frightened Japan and South Korea step over the nuclear threshold and China would thus face more powerful enemies. In addition, a serious attack on Taiwan would severely damage the economy there Xi would no doubt see as part of the prize. Lastly, an attack on Taiwan would see Chinese killing Chinese, people who speak the same language and share several thousand years of culture. Pre-Covid, travelers from China made 2.68 million visits a year to Taiwan, many of which were to visit relatives. Student exchanges between Taiwan and China began in 2011, with some 25,000 Mainland kids studying on Taiwan pre-Covid. Even a “successful” attack would be near-political suicide for Xi. An invasion of Taiwan would leave the China politically isolated, economically damaged, and reputationally crippled. A failed attack could lead to a Taiwanese declaration of independence China would be incapable of stopping.
Caution is not appeasement. Every diplomatic move is not a full-spectrum weighing out of strength. Tiananmen was 33 years and a major change or two of governments ago (you still talking about that Kent State thing, bro?) Hong Kong was taken from China and colonized and exploited by the British before being returned to much the same status under Beijing. Same for Macao and the Portuguese. The U.S. fought China directly in Vietnam and Korea and that did not bleed over into Taiwan. China went nuclear and did not invade Taiwan.
Strength and weakness do not rest on a single visit by someone as close to the end of her tenure as Nancy Pelosi. Bullies are gonna bully but China and Taiwan are not in that sort of relationship; they exist in a complex diplomatic dance overshadowed by massive amounts of cross-straits commerce, investment, and travel. In every sphere outside the political and martial they grow closer together, not further apart, and much of the differences are promoted by the U.S. and an industry of “China experts” who thrive like dung beetles off the potential for conflict.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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