Archive of "Trump" Category
August 6, 2022 // 1 Comment »
Joe Biden doesn’t have the the guts to do what people are suggesting he do, be the first president to stare down a Supreme Court ruling and refuse to abide by it. It wouldn’t matter anyway.
Abortion in American should never have been allowed to turn into the judicial and moral circus that it is here and nowhere else on earth. Women even under Roe faced 50 different sets of rules and laws, abortion clinics tried to hide what they did, religious child help centers tried to pretend abortion was an option they offered, and the scene was full of protesters and clinic escorts and dozens of other things which separated a woman from her doctor and possibly her clergy in a regulated environment in which to make a very difficult decision. But that was the world we created out of professed concern for women and for the unborn. It was a system which said the fight would never really end, just change as the Supreme Court changed and saw things differently from 1972 to Roe and Doe in 1973 to Dobbs in 2022 to…
The clarity of Dobbs is unfair to the mess which followed: the Court was very clear, abortion regulation was to be decided on the state level, not the quasi-federal level of Roe and Doe. You know how that works; New York allows third trimester abortions when necessary and Ohio prohibits any abortion past fetal heartbeat, even in cases of rape or incest, and so forth. Dobbs was not intentioned to set off a round of how can we detour around what the Court really said and give abortions in National Parks.
The biggest change since Roe is chemical abortions. Already pre-Dobbs over 50 percent of all abortions were done chemically, with the mother taking one or two medicines to provoke a miscarriage. While typically done under professional supervision (miscarriages can result in dangerous bleeding, and incomplete miscarriages can be fatal to the mother) a single pill taken by a woman on her own will in most cases provoke a safe miscarriage. This is what will replace the horrible “coat hanger” abortions of the pre-Roe days according to many advocates.
If America is good at anything, it is smuggling drugs across state lines, and so certainly “abortion pills” will be readily available to many woman in non-abortion states, albeit illegally the same way other drugs smuggled across borders are illegal and occasionally even prosecuted. In the crudest of practical terms, it is unclear how many women will not have access to an abortion post-Dobbs. However, Biden is being pushed to do something more. He is being pressed to refuse to abide by the Supreme Court.
Joe Biden’s White House is considering executive action to make abortion pills accessible nationwide despite state laws restricting the drug. The administration may seek to use executive power granted under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act to declare a public health emergency to allow abortion providers and pharmacists to distribute chemical abortion pills, even in states where abortion is heavily restricted.
Senators Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, along with 16 of their colleagues, urged Biden to take such action in a July 13 letter. “While it is impossible to immediately undo the damage inflicted by the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, the Biden-Harris Administration must use every tool within its power to fight back,” the letter said. “We urge you to declare national and public health emergencies over Americans’ access to reproductive care.” Technically, powers available under the PREP Act would shield doctors, pharmacies and others from liability for providing abortion pills to people across the country. The exact same law was just used with broad popular support to shield manufacturers of Covid drugs and treatments from legal liability in order to get vaccines deployed expeditiously. The use of such law to expand presidential power past a decision by the Supreme Court to the exact contrary, however, would be devastatingly controversial.
If Biden were to take such a decision, it would put him in immediate legal conflict with those states that choose to regulate chemical abortions and more importantly, the Supreme Court itself, which just ruled this was a states’ right to do, not a Federal one. No president has ever previously directly denied the Supreme Court. Nixon resigned rather than follow or resist the Court’s order to hand over incriminating evidence during Watergate. While many worried Trump would refuse to obey the Court in this situation or that, in the end the Cassandras were wrong, again, and the fight never happened.
The first draft of America circa 1789 or so did not grant the Supreme Court this power of review. Marbury v. Madison, arguably the most important case in Supreme Court history, was the first U.S. Supreme Court challenge to apply the principle of “judicial review” — the power of federal courts to void acts of Congress in conflict with the Constitution and declare other government actions “unconstitutional.” Written in 1803 by Chief Justice John Marshall, the decision played a key role in making the Supreme Court a separate branch of government on par with Congress and the executive.
The actual facts surrounding Marbury are irrelevant to the abortion discussion. Relevant, however, is even though the instant case found Secretary of State James Madison had acted unconstitutionally, the underlying matter was resolved without a head-to-head conflict between the executive and judicial and the doctrine stood. With Marbury a new tool in governance, there exist only three ways to fight back against a Supreme Court decision: Congress can pass a new law (in this case legalizing abortion across the states), the Constitution itself can be amended or the Court can overturn itself, as it just did with Dobbs.
That means should Biden try for option four, executive action, his quest will be Quixotic. Sitting in some Texas government official’s outbox is no doubt a completed challenge to any such action ready to file, meaning a lower court would almost immediately stay Biden as things got sorted out (that is what happened to some of Trump’s early immigration legislation, the so-called Muslim Ban, giving the false impression of early victory to progressives angrily hanging around airports in that instance.) The challenge to Biden would quickly find its way back to the Supreme Court, which would correctly uphold itself. The same result is likely should Biden try some sort of clever end-around, such as abortion clinics on Federal land. The use of PREP would also invite a legal challenge over the point of public health emergencies, and post-Covid utterly politicize what’s left of public faith in public health.
As an aside, despite the noise, there is no likely path toward prohibiting interstate travel for abortions, say a pregnant woman driving from Texas to New Jersey and thus nothing there for Biden to worry over. Crossing a state border for abortion services is not likely to become illegal. Apart from the Constitution’s unambiguous support for interstate commerce, the House recently passed legislation affirming interstate travel for abortion, and no state has any opposing law on its books. And of course no one from Ohio is arrested for gambling coming home from Vegas, either.
Criminalizing activities done out of state, or preventing interstate travel, is basically prevented by the Constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause, which holds a citizen of one state is entitled to the privileges in another state, from which a right to travel to that other state is inferred. There’s also Bigelow v. Virginia which dealt directly with the issue of out-of-state abortion. The Supreme Court concluded “a state does not acquire power or supervision over the affairs of another state merely because the welfare and health of its own citizens may be affected when they travel to that state… It may not, under the guise of exercising internal police powers, bar a citizen of another state from disseminating information about an activity that is legal in that state.”
That a gesture like declaring a PREP emergency accomplishes nothing practical does not mean it would not appear politically attractive to Democrats as they head into what promises to be a very rough midterm election. Biden, however, does not seem like the kind of guy who wants to go down in history as the only president to thumb his nose at the nation’s highest court, and all that for no actual gain. Biden knows any action he could take would simply be struck down by the very court that put him in this place. It is called “checks and balances,” Joe, look it up, and it works well in these cases.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
July 1, 2022 // 2 Comments »
The Joe Biden administration at about 500 days in office tests the limits of those who claimed 501 days ago “anybody” would be better than Trump. With the threat of nuclear war now well alive, Biden presides over the highest gas prices, the worst inflation, and the saddest stock market in lifetimes. It is not morning in American as much as late Sunday afternoon and raining.
Start with the record breaking vacation time. It became a meme during the Trump years to criticize him for weekends at Mar-a-Lago, and to point out how much the Secret Service paid him for their accommodations. Yet as he marks Day 500, Biden is preparing for another weekend scram, on track to take more vacation than any other of his predecessors. So far since taking office Biden spent 191 days away from the White House vacationing in either of his two Delaware properties, at Camp David or on Nantucket. Trump spent 381 days on vacay but over four years. Go Joe!
And as for those Secret Service room bills, they pay them for every president, as the Service is prohibited from accepting “gifts,” even the free accommodations necessary to protect the president. At Biden’s home in Delaware he charges the Secret Service $2,200 a month rent for a cottage on his property. He made $66,000 in total off the Service in 2013; contemporary figures are not available but they tally up, just like Trump and the others. Hillary bought a second house in upstate New York just for the Secret Service anticipating her victory in 2016.
But what of the time Joe Biden has spent in the office, how have the 500 days gone so far? Biden succeeded primarily in engineering a new form of war in Ukraine, not quite Cold and not quite Hot. Not Cold as in 1945-1989, because American Special Forces may soon be on the ground in Kiev and American ships in the Black Sea, and Ukrainians have boasted how American intelligence and targeting information have killed Russian ships, tanks, and generals. With no regard to what leakage into the global black arms market might mean, Biden is sending billions of top-notch weapons into the nation with the avowed aim of bleeding out Russia. When something like this was tried in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. had the common courtesy to do it through the CIA and keep at least some of it secret. No more. Vladimir Putin, in return, has reminded the world several times he has nuclear weapons he is not all that opposed to using. Joe Biden has succeeded where presidents since 1989 have failed — he sends Americans to bed at night worrying about nuclear holocaust. And that is his greatest foreign policy accomplishment absent the clusterfutz evacuation from Afghanistan and a soon-to-really-happen trip to forgive the Saudis for their sins and become the first president since the 1970s to overtly beg for more oil.
(For the record Trump was the only president in some 20 years who did not start a new war during his term, and the only one in that same rough time period who made an effort to seek peace with North Korea, a country Joe Biden continues to ignore as official policy. When asked in Seoul if he had a message for Kim Jong Un, Diplomat-in-Chief Biden said “Hello. Period.”)
In other Leader of the Free World accomplishments, Biden’s actual leadership was shown when Mexico snubbed him, refusing to attend the Summit of the Americas because Biden would not also invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, all Cold War hissy fits Joe is keeping alive for a new millennium. “There cannot be a summit if all countries are not invited,” Mexico’s president said at a press conference. “Or there can be one but that is to continue with all politics of interventionism.” It really is 1980 again! Additional leadership has been shown in Europe, where Germany and France agreed to U.S. demands to stop buying Russian energy but just not for a couple more months, okay? To make it look like something is being leadered around they have stopped buying energy delivered by ship as a face saving gesture, just as they keep lapping up the massive pipeline delivered materials. But Biden did travel twice to Europe and declared “America is back,” so there’s that.
As for domestic achievements, everyone in America knows about Joe’s gas pains, which he disingenuously claims like a hubby caught with lipstick on his collar are not his fault. Biden apparently sees no connection between his sanctions against Russian energy (which seek to remove significant amounts of oil from the world markets) cutting supply at a time when demand is rising, and inflationary prices. The good news is the sanctions on Russia, well, no, it is not good news, Russia is still fighting away in the Ukraine which means the sanctions have so far failed in their primary function. Biden will give them more time apparently, as the U.S. is not seeking negotiations to otherwise curtail or end the fight.
Biden further sees no connection between his failure to anticipate a baby formula crisis and hungry children. A smarter Biden would have one of his interns sit down with The Google today and make a list of everything that is affected by supply and demand, and of those things, jot down which are only made in a single factory. That accomplishment alone would eclipse the rest of Biden’s domestic agenda, which consists today entirely of pretending historic inflation is Putin’s fault.
Of course that last line is not fair, as Joe did finally pass a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill which in no way could have helped contribute to inflation by dumping all that money into an economy still chasing goods scarce from those naughty supply chain issues. Then there was that $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill (less than half of American approve of Biden’s Covid handling) now that everyone feels better which in no way could have helped contribute to inflation by dumping all that money into an economy still chasing goods scarce from those naughty supply chain issues. Plus wages are up, pouring more money into an already inflationary economy.
The media actually listed Joe’s Biggest Achievements for us in case they were hard to pick out, to include appointing a boatload of judges, 80 percent of whom are women and 53 percent are people of color (“judges that reflect our nation”) which in no way reflect our nation and in no way is racist because you obviously fight back against racism and gender inequality by promoting people based on race and gender. Biden also strategically secured America by overturning the Trump ban on transgender people in the military. In fact, the White House brags it has the first majority non-white Cabinet in history, with most women in the Cabinet, including first woman Treasury Secretary, first LGBTQ and Native American Cabinet officials, and first woman Director of National Intelligence as if someone was giving out prizes for those things.
But it is always best to go to the source, the White House itself with its own list of “record firsts” in Joe’s presidency. You can read them yourself, but you’ll run into the same problem everyone else does — it is all boasting with no links, sources or details attached. So we hear Joe was “most significant by economic impact of any first-year president” but with nothing more. Um, okay. A lot of the rest of the stuff, unemployment and child poverty, got better by the numbers but there is not a word about how anything Joe did caused those things. It is kinda like taking credit for a comet on your watch, especially given how much “not our fault” garbage is being tossed around when someone brings up inflation or fuel prices.
As for Democratic issues of importance like gun control, abortion rights, and climate change, the home town stuff, Biden rates a zero. The EPA continues to recommend Flint, Michigan residents use filters in their homes to remove lead. Joe has driven home the idea that unless a president has a super majority in both houses and now, the Supreme Court, you better not expect much from him. Indeed in Biden’s case he can’t even wrangle his own party, with two key Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, stymieing Joe. Biden for his part predicted Republicans would have an “epiphany” after Trump left office, but that has not yet materialized. The expected Democratic midterm loss currently scheduled for November 2022 will not help. And we haven’t even talked about Biden’s Dead Man Walking lifestyle and walk-it-back gaffes.
So it has only been 500 days, plenty of time left. But to date the Biden administration has strained those statements about how anyone but Trump would be a better president.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
June 25, 2022 // 10 Comments »
Was there a coup attempt on January 6? To answer yes, there had to have been some realistic path by which some action on that day could have resulted in Donald Trump remaining president of the United States.
Watching the show trial on television and the saturation coverage of the same across all media, you could just believe it might have been possible. The TV show is dedicated to convincing a lay audience they came “that close” to tossing away their democracy as some mechanism almost clicked into place to leave Trump in power. It would be easier to take the Dems much more seriously if they would just coolly and in detail outline just how Trump could have stayed in office without the military, who were clearly not taking a partisan stance on January 6. Absent that, you had political theatre and a riot, not a coup attempt. Think back to the 1960s and imagine how occupying the administration building on campus was going to stop the Vietnam War in its tracks. This is politically much ado about not much except Democratic Party 2024 election engineering.
So here it is in a sentence: Democrats, take two minutes from your hate telethon and tell us how it would have worked. How was Trump going to stay in power?
The answer is there is no answer, and that should end the matter. Anything that has zero pathway to success is not a coup attempt. To stage a coup you need tanks on the White House lawn, and America again instead transitioned peacefully from one administration to another. That, that hard reality, is what is wholly missing from the Democratic January 6 Committee hearings and all the frou-frou that accompanies them.
Could Trump have used the Capitol riot to declare martial law and stayed in power? No. The president cannot use the military domestically in a way Congress does not agree with. The “web of laws” Congress enacted to govern the domestic activities of the armed forces — including the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of federal troops to execute the law without express congressional authorization — would stop Trump cold. According to well-settled principles of constitutional practice, the president cannot act in a way Congress has forbidden unless the Constitution gives the president “conclusive and preclusive” power over the disputed issue. Martial law has been declared nine times since World War II and, in five instances, was designed to counter resistance to Federal desegregation decrees in the South. Although an uneasy climate of mutual aid has always existed between the military and civilian law enforcement, Department of Defense personnel are limited in what they can do to enforce civil law. They can’t extend a presidential term. So that business about putting tanks on the White House lawn? Somebody has already thought it through.
The Insurrection Act of 1807 is the one statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act that does allow the president to deploy the military domestically, but by precedent they can be used to suppress armed insurrections or to execute the laws when local or state authorities are unable or unwilling to do so. Their role is limited and in no way puts the military “in charge” or suspends the normal functions and authorities of Congress, state legislatures, or the courts. More importantly, troops in the streets have nothing to do with what votes are already in the ballot boxes. Same for seizing voting machines or ballots; they were already counted by January 6. The president has no authority to simply “suspend” the Constitution.
Anything Trump might have tried to do required the military to play along, something there is no evidence to support. Just the opposite. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley took a number of steps in the final days to ensure any dramatic orders out of the White House would be confirmed, checked, and likely delayed indefinitely. While some of Milley’s concerns raise Constitutional issues of their own, particularly his right-to-the-edge-of-the-line actions to interfere with the nuclear chain of command, clearly Milley was in no way priming his forces to participate in any sort of coup.
Lastly, it is critical to point out how deeply the idea of legal civilian control of the military, and the separation of powers, is drummed into America’s officer corps. Unlike many developing world situations, America has a professional officer corps well-removed from politics, and which sits atop an organization built from the ground up to respond to legal, civilian orders. Like a religion. If Trump had ordered the 82nd Airborne into the streets of Pittsburgh their officers would have most likely said no.
With martial options well off the board, Trump’s coup would have needed to rely on some sort of legalistic maneuver exploiting America’s complex electoral system. The biggest issue is the 20th Amendment, which states unambiguously the president’s term ends after four years. If Trump somehow succeeded in preventing Joe Biden from being inaugurated, he would still have ceased to be president at noon on January 20, and Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, would have become president. There is no mechanism to stop that succession, ironic as it would have been.
That said, the most quoted Trump plan ran something like this: “Somehow” even though the Electoral College had met on December 14 and decided Biden was to be president, Republican-friendly legislatures in places such as Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would “ignore” the popular vote in their states and appoint their own pro-Trump electors. The law (the 19th century “Electoral Count Act“) does allow legislatures to do this in some never-used extreme situation if states have failed to make a choice by the day the electoral college meets (no matter that date had passed by January 6.) Never mind the details; the idea was to introduce enough chaos into the system to force everyone in the whole of the United States to believe the only solution was to force the election two months after voting into the House where Vice President Pence himself would vote the tie and choose Trump for another term.
In addition to every other problem with that scenario, Pence had no intention of doing any such thing. Trump maintained “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors” when in fact Pence’s January 6 role was entirely ceremonial, presiding over the House and Senate as they receive and certify the electoral votes conveyed by the states, and then announcing the outcome. Location did not matter; although the riots delayed the final announcement, which still occurred at the Capitol, there is nothing in the Constitution which requires the receipt and certification to take place there. Pence could have met with Congress at a Starbucks in Philadelphia and wrapped up business. Pence, in a 2022 speech, said “I had no right to overturn the election. Frankly, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
To imagine a dystopian fiction where one state legislature blows past the vote to chose pro-Trump electors is difficult. To imagine several doing so simultaneously to gin up enough Trump electors, and then to imagine the Electoral College changing its mind, is beyond possibility. There was no indication Republicans in these important states considered going along with this anyway. Pennsylvania’s top state Repub indicated his party would follow the law and award electors to the winner of the popular vote. He stated the state legislature “does not have and will not have a hand in choosing the state’s presidential electors or in deciding the outcome of the presidential election.” Besides, the borderline states all had Democratic governors who would have refused to approve after-the-fact Trump electors.
To be fair, such goofy schemes were also in the wind in 2016, when Trump was elected and many progressives were looking to little-known Electoral law for some sort of fail-safe. They failed, too. Despite the many claims about how close we came to democracy failing, in reality the complex system proved at least twice in recent years to be made of stiffer stuff.
There were a few left-overs that were far-removed from January 6, specifically a very unclear plan to weaponize the Department of Justice to declare something, nearly anything, about the election invalid enough to provoke a Supreme Court fight. The details matter and did not really exist, plus the Constitution is very clear the election of the president is primarily a state matter and absent a good reason (as in 2000 where the problem was one state and urgency begged) needs to be decided at that level. There was also the matter of Attorney General Bill Barr refusing to cooperate with Trump and resigning, followed by his successor refusing to cooperate, followed by threats by a whole raft of senior Justice Department officials threatening to resign. And for the record, there was no incitement by Trump. For all the talk of sedition and coup no charges will ever be filed.
What is missing most of all from the Great January 6 Democratic Telethon is a statement the system worked. The Constitution held. Officials from Vice President Pence on down did their jobs and stood up for the democratic system. All the fear mongering, all the what-ifs Dems now hope will distract Americans from their own party’s failings at governing — war, inflation, gas prices, gun and crime violence, a growing despair — miss the most important point of all. In the end, no legal mechanism was ever going to allow Trump to continue being president. There was no attempted coup.
The real problem is the Dems can’t win in 2024 on what they have to offer. Most of their domestic agenda is shot. They have no clear plan for the economy. With all the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump for something (including January 6) having failed, their sole strategy is to make people believe Trump tried to overturn the last election, and having not succeeded, chose the odd path of re-embracing the electoral process. There is room to judge Trump’s actions. But that judgment must not come from a kangaroo court, if you want to talk about preserving the rule of law. We were never even close to losing our democracy. The system worked is the real message echoing from January 6.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
June 19, 2022 // 2 Comments »
An African-American college student was arrested for shoplifting and a culture war erupted at Oberlin College, Ohio. He’s black now, the term African-American itself becoming offensive to some in the interim, and the war is mostly over. Ultra-liberal Oberlin lost after six years of legal wrangling. Oh, and the college owes $33 million in defamation damages to the surviving white people (two of the plaintiffs died of old age while the trial dragged on) who own a bakery it defamed over racial issues.
It was 2016 and Donald Trump had just been elected president, defeating candidate Clinton. Everyone was certain Trump’s victory was the End of Democracy and was anxious to claim their victimhood in the New Order.
Enter Oberlin College, arguably the most socially liberal school in America. Students protested the inauthenticity of food at the school’s Afrikan (sic) Heritage House and complained the cafeteria sushi and bánh mì were prepared with the wrong ingredients, making a mockery of cultures. There was scrutiny of the curriculum, and a student wanted trigger warnings on Antigone. African-American students wrote a letter to the school’s president with 50 non-negotiable demands for change in Oberlin’s admissions and personnel policies. And all that was seen — in 2016 — as a good thing. Such were the times.
Then on November 9, 2016 (just the day after Donald Trump was elected), three black students from Oberlin College were arrested for attempting to steal wine from nearby Gibson’s Bakery. The shop was as much a part of the traditional Oberlin scene as the statues and college green. The white owner confronted one student, who ran from the store. Outside, the owner detained him, and while waiting for the police was attacked by two other black students. The students eventually entered guilty pleas, and were convicted. They read statements recanting allegations of racism against Gibson’s. Nothing connected the theft with Trump or racism except… racism.
Upon hearing of the arrest Oberlin’s Student Senate immediately declared the incident a case of racial profiling, and without investigating passed a resolution calling for a boycott of the bakery. The college’s administration sent an email to students implying Gibson’s discriminated on the basis of race. Then-Oberlin Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo (she’s now vice president for student affairs at Oglethorpe University) handed out flyers supporting the boycott. As protests kicked into higher gear, Oberlin College provided a break room stocked with coffee and pizza in a nearby school building. Dean Raimondo also agreed to reimburse a student for money spent on gloves given to protesters to combat the cold weather. Raimondo had the college’s food distributer cut off food from the bakery. Gibson’s business suffered.
The problem was the bakery did not racially profile anyone. The students had been shoplifting. The college acted against the bakery (“tortious interference with the business relationship” said the court) based on nothing but its underlying anger at Trump’s election. After some weak efforts to claim protection under the First Amendment (the legality of the protests was not in question), demand a mistrial, and blame everything on the students alone, the College dragged the case out for so long two of the Gibson’s owners died while waiting for the verdict.
The case eventually ended up at the Ohio Court of Appeals, who knew a textbook defamation case when it saw one, and quickly fined Oberlin College $33 million in damages. Oberlin can but has not yet appealed the decision further. It was left to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost to tweet the ruling represented “The cost of woke.” He was mocked on Twitter, of course.
As knee-jerk reactions driven by an anti-Trump political agenda were a mark of the Trump Administration years themselves, so will defamation lawsuits, like the one with Oberlin, be a symbol of the post-Trump era. Defamation is a statement that injures a third party’s reputation, either as libel (written statements) or slander (spoken statements). Proving defamation requires showing four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact (Gibson Bakery is racist); 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person (the flyers and protests); 3) fault (e.g., intent) amounting to at least negligence (Oberlin ignored the shoplifters’ guilty pleas and other facts regarding the underlying crime); and 4) damages (Gibson lost business.)
The Gibson case aside, the most likely source of defamation today is the media, given their reach via “publication.” So why aren’t there more defamation suits? First, the courts in the U.S. traditionally set the bar high to preserve the 1A’s duty to constitutionally-protected opinion. Historically the courts have also granted leeway to anyone, journalist or not, who appears to defame public figures. The idea is that if you put yourself out there, you’re expected to take a few slings and arrows. This is what allows tabloids like the National Enquirer to get away with making up stories about celebrities as their mission statement. But defamation as a business practice was once upon a time what bottom feeders did, not regular practice for the media of record and college deans.
Things may be changing given the free-for-all media environment which relies on defamation to generate clicks. In addition to the big money Oberlin case, two years ago Covington Kid Nick Sandmann successfully sued CNN for defamation to the alleged tune of $25 million. The media falsely accused Sandmann of racism on the National Mall when he and some fellow high school students were confronted by actual racists. Sandmann’s suit charged CNN journalists “maintained a well-known and easily documented biased agenda against President Donald Trump and established a history of impugning individuals perceived to be supporters of the president.” They asserted CNN and the others would have “known the statements to be untrue had they undertaken any reasonable efforts to verify their accuracy before publication.” In other words, they should have committed journalism, the finding of facts, in lieu of packaging what was actually nothing at all into a steamy piece that fit an existing agenda.
In another example, John Paul Mac Isaac came to own Biden’s laptop after the president’s son abandoned it in his repair shop, the Mac Shop, in April 2019. The repair shop owner recently filed a defamation suit against the Daily Beast, CNN, and Politico seeking at least one million dollars in compensatory and an unspecified amount in punitive damages. Those media outlets claimed that Isaac was a liar who stole Biden’s laptop.
The mind set of 2016 seems so long ago. People like AOC and her Squad, Michael Avenatti, and Andrew Cuomo were thought of as likely presidential candidates. Yet justice grinds on. Just check with the people who have to pay for it at Oberlin College.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
June 18, 2022 // 9 Comments »
Imagine a BLM member’s trial in which the prosecution simply played videos of acts of violence over and over, even acts not related to the defendant in question. Sound fair, a quest for truth, a process to establish facts? No? Well, welcome to the Third Trump Impeachment, aka the January 6 televised hearings.
Having watched a lot of PBS back in the day, I kept waiting for hearing chair Bennie Thompson to appear on my screen asking for a donation to “stop the violence” and promising me a Democratic tote bag if I phoned in my pledge of $50 or more. That was the tone from, as they say, gavel to gavel. But there are so many important things being left out in the Dems desire to showcase violence. Here are just five of the hearings’ unanswered issues.
1) Dems and groupie Liz Cheney constantly use words like coup, insurrection, incitement, sedition, and treason. Most of them are lawyers and are well aware those words have specific legal definitions. They’re real fighting words, not to be thrown around like casual slurs against a man who once was president and has a very good chance of being president again. So let’s add one more: indict. It is easy to be the bully, ganging up unopposed on TV to say nasty words. But they only count if the Department of Justice indicts Trump for one of them and seeks to bring him to trial. That’s why we have a judicial system, to prevent organs of government from simply making accusations against citizens without due process. Indict him or drop it. If there are not grounds to indict, drop it. Democrats, put up or shut up.
Like the members of the Warren Commission before them, the people claiming the accepted narrative about January 6 is beyond reproach are the same ones blocking any court challenge that might challenge it. Potential game-changers are wish-washed away as conspiracy theories, not to be spoken of. You will not hear the word indictment raised this week in the hearings.
2) Are we finally going to hear who Ray Epps is and what the role of the FBI was on January 6? It would take a simple series of questions from the committee: Mr. Attorney General, how many undercover people did you have on the ground on January 6? How many of them traveled to D.C. with groups they had elsewhere previously infiltrated? What was their purpose on January 6? What were their rules of engagement—in other words, what were they allowed to say or do? Could they scream, “Yeah, let’s go!” and lead people forward? Could they give statements to the media misrepresenting the aims and mood of the crowd without revealing their identity? Did any of the agents stray from being after-the-fact accessories and instead become provocateurs?
You would think, at least, that the raw number of undercover officers on the ground on January 6 would be an easy question to answer. Yet when Representative Thomas Massie asked Attorney General Merrick Garland at an earlier hearing in October 2021 if any federal agents or assets entered the Capitol or incited others to riot, Garland refused to answer. Massie played a video of a man on January 5 saying “we have to go into the Capitol,” and asked Garland if that man was a fed. No comment, said Garland. That man was Ray Epps, president of the Arizona Oath Keepers, who is also seen on video organizing the first group to breach the Capitol. That is just one minute after a pipe bomb had been found, as if the acts were themselves a conspiracy. This all appears to have happened even before Trump finished his “incitement” speech.
Epps refuses to answer journalists’ questions about whether or not he is a federal agent and is still a free man. Why? Under oath and before the January 6 committee, someone should ask FBI Director Wray, Attorney General Garland, and Ray Epps to give a yes or no answer to this question: Did Ray Epps work for or with the federal government? Why won’t they ask that question? You will not hear Epps’ name on the televised hearings this week.
3) While the Justice Department has called the inquiry into January 6 one of the largest in its history, why has no information come to light on the pipe bomber? Two bombs were planted near the Capitol. Official Washington is one of the most heavily surveilled spots on earth. Why haven’t the Capitol Police allowed the release of more than a few minutes of the 14,000 hours of the pre-riot security-camera footage? Social media only shows the riot in process. The surveillance video would show what happened before. Who planted the pipe bombs?
4) Why, and on whose order, did Capitol police allow 300 people to simply walk into the building without resistance on the afternoon of January 6? And who was the man in a bicycle helmet whom video shows initiating the window-smashing that ended in the shooting of Ashli Babbitt? Why was he welcomed behind police lines once things got out of hand?
5) We’ve heard over and over people died on January 6, and indeed they did. At what point will Ashli Babbit’s killer, who was never punished and never faced a trial (simply an inquiry; because Congress exempts the Capitol Police from the Freedom of Information Act, the family is forced to sue “for notes and summaries of what the officer said regarding the shooting and the reasons he discharged his weapon.”) testify? When will the Committee start showing the video of her being shot by Capitol Police? Babbitt, wearing a Trump flag like a cape, was one of the rioters who smashed the glass on the door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby of the Capitol. A plain clothes Capitol Police officer, without warning, fired a shot and Babbitt fell into the crowd and died. It was the only shot fired in the riot. A SWAT team just behind Babbitt saw the situation differently and never fired on her or those with her. Babbitt was unarmed and was not resisting arrest because the cop never got that far. He just shot her.
Though these issues will be missing from the hearings, what is missing most of all from the Great January 6 Democratic Telethon is a statement the system worked. The Constitution held. Officials from Vice President Pence on down did their jobs and stood up for the democratic system. Trump was never going to retain office. The whole thing is flim-flam, the truth another victim to Democratic desperateness to frame Trump for something, anything, ahead of 2024.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
June 17, 2022 // 1 Comment »
Raised in 1970s Ohio meant I was raised Democrat. In my area of industrial northern Ohio, Republicans were old people, or those younger, good natured guys from the Jaycees who always joked about “next year” at the get-out-the-vote rallies. It’s true. I used to write for The Nation, even a couple of articles for The New York Times. I didn’t change much, but my party did and one day a few years ago I woke up being yelled at by women in pink hats clamoring I was a racist if not an outright Nazi for supporting free expression they ignorantly called “hate speech.”
I didn’t leave the Democratic party as much as I was abandoned. With the midterm crushing of the party coming as sure as the good guy wins in professional wrestling (big in Ohio) I can’t say I’m ready to go home. But if the Dems want to lure people like me back, here are some things they’ll need to do.
Abortion. I am a practical person, and one in favor of people making decisions not government, and support some level of access to abortion. It is obvious in cases of the horrors of rape and incest. What beast wants a woman already victimized to be forced to give birth to her attacker’s child — hey, look, he has his father’s glowing red eyes! I understand religious objections, but remember the 1A protects all religion, even that which isn’t really religion. I understand Roe as an imperfect mess of judicial creative writing, but representing a distasteful flavor of compromise I could live alongside. But Dems, third trimester abortions? And because I support limited abortion rights you say I also have to buy into a whole full-meal deal of unrelated-to-everyone-but-you LGBETC rights and trans stuff? Didn’t you get the memo that trying to bundle all these things with the Equal Rights Amendment and with various abortion measures cost you support, not earned it? Stick with the basics post-Roe.
Jettisoning the Blue-Anon rhetoric is a natural follow-on. I barely made it through four years under Trump hearing daily the sky was falling, the walls were closing in, and that damn clock would not stop tick-tocking. Every tweet by Trump was not the end of democracy, fall of the Republic, wrap party for the rule of law, etc. When the Supreme Court moves against your wishes, I don’t need to wake up to a headline like “The Supreme Court is a Tool of Tyrants” or worse, “Time for Canada to Offer Gender Asylum to American Women.” Same for when the Electoral College or the Senate does not bounce your way. These institutions were crafted by the Founders to achieve a balance of power, and they do it fairly well. Accept that “balance” means occasionally things will go the other way. The same court that rewrote society implementing Roe can do it again taking down Roe without you losing our mind.
I just can’t support a party where people like Elizabeth Warren go on national TV and act like they just mainlined a warm syringe full of Tourette’s every time something goes wrong. So no more Op-Eds demanding a packed Court, or a change to equal representation in the Senate, or the end of the EC, or more weight on the popular vote, or any of all that. Instead shut down MSDNC and its hemophilia of fake news. I’m tired of the media taping a transcript the chosen candidate’s debate performance on the national refrigerator door.
The Founders, speaking of them, still matter as examples of the more perfect Americans despite their flaws. As a group they were only in the 20s, kids, who for the first time in history created a nation based on a synthesis of ideas; they wrote the code running underneath the United States matrix. They risked “Our Lives, Our Fortunes And Our Sacred Honor” to do that, a dandy example for pols today not willing to stand up and offer an opinion without polling advice. Yes, yes, most of them participated in the ugly slave trade of their day. They weren’t perfect but they are deserving of those school names. Find something more important to fritter away political capital on. What we see in modern wokeness is the difference between a small mind and a great mind, between people who ignore their own flaws to pick at others’ out of time and out of context. Men like Jefferson were prime movers, the thing that lead to the next thing. That is worthy of a statue.
The party should be a Big Tent, but that does not mean we all have to give up our seats for the meme-o-the-day. The Democratic party’s pandering to one racial group (black lives do not matter any more than any other lives, such as my own) or gay folks until they got boring and the party switched to the All Trans Network. Don’t leave more people out, leave more in. Stop elevating shallow clowns like AOC and her Squad. They are hypocrites, demanding we not judge by color or gender while demanding white men to the back of the bus. Look back to the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights movements, which stressed the inclusivity of human rights, not special treatment for every high school kid wanting to annoy his parents by wearing dresses junior year.
Many of us currently outside the tent care as much about the First Amendment as any of the above issues. The 1a — speech in all its forms — is the fundamental right, the one that supports and drives forward all the others. That beautiful haiku of the 1A embraces everything from Jefferson’s eloquence to rotten pornography. It certainly protects what you call hate speech, something that if it started with good intentions has gone on to suck dirt in hell and mean anything that offends anyone anytime. The Supreme Court has found over and again nasty stuff is protected by the 1A, rightfully so, as in the past simply using words like “gay” has been prohibited. Let them sing, the rude and radical, and get back to fighting bad speech with better speech. And leave Elon alone. Twitter before him sold censorship, the promise your pretty little flower people would never encounter challenging ideas in that social media stream, an anathema to a democracy that must thrive on the marketplace of ideas. Right now social media isn’t a barometer, it’s a mirror.
No more wars, okay? Nobody, after two decades of failures and lies and body bags in the Middle East, voted for Joe Biden to restart the Cold War. The United States, I thought, had learned some sort of lesson in the pathetic finale in Kabul, until Old Joe reminded us it was 1980 again by his watch. How in the hell did I end up worrying about nuclear war again? Trump (say what you will, I’ll wait) did not restart the Cold War. He did not go to war as you said he would with China, Venezuela, or Iran. He even tried to make peace with North Korea. I want more of that, not this.
And please, Dems, if you want some of us back, really retire Hillary. She represents little beyond corruption, from the sleazy Arab “contributions” to the Clinton Foundation (which dried up alongside her political chances, funny thing) to a near-endless appetite that lead her to make terrible decisions on things as mundane as running her own email server to avoid FOIA requests. In 2016 we asked for change and we instead watched the party drive Bernie out to the marshes (leave the gun, take the lox.) In 2020 we asked for change and we got the sad skeleton of Joe Biden. So no more rigged primaries. No more Hillary and her “debates” with Martin O’Malley playing the role of the Washington Generals. Learn the lesson before 2024. Take a second look at some of the bright minds on your back bench to see if they might be part of the party’s future if you would like people like me to be part of the party’s future. Otherwise we’re going to vote Trump, or sit it out.
That’s a lot of ask. And spare us “but the other party does…” because that line of argument sounds like “did to, did not” and that failed even fourth grade logic. People understand nobody is perfect, as is no party. Give it all some thought as you’re licking your wounds over the loss of Roe, and the very likely thumping of the midterms. You still have two years to find a real candidate and avoid the easy outs of clones like Harris, Beto or Buttigieg. It’s a hint when someone does not have what it takes when they’re available to run for the White House because they lost locally and were given a patronage job for four years.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
June 4, 2022 // 5 Comments »
Show of hands? How many still believe Trump and Russia colluded? That Trump is somehow beholden to Russia? That Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with “Russiagate?” Anyone? In the back, Bueller? And we’ll get to the large group chanting “it doesn’t matter” and “but Trump did, too…” in a moment, so stick around.
Hillary Clinton lied about Russiagate. The latest information shows Hillary paid experts to create two data sets, one purportedly showing Russian cellphones accessing Trump WiFi networks, and another allegedly showing a Trump computer pinging an Alfa Bank server in Russia. The latter was supposedly how Trump communicated incognito with his handlers in Moscow Center. We’ve seen the lipstick on the collar before but how do we know for certain this time?
Because former Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias on May 18, 2022 during the trial of his former partner, Michael Sussman, swore to it under oath. Special Counsel John Durham brought Sussman to trial for allegedly lying to the FBI, perjury, claiming he was not working for a client when he was actually surreptiously representing the Clinton campaign. Elias admitted he briefed Clinton campaign officials about the fake information, including Hillary herself, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri, and policy director Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser. Elias also personally briefed campaign manager Robby Mook.
In a bombshell during the Sussman trial, Mook testified Hillary Clinton signed off on the plan to push out the information about the link between Trump and Alfa Bank despite concerns the connection was dubious at best. Mook’s testimony is the first confirmation Clinton was directly involved in the decision to feed the Trump-Alfa story to journalists. It explains some of her later actions.
Here’s the timeline which reveals the specific “why” behind Russiagate:
— On July 5, 2016, FBI Director James Comey issues a statement clearing Hillary Clinton of any wrong doing in connection with her private email server. This removes what was thought to be her last major hurdle to nomination.
— Wikileaks releases information taken from the DNC servers which showed, inter alia, the Clinton campaign’s efforts to disparage Bernie Sanders. The leaks break during the Democratic Convention (July 25-28) and threaten to split the party, with the Sanders wing considering walking away from Hillary. This development means crisis time for the Democrats.
— Clinton’s sign off to begin the Russiagate dirty tricks campaign (as Mook testified to, Smoking Gun One) had to have been in late-July (likely concurrent with the Wikileaks disclosure and the Democratic National Convention 2016, which would have created a sense of panic inside the campaign) because on or about July 28, 2016 CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie Candidate Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server. A highly-redacted document states “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. Cite alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26 a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”
— The FBI then opened its omnibus investigation into all things Trump-Russia, Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016, a Sunday, coincidentally only four days after Clinton initially approved the dirty tricks campaign and as the DNC ended with Clinton’s nomination. Crossfire was ostensibly opened based on information on Trump campaign member George Papadopoulos relayed by an Australian diplomat. Many believe the timing of the investigation suggests it was based on disclosures to the FBI of the Steele Dossier from inside the Clinton campaign, not diplo gossip about Papadopoulos. Many believe a cut out like Sussman, or Steele himself, ran the dossier data to the FBI the same way Sussman ran the Alfa Bank data to the FBI.
— Brennan may have been personally tipped off by Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security advisor and then the most likely “foreign policy adviser” inside the Clinton Campaign running the Russiagate caper, as Brennan as CIA Director briefed Obama on Clinton’s July 26 sign-off (Smoking Gun Two) on the dirty tricks campaign while his own agency would not come to the same conclusions until September 2016, when it forwarded to the FBI an investigative referral about Hillary Clinton approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections in order to distract the public from her email scandal.” If not a tip off, then how did Brennan, always a public Hillary supporter, know before his agency did?
— Aiming for an October Surprise (i.e., a major, game-changing political event breaking in late October, early enough to influence the election but too late for the opposition to effectively rebut), Sussman then meets with the FBI to lay out the Alfa-Bank and smartphone story on September 18, 2016.
— The FBI (via fraud) on October 21 obtains the first FISA warrant against a Trump team member.
— Following a press release by Jake Sullivan, Hillary tweeted on October 31, 2016 Trump had a secret server and it was communicating with Russia (Smoking Gun Three.) She knew her campaign paid to create that information and push it into the public eye via Sussman (to the FBI) and a woman named Laura Seago.
Seago was an analyst at Fusion GPS, the people who commissioned the infamous Steele dossier on behalf of Clinton. Seago testified at the Sussman trial she, Fusion co-founder Peter Fritsch and another Fusion staffer went to journalist Franklin Foer’s house to pitch the story, telling him it had been vetted by “highly credible computer scientists” who “seemed to think these allegations were credible.” Foer ran the story on October 31, 2016 strongly suggesting the server connecting Trump with Alfa Bank was used as a clandestine communications tool, a smoking gun in the world of espionage. The story stated “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”
Need it even clearer? Comey cleared Clinton of legal trouble over her emails. The last barrier to nomination was breached. Then Wikileaks disclosures threatened to derail the convention. A distraction was needed. Mid-convention Hillary signed off on the Russiagate dirty tricks campaign per Mook and Brennan and then just days later the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane based on either flimsy foreign gossip and/or the Clinton paid-for Steele Dossier.
“The trial is the vehicle that Durham is using to help bring out the truth, to tell a story of a political campaign that in two instances pursued information that was totally fabricated or at least misinterpreted with the Alfa Bank connection to Trump and use that disinformation to mislead the American voter,” Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former assistant director for intelligence, said. The Sussman trial shows if nothing else Hillary Clinton herself was personally the start and the end of Russiagate’s false story. As dirty tricks go, this was a helluva tale she sold to a gullible public and ready media.
But so what? Politicians approve dirt being spread on their opponents all the time. But not outright, fabricated lies, which is fraud/defamation, that’s the short answer. And Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, played a still-hidden role in all of it. And what kind of president would Hillary have made if she was willing to lie like this to get elected? She is all appetite, still active in her party, still a dangerous animal. The spiteful Clinton still maintains Trump has ties to Russia and through surrogates like Brennan kept Russigate alive to defang the Trump administration even after she lost, the real insurrection.
Twitter has still not removed the Clinton/Sullivan Russiagate tweets from 2016 as “disinformation.” That silence allows the lie a second life, important because of course Trump is running again for president and polls show almost half of Americans still think he colluded with Russia.
It is easy enough to still say “so what?” at this point. Most people who did not support her concluded long ago Hillary Clinton was a liar and untrustworthy. Her supporters know she’ll never run for public office again, hence the claims that none of this matters, right?
Wrong. What matters in the end is less the details of Hillary’s lie than that as someone close to being elected as her would lie about such a thing, claiming her opponent was working for Russia against the interests of the United States he would soon swear an oath to. This week’s revelations and the way they fill in “motive” in the timeline are bombshells if you blow the smoke away.
No doubt in many minds Clinton and the intel community’s manipulations are being measured alongside whatever transgressions are attributable to Trump himself. Those who think that way may have missed the day in kindergarten when everyone else was taught how two wrongs don’t make a right, and in high school where good and bad were shown not to be a zero sum game. Trump did not win to absolve Hillary of her sins. And those who worry about the 2024 election being stolen over simple vote miscounts are thinking way too small.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
May 30, 2022 // 6 Comments »
It’s sometime a very sad moment when truth is all that’s left. Suspicions of infidelity become credit card receipts from the no-tell motel. A Facebook post tells of a meal shared when a business trip was scheduled. It is ugly, especially the now certainty that you were lied to by someone you once trusted. Two such instances passed through the MSM this week with barely a notice that deserve notice.
The first is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, through the MSM, lied Russiagate. Hillary, et al, paid experts to create two data sets, one showing Russian cellphones accessing Trump WiFi networks, and another showing a Trump computer in contact with a mystery Alfa Bank server in Russia. The latter was supposedly how Trump communicated incognito with his handlers in Moscow Center. Neither happened, both were lies, and both were made up for and paid for by Hillary. How do we know this with certainty?
Former Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias on the stand May 18, 2022 in the trial of his former partner, Michael Sussmann swore to it under oath. Special Counsel John Durham brought Sussmann to trial for allegedly lying to the FBI, denying he was working for a client when he was representing the Clinton campaign. Elias testified he and Sussmann worked for the Clinton campaign, and had engaged Fusion GPS to acquire dirt on candidate Donald Trump. He also admitted that he had briefed Clinton campaign officials about the fake information, including contacts with Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, campaign chair John Podesta, spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri, and policy director Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser and who aggressively pushed the Alfa Bank server story in the media. Elias said he also spoke with Hillary Clinton and was involved in meetings where she was present.
Does this have to really be so ugly? Do we have to hear it in her own words? Somethings it takes that harsh splash of cold water. Yes. Hillary tweeted on October 31, 2016 Trump had a secret server and it was communicating with Russia. She knew it was false at that moment because her campaign paid to create that information. The only thing left for the trial to prove or disprove is whether Sussmann lied about working for the campaign when he met with the FBI. He pleaded innocent but is a very bad liar; Sussmann billed the Clinton campaign for his meeting with the FBI. The material facts otherwise have been demonstrated — she lied. Cold and simple. No one colluded with Russia (as the Mueller Report later concluded.)
The next splash of water require you to wallow so deep in hypocrisy and lies if it was all water you’d drown. After refusing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story except to label it Russian disinformation in autumn 2020, the same NBC news headlined a story May 18, 2022, almost two years after the laptop story first broke, reporting “analysis of Hunter Biden’s hard drive shows he took in about $11 million from 2013 to 2018” from Ukrainian and Chinese companies for dubious consulting work. NBC reports this as breaking news, and made no mention whatsoever that they sat on the story.
To understand why NBC spiked the story for almost two years, one needs to go back to 2020 as the laptop tale was breaking elsewhere. Almost in real time more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” With absolutely no evidence, the signers said their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” “If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The letter was evil brilliance in that it played off earlier prejudices created by Hillary Clinton in 2016, that the Russians sought to manipulate American elections. In fact, most of the key signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had misdirected public opinion around the whole of Russiagate. In the hands of the MSM the meme quickly morphed into “the laptop is fake,” a parallel to “but her emails!!!”
NBC News wrote in 2020 U.S. intelligence agencies suspected Trump associate Rudy Giuliani, who had been shopping the laptop contents to various media organizations, had been in contact with alleged Russian intelligence agents. The FBI was “looking into whether the Russians played any role, and no official has ruled that out,” said NBC. Twitter also blocked the Hunter laptop story after intelligence officials shared Russian hack rumors.
NBC also claimed in 2020 the laptop was not “newsworthy” as it contained no smoking gun, and because despite any ethical lapses by Hunter “Trump… is ethically challenged when it comes to appearing to use the power of his office to enrich himself and his family.” NBC in 2022 offers no explanation why the same laptop contents which it deemed not newsworthy days before Joe Biden’s election to the presidency are suddenly newsworthy in the middle of his second year in office.
The takeaway is NBC News did not pursue the Hunter laptop story in 2020, when it mattered most, because it acted in collusion with the U.S. intelligence community to make the story go away during the election. As Hunter has publicly paid millions in back taxes and the New York Times among others validated the laptop contents, there’s no need to pretend the story is not newsworthy or Russian trickery.
It is easy enough to say “so what?” at this point. Most people who did not support her long ago concluded Hillary Clinton was a liar and untrustworthy. Her supporters know she’ll never run for public office again, hence the claims that none of this matters. As for NBC, the last days before the election were confusing times, and the Hunter laptop story after all was out there for anyone who wanted to read it at the NY Post or Fox. So that doesn’t really matter either, right?
Wrong. What matters is less the details of Hillary’s lie but that as someone very close to being elected she would lie about such a thing, claiming her opponent was working for Russia against the interests of the United States he would soon swear an oath to. As for NBC (and Twitter) its journalistic slovenliness laid bare news organizations work with the intelligence community to manipulate elections. Both of this week’s revelations are bombshells if you blow the smoke away, and both threaten to make a second run at our democracy in 2024.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
May 17, 2022 // 5 Comments »
After almost a four-year lifetime suspension, Elon Musk let me back on Twitter, with a new account @PeterMVanBuren, and the promise of once again being privy to the world’s opinion. I could again read the “takes” of people smart enough to have a Blue Check (I do not) including those whose points of view I usually don’t share. Here is what I learned.
Progressives are insane. They have lost their minds. They are certain every event which they do not personally support is the End of Times.
I started back on Twitter the week after Justice Alito’s draft opinion overthrowing Roe was leaked, and right away was blasted by Blue Anon stuff like “The Supreme Court is a Tool of Tyrants” or “Time for Canada to Offer Gender Asylum to American Women.” But at least those tweets started life in the actual media, where editors wiped some of the spittle away. Tip to Elon: never mind banning people on Twitter, shut down MSDNC, et al. We’ll be fine without their hemophilia of journalism.
But when I write the collective “we” I must exclude the once-sentient Lawrence Tribe (@tribelaw) who could not be more sure of himself if he saw the code behind the Matrix. He tweeted: “Three-fifths of the Supreme Court justices who joined that Alito abomination were nominated by a serial abuser of women, Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes and were confirmed by Senators representing a minority of the U.S. population.” The Founders must have been drunk when they wrote Article I!
Tribe speaks for his generation, which at least on Twitter has a longing for Hillary that would border further on the creepy only if they started posting Photoshopped images of her in a Princess Leia bikini. Many Twitter celebrities re-cycle memes along the lines of “What if she’d won?” with some clever image of Mrs. Clinton smirking that “I told you so” look that so endeared her to non-deplorable people. She is the behind-the-scenes smiter of Trump in one wrinkled body.
There was no actual Tweet saying President Hillary would have raised Ruth Bader Ginsberg from the dead and reappointed her to the court, but it was implied. David Weissman (@davidmweissman) felt the need to write “Since the Clintons are trending, I will say that after learning the truth about Hillary Clinton and seeing how right she was about everything, I stood with her. Even a few years later, I continue standing with the Clinton family.” Mollie Katzen (@MollieKatzen) “Imagine where we’d be now had more people listened to Anita Hill, Hillary Clinton, and Christine Blasey Ford.”
To be honest, I had to look up that last name. Ford was the woman who testified a clothed Brett Kavanaugh laid on top of her in 1982 and would then go all Handmaiden’s Tale on the Supreme Court because she could just tell. As you read these Tweets, patterns like that emerge. If a handy glossary existed for conservatives, it would include sketch bios of Ford, RGB, and that one woman artist with the unibrow, and entries for popular vote, electoral college (why sucks) and fan fiction about a 45 member Supreme Court to help understand what all the Tweets are about. some topics, like Michael Cohen, need their own glossary for terms like fixer, Fredo, and consigliere.
But things only got worse, much worse, when I got deeper into the personal Twitter accounts of the Blue Checks (the term sounds like a Dr. Who villainous force,) the places where they usually slither about without an editor and say what they really think. What they really think is that America is almost cooked and done. They imagine we just barely survived the Trump years without putting Beelzebub on our coins, and face the likely prospect of Candidate Trump returning to the White House with the anticipation of a colonoscopy done by a doctor nicknamed “knuckles.” Look:
Heidi Przybyla (@HeidiNBC) “Are we up to democracy? …I worry we are entering the darkest period.”
Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) “WARNING: 62 days before 1/6 I warned that Trump would start a political/paramilitary insurgency to seize American democracy. It has begun.”
Rob Reiner (@robreiner) “The reason Republican lawmakers are refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 Committee couldn’t be more obvious. They were part of the Seditious Conspiracy to violently overthrow the Government. Period.”
Progressives seem to have their own vocabulary, things like ending an emphatic Tweet with Period. End of Matter. Full stop. They like to say they are standing with someone or something a lot. The only historical events they know are Munich, the Reichstag fire, and Weimer.
Tweetmaster Reiner later managed to get three issues into one Tweet (economy of prose is prized on Twitter and when shouting on a street corner wearing only a shower curtain) saying “There is only one way to save a woman’s right to choose, our Democracy, and our Planet. Vote for Democrats.” He also wrote “You cannot reason with a Trump supporter. They believe a Lying Criminal who doesn’t give a flying f*** about them was sent to them by God. Don’t try to reason. Just Vote. Vote like our Democracy depends on it. Because it does. It couldn’t be more simple. A vote for Republicans is a vote to destroy Democracy.”
But how will Trump pull this off? His last coup resulted in exactly nothing happening except him breaking up with Mike Pence right before prom. Twitter knows:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) “I’ve been warning Americans for months that the GOP is replenishing its political ranks with criminals who have the skill set and character to support autocratic rule. Fascists in Italy and Germany brought thugs and murderers into party and state bureaucracy.” Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) has the nuts and bolts figured out “Republicans in Michigan have replaced election officials who certified Joe Biden’s win.” Anyway, you heard it here first, says Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) “If (when?) Trump steals or tries to steal the 2024 election, don’t say we weren’t given plenty of advance warning that it was coming.”
Spending time on Twitter convinces you journalism today is basically cramped somewhere between bad opinion making and simple propaganda. It mostly fails the most basic test of being interesting. That should finish it off as a profession in a couple of years, and we can all watch it slide into the sea on Twitter.
And then out of nowhere came a moment of clarity from none other than CNN’s master journo Jim Acosta (@Acosta) who for no reason whatsoever felt the need to write “Ran into an Afghan refugee in the elevator today. He was delivering groceries. Didn’t know which buttons to push so I helped. Must have been new. As he got off the elevator, he thanked me and said ‘I am Afghan.’ I said good luck and welcome to America. He smiled. He’s on his way.” So there’s that. Bill Kristol tweeting for blood in what he hopes is the Google dialect of Ukrainian was a close second.
Four years for me without Twitter was a long time. I am glad I am back, and feel smarter already because all of the Tweets above came in only one afternoon. Twitter is once again my guide, and I look forward to sniffing some old airplane glue and joining in.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
May 14, 2022 // 2 Comments »
One of my kids is studying law, and I’ve read a bit over her shoulder as she prepped for exams. Two critical things stand out: unlike in literature, words in the law have very specific meanings (lie, fraud, possess, assault), and intent matters quite a bit. The latter is very important, because people say things all the time they do not mean, such as “If Joe in Sales misses that deadline I’m gonna kill someone.” No one’s life is actually in danger, we all understand. Same for all those neighbors who were going to but never did move to Costa Rica if Trump was elected.
Misunderstanding words as moving from the general to the very specific when you pull them out of a conversation and try to bring them to court, and determining intent based on what you “believe,” are really at the root of the ever-growing string of failed legal actions against Trump (there are some 19 still pending.) We have, and this is just hitting the highlights, all of Russiagate, the Mueller Report, Impeachment I, Impeachment II, Stormy Daniels, failed accusations of real estate valuation fraud in New York and most recently, a grand jury seated to look into election fraud in Georgia.
For example, in Impeachment I, the Ukraine caper, the entire brouhaha hinged on Donald Trump’s own words in the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president. But did they mean Trump was demanding foreign interference in the 2020 election? Or was he asking an ally to run down unethical actions by Joe Biden as a public service before he might become president? What was Trump’s intention when he said “A lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.” Later in the call Trump suggested some aid to Ukraine might be withheld, though not in specific reference to any investigation into Biden.
The people who brought the impeachment proceedings decided all that constituted an illegal solicitation of a foreign in-kind contribution to Trump’s re-election campaign, maybe even extortion. The allegation was referred to the Justice Department, which declined charges. Many Democrats though that unfair, failing to see the lack of anything coming of it (i.e., no investigation by Ukraine), the lack of anything withheld (the aid was eventually delivered) and overall the lack of intent to commit a crime by Trump. The legal definition tests for words like solicit and extort were not met and Justice correctly dumped the case and there was no conviction in the Senate.
Same story in New York, where the facts seemed to support Trump valued real estate at a lower price for tax purposes and a higher price when used as loan collateral. It’s called valuation and is legally done all the time. But some decided saying one thing to one person and another to another person to gain something was “fraud,” and everyone pursuing the case forgot that they also had to prove intent, that Trump lied with the intention to commit a crime and gain by ill begotten methods. The case rightfully collapsed.
Yep, same with the Stormy Daniels saga, where the facts seemed to be Trump, via Michael Cohen, paid money to Stormy to keep quiet about their affair. Sleazy enough, but paying someone as part of a non-disclosure agreement is not illegal. It would be a crime if the money was paid by Trump with the intent of influencing an election, which he suggested was not true, the cash-for-silence was maybe to protect his marriage. Campaign finance laws require proof a person was willfully violating the law. Prosecutors would have to demonstrate that willingness by Trump alongside showing his principal goal was to influence the election. If this kind of case would have ever reached court, Trump would have simply denied intent.
Another example can be found in the incitement allegations surrounding the speech Trump made just before his supporters entered the Capitol building January 6. A democracy can’t lock up everyone who stirs up a crowd. Speech which inspires, motivates, or warms the blood cannot be illegal as it is the very stuff of democracy. Trump thought the election was unfair and had a right to say so. Brandenburg v. Ohio refined the modern standard to 1) the speech explicitly or implicitly encourages the use of violence or lawless action; 2) the speaker intends their speech will result in the use of violence or lawless action, and 3) imminent violence or lawless action is the likely result of the speech. Brandenburg is the Supreme Court’s gold standard on what government may do about speech that seeks to incite others to lawlessness.
The key is always intent. You have to prove, not just speculate, the speaker wanted to cause violence. Listeners’ reaction to speech is not alone a basis for taking action against a speaker. You’d need to prove Trump wanted the crowd to attack the Capitol and set out to find the words to make that happen. It ain’t gonna fly for the January 6 Committee.
Which brings us to Georgia, where the NYT asks “Will Trump Face a Legal Reckoning in Georgia?” On January 2, 2020, facing an election loss, Trump called Georgia’s Secretary of State to demand he “find 11,780 votes,” one more than Joe Biden’s tally. Did Trump encourage the secretary to commit election fraud? That prosecution will fail, as did all of the ones above, for the same two reasons: words are not solely what they seem, and intent is hard to prove.
For example, to the Democratic lay person “find” means commit election fraud to come up with votes. But well before anything goes to court, it will be made clear that “find” in this context can also mean, in just one example, recount all legal ballots to see if a mistake can be found which legitimately sends more votes to Trump. The other issue is again intent; to prove solicitation of election fraud, Georgia law requires a person intentionally “solicits, requests, commands, importunes or otherwise attempts to cause” another person to engage in election fraud. Trump and his associates need only to maintain they meant “find” as in recount, not as in cheat. Case closed.
In seeing the same mistakes made over and over, you’d start to think maybe the Democrats need some better lawyers. But don’t worry. Democratic lawyers know just as well as Republican lawyers none of these cases ever had a chance in a real court. Their purpose was purely political, to manufacture some headlines, to influence voters, to create the impression Trump has to be guilty of something if only he could be stopped from wriggling away. The goal is to convince voters to ignore the rule of law and take matters into their own hands in 2024 to stop Trump.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
May 13, 2022 // 2 Comments »
With bad things accumulating like Ukrainian mud around Democrat midterm chances, nobody seems to be talking about the elephant in the room. Its name is Roe, and if national abortion rights are overturned, it could help destroy the Democratic party. A Supreme Court decision is expected soon.
The signs of significant
change are clear. Texas is already effectively restricting abortions after six weeks (Idaho passed similar legislation.) Florida restricts most abortions after
15 weeks. If
Roe is gone,
26 states are expected to ban or limit abortion. Four states support the Mississippi law the Supreme Court is now
reviewing in
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Mississippi law is a direct challenge to
Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Court decision which made abortion a woman’s right through the second trimester. The Court will likely announce this spring a decision to
overturn or significantly weaken
Roe, clearing the way for each state to create its own restrictions. It will also signal the end of an era dominated by Democratic party social policy.
Politically the loss could be part of a death spiral for Dems. “Protecting Roe” has been a central Democratic talking point for decades and if that protection fails, especially under a Democratic president and with Democratic House, it will not go down easy. The decision may have as much effect on the midterm elections, and possibly 2024, as any other factor. A lot of Democratic support from educated women is tied to abortion rights, as well as many progressive votes in general. With the party already losing/lost working class voters and many Hispanics, they cannot afford to jettison too many more blocs. And somebody is going to be blamed.
The most likely gambit by the Dems will be self-destructive, to scold voters, saying if the dumb rednecks hadn’t elected Trump we would not have three new conservative judges on the Court. Scolding and mocking voters was a signature of Hillary’s campaign and look where it got her; “deplorables” is forever an American election meme now. And even if the Democrats were to 3-D print a viable candidate for 2024 out of soy-based beef substitute, it is unlikely he could bring enough new blood to the Court (only Justice Breyer was the obvious candidate to retire) to change the balance quick enough to rally Roe. So the most obvious Dem slogan, elect us and we’ll repack the Court with liberals, is at best a solution decades away even if everything goes well. There is no will to expand the Court outside of the NYT Op-Ed pages.
Dems will not mention it, but the real blame lies in 50 years of Congress refusing to codify
Roe’s judicial creative writing into actual law that could withstand a conservative court. Over the decades the Democrats when in the majority treated abortion, as they did same-sex marriage for many years, as a third rail. They supported it but would never risk the votes by actually touching it. It will beg the question in many Blue voters’ minds of why bother to elect Democrats at all. The Democrats of course don’t see it that way; “I think the country hasn’t seen the rage of women speaking out,”
said Representative Jackie Speier. Representative Pramila Jayapal
said “I think it’s going to mobilize people to go to the polls. You will see an outcry like you’ve never seen before.” Righteous anger? Maybe. But Democrats will have quite a battle convincing these angry voters that yes for sure this time promise they’ll actually do something to protect abortion rights other than talk about losing them and holding
Handmaidens Tale watch parties.
The other question Democrats will need to confront is what do Americans really want? In a nationwide survey,
56 percent said they would support restricting abortions after 15 weeks, what the Mississippi law at the center of
Dobbs aims to do.
Hispanic voters, who Democrats are already losing, are divided on the issue of abortion and vote Red in notable numbers. Same sex marriage finally became so widely supported that even Democratic candidates in purple areas could safely jump on the bandwagon. Not so with abortion.
There are other players the Democrats might want to spread a little blame on as well. In the case of
Dobbs now at the Court, their champion Justice Sotomayor failed to lay a legal glove on her opponents. While the conservative and swing justices walked their colleagues through case after important case where precedent was overturned, she whined like a 1L that precedents she supported were untouchable. She chided her colleagues if they overturned
Roe the whole Court would lose credibility and take on a “
stench.” She spoke like someone running for election in San Francisco, not a sober justice building a case her colleagues would sign on to. She seemed to
forget at oral arguments the justices aren’t really talking to the attorneys before them; rather, they’re talking to each other through the lawyer at the lectern. But at least her no doubt snarky dissent will earn her comparisons to the Notorious RBG.
Speaking of RBG, perhaps she deserves a dainty teaspoon of blame. Her hubris in a) thinking she would live forever and b) assuming Hillary would be anointed and choose her successor lead directly to Donald Trump’s signature political triumph, turning the Court right. The blood of the martyr Breyer waters RBG’s grave site.
Which also suggests Barack Obama, who failed to fight for his Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, shares some blame. Claiming Obama could not effectively fight for his nominee because of Republican opposition again begs the question of why bother to elect a Democrat at all if they’re just going to fail and blame the other party for their failure. You’re just not a very good politician if you can only get things done with a super-majority.
More broadly, blame should
Roe fall lies in part with the feminist movement and the far-left of the Democratic party. They long ago insisted on including the contentious issue of abortion in with the basket of more broadly supported women’s issues, such as equal pay. They then turned away many middle-of-the-road voters and “purple” women by tying abortion rights into all sorts of issues which do not enjoy consensus dealing with LGB and incessantly, trans people. “America’s anti-abortion agenda is also anti-trans” announced one queer media
outlet matter-of-factly. “Banning trans people from public life and banning abortion are all about installing a regime of gender roles.” For those whose idea of “a regime of gender roles” means basic biology not same-sex toilets the argument is as non-inclusionary as an NFL locker room.
As if to double-down on the idea, many Democrats are ginning up
scare tactic ploys, saying if
Roe falls same sex marriage is next along with a slate of basic civil rights. This strategy, which insists on pairing the broad political spectrum among gay and lesbian voters with a radical feminist perspective, fails to account for the fact the
Roe was a cobbled together compromise using the 14th Amendment to create a “right” to abortion, which really made no one feel things were settled. Cases like
Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage legal, and
Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned laws criminalizing same-sex relationships, rest on much different and sounder precedent.
Any politician seeking to build support instead of acquire virtue points tries to make the tent bigger. Instead, Representative Ayanna Pressley, basically saying hold my beer to Hillary “Deplorable” Clinton,
stated “Pro-life laws hurt our lowest income sisters, our queer, trans and nonbinary siblings, black, Latinx, AAPI, immigrants, disabled and indigenous folks. And none of this is happenstance… These bans are rooted in a patriarchy and white supremacy.” And no progressive commentary is complete without the now-obligatory Nazi reference. It was feminister has-been
Gloria Steinem who added ahistorically “You know, Hitler’s first official act was banning abortion.” The basic line “all men are pigs and rapists” did not build support for feminist issues in the 1960s, it did not build support for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and it is not helping today.
In one
article of so many on such themes, the writer begins by asking why more men don’t overtly support women in the abortion fight. She then calls any opposing views from hers “Taliban-adjacent,” claims the government is over-represented by men, and cites the need to destroy the patriarchy. She goes on to mock men who claim they understand women’s issues because they have daughters. Hmm, sister, if you don’t see why you’re not building up support among us dudes after that, I can’t mansplain it.
The real problem for the Democrats is if the Republicans can claim victory in overturning Roe, they will empower their base in new degrees; a signature victory for many social conservative and evangelical voters was delivered. Those evangelicals who held their noses and supported Donald Trump will have new found reason to look past his gross person; he came through for them on an important issue. In response, “Vote for us, we lost Roe on our watch” is not a very inspiring Democratic campaign slogan.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
May 9, 2022 // 7 Comments »
If you had “Trump goes to jail” in the office pool, better double-down on “Trump Gets a Minor Civil Fine.”
The end of any possible criminal prosecution out of New York over Trump’s finances has come as the grand jury seated to find them has sunseted. The possibility of a civil penalty, likely a fine, looks poor but anything is possible. This is all a long way from predictions when these cases were initiated through the Southern District of New York (SDNY) that the walls were supposedly closing in. Dems, dragging all their Biden baggage along, are going to have to beat Trump at the ballot box, assuming anyone can afford the gas to drive out to vote.
We need not spend too much time on all the failures preceding those of the SDNY, though a list is educational: DNC server, Putin’s agent, all of Russiagate, Mueller Report, Impeachment I, Impeachment II, and Stormy Daniels. The January 6 campaign is floundering. The IRS has had Trump’s taxes in hands for decades without any criminal prosecutions, and the New Jersey Gaming Commission held Trump’s casino financials without incident. It is possible to conclude however much one might hate Trump, he just is not guilty of any crimes.
Each prosecutorial dream began with the certainty Trump did something wrong, that the evidence was growing, that some stooge would flip (and the mindless Godfather references), followed by… nothing much. The true believers will always believe, but for most Americans the over-stimulus followed by the let down followed by mumblings it all wasn’t fair again have grown tiresome. Yet there are always teachable moments, even in such farce, and the most recent failure in Manhattan to bring down Trump is one of those.
Like all of the capers, it begins with the premise Trump is sleazy and any success he enjoyed must be due to cheating. In the instant case, the DA claimed The Trump Organization had over-valued some properties to obtain loans from Deutsche Bank, and then under-valued those same properties to pay lower taxes to the city of New York. This is all that’s left in the civil action in New York against Trump. The investigation along these lines has been running since 2019, so far with no actionable results. The most recent legal move was a contempt citation against Trump over not turning over a couple of cell phones, that after Trump already complied with millions of pages of documents and 13 employees of the Trump Organization sent up for interview. The belief seems to be there must be something in there somewhere.
For anyone who has owned property in New York, either directly like Trump or via the co-op system like millions of middle class New Yorkers, none of this is a headline. It literally happens all the time. For example, Building A sits on land the City has taxed for hundreds of years. The value of that land in that context is hardly in contention. But if someone wanted to use that land as collateral for a loan, they might instead explain how the ground floor of the building is now ready for flush post-Covid clients to return. They might cite a new luxury building across the street, which will raise local real estate prices. They might show how the average tenant stays longer in their building then elsewhere, assuring stability. What something is worth — a building, a Pokeman card, a drink of water in the desert — is very much a negotiation between two sides. This is known as “valuation.” There are numerous methods of assessing the value of a property. In New York you have your assessed value, your transitional value (Tax Class 2, 3, and 4 only) and other variables such that there are lawyers who specialize in nothing else.
Banks, which look to the future to make sure their loan will be profitable, understand well what the DA is trying to avoid, that property valuation is inherently subjective. It is important to note Trump loan seller Deutsche Bank has raised no objections, made no claims of fraud, and has not asked the DA to look into all this. Nope, the Manhattan DA’s office itself scanned the skies over Gotham and decided they saw a crime. Some say it was a political action, because in almost every other value dispute case in New York history the issue was sorted out by negotiation, and at last resort, by a special civil court that does nothing else. No one can say Trump is the only instance where the City has jumped from valuation to a criminal case with a grand jury, but it is damn hard to find another modern example.
For the New York DA to “win” a political case like this, some written decision by a no-name magistrate judge’s tax court saying Trump should pay some more property tax is far from enough. So, they had to imagine the case as a criminal one, and that’s where everything falls apart (as with obstruction, as with incitement.) Though the law differs with obstruction and incitement to some extent, basically to win these as a criminal cases the DA has to prove criminal intent. So prosecutors would have had to prove not just that Trump inflated the value of his assets, but that he intended to break the law doing so. Even harder is to show the valuation was Trump’s personal decision, near impossible to do with massive, complex corporations where the actual decision maker is traditionally obscured exactly to avoid such liability.
Prosecutors fell victim to their own prejudices. They had hoped to “flip” Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime finance chief by drumming up equally weak criminal tax charges against him. Those charges have to do with Weisselberg accepting car service and apartment payments from Trump and allegedly not declaring them properly as income on his taxes. These cases are again typically settled with a fine (though Weisselberg maintains innocence) not jail. The infamous Al Capone tax case is infamous because it was so unique. Weisselberg, with his years of financial experience, has a pretty good idea he is not going to jail and thus has little incentive to rat out Trump if indeed he had anything to rat about.
That pretty much left prosecutors with Michael Cohen, the guy who pleaded guilty to nine criminal offenses, including lying to Congress, tax fraud, and campaign finance violations. Cohen would have faced questions of personal bias, given his own multiple lawsuits against Trump. He would have faced questions about whether he received a benefit from prosecutors, early release from prison, for cooperating. If a liar like Cohen is your only witness on Trump’s intent, you really have no witnesses.
There are still 19 cases pending against Trump, including a number of civil suits. Maybe one of them will land a blow. But none have the potential to be the knock-out punch Dems thought was an easy route to winning 2024.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
April 23, 2022 // 5 Comments »
If you still dismiss “Russiagate,” the Dossier, Alfa Bank, and the Yota Russian smartphone events surrounding Donald Trump, the 2016 campaign, and the Mueller investigation, you may want a second cup of coffee. The latest filing by Special Consul Robert Durham suggests the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper. I hate to sound like Rachel Maddow, but it is just that much more likely the walls are closing in.
Durham filed a new, 34-page motion on April 15, 2022, in answer to defendant Michael Sussman’s request to dismiss the case against him. Durham accused Sussmann of lying to the FBI about his working for the Clinton Campaign while he was trying to sell the Bureau on opening an investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia, focusing on alleged Internet pings between a Trump server and the Russian Alfa Bank. Sussmann’s claims included a number of pings against Trump Tower WiFi and later White House WiFi by a Russian-made Yota cellphone. Sussmann’s motion basically called Durham case garbage, which pressed Durham to explain to the court why the case needed to proceed, hence the new motion (the court subsequently ruled against Sussmann and the trial will commence soon.)
But as he has done in the past, Durham used the required motion filing as a chance to tip over a few of the cards he is holding. It looks like aces.
Durham previously established CIA knew about what we’ll call “Russiagate” as of at least July 2016 and briefed President Obama on the same only five days before the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane full-spectrum investigation into Trump/Russia began. The new filing adds the next chapter. Sussmann met with unknown persons at CIA to tell them a Russian Yota cellphone seemed to be following Trump around, attempting to log into the WiFi network wherever he was. This included Trump Tower and later the White House. At January and February 2017 CIA meetings Sussmann claimed the phone “appeared” in April 2016 (coincidentally right around the time the DNC hack supposedly took place) and even “appeared with Trump in Michigan” when he was interviewing a future Cabinet secretary. Sussmann went on to disingenuously claim to CIA the Yota smartphone model used is often gifted to Russian officials. He also claimed his client was a Republican.
The problem was the information Sussmann passed to the FBI was fake. Phony. Made -up. Fabricated, much like the Dossier. CIA “concluded in early 2017 Russian Bank-1 data [Alfa] and Russian Phone Provider-1 [Yota] data was not “‘technically plausible,’ did not ‘withstand technical scrutiny,’ ‘contained gaps,’ ‘conflicted with [itself]’ and was ‘user created and not machine/tool generated.’” Reuters‘ own tech people also said they could not authenticate the data and passed on the story. While CIA declined to open an investigation based on such data, the FBI did, leaving open additional questions on whether or not the FBI was technically unschooled, or in on the greater conspiracy.
This new information also begs the question of why Robert Mueller or DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz did not ask why the FBI was so easily fooled when their cousins across the river (and some journalists) saw through the grift. The FBI were warned — on September 7, 2016 the CIA sent FBI Director James Comey and Peter Strzok a warning Hillary Clinton approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia to distract from her email scandal. Then only 12 days later Sussmann approached the FBI, who despite the heads-up, took the hook. About a month later the courts issued the first FISA warrant. Hillary Clinton tweeted “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”
This would also raise questions about Michael Sussmann and his role representing the Democratic National Committee and the DNC server hack. Careful research by retired NSA persons suggested the server was accessed from inside the U.S., not hacked from Russia as widely alleged. If there is truth to that, would the same people who fabricated complex DNS and WiFi log data (i.e., good enough to fool the FBI) have been capable of making a local hack look international? One hates to go down the conspiracy road, but is Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks released some of the DNC emails, imprisoned in part because he could prove his source for the hacked emails was not Russian, as he has claimed?
Who knows, right? Maybe Researcher-2 (identified elsewhere as David Dagon of Georgia Tech, whose research focus is Botnets.) Dagon previously bragged of using a “bag of tricks” to prove Trump-Russia collusion.) Durham granted Researcher-2 immunity to “uncover otherwise-unavailable facts underlying the opposition research project.” Durham also granted immunity to someone at Fusion GPS, the front organization that moved money from the DNC/Clinton Campaign to both Dossier author Christopher Steele and Alfa/Yota pitchman Michael Sussmann. The Fusion person is likely Laura Seago. Seago helped sell the fake Alfa data to Slate.
Earlier articles established the Alfa/Yota conspiracy mirrored the Dossier conspiracy in style, funding, and execution. This new information from Durham adds now as with the Dossier, the Alfa/Yota data was faked. The commonalities between the two as yet legally unlinked conspiracies strongly suggests a common backstage element. We spoke with a former U.S. intelligence officer about what would be involved in managing an operation this size, Alfa, Yota, Dossier, etc., liaison with the FBI, all the media planted bells and whistles, but just the admin side, not the actual spy work. She said it would be a very large job, likely bigger than many overseas stations would take on, something that would need its own working group in Washington. She said keeping the finances clean but covert alone would be a near full-time job.
So what does it all mean? Special Counsel Durham is revealing a relentless effort by Democrats to sell the Russia collusion narrative across the U.S. government from CIA to the FBI, to the point where in the absence of derogatory information they created it. The Democrats then enlisted (to date…) Christopher Steele and Michael Sussman to peddle the false information across Washington in hopes of stirring someone in the intelligence community to turn their vast resources on Trump to find actual dirt. The whole venture failed in the initial sense — Trump was elected and completed his term — but large numbers of Americans still believe in whole or in part Trump is somehow allied with the Russians, a hangover likely to last into the next election.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
March 24, 2022 // 3 Comments »
The amount of disinformation coming out of the Ukraine war is unsurpassed in modern history. Unlike the glory days when outlets like CNN sent knowledgeable reporters into combat zones looking for actual information, today most MSM coverage is based on borrowed social media video, or just. made. up.
The problem with the former, video from social media, is it lacks context. Here’s eight seconds of a tank blowing up. Where was it shot? When? Was the explosion caused by a mine, a missile, or something internal to the tank? Is the tank Russian or Ukrainian? In most cases the media outlet has no real idea of the answers to those questions, never mind who shot the video towards what end. Even if they tumble on to the basic who-what-where, the exploding tank video is devoid of context. Was that the lead tank hit, stopping the Russian advance toward a village? Or was it a Russian tank that lingered in an open field and got picked off in a lucky shot, strategically without much consequence. At that point it is just war porn, a little jolt for the viewer. Such videos were immensely popular among the terrorists in Iraq; nearly every one captured had some random video on his phone of a US vehicle being blown apart by a roadside IED. Now the same thing is on MSNBC.
The bigger problem is the media’s willingness to make things up, and then reinforce each other’s “reporting” by agreeing on what they have made up. Let’s disassemble one such episode.
The media found online photos of a Russian convoy some 40 miles long. Within hours those images had become a story — the Russians had run out of gas just miles from Kiev, stalling their offensive. That soon led to think pieces claiming this was evidence of Russian military incompetency, corruption, and proof Ukraine would soon win. Soon enough Reuters was agreeing with CNN who agreed with NYT: stalled, no gas.
Leaving aside the idea that perhaps no one on earth absent some Russian generals actually knew why the convoy was not moving, the media created a reason and confirmed each other. If you follow the right people on Twitter you can sometimes watch them form these consensuses on issues, journalist all thousands of miles away from the scene with no information on hand nudging one another into the narrative. It’s kind of like watching a time-lapse film of water freezing into ice. So are the Russians out of gas?
Consider the lack of supporting evidence. Fuel travels through the same logistics chain that beans and bullets do, and the Russians do not seem to lack for ammunition. Artillery shells are big heavy things, and there seem to be plenty of those making it to the troops on the ground. The Russians have over a million men in the field and absent one blurry TikTok purportedly showing some shoplifting, seem to be feeding them. If a million men needed to shoplift three meals a day it would not be hard to discover. We have also seen no evidence Russians are looting fuel dumps as they make their way across Ukraine. Russians are flying some 200 air sorties a day, many of which are helicopter flights from inside Ukraine. Each can use hundreds of gallons of fuel a day, never mind ammunition and spare parts, all of which must be hauled in. And look past that single stalled convoy; Russian armored thrusts are moving across vast swaths of land to the south without any concern for fuel. The empirical evidence suggests if anything there is plenty of gas. If not, that “stalled” convoy on the outskirts of Kiev is only about 100 miles from the Belarus border, a very short transit for fuel trucks on paved roads Russia controls.
On the other side, if the Ukrainian forces had any information the Russians were low on gas their strategy would look different. You might see a full-on effort to attack fuel dumps, using Ukrainian air or drone forces, or even ground troops. You’d see Ukrainians blowing up gas stations and fuel handling facilities as they retreated. Instead of the exciting video of Javelins hitting tanks, you’d see everything from hand grenades to Molotovs blowing up fuel trucks. A tank without gas is already dead, what they military calls a soft kill, at much lower expense than destroying a modern tank. You might also see the Ukrainians trying for a much more mobile defense, ceding territory and making the Russians chase them until they run out of gas. There have been no signs of any of this, mostly the opposite actually as the Ukrainians set up static defensive lines on the outskirts of cities. There is literally nothing to support the MSM’s contention that the convoy ran out of gas.
There were also MSM reports the Ukrainians had made significant attacks against the parked vehicles. While no doubt some skirmishes must have taken place along the 40 mile stretch, the fact that the convoy remained bunched up nose-to-bumper and not dispersed suggests no one was very worried about being attacked. The soldiers openly slept on the ground, it is not clear from the photos that air defenses were aggressively deployed, and overall it looks more like soldiers killing time than soldiers preparing to repel attackers. Though the MSM was in no position to know anything about the soldiers’ morale, they commented on it endlessly.
Of course the convoy did start to move, and in a very predictable way. The textbook approach to using armor against an urban area is to surround it, besiege it, cut off food, water, power, and communications, and then if the defenders will not surrender, use artillery to either force them out or destroy them. Such an attack has to be coordinated 360 degrees so if some troops arrive early they must wait for the others to show up. This is what is happening now in the city of Mariupol. What is not done is to drive straight into town, where the narrow streets grant cover to defenders. The “stalled” convoy appears to have waited until Russian forces advancing from the south had made sufficient progress toward Kiev before spreading out west of the city and beginning bombardment.
One convoy and one falsely reported story matter little in the middle of a vast war. But they serve as a clear example of how far the media has fallen, to the point where outlets like the BBC have become little more than propaganda mouthpieces, creating a fake narrative out of whole cloth and peddling it to an increasingly non-critical western media consumer.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
March 11, 2022 // 1 Comment »
I hate going back, again, to Orwell, but since the world is intent on using his epic novel 1984 as an instructional guide, I have no choice. So proles, take note: this week’s Two Minutes of Hate will be split among Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. They may in fact be the same person, and we are certainly told they share the same goal: destruction of American democracy via the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
Something very sinister happened in the American mind space over the last few days. Ukraine, a country of little importance to the United States, suddenly became the sole focus of most media-consuming Americans. Constructed to appear organic, it is impossible to not imagine guiding hands behind the shift of every media outlet to a single story told in a single way. Leap frogging over one another, social media and traditional media competed for the most extreme Ukraine stories, all slanted towards unbelievability. One of the first was the Ghost Pilot of Kiev, who improbably shot down six Russian aircraft. No matter the video was undated and could have been taken anywhere anytime, and no matter when the whole story proved false and the images shown to have been created by home aircraft game sim software. This was followed by a tale of Ukrainian soldiers on some island who died valiantly rather than surrender, which also was not true because we learned days later they did indeed surrender.
America was flooded with images of gorgeous Ukrainian girls with AirSoft toy rifles volunteering for the front. Ukrainian cats are supposedly being trained to spot Russian laser sights. Pictures appeared of plucky people making Molotov cocktails to fight the Russians in the streets. FYI, those cocktails would a) have either evaporated their inflammant through the rag before use, you can’t make ’em days in advance or b) set fire to the thrower. Unless the rag is very, very tightly in the bottle, the inflammant will run down the thrower’s arm and set him afire. Propaganda has no time apparently for WikiHow. But the most intense propaganda has been reserved for the Ukrainian president, who has been labeled by the MSM as both a George Washington and a Winston Churchill. Combat reports of him patrolling the streets in cammies are now a standard feature.
The tell on all this is how unspecific the propaganda is. Yep, that’s Zelensky alright, but exactly where is he? When was the footage shot? We haven’t seen this much veneration of a foreign leader since the election of savior-o-the-day Iraqi Prime Ministers a decade or so ago. Same for all those images of tanks (are they Russian? Tonka?) rolling across snowy fields, or planes firing rockets into wooded areas. The Ukraine coverage is nearly fact-free. It’s all about narratives, hot girls with guns, little clips of tanks. But nothing about what is going on. Is one side winning? It’s all just emotion to stim you into equally meaningless acts on social media.
But it has worked. Shallow Americans are “standing with” Ukraine, throwing Russian alcohol off the shelves, lining up to eat at Ukrainian diners in New York, and of course posting their support across social media. Overnight we as a nation have become experts on the SWIFT system, and patriots ready to pay more at the gas pumps for freedom. My neighbor made a show of pouring out some old vodka but was unaware our state generates most of its electricity off Russian crude oil. Whatever, he’s doing what the teevee says to do. And yes, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider “absolutely” approves Ukrainians using “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as their anthem amid Russia’s invasion.
Alongside all this false and misleading information is the overnight disappearance of those fact checkers that plagued thoughtful journalism through the Covid era. The same people who would jump on an article for misquoting a protein statistic, or cancel an account for not following the party line on masking, are dead silent in the face of a tsunami of propaganda purposely painting an incomplete if not completely inaccurate picture of the war in Ukraine. So no surprise the former Ukrainian president lauded CNN as an “objective source of information as a contradiction against Russian information.” Twitter will label all tweets linking to Russian state media while allowing Ukrainian sources free reign. Everybody’s working the same angle here.
If any of this seems familiar, rewind to the 2016 presidential campaign, and then get back to the future.
The propaganda, having done its job of whipping Americans into a blood orgy demanding Putin’s death, has now begun its morphosis into tying Trump into all this. In doing so, the campaign builds on the remnants of 2016, when the Clinton machine falsely claimed the Russians elected Trump as their agent in place. USA Today writes “Trump’s bromance with Putin was very much on display… as the former president saw it, there was nothing to condemn [in Ukraine] but much to admire.” The NYT says “The American political right… has shifted toward fawning praise for autocrats, even those leading America’s traditional adversaries. Where once Russia and other autocracies were seen as anti-democratic, they have now become symbols of US conservatism — a mirror for the right-wing worldview. Supporting Mr. Putin, as well as other authoritarian leaders, is yet another way in which the political right is weaponizing culture wars to further divide Americans.”
Salon explains “How Trump’s coup attempt [January 6] encouraged Putin’s Ukraine invasion” and says “Donald Trump and his regime consistently acted as vassals for Vladimir Putin’s regime and Russia’s strategic interests.” WaPo noted “the implications of President Vladimir Putin’s actions against the United States in 2016 will finally sink in, especially for Republicans in Congress. The Vladimir Putin who planned, staged and launched a large-scale war on Ukraine is the same Vladimir Putin who ordered an aggressive, multifaceted, clandestine campaign to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The Atlantic hauls out none other than Hillary Clinton to thunder “It’s a five-alarm national-security crisis. The hard truth is that if Republicans won’t stand up to Trump, they can’t stand up to Putin or Xi.” Has-been with a platform Al Franken predicts Trump will win in 2024 and it will be the last democratic election. It’ll be a dictatorship.”
There are two things to worry about here. The first is the amazing speed with which a massive narrative can be forced across America in a coordinated fashion by traditional media, government, and social media. Overnight no other version of the story could be found. Ukrainian propaganda sucked all of the oxygen from the room so quickly it should scare us. The second thing to fear is how quickly American partisan political forces were able to hijack the initial anti-Russian narrative and repurpose it into a slightly revised version of 2016’s “Trump is a Russian asset.” No matter that that itself has been debunked as Clinton-made propaganda, the story line is somehow — meh, the details don’t matter — Trump and Putin are working together to destroy Ukraine on their way to ending American democracy.
Trump has nothing to do with Putin, or the Ukraine, and the latter two have nothing to do with American democracy. As in Orwell’s world, our thoughts are no longer are own. We are told how to think and increasingly, groomed how to vote.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
March 8, 2022 // 3 Comments »
1) Special Counsel John Durham dropped a new filing in his Russiagate investigation. Fox says it means one thing, and CNN says something almost the opposite…
The whole filing is only 13 pages; the juicy stuff about “spying” is only a few paragraphs. Just read it.
2) I’m kinda busy, so could you just give me the gist?
All the quotes below are from the filing text. The new filing is at its heart legal housekeeping, asking that a waiver be considered to allow indicted Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann to retain his current law firm. A potential conflict of interest exists because Sussmann’s representative works for a law firm which also represents others Durham may be going after, and may have been involved in the larger events under investigation, perhaps as witnesses. Sussman is under indictment for lying to the FBI. He brought the Trump-Alfa bank accusations to the FBI pretending to be a patriotic citizen, when he was actually working on Clinton’s behalf trying to get the FBI to investigate Trump.
While the conflict of interest issue is interesting in itself, what is news worthy in Durham’s latest filing are allegations tech company Neustar and its executive Rodney Joffe (who was also a law client of Michael Sussmann) accessed “dedicated servers for the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).” Joffe then “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
Joffe also “enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university” (likely Georgia Tech) who had access to “large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.” This would have been how Joffe got access to data from Trump’s private computers. “[Joffe] tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” he added. “In doing so, [Joffe] indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”
3) What’s all the DNS stuff mean?
Remember metadata, the info about a communication Edward Snowden showed us the NSA gathers? This is like that. Metadata shows, among other things, when and where a communication started, and where it ended up. DNS data, a kind of metadata, comes from a Dynamic Name Server. When you use a smartphone or type www.theamericanconservative.com into your browser, it contacts a DNS server, which translates those English words into the numbers the Internet actually runs on. Same thing for email, Tik Tok, anything online. If you have access to DNS data, such as Joffe did, you know who the White House and Trump were communicating with. DNS data is a road map and if you have enough of it, patterns, such as perhaps regular communication with Russia, emerge. That’s why the NSA does the same thing against its enemies or competitors.
4) So is that “spying?” Durham never uses the word in his filing.
What word would you use to describe secretly and likely illegally collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them? Durham is writing a legal document, and must use precise words, so of course he would not use a blunt term like spying. But it is pretty hard to call what actually happened anything else.
5) How is what Joffe/Neustar did illegal? They did not hack into any servers. They had access to them.
There were two sources of DNS information, let’s take them separately. The first was DNS servers actually inside the White House. Neustar provided these servers under a contract with the government. Contractors like Neustar and Joffe working on sensitive data systems do not own the data they see. Their scope of usage is very specific to the job they were hired to do. It does not include exploiting high-security government contracts for political purposes, personal gain or to help Hillary. Sort of like your doctor, who knows your medical information but cannot just share it with his brother-in-law who sells insurance.
Joffe also monitored the DNS data from Trump Tower and other Trump properties. He got this data via Georgia Tech. They got it (along with a gazillion other DNS records) as part of an unrelated contract with the Pentagon. Georgia had no obvious right to share data with Joffe and he had no right to use the shared data for political purposes. There has got to be a crime in there somewhere.
6) But Joffe and others never read any Trump email or listened in on calls. So it’s not spying.
Time to update the definition of spying from 1945. In Joffe’s case, he was trying to establish a pattern of communications between Trump and Russia. Michael Sussman was then to take that pattern pulled from the DNS data to the FBI and CIA as a patriotic bystander, and those agencies would be able to go in deep reading individual emails with a flick of a switch. The NSA does this all the time, looking at who one terrorist contacts in order to target another. It is the core of modern spying and it looks like the Clinton campaign was doing it, and then using Michael Sussmann as a false front to peddle it to the FBI and CIA. We know the FBI took the bait.
7) But I heard all this DNS monitoring of the White House started under Obama.
Neustar got the contract and installed the DNS servers in the White House during the Obama administration. This may have been for some legitimate cybersecurity task and/or to establish a baseline of “normal” White House-Russia communications. Joffe continued his DNS monitoring of the White House into February 2017, after Trump took office. Having failed to stop his campaign, the data was lined up to aid in driving him out of office. The other monitoring, of Trump’s personal and business DNS data, took place during the campaign, which of course meant it was while Obama was in the White House.
8) This guy Joffe seems right out of Better Call Saul.
In quid pro quo, Joffe was offered a top cybersecurity job in the future Hillary Clinton administration. But his background goes deep. Among other things, Joffe’s other company, Packet Forensics, sells wiretapping equipment that allows federals to spy on private web-browsing through fake Internet security certificates. This lets agents see an individual’s online transactions without obtaining a warrant. This is not to imply, at least not yet, that Joffe could have easily used his access to the White House servers to install his product and then monitor everything. Joffe’s company has done $40 million in federal contracts, including with the FBI (in 2013, FBI Director James Comey gave Joffe an award recognizing his work on a case) and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA.) Joffe’s firm also monitors the computers of other government officials for threats, including in the office of Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz, who investigated the FBI for Russiagate wrongdoing. He is one guy in position to know a lot.
Joffe started out as a direct mail marketing scammer in the 1980s. In the 90s he sat on the board of PlasmaNet, which then operated FreeLotto.com, an scammy online sweepstakes game. And small world– Joffe’s company Packet Forensics landed a recent Pentagon contract to manage Internet domains. The bid was awarded the day Joe Biden was inaugurated president.
9) What’s next?
Indictments by Durham against Joffe are almost certain. Durham may also get curious why the FBI and CIA did not question where Sussmann got his data, given that it could have only come from White House servers. In addition, if researchers at Georgia Tech who were being paid by the U.S. government via a DARPA grant were freelancing the data they collected to help the Clinton campaign smear Trump, that would be another area Durham will be looking into. Durham might also seize the Neustar-provided DNS servers if they haven’t been wiped and see if any data reading software was ever installed.
One of Durham’s earlier indictments, former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, has already been found guilty of falsifying data on a FISA application to enable wiretapping Trump staffer Carter Page. The case against Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann is ongoing, as is the third publicly-known indictment, against Igor Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the United States. Danchenko made up most of what he told Christopher Steele for his dossier.
Keep your eye on Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack. Dolan has close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape and otherwise using cut-outs to feed false info about Trump into the dossier.
10) Anyone going to jail?
Durham’s filings are lightening flashes, briefly and unpredictably illuminating part of the whole. One thing seems clear, however. The statute of limitations on many of the process crimes Durham is pursuing, like perjury, is short. Any strategy of using little fish to catch bigger fish is likely to time out, at least as far as actual prosecutions. Instead, Durham seems intent more on exposing the larger conspiracy, to include the Russia dossier and now electronic, well, spying, by the Clinton campaign. He may also expose more fully the intelligence community’s role in all this, turning a blind eye on the sources and methods (which effect credibility) and accepting anything peddled to them about Trump. One can imagine future hearings in a Republican-controlled House showing what Hillary knew, never mind potentially Obama and Biden.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
February 25, 2022 // 3 Comments »
There is a word for secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them.
According to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, the Hillary Clinton campaign surreptitiously and likely illegally reached into protected White House and Trump communications data to try and show some link between Trump and Russia. The Clinton campaign during the election hid from FBI, CIA, and the media that it was the source of the information gathered. Durham doesn’t use the word “spy” but that in no way changes what happened.
The recent filing relates to Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who represented the Clinton campaign while at the Perkins Coie law firm. Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI at a September 2016 meeting when he presented documents claiming to show Internet communications between Trump and Russia-based Alfa Bank. The indictment says Sussmann falsely told the FBI he was presenting this information as a good citizen, purposely hiding his ties to Clinton. The allegations about the bank were false.
The new filing is at its heart legal housekeeping, asking that a waiver be considered to allow Sussmann to retain his current law firm. A potential conflict of interest exists because Sussmann’s representative works for a law firm which also represents others Durham may be going after, and may have been involved in the larger events under investigation, perhaps as witnesses. While that is interesting in itself, what is news worthy are broader details of what really happened around Russiagate that potentially point to crimes on a Watergate scale.
The filing says tech company Neustar executive Rodney Joffe (who was also a law client of Michael Sussmann) worked with the indicted Clinton campaign lawyer to access “dedicated servers for the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).” Joffe then “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
Joffe also “enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university” (likely Georgia Tech) who had access to “large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.” This would have been how Joffe got access to data from Trump’s private computers. “[Joffe] tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” he added. “In doing so, [Joffe] indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”
Some nerd stuff. Remember metadata, the info about a communication Edward Snowden showed us the NSA gathers? This is like that. Metadata shows, among other things, when and where a communication started, and where it ended up. DNS data, a kind of metadata, comes from a Domain Name Server. When you use a smartphone or type www.spectatorworld.com into your browser, it contacts a DNS server, which translates those English words into the numbers the Internet actually runs on.
DNS is like a phone lookup; you want to speak with Mom, who the phone knows only as 212-555-1212. Same thing for email, Tik Tok, anything online. If you have access to DNS data, such as Joffe did, you know who the White House and Trump were communicating with. DNS data is a road map and if you have enough of it, patterns, such as perhaps regular communication with Russia, emerge. That’s why the NSA does the same thing against its enemies or competitors.
The Clinton people got access to all this information via a private contractor, Joffe’s Neustar, which provided the actual DNS servers to the White House. Durham wrote, starting in July 2016, Joffe’s company “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” In quid pro quo, and despite a fraud-laden past, Joffe was offered a top cybersecurity job in the future Clinton administration.
The data gathering on the Trump campaign began while Obama was still in office (and the EOP portion could have been to establish a baseline of “normal” White House-Russia communications) and continued into February 2017, after Trump took office and all attention turned to impeachment. Having failed to stop his campaign, the data was lined up to aid in driving him out of the White House.
But no one stole or hacked the data, right? Not so fast. Contractors working on sensitive data systems do not own the data they see. Their scope of usage is very specific to the job they were hired to do. It does not include exploiting high-security government contracts for political purposes and personal gain. Sort of like your doctor, who knows your medical information but cannot just share it with his brother who sells life insurance.
Indictments by Durham against Joffe are sure to be coming. It is also curious FBI and CIA did not question where Sussmann got his data, given that it could have only come from White House servers. In addition, if researchers at Georgia Tech who were being paid by the U.S. government via a DARPA grant were freelancing the data they collected to help the Clinton campaign smear Trump, that would be another area Durham will be looking into.
Back to Michael Sussmann, the Clinton lawyer. As he tried to get the FBI interested in the Trump-Alfa Bank tale in September 2016, Sussmann went to the CIA (“Agency-2”) on February 9, 2017 and “provided an updated set of allegations — including the Russian Bank-1 data and additional allegations relating to Trump.”
Sussmann also “claimed lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House.” Durham says this is unsupported, though as recently as October the New York Times was still defending it. The Durham filing also maintains Sussmann lied again to CIA about having any affiliation with his paying clients Joffe and the Clinton campaign.
So call it what you will — spying, hacking, infiltrating, a rebut to but her emails – but here is what it is: Durham asserts Neustar, on behalf of the Clinton campaign, gathered data likely illegally and certainly surreptitiously from White House and Trump computers, seeking a connection to Russia. Lawyer Michael Sussmann, hiding his connection to Clinton and Joffe, brought false conclusions drawn from this data to FBI and CIA (and perhaps the DOJ Inspector General) in hopes they would turn their enormous resources toward investigating Trump. The con worked with the FBI.
This would mean Hillary and her lawyers masterminded a coordinated electronic conspiracy against Trump when he was a candidate and later president, while simultaneously perpetuating the dossier hoax. As with the dossier, everything Clinton peddled was fake. There was no pee tape, no payoffs from Putin, no connection to Alfa Bank, and no Russian-made smartphones. But this is not a fake scandal. Durham has potentially uncovered the most destructive political assassination attempt since Kennedy.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
February 19, 2022 // 2 Comments »
While President Trump was in office, White House staff periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet and believed the president had flushed documents. So reports the NYT’s Maggie Haberman, based on anonymous sources. How does a literate media consumer know the story is garbage? Read it like an intelligence officer.
Start by applying some of the same tests intelligence officers do to help them evaluate their own sources. Thinking backwards from the information to who could be the source is a good start on evaluating credibility.
For example, is a source in a position to know what they say they know, what intelligence officers call spotting? The “position to know” idea scales up sharply when a source says they are privy to important conversations; how would they know the contents of a call the president-elect made to a foreign leader? Only a very few people would be in the room for something like that. Would any be likely leakers?
In Haberman’s toiletgate, the circle of real sources is very small, the same as those who have access to the president’s personal crapper. Notice Haberman does not characterize her source, as in “one who has direct access to the pooper,” another red flag. If there is any source at all, it is likely cafeteria gossip. Remember in the case of journalism’s most famous anonymous source, Watergate’s Deep Throat, his information was used to guide the reporting, not as a scoop by itself, because it could not always be verified.
As for verification, watch out for what intel officers call loops, where multiple reports come in to different people/journalists, with the fact that they came from the same source disguised. This is often how reporters erroneously confirm each other’s fake news, not realizing they are all talking to the same “anonymous” source. Now Google “Christopher Steele.”
Any article that cites a source who claims to know the “why” behind some action, what was in the head of a decision maker, should be subject to special skepticism. Key officials are generally not in the habit of explaining their true motivations out loud. In Haberman’s submission notice how she avoids addressing the “why” directly. She claims her sources “believed” the president flushed pieces of paper, with the implication Trump was destroying records instead of over-wiping.
Haberman also suspiciously released her scoop along side stories some White House records had been sent to Mar-a-Lago, not the National Archives. She manipulates her readers by telling them something in line with what they already believe. This is one way double-agents try to fool intel officers. A careful reader has to honestly ask himself whether he wants to believe such a thing bad enough to overlook its improbability.
Legitimate sources risk something by talking, such as job loss, maybe even jail. Is what they will get out of the leak worth the risk? In this case the actual source would have to be an intimate staffer, or at least a White House plumber. Why would such as person risk his job to feed free gossip to Haberman? Did Trump anger them by leaving the seat up one too many times?
If the answer to the question of “what’s in it for them?” is not obvious, the source is suspect. Intel officers always work to understand their source’s motivation, usually a combination of money, sex, revenge, personal advancement, and nationalism. Any of that apply to the White House plumbing staff, most of whom have worked at the place for years?
Sources may push out info intended to influence public opinion. If you the reader can’t suss out the mystery source’s likely agenda — what they want — then you’re the guy at the poker table who can’t tell who the rube is, and needs a mirror to find out. Remember what happened when journalists failed to see what leakers of false info about Iraq’s WMDs were up to, and helped start a war? Always ask, cui bono, who benefits?
Similarly, is what you are reading consistent with other information on the subject? Does the new info track known things, what intelligence officers call expectability? Overall, the further away from expectability a story stretches, the more obligation to be skeptical. Falling back on “it might be true” or “you can’t prove it’s not true” are typical signs of fake news. Same for “news” which can by definition never be proven false, such as proving the negative Trump did not flush documents. It’s like claiming Putin kills fluffy kittens for sport; how can you disprove such a statement?
So there is the expectability question of why would Trump flush documents when shredders and burn bags are literally everywhere in the White House? And why would he do it “periodically,” as Haberman asserts, after finding out it is not a good way of getting ride of something because it only ends up in the wet hands of some plumber? It literally makes no sense.
The closer information gets to something you want to believe is true the more skeptical you should be. The best example of this is the infamous dossier and especially the “pee tape” (shown to be disinformation created by an actual intelligence officer to discredit Trump.) The tape was the magic bullet which would end Trump. About half the country wanted it to be true. In addition, the supposed tape too easily hit all the Trump tropes: hatred for Obama, sexual piggishness (notice how like a fetish the media loves to connect Trump with scatological themes?) and of course the Russians. If it seems too “good” to be true, it probably is.
In addition to considering the source of the information, consider the source of the reporting — what do they have to gain? In this instance, Haberman released her toilet blockbuster to directly promote her new tell-all book on Trump. It is obvious her story is advertising, not journalism. Let’s ask Haberman why she squatted on “reportable” poopy information, flushing it into the MSM public sewer only when she needed to pimp her book.
In the end, an intelligence officer rarely knows what is 100 percent true, so he assigns a rating, such as high, medium or low confidence, and acts on the information (or not) in line with that. A reader can similarly never know with certainty the truth about an anonymously-sourced story. But while anything is possible, only some things are probable, and that’s usually the way to read it.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
February 5, 2022 // 9 Comments »
The Democrats’ newest champion (Michael Avenatti did not return calls) Rep. Liz Cheney just about said the quiet part out loud: her January 6 Committee has the singular goal of pre-defeating Trump ahead of any voting in 2024. As it becomes clearer the Committee is failing in its propaganda campaign to get Republican Party powerbrokers to dump Trump, and as it is near crystalline the Committee will not find evidence leading to formal prosecution of Trump for sedition, treason, or insurrection, they are getting desperate. The latest? Purposefully misinterpreting an obscure phrase from a post-Civil War Constitutional amendment.
Cheney said “I think one of the really important things that our committee has to do is lay these facts out for the American people, so that they inform us in terms of our legislative activity going forward.” Cheney is talking about one phrase from the 14th Amendment, no doubt presented to her by an intern applying a Control + F search for “insurrection” to an online text of the Constitution. This is a familiar strategy for the Democrats, having purposefully taken phrases out of context from the 25th Amendment and the Emoluments Clause trying to force Trump from office for four years.
While the 14th Amendment was written primarily to grant citizenship and rights to freed slaves, it also created the “equal protection clause” which cornerstoned landmark cases including Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and Bush v. Gore. But tucked away in Section 3 was a bit of post-civil war housekeeping, the phrase “No person shall hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.” The 14th also provides for Congress to enforce the provisions via legislation, and Cheney thinks that’s the key to Democratic success. Seriously.
The intent in 1868 was to prevent Confederate leaders from returning to power. But the January 6 Committee is in 2022 so lacking in substantive content that they are considering some sort of legislation labeling Trump an insurrectionist, and thus prohibiting him from taking office again, even if he were to win the election. Cheney is not alone; Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin has also called the use of the 14th a “live proposition.”
Section 3 does not have a particularly glorious history. Reconstruction Era prosecutors brought civil actions in court to oust officials linked to the confederacy, and Congress in some cases took action to refuse to seat Members. Section 3 was last used in 1919 against a socialist congressman accused of having given aid and comfort to Germany during WWI. The congressman was eventually seated after the Supreme Court threw out his espionage conviction. Currently the only criminal punishment left on the books dates to 1870 and makes it a misdemeanor to run for office when ineligible to do so under Section 3. So while the Constitution does specifically refer to legislative action by Congress as a way to enforce Section 3, precedent clearly shows due process and litigation would step in. Imagine Cheney or anyone trying to label someone who controls the loyalty of roughly 50 percent of Americans an insurrectionist through a show of hands.
Such legislation would also have to pass both houses and be signed by the president, something beyond a non-starter. The question of whether Section 3 is actually an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder is also not fully resolved. A Bill of Attainder in simple terms is a piece of law designed solely to punish one person, an argument the Democrats of 1868 themselves used to try and prevent Section 3 from even becoming part of the Constitution. The question was left largely unsettled as old Confederates died off and the use of Section 3 effectively ended in 1919 except in the fevered brains of people like Cheney.
There is also the open question of whether use of Section 3 against Trump would represent an unconstitutional ex post facto law. The drafters of Section 3 were clear their intent was precautionary, looking not to punish Confederates for the past but to prevent them from taking power again in the future. It was not a measure of punishment, but a measure of self-defense, and the bar was set very high: participating in actual warfare against the United States that took the lives of millions in pursuit of breaking up the Union. In Trump’s case, given that his offense would be being voted an insurrectionist over a year after making a speech to keep him from the White House, it would be very hard not to see it as punishment.
More problems? Section 3 prohibits someone from taking office, not from running for election. Imagine Trump conducting a three year campaign, winning the race, and then being prohibited from taking office over a clever interpretation of some words from 1868 clearly meant for a wholly different purpose.
The use of the 14th Amendment to end Trump is the kind of thing non-experts with too much Google time can convince themselves is true. Given that there is no realistic possibility of preventing Trump from taking office in 2024 under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, what is this all about? Most superficially it is a chance for a trog like Liz Cheney to get on TV spouting some quasi-legalistic garbage. It will be diluted through CNN as “Trump’s election is barred by the Constitution” and “Trump is in violation of democracy” and repurposed into Lincoln Project Facebook memes.
But more substantively, silliness like Cheney’s is a sign of increasing desperation by the Democrats, three full years before the election. Increasingly sure they will lose at the ballot box, the Dems strategy is to prevent Trump from ever reaching the ballot box. Failing to be able to prosecute him, they have only left to persecute him, across tax courts in New York, the January 6 Committee, endless manhunts for Capitol trespassers, and the like. For a party that cries continuously that democracy is in danger, the Democrats act increasingly like thugs in a banana republic trying to bring down their opponents extra-electorally.
Political prosecutions are not new in America. Political pogroms are. It is sad to watch the Democratic Party embrace such third-world practices as policy.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
January 23, 2022 // 15 Comments »
I hate these people. I hate them for who they are and for what they are doing and most of all I hate them for the larger thing they are a part of.
The people I hate call themselves sedition hunters. They give themselves war names glorified by a liberal press, names like Deep State Dogs and Capitol Terrorists Exposers. What these people do, as a sort of Orwellian hobby, is identify people who participated in the January 6 Capitol riot. They spend their days slithering around the Internet looking for evidence that can put a name to a press photo and then turn what they find over to the FBI in hopes the Feds will play Sturmtruppen to their Gestapo and kick some doors down. They turn neighbors in to law enforcement as a hobby.
One specific goal they have is to find higher quality images of a suspect that the FBI or their more tech-savvy fellow fascists can run against facial recognition tools. They spend hours on PimEyes, a facial recognition website, copying and pasting photos from CNN freeze frames and Facebook profiles. And unlike the FBI, whose use of facial recognition is at least nominally controlled by law, these amateurs are free to use and misuse the tech on behalf of the FBI without legal or moral fetter.
Here’s how one hagiographic journalist described the sedition hunters: “There are archivists with the encyclopedic knowledge of the timeline, locations and key players. There are hashtaggers who generate catchy, memorable nicknames [example: NaziGrayHat, AuntRageFace, MAGAGuy] to help the community track the actions of suspects still at large. There are the computer whizzes who create slick websites that let you explore evidence in a user-friendly format. There are the diplomats who serve as liaisons between break off groups in the larger sedition hunters network.”
One of those slick websites, January 6 Evidence, offers a minute-by-minute timeline linking photos and videos, overlaid with a geolocator map for suspects. You can filter for AntiAbortionTrumpers and CapitolFireExtinguishers, or chose to target only Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. The Persons of Interest page displays almost 1,800 faces, photos we assume were taken from the press coverage but who knows, of those ID’ed and those pending ID, updated with links for people busted by the Feds. One of the page developers, K2theSky, runs a companion Twitter account all about tracking down the January 6 participants that plays out like a serial killer’s bulletin board. You can almost hear her greasy sounds of self-pleasure in the background as a crusader tags another victim. It goes well beyond the “revenge of the nerds” meme the MSM employs to humanize these people.
The web site is an extraordinary obsession. While you were walking the dog, or volunteering at the food bank, these people did all this work on their own, for free. It takes a lot of hate to inspire thousands of painstaking, detail-oriented hours of free work over a period of months. Imagine that much hate channeled by a charismatic leader. It would be a triumph of will.
Putting the events of January 6 in perspective is important to understanding my hate for these people. January 6 just was not anything significant, despite all the heat and noise. The most perfect way to know that is to look at the convictions resulting out of all this Scooby “sleuthing” and FBI work. To date 702 people have been arrested. Of the completed cases, the majority have been plead guilty to things like trespassing, unlawful entry, and picketing in a Federal building, the kind of things which follow a rowdy Ohio State-Michigan game. There have been no convictions for treason, sedition, incitement or insurrection (though Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder, has been charged with conspiracy related to sedition.) Things are so far from reality that one rioter just skipped prison time because the judge noted she came to the Capitol in a tutu and not tactical gear.
The Capitol riots were goonish, embarrassing, but in the end about as historically meaningful as a floor brawl in the Taiwanese legislature. For it to be a coup, insurrection, etc., it would have needed a path toward accomplishing a change of government. There never was any. Joe Biden was always going to be president just like the election said should happen. All the mob accomplished was a meaningless few hours’ delay in a largely ceremonial christening by the House. Trump’s actions vacillated between bizarre and shameful, but hardly Weimar material. As the fat kid in Jojo Rabbit said, “Not a good time for Nazis.”
We must also dismiss the notion that the sedition hunters are some sort of modern day crime fighting superheroes. They are politically motivated vigilantes. They don’t hunt pedophiles or murders, they hunt Trump supporters over misdemeanor trespassing cases. Their actions are not aimed at justice but rather toward contributing to a propaganda meme that says what happened on January 6 was the most significant events of their meaningless lives. They do not want to solve crimes; they want to ruin the lives of people pictured by the media.
In the aftermath of the Rittenhouse trial it has become common to rhetorically ask “What would have happened if Kyle Rittenhouse was black?” So let us try the same here. Imagine a group of online sleuths dedicating themselves to identifying the young black men who busted windows and burned stores during BLM riots. Imagine people devoting their lives to creating online resources with real-life consequences for Americans not charged with any crime, feeding everything from rumors to facial recognition results to law enforcement so they could kick down some uptown door and drag a 24-year-old black kid to jail.
I hate the sedition hunters because they do not realize they are pawns in a larger game. Democrats and mainstream media are trying to sell the events of January 6 to frightened Americans as a new 9/11. This is in service to two goals: electing a Democrat in 2024, and using the tools of law enforcement against Republican supporters. You, too, should hate that.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
January 14, 2022 // 9 Comments »
One truth is the 2020 campaign never really ended. On paper Joe Biden became president and Donald Trump became a real estate developer again, but in reality Biden is simply a placeholder and Trump an active candidate for the presidency in 2024.
A second truth is in the law, unlike in propaganda and journalism as it is practiced today, words have very precise and specific meanings. Terms like assault, for example are well-defined by decades of case law. You can write gobbledy guck about things like a “verbal microaggressive assault” but that’s just for the rubes; don’t expect the case to make it to court. The same for terms like incitement, hate speech, and conspiracy. Never mind terrorism, treason or sedition.
The question is: after five years of failed, false accusations against Trump (Russiagate on down), how valid of an election strategy is it to twist vernacular definitions into quasi-legal ones? After so many instances of crying wolf (walls closing in, tick tock, etc,) will doing it all again over the events of January 6 actually win votes for the Democratic candidate, or will voters finally realize the Emperor’s arguments about Trump have no clothing and stay home?
Absent some Pearl Harbor-scale event, it is difficult to see what the Dems can run on in 2024. It is unlikely the Democrats will emerge from the 2022 midterms with a new majority, meaning all of their domestic agenda promises are shot. They are likely to lose the battle over Roe, and accomplish little on immigration other than the half-arsed decision to stop enforcing immigration law on the southern border. Even if Mother Nature casts a vote and cleans up Covid somehow, it will be difficult for Democrats to take much credit. They have no clear plan for unfutzing the economy and any progress made will be seen as catch-up at best. Tearing down statues and appointing transpeople only goes so far.
Their whole strategy for 2024 is to make people believe Trump tried to overthrow the Constitution on January 6, and having failed sulk away to embrace the electoral process and just run for president again. It’s a tough ask. Propaganda/journalism have 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. Some goofy tax problem in a New York state court or empty process crimes like “conspiracy to…” which dragged the Russiagate mess, will not be enough.
The issue? In the law, unlike in propaganda and journalism as it is practiced today, words have very precise and specific meanings. Problem One is there was no coup. Presided over by Trump non-accomplice Mike Pence, Congress did its job. Biden took office. Trump went home. The rioters went home. After a year of efforts none of the 700 some prosecutions have been for anything close to sedition or treason, mostly just fluffy versions of trespassing. None claimed they acted on orders from Trump, Don Jr. or the Pillow Guy. Despite all the over-blown Powerpoints and texts, there was no realistic path toward a coup taking place. That is a very high bar to climb over and prove something serious like treason. You need a fire to prove arson.
So the Dems and media are left with some lawyering to do, in their minds the equivalent of taking down Al Capone on tax violations. The problem is Capone really did fail to pay taxes. Trump’s actions were instead legal under the First Amendment. The smoking gun can’t have been loaded with blanks.
So the focus ends up on the one thing Trump actually did do on January 6, speak at the Stop the Steal rally. Dems argue his words constitute incitement. You can reread them, but it would be more productive to spend some time learning what actually is and is not incitement.
A democracy can’t lock up everyone who stirs up a crowd. Speech which inspires, motivates or stirs up the blood cannot be illegal as it is the very stuff of democracy. Trump thought the election was unfair and had a Constitutional right to say so. Democracy could not exist if the law held every speaker responsible for whatever people who heard him talk did later. A finer line was needed.
The first try at restricting “dangerous speech” was
Schenck v. United States, which produced the misunderstood line about not shouting Fire! in a crowded theatre. It would be for the later case of
Brandenburg v. Ohio to refine the modern standard for restricting speech. It tightened the criteria to 1) the speech explicitly or implicitly encouraged the use of violence or lawless action; 2) the speaker intends their speech will result in the use of violence or lawless action, and 3) the imminent use of violence or lawless action is the likely result of the speech.
Brandenburg is the Supreme Court’s statement on what government may do about speech that seeks to incite others to lawless action.
The key to Brandenburg is intent. You have to prove, not just speculate, the speaker wanted to cause violence. A hostile reaction of a crowd does not automatically transform protected speech into incitement. Listeners’ reaction to speech is thus not alone a basis for regulation, or for taking action against a speaker. The speaker had to clearly want to cause some specific illegal act. You need to prove Trump wanted the crowd to attack the Capitol (he instead tells them to walk there and cheer on the legislators “who do the right thing” and “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”) and set out to find the words to make that happen.
In the 1982 Claiborne v. NAACP the Court ruled civil rights leaders were not responsible for a crowd which, after hearing them speak, burned down a white man’s store. The state’s argument, rejected by the Court, was that no matter how they disguised their codewords and dog whistles, the leaders just knew their inflammatory rhetoric would drive the crowd to violence. Nope, said the Court, the standard is simple, the actual words spoken.
The law is similar for sedition, seeking to overthrow the government by force. This is intimately tied to the concept of free speech in that any true attempt at illegal overthrow, as well as any legitimate criticism of the government, will both include persuasion and stirring up of crowds. The line between criticizing the government and organizing for it to be overthrown is a critical juncture in a democracy. The law requires the government prove someone conspired to use force to overthrow the government. Simply advocating broadly for the use of violence is not the same thing as violence and in most cases is protected as free speech. That’s why no one from January 6 has been or will be charged with sedition or treason or anything similar. For example, suggesting the need for revolution “by any means necessary” is unlikely to be seen as conspiracy to overthrow the government by force. Actively planning such an action (distributing guns, working out the logistics, actively opposing lawful authority, etc.) could be considered sedition. But that’s not what happened with Trump on January 6.
Most of the rest of the guff around Trump and January 6 is even emptier of substance, things like “giving aid or comfort” to those committing sedition, conspiracy to forcibly “prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or corruptly impede any official proceeding. The Dems focus in this sphere is on what Trump did not do to stop the riot, particularly his taking three hours to issue a video request for the rioters to go home. The over-arching problem is that crimes generally require you to do something. Not doing things, or not doing them fast enough to the Dems satisfaction, is hardly a chargeable crime.
The clearest sign there is nothing real behind the exaggerated claims surrounding January 6 is that after an impeachment, a calendar year passing, and 700 some low-level prosecutions, nothing much has been proven. As with Russiagate, the more time that passes with nothing but media-generated smoke the less likely there is anything more. Even die-hard Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers like Laurence Tribe are reduced to weakly calling for more robust investigations instead of beating the drum for execution. Time for the left to lump Merrick Garland in with Robert Mueller as a great failure.
There is certainly room to judge Trump’s actions on January 6. But that judgement must come from the voters, not a kangaroo court, if you want to talk about preserving the rule of law.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
December 26, 2021 // 10 Comments »
In early December Hillary Clinton appeared on the Today show to read aloud her never-used victory speech from 2016. The scene was bizarre, Clinton tearing up as she read in first-person, present tense about becoming the first woman president, something which in real life did not happen. She then layered on another alternate reality, one in which President Hillary travels back in time to tell her dead mother “your daughter will grow up and become the president of the United States.” She glowed; she was hearing applause that never happened.
The unreality of it all was leavened somewhat by the reveal Hillary is selling a video “masterclass” on resilience and the speech is somehow an example of that. While this may be just another example of a Clinton grift, like selling a Bill and Hillary Bass-o-Matic, the thing that stands out is never before has a Democrat loser been reanimated from the grave like Hillary. Al Gore and Michael Dukakis are two of those people you Google to see if they are still alive, and even an attention hound like John Kerry pretends his own presidential wipe out never even happened. A good political rule of thumb is to usher your losers off stage (or make them ambassadors.) Instead, Hillary was on the flagship Today show, not a late night infomercial where garbage like “masterclasses” in resilience usually is peddled.
But Hillary’s delusional take is not hers alone. After a second White Claw the faithful will insist Hillary did win the popular vote, which counts as actually winning in Clinton Math. They’ll quickly tell you Hillary only lost because Trump cheated or the Russians helped. The Dems and the media so believed that Trump did not actually win-win that they spent his entire term in office trying (unsuccessfully) to negate him, impeach him, prosecute him, or just magically wish him away with a fan-fiction interpretation of the 25th Amendment which presupposed Mike Pence was more evil then they were. The high point of the delusion was Russiagate, a saga entirely made-to-order by the Clinton team and fluffed by the media. It’s one thing to self-righteously say “Not my president” (some MSM pundits would add an asterisk to the word president* when referring to Trump) but it is delusional to say “and he can’t be yours, either.”
With Hillary granted a pass because she is using her defeat delusion to sell merch, one would have hoped the whole thing would have gone away with the election of Joe Biden. Democrats, you won! And you got the House! You can right all wrongs! Instead, the delusions just continue, an entire party seeming in the grip of political Alzheimer’s. One delusion is Trump will be pre-defeated ahead of 2024 by a mythical… something. This has been kicking around since Trump won in 2016, the idea that he’ll soon go to jail over taxes, property valuations in New York, or one of his lady victims successfully suing him. Sure, the IRS has had Trump’s taxes for decades, there is at worst a civil penalty in property valuation tomfoolery, and all those victims only seem to end up dragging Dems deeper into the mud of hypocrisy as we’re told to believe all women except those who accuse Uncle Joe of getting a little handsy. Dems, if this is your best, your best won’t do.
Nah, that stuff is just chum in the water while the Grand Illusion is tweaked. That one is a dramatic statement democracy is dying in America and only defeating Trump (again, once was not enough) will save it. It is a big ask to a weary voting block because a) it is untrue; b) the only evidence lies in a made-up retelling of the Capitol riot and c) the Democrats won in 2020 in an election, something which strongly suggests democracy did its job. The rebuttal that January 6 was just a rehearsal is fact-free, and after all, real Nazis only needed one crack at burning down the Reichstag.
One can find examples of the delusion almost by throwing darts at the Internet, but a concise one is MSNBC meat puppet Brian Williams’ farewell address. Williams of course earned America’s trust as a journalist by constantly lying throughout his career, usually in ways that suggested he was studlier than the Rock. Williams said “I will wake up tomorrow in the America of the year 2021, a nation unrecognizable to those who came before us and fought to protect it, which is what you must do now. They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside… But the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods… Grown men and women who swore an oath to our Constitution, elected by their constituents, possessing the kinds of college degrees I could only dream of, have decided to join the mob.”
First of course, an acknowledgement Williams plagiarized the phrase, “darkness on the edge of town,” from Bruce Springsteen, himself given over to the delusion because even as he pals around with Barack Obama all the characters from his songs now vote Republican.
If you haven’t guessed it, Williams is referring to the delusion that the Capitol riot was the seminal event of American democracy. Williams, like others, believes Hillary won in 2016, that the Trump years saw America held prisoner, and that Trump spun up a mob on January 6 to overturn the election and remain in the White House as dictator. That none of that happened, and in fact could never have happened, matters not if you believe in it hard enough.
Williams is far from alone. “Democracy will be on trial in 2024,” the Atlantic’s Barton Gellman writes. “American democracy is tottering,” warns Vox. “Can American democracy escape the doom loop?” says one Salon piece. “If America really surrenders to fascism, then what?” asks another. “If Merrick Garland Doesn’t Charge Trump and His Coup Plotters, Our Democracy Is Toast,” says the Daily Beast.
“Are we doomed?” writes the once sentient George Packer. Packer actually imagines “A blue militia sacks Trump National Golf Club Bedminster; a red militia storms Oberlin College. The new president takes power in a state of siege.” Google up as many examples as you want, they are as common as anti-anxiety meds should be on Brian Williams’ night stand. Even Hillary has weighed in, warning “[2024] is a make-or-break point. Are we going to give in to all these lies and this disinformation and this organized effort to undermine our rule of law and our institutions, or are we going to stand up to it?”
Charles Blow in the NYT seems to take the prize, in an article headlined “We’re Edging Closer to Civil War.” Blow claims “this war won’t be only about the subjugation of black people but also about the subjugation of all who challenge the white racist patriarchy. It will seek to push back against all the ‘others’: black people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people and, yes, women, particularly liberal ones.”
So looking ahead to the democracy dies in the darkness delusion which appears to be the centerpiece of the Democratic campaign of 2024, Americans must be tutored to believe the Capitol riot was part of a massive conspiracy involving Trump, hoping to end democracy in the United States by overturning the 2020 election results via some means no one is able to articulate. All that could have happened was Congress delayed its largely ceremonial blessing of the electoral college results for a day, assuming they just did not convene the afternoon of January 6 somewhere else besides the chaotic Capitol. There is no realistic scenario that could have changed anything that mattered, and no evidence of any national-scale conspiracy underlaying the riot. It was just a bunch of angry people who got out of control for a couple of hours then went home to wait on being arrested months later. None of the rioters has been charged with treason or terrorism, mostly just trespassing. None of the arrested claimed they acted under any organized structure set in place by Trump or anyone else. In their trials each basically said the same, things got out of hand.
After selling voters that something that did not happen happened, the Democrats must then explain how after four years in power they have not really done much to bulk up democracy except whine about stuff that’s unfair, such as Republican gerrymandering (but not Democratic gerrymandering) and Republican poll watchers (but not Democratic poll watchers) and Republicans not accepting election results (but not Democrats like Stacey Adams not accepting election results.) Never mind out-and-out garbage like the same court system is racist when it acquits one shooter and on-the-mark when it finds another guilty based on the races of shooter and victim. Voters will also have to buy in to the Democratic delusion all the bad stuff they said Trump was gonna do but did not do — LGBT concentration camps, war with Iran, fascism — will for certain happen the next time.
Elect us to save democracy, say the delusional Democrats, ignoring the reality that democracy is bumbling along pretty much as it was intended to do. The Dem line would all make more sense if Trump had appeared bare chested at the Biden inauguration atop an M1 tank or something, but that is the nature of delusion.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
December 13, 2021 // 3 Comments »
I punched Elon Musk in the nose. I figured, why not, he’s a jerk. Little did I know my punch would dislodge a chunk of artisanal tofu he was in the process of choking on and save his life. To say thanks, he offered to pay for a private Spice Girls reunion (minus Posh) for me on the next Space X flight. I hesitated, and he smiled wickedly and said “Or you could be the first man to test my time machine…”
I landed right in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign.
It had been a hard run for the Democrats. After a harrowing primary season with several hundred candidates confused voters, the Party simply started listing them on the ballots as the black one, the gender-ambiguous one, Beto, the guy who looked like Beto but was from Ohio, and no-chance Governors I, II, and III. Even this proved too much, and in the end Democrats nominated a visibly intubated Joe Biden for a second term. There was no attempt to hide the fact that Joe might be technically dead, with various medical devices animating him. Dr. Jill would always be at his side and catching her lips moving while Joe “talked” was a popular Tik-Tok meme. Kamala was listed for legal purposes as the VP but made no public appearances. It was unclear she still lived in North America.
Biden’s problems had accumulated over the last three years like a bad Sunday night snowfall. The Biden infrastructure plan, once called Build Back Better and priced at $3.5 trillion, had been ground down after years of debate to just offering free parking at some sporting events. A Dem plan to turn chanting of “F**k Joe Biden” into a joke fake Tindr profile proved embarrassing, as did suggesting America’s next aircraft carrier be named the USS George Floyd. Finally, after the Great 2022 Midterm Massacre, the Democrats gave up on actual legislation and stuck entirely to renaming Civil War memorials after modern day trans heroes. The final blow to Democratic power came when the Republican majority beat up the last Democratic senators in the cafeteria and stole their lunch money (“an attempted coup,” reported Maddow.) Colbert is still talking about it, threatening to tell a teacher on them all.
Foreign policy-wise, Biden was further embarrassed when the Taliban legalized casino gambling and turned Afghanistan into a global celebrity mecca. The last Americans were finally evacuated on George Clooney’s private jet. Desperate, the Biden administration tried to pick a fight with China. Things got hot after a Chinese warship supposedly rammed an American one in the Gulf of Tonkin, but the nascent war was stopped by Jeff Bezos. Bezos, through quiet acquisitions, had secretly become the world’s largest arms dealer, and ended the fight before it really began by cutting off supplies to both countries. By summer 2024, the only thing left for Democrats to run on was the slogan “Red, White, Blue, Not Orange” and rumors Trump had plans for a new hotel-casino in Kabul.
Candidate Trump had not yet chosen his running mate. Instead of the usual nominating convention setting, Trump planned an Apprentice: VP Edition live TV special. After vetting multiple candidates by blood type (“The 25th Amendment may require him to donate organs to me,” Trump tweeted. Yeah, that’s back, too) the candidate planned what the MSM dubbed “political-style Squid Games” to make the final decision. Behind his new signature slogan, I Won’t Tell Your Wife You Voted for Me, Trump filled stadiums. By the end of summer he had mostly abandoned actual speeches in favor of simply scowling from the podium and spitting. MSNBC claimed Trump was secretly messaging voters that his saliva contained magic powers, while CNN focused increasingly on videos of its reporters punching random Trump voters in the stomach under its new ownership by the Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and Jeffrey Epstein Foundation.
The real news from 2024 is that the actual voting process had changed so much no one was sure how a winner would be chosen. Championed by California, actual “mail-in” voting began a year before election day and allowed anyone to vote via Twitter RT for Democrats, while requiring Republican voters to solve a series of increasingly complex puzzles to reveal the one polling place open to them in-state. Texas on the other hand passed new legislation stating all voters would be assumed to vote Republican unless otherwise noted, and allowing citizens to sue anyone who voted Democrat outside of Austin. As the country approached November 2024, there were 51 distinct and radically different systems. Afghanistan, which had applied for U.S. statehood, was being allowed to vote in 2024 after Jeff Bezos’ personal intervention following his acquisition of 98 percent of its arable land. Bezos’ earlier suggestion, that all voting be done via Prime Points, was pushed forward to 2028.
The future is grim. The once robust rumble-tumble political system had reached the point where the only viable candidates were two geriatric lab experiments. For the first time in history the sum of both candidates’ disapproval rating was over 100 percent. The voting process itself had devolved into something so crooked and complex the only thing left for the final fall from democracy would be to replace it with actual gladiatorial combat among Red and Blue voters. The absolute only thing American agreed on other than making AOC the permanent host of SNL was a bad idea was that no one believed any election results. The other thing generally understood was in the end who was elected president did not really matter much. No matter who was being kept alive in the Oval Office-ICU, nothing substantive was going to change. The real decisions were being made for sport and profit by the hyper-wealthy. Or it may be that we are just ungovernable. Seeing the future made the future looks hazier than ever before.
As for the rest, I need to be careful about what I disclose but the new iPhone costs more than the last one. Mick Jagger’s pact with Satan for eternal life seems intact. The most popular movie of 2024 is Casablanca II with Lady Gaga playing the Bogart role, and the most popular job for recent grads is borrowing money from the patriarchy (your dad.) And don’t throw away those Covid masks, you’ll still be wearing them in 2024.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
December 8, 2021 // 10 Comments »
The Democrats only possible path forward is to ensure Trump does not run in 2024. They want to lock him in jail.
With only three years left to go, the 2024 race is narrowing quickly to Trump versus Some Democrat. By election day President Biden will be a vaguely sentient 82, VP Harris likely will have left the country, and the Dem’s rainbow coalition of identity claimants will quickly winnow itself down to nobody as their collective lack of experience devalues their various claims of victimhood. What to do about Trump?
You can convince a group of Americans for awhile Trump is a Russian agent, or violated an Emoluments Clause thingie they never heard of, just by saying it over and over. The problem is once the accusation reaches the judicial system, the Maddow-Goebbels Gambit withers. Once in the courts, words like “fraud” have very specific meanings. Treason, and anything that brushes against free speech such as incitement, have long trails of precedence. Even for something as basic as the Kyle Rittenhouse self-defense case, any first year law student will tell you there are five elements that need to be met. If the jury agrees they were met, the defendant walks, whether BL really M or not. The rule of law means those tests apply no matter how certain the public is that Rittenhouse is a murdering white supremacist. Or Trump an immoral misogynist. Of course what the Dems really want is a law making “being Trump” illegal. But in America those things are still weighed by elections.
Everyone is familiar with the litany of such failures to turn belief into crime over the last four years — Emoluments Clause, Russiagate, impeachments I and II, Stormy Daniels, obstruction of justice, and incitement. On the sidelines were extra-judicial attempts connected with the 25th Amendment, having doctors who never examined the man declaring Trump mentally ill, and even accusations of incest. The Southern District of New York previously failed to indict Trump’s children and failed to prosecute Paul Manafort. E. Jean Carroll’s rape-cum-defamation case was so egregiously lousy even the Biden DOJ took Trump’s side.
One of the latest rumored prosecutions-to-come involves Trump under-valuing properties for tax reasons, then over-valuing them to get loans, which despite the banks involved being happy enough with the terms after their own due diligence, Dems think maybe could be some kind of fraud. This kind of property valuation switch is practically New York City’s official sport, and is often and well-played by many property owners a few billion dollars short of Trump. The regulations governing how one values a NY property are thick. Built into the law is an automatic fudge allowing the same property to have both a high market value and a lower asset value. Problems are sorted out as civil matters and usually settled with the city sending out a bill, especially if the bank is not claiming fraud, only the DA, as in Trump’s case. “New York’s property tax system,” wrote Bloomberg, “is demonstrably inaccurate and unfair.” Michael Cohen, recently in prison for being a liar, is trying for another round in the spotlight claiming he has the evidence. To think the Dems will ignite righteous anger among voters with something this dense is quite funny.
All the smoking guns fired blanks. Behind every attempt to overturn the election was a certainty by the zealots that Trump must be guilty of something. Yet it all failed. Trump served out his term. He is not in jail. But “just you wait!” remains an ever-weaker rallying cry heard by ever-fewer diehards.
Like bad poker players, the Dems have all too obviously tipped their hand on their 2024 strategy. The full-court press will, sadly, focus on January 6, an out-of-hand riot wished into a second life as a coup, an insurrection, or an overthrow attempt. The characterization is silly; among other things, a coup must have some path towards success, in this case, preventing Joe Biden from becoming president. The rioters at best might have delayed the largely ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes until the next day. They didn’t even get that done.
As before, the truth is of little importance. The Daily Beast is one of many outlets claiming “If Merrick Garland Doesn’t Charge Trump and His Coup Plotters, Our Democracy Is Toast.” The article does not mention any specific, chargeable crime Trump is to be charged with, though it mentions the words coup and abuse of power a lot. Like all of its lot, it does not address the gaping question of why the actual Capitol rioters have only been charged with things like trespassing, and not treason or sedition. Surely as what one journalist called the armed wing of the Republican Party (comparing them to the IRA and Sinn Fein) some of the January 6 cosplayers should by now be charged with something serious enough to warrant fears the Republic itself hangs by a thread.
Since the Democrats have no viable 2024 candidate, and since Trump’s support remains high, the only way to defeat him is by some non-electoral process just short of Dealey Plaza. Political prosecutions are not new in America. Political pogroms are. There has never in our history been a more sustained yet unsuccessful judicial effort to oust or destroy one man.
The Democrats, so used to failing at this, are also not looking at the secondary effects of their dirty work, specifically wearing out the public they seek to influence against Trump. After four years of faux scandals being spiked into the public’s veins, how many more times can they try the same game before voters simply stop listening? Meanwhile, every shot at Trump that misses only increases support among his own followers as the candidate brags about beating the charges again. When non-supporters begin to ask themselves if indeed Trump is right when he claims persecution, the Dems have already lost.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
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In one of the great scenes in the movie Citizen Kane, newspaper publisher Charles Kane, in desperate need of headlines to boost circulation, decides a patriotic war would be just the thing. When his reporters fail to find evidence of imminent hostilities, Kane famously bellows “I’ll supply the war, you supply the pictures!”
Kane is directly modeled after the real-life William Randolph Hearst, who generously fanned the flames of the Spanish-American war, making the sinking of the Maine, a U.S. warship, by the Spanish, into a casus belli. It was all a lie; the Maine exploded internally, on it’s own. No matter, a war was needed and so that decision made, a cause was created. The real reasons for the war included a U.S. desire to take control of Cuba and to become a Pacific power by seizing the Spanish colony in the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt, who was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy at this time, advocated for the war as a rally-round-the-flag event to heal the lingering wounds of the American Civil War and as an excuse to increase the U.S. Navy’s budget. After all, they sank our ship! The press would wait until WMDs were created to ever be that compliant again.
Very much the same story in Vietnam. The U.S., imagining a global communist conspiracy rising from the ashes of WWII, began its war in Vietnam by proxy in 1945, soon funding the French struggle for years. By 1950 the first American military personnel were stationed in Saigon. When America advisors, and casualties, began to come to the public’s attention, and successes by the other side began to pile up, the real American war got underway. But with a more overt war, a more overt reason had to be found. That took the form of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, a claim two American warships came under unprovoked attack by the North. What really happened was far from that, but does not matter. Congress passed an enabling resolution and the war escalated as needed. They hurt our ships!
There are even historic breadcrumbs suggesting the U.S. purposely ignored warnings about an impending attack on Pearl Harbor, knowing it was soon enough going to war with Japan. Allowing the attack to happen was a good excuse to escalate America’s growing role supplying war material to Britain to outright combat, given the public’s reluctance to go to war absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event. They sank our ships!
In the late 1990s, The Project for the New American Century think tank developed its “compelling vision for American foreign policy” based on a “benevolent global hegemony.” They had nothing less in mind than a global war of conquest, occupation, and regime change, focused on the Middle East. The war was set, but the problem lay in convincing the American people to support it. “The process of transformation,” the neocons wrote, “even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” Somebody better sink some damn ships!
The new Pearl Harbor fell into their laps from the sky on 9/11. Even then, though, another made-up reason was needed to justify the invasion of Iraq, the jewel in the neocon planning. The Bush administration made a few attempts to link Saddam to 9/11 directly, then to terrorism generically, even threw in some tall tales about his cruelty to his own people and gassing the Kurds, but none of it stuck with the public, correctly confused about why an attack largely planned, funded, and executed by Saudis required a war in Iraq. In the end the decision to stress the threat posed by Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction above all others was taken for “bureaucratic” reasons to justify the war, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said. “It was the one reason everyone could agree on.” It really did not matter that it wasn’t true.
This was followed by two decades of conflict under four presidents. Along the way mini-versions of the same scam — war decided on first, reasons ginned up later — were run to justify invasions in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, mostly a creation of a mini-Pearl Harbor events in the guise of “he’s gassing his own people.” Genocide is especially handy as the rhetoric can be recycled — never again, America has to believe in something, we can’t stand silently by. It does not matter what is true because the incidents, real or imaginary, are just like buses; miss one and another will along soon enough.
Which brings us to China, which appears to be the next war now searching for a reason.
“The Fight for Taiwan Could Come Soon,” warns the Wall Street Journal, alongside nearly every other publication of note. President Biden has begun the propaganda spadework, declaring “On my watch China will not achieve its goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world.” Is war imminent? One report shows China just surpassed the U.S. in global wealth, one of Biden’s three tripwires.
The reasons China has no reason to invade Taiwan are lengthy and cover economic, military, and political fields. There is no rational, risk vs. gain, reason for hostilities. But that is not what the historical playbook says matters. It may be the United States has already decided a good, old fashioned, bench clearing, global superpower showdown is needed, muscle tussling eagle vs. dragon for control of the Pacific. We just need to find a reason, given that China is unlikely to be a sport and invade Taiwan for us. You can lie about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction long enough to get a war started, but an actual Chinese invasion is a bridge too far for straight-up fabrication.
Now it is possible the war fever over China is just a con inside a con. It is possible the Deep State really knows it will never fight an actual war, but is simply using the threat as a way to run up the defense budget. They remember how the lies about the “missile gap” and all the other “gaps” with Russia exploded the military industrial complex budget following WWII. A Chinese threat requires endless spending on the good stuff, big carriers and space forces, not the muddy ground troops we squandered losing to goat farmers in Afghanistan.
That would be the best case scenario and if that’s all this is, it is well underway. But what if the U.S. has its mind set on a real war, as in Vietnam and after 9/11, and needs a palatable reason to be found?
So, a challenge to all readers. On a post card addressed to the White House, what would be the declared justification for the U.S. going to war with China? You can have fun with this (Beijing kidnaps Taylor Swift and a rescue mission escalates into full-on war. Or China is caught releasing a virus that disables global trade) or geopolitical serious stuff about struggles for rare earth minerals or disputed islands. No cheating with statements pretending to reasons, things like China is an “imminent threat” or declarations like “clear and present danger.” Pretend you’re a modern day Paul Wolfowitz, handed the fait accompli of war and tasked with ginning up a reason Americans will buy. But no “they sunk our ship” scenarios. Been there, done that.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
December 7, 2021 // 5 Comments »
When will our intellectual life return to normal, the place Socrates, et al, once left it, where facts come together into conclusions? Today in service to ideologies like CRT a conclusion is established and facts are manipulated or just ignored to support it.
You can’t argue intellectually against something so profoundly unintellectual but you can still take note of it in hopes someday we will want to untangle ourselves. That’s why we’re visiting today the Tenement Museum on New York’s Lower East Side.
When I joined the Museum as an educator in early 2016 it was a small, elegant, good place. Inside a restored 19th century tenement apartment house, it told the story of some of the actual all-immigrant families who had lived there, from inside their actual apartments. Of the over 7,000 people who inhabited that building over its lifespan, researchers established who had lived in which rooms, detailed their lives, forensically reconstructed the surroundings, and we shared that with guests. Rule 1 was always “keep it in the room,” focus on specific individuals and how they lived in the room where you were standing. Over the years these included Irish, Jewish, German, and Italian immigrants. There had been no Bangladeshi’s, Spaniards or blacks; their stories lay elsewhere, “outside the room.” It is the same reason there is no monument to those who died on D-Day at Gettysburg. That didn’t happen there. That story is told somewhere else.
Imagine the power of telling the story of an immigrant family’s struggle between earning a living in the new factories demanding labor in New York, and the pull of maintaining their own religious traditions from their living room where such family arguments took place. Think about explaining sweat shop conditions in a room that was actually such a place. No need to talk about lack of space and privacy, it was literally all around visitors. The Rogarshevsky family walked this hall. The Baldizzi family put their hands on this banister to climb the stairs at the end of a weary day. They came home to this evening light in their parlor. They smelled the rain as visitors did on a March day. You could literally feel history.
After Trump’s election everything changed. Our mission at the Museum went from telling real stories to “fighting fascism and destroying the patriarchy.” With our focus on immigration, we were given tips on handling what the museum snidely called “red hats,” MAGA-capped Trump supporters, usually parents visiting a hip child in NYC who dragged them in for reeducation. I witnessed an Asian museum educator say out loud without any concern by management “No more Jews, I want to tell my story!” Her parents were university professors from Asia and she was born in a toney NYC suburb, so I’m not quite sure what her story was. Narratives were rewritten, so for example the Irish immigrants went from suffering anti-Catholic discrimination in Protestant New York to being murderers of innocent blacks during the 1863 Draft Riots. Never mind the Irish family spotlighted by the Museum lived there in 1869 with no connection to the Riots.
The wokeness which drove me to quit is now poised for a new lows in a desperate move to shoehorn a black family into the mix because of course everything has to be about race. The Museum is planning for the first time not only to feature the story of a (black) family who never lived there, the family were not even immigrants, born instead in New Jersey. To accommodate this change, the Museum will do away with its current Irish family tour in lieu of a hybrid to emphasize black suffering and deemphasize the actual life experiences of discrimination imposed on the Irish by “whiter” New Yorkers. They will build a “typical” apartment of the time on the fifth floor for the black family, an ahistorical space they never lived in, an affront to those whose real life stories once did. It would make as much sense to build a space to tell Spiderman’s story.
The existing Irish tour is particularly important because it supports a classist, not racial, basis for discrimination in America. It forces guests to think through the roots of inequality given that rich white people already established in New York discriminated against poor white people (the Irish first, then the Jews and Italians.) That narrative is problematic in 2021 because it spreads victimhood broadly, and chips away at the BLM meme that race is the cause of everything.
The story is also problematic in 2021 because it emphasized how the Irish organized themselves politically to fight back and claim a more equal place in society. Many of the Irish had entered the United States before there even was any immigration law, simply walking off ships into the New World. Later, as nascent citizenship laws demanded proof of several years of residence as a condition for regularized status, many Irish could not prove it, the purest form of undocumented as no documentation existed when they went feet dry. The post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution designed to overnight change freed slaves into American citizens with the right to vote also scooped up masses of Irish immigrants. Aided by the sleazy needs of men like Boss Tweed who were willing to trade patronage jobs for votes, the Irish began to prosper.
If you wanted to ask the question of how the Irish did that, and later the Jews, Germans, Italians, Hispanics, and Chinese, but not blacks, you were once welcome to do so. In better days the museum referred to this as “introducing complexity,” asking questions without clear answers instead of imposing a pre-written doctrine on guests. No more. The Irish are once again not popular among the rich white people running New York, this time in the guise of the Tenement Museum. Their story will exist only as a sidebar to a black experience that never really was. It is a literal rewriting of history. What a shame a place designed to help us remember wants to make us forget.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
November 20, 2021 // 6 Comments »
It was Hillary all along. The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI demonstrates conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI to try to derail the Trump campaign. When that failed, the dossier was used to attack the elected president of the United States. The whole thing was the actual and moral equivalent of a Cold War op where someone was targeted by the FBI with fake photos of them in bed with a prostitute.
Start with a quick review of what Durham uncovered about the most destructive political assassination since Kennedy.
Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign (after Clinton’s denial, it took a year for congressional investigators to uncover the dossier was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, paid through the Perkins-Coie law firm) did no investigative work. Instead, his reputation as a former British intelligence officer was purchased to validate a dossier of lies and then to traffic those lies to the FBI and journalists.
Durham’s investigation confirms one of Steele’s key “sources” is the now-arrested Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the U.S. Steele was introduced to the Russian by Fiona Hill, then of the Brookings Institute (Hill would go on to play a key role in the Ukraine impeachment scam.) Danchenko completely made up most of what he told Steele about Trump-Russian collusion. What he did not make up himself he was spoon fed by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack and campaign regular. Ironically, Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape episode. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who passed the information to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina noted in e-mails she was expecting Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration. Steele, a life-long Russia and intelligence expert, never questioned or verified anything he was told.
In short: Clinton pays for the dossier, Steele fills it with lies fed to him by a Clinton PR stooge through Russian cutouts, and the FBI swallowed the whole story. There never was a Russiagate. The only campaign which colluded with Russia was Clinton’s. And Democrats, knowing this, actually had the guts to claim it was Trump who obstructed justice.
That the dossier was a sham was evident to anyone who ever read a decent spy novel. It was a textbook information op and The American Conservative, without any access to the documents Durham now has, saw through it years ago, as did many other non-MSM outlets. See here (2/5/2018). Here (2/15/2018). Here (6/15/2018.) Here (3/25/2019.) Here (12/11/2019) and more. What was obvious from the publicly available information was, well, obvious to everyone but the FBI.
The dossier was the flimsy excuse the FBI used to justify a full-on investigation unprecedented in a democracy into the Trump campaign. That included electronic surveillance (obtained by the FBI lying directly to the FISA court and presenting Steele’s lies as corroborating evidence,) the use of undercover operatives, false flag ops with foreign diplomats and case officers, and prosecution threats over minor procedural acts designed to legally torture low level Trump staffers (Carter Page, who the FBI knew was a CIA source, and George Papadopoulos) into “flipping” on the candidate.
Page in particular was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug used for a fishing expedition.
What’s left is only to answer was the FBI really that inept that they could not see a textbook op run against them or that the FBI knew early on they had been handed a pile of rubbish but needed some sort of legal cover for their own operation, spying on Trump, and thus decided to look the other way at the obvious shortcomings of Steele’s work.
“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen. They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”
The 2019 Horowitz Report, a look into the FBI’s conduct by the Justice Department Inspector General, made clear the FBI knew the dossier was bunk and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming instead the dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the dossier. The FBI knew Steele, who was on their payroll as a paid informant, had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported their goals.
How bad was it? At no point in handling info accusing the sitting president of being a Russian agent, what would have been the most significant political event in American history, did the FBI seriously ask themselves “So exactly where did this information come from, specific sources and methods please, and how could those sources have known it?” Were all the polygraphs broken? The FBI learned Danchenko was Steele’s primary source in 2017, via the Carter Page tap, and moved ahead anyway.
From the FBI’s perspective, turning a blind eye was not even that risky a gambit. They were so certain they would succeed (FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”) and Hillary would ascend to the Oval Office that they felt they would have top cover for their evil. After Trump won and the FBI’s coup planners shifted to impeachment, they held on to their top cover as James Comey presented himself as the man on the cross, aided by a MSM which cared only about a) ending Donald Trump and b) cranking up their ratings with dollops of the dossier’s innuendo. A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again” did it again.
If a genie granted me a wish, I would want a conversation with Robert Mueller under some sort of truth spell. Did Mueller “miss” all the lies in his lengthy investigation, hoping to protect his beloved FBI? Or did he see himself as a reluctant white knight, having realized during his investigation the real crime committed was coup planning by the FBI and thinking that by ignoring their actions but clearing Trump he would bring the whole affair to its least worst conclusion?
I suspect Mueller realized he had been handed a coup-in-progress to either abet (by indicting Trump on demonstrably false information) or bury. He could not bring himself to destroy his beloved FBI. But the former Marine could also not bring himself to become the Colin Powell of his generation, squandering his hard won reputation to validate something he knew was not true. Mueller split the difference, and kept silent on the FBI and left Trump to his own fates.
This is the third indictment by Durham. Danchenko’s indictment, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s, and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s depict criminal efforts to get Trump. The arrest of Danchenko makes clear Durham knows the whole story. What will he do with it? Will he walk his indictments up the ladder ever-closer to Hillary? Will he proceed sideways, leaving Hillary but moving deeper into the FBI? Maybe see if Fiona Hill connects the failed Russiagate coup she played a pivotal role in with the failed Ukrainegate impeachment she played a pivotal role in? Or will he use the stage of Congressional hearings as a way to bypass Joe Biden’s Justice Department and throw the real decision making back to the voters?
History will record this chapter of America’s story as one of its more sordid affairs. Only time however will tell if the greater tale is one of how close we came to ending our democracy via an intelligence agency coup, or whether Russiagate was just a nascent practice run by the FBI, on a longer road which led to our demise a president or two later. For those who belittled the idea of the Deep State, this is what it looks like exposed, all pink and naked.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
November 13, 2021 // 4 Comments »
The worst bout of food poisoning I ever had took days to run through me. Every orifice worked day and night to rid my body of whatever evil I had ingested and even when it was all gone it took more time for things to reset themselves. It was as awful as it was necessary to cleanse. And so it goes with the Clintons.
The defeat of the Democratic party in Virginia in general and Terry McAuliffe for governor in the specific could truly be the end of the Clintons and a chance for the Democratic Party to reset itself from the self-destructive path it is on. It can heal and be a righteous challenger to Republicans. Or it might just eat another chili dog and puke through the midterms.
Of all the things Terry McAuliffe is (mediocre former governor, race-monger, liar, visa fraudster, investment scammer) he is also the last bit of Clintonite political feces the body politic needed to have expelled to allow healing to begin. McAuliffe was co-chairman of Bill’s 1996 reelection campaign, Clinton-installed chair of the Democratic National Committee 2001-2005, and chair of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign. Bill and Hillary leveraged their then-popularity to help McAuliffe win the Virginia governorship as payback. In 2013, Bill did a nine-city tour of Virginia with McAuliffe, while Hillary raised money for him in California. McAuliffe had never held public office and wasn’t even from Virginia but the job was up for grabs in a state turning blue and the Clinton’s turned on the money spigot.
As Virginia’s governor, McAuliffe was a campaign surrogate for Hillary 2016. Bill Clinton, disgraced as he is, actually still held fundraisers for McAuliffe in 2021, albeit in New York, not Virginia, an early clue to how things would end. Terry nurtured the relationship at every opportunity and got ahead, a reminder of the transactional politics the Clintons thrived on. Compare his political run with fellow Clinton syncopate Andrew Cuomo. After the departure of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros under the cloud of an FBI investigation at the end of Clinton’s first term, Cuomo took over as Secretary of HUD. You know the rest of the story. Of all the faithful, McAuliffe is the last vestigial limb of what once was a Democratic dynasty.
To understand what the end of that dynasty means one has to understand the damage the Clinton’s did not only to America but to their own party. It was in part Hillary’s willingness to stay silent that allowed Bill to escape being removed from office for perjury and overall conduct unbecoming when he had sex in the Oval Office with an intern. Hillary demanded and got her pound of flesh, a walk-on coronation as a New York Senator (it was Terry McAuliffe who in 1999 personally guaranteed the mortgage on the New York home the Clintons bought so Hillary could claim residency) which would be her springboard to the White House. She consistently voted with the political winds of the day for wars, free from any morality. When she was beaten by Barack Obama in 2008, she took SecState as an obvious consolation prize alongside a fairly certain promise she would be the Democratic candidate when Obama retired (sorry, Joe, tonight ain’t your night kid.) She taught a generation of women and girls to have no self-respect, no honor, take whatever your man deals out with over-done smiles and understated pearls, and have nothing but appetite.
Hillary’s destruction of the Democratic party continued with the political castration of Bernie Sanders. Love him or hate him, Sanders represented what is likely to be the last true set of original ideas presented by a mainstream candidate who actually had a chance at winning. The Democratic party’s willingness to destroy Sanders to press Hillary into the nomination left a whole generation of Sanders supporters, the youth which should be today coming into their own as the party base, bitter and disenfranchised. She casually threw away rural voters, once a Democratic mainstay, practically demanding they vote for her opponent after she dismissed them as deplorables. She welcomed silly social justice memes into the party thinking she was building herself a new base. She made the Democrats wholly dependent on the notoriously unreliable black vote. And then Hillary lost to Donald Trump, the only person to claim that title.
What happened next was a void in Democratic leadership. The party went insane, with Nancy Pelosi and her crowd becoming serially addicted to impeachment and a collection of political curiosities like AOC and the Squad elevated to some sort of odd status (be very loud but accomplish nothing) by the media. It was clear no one was in charge. Democratic election strategy became a carnival game of try and dunk Trump. Mueller threw a few balls, until that broke down into a free for all featuring a quasi-coup attempt over a phone call to the Ukrainian president, graphic descriptions of Trump’s penis by Stormy Daniels, and ended with Trump being impeached after he left office for inciting an insurrection that didn’t happen. In the background the Democratic party imploded searching for a nominee, with people like Beto the Clueless Cowboy headlining for a few weeks, then a local mayor who got some tailwind out of being gay, and whatever Andrew Yang was supposed to be. The impression that no one was in charge post-Clintons was finally made clear when the system coughed up a crash test dummy like Joe Biden as the best it could manage and then limp into office thanks to Covid fear and media fealty.
That scenario won’t happen twice. White women in Virginia recorded a 15 point voting swing to the GOP in the gubernatorial election compared to the 2020 presidential election. The setbacks in heavily suburban blue Virginia suggest a backlash to the whining about race and identity championed by Democrats. These voters are not white supremacists and to label them as such is to dismiss a parent’s rightful desire to see their child get the best possible education. The Dems campaigned on a very visible contempt for the people in calling them haters and racists needing to have their children saved from their parents. Dems, you went too far and you lost Virginia. It wasn’t about Trump, it was about you.
The Democrats have a chance to try again. McAuliffe’s defeat frees them from the last of the Clinton influence, an empowering marker that it is safe to finally leave Bill and Hillary behind. McAuliffe’s defeat, based on social justice issues like trans-everything and racism-everything losing to common sense, can be equally empowering, freeing the party from having to listen to people like the Squad ever again. Nobody wants to see Biden run for a second term, and Democrats know there is equally as little support for Kamala Harris (reminder to all, she is still officially listed as vice president.) The Dems, finally, have a chance to find a real candidate. A first sign they see the light might be turning to jobs, Covid, inflation, and the supply chain, indicating they do understand there are voters outside Brooklyn and the Bay Area who care deeply about things other than climate change and transrights. Call it centrist if you like, though realist is a better word. If all the Dems have going into the midterms is some renamed school houses and recycled anti-Trump rhetoric (Van Jones said of the Virginia loss “Glenn Youngkin represents delta variant of Trumpism,”) why would anyone vote for them?
The Dems need the equivalent of drinking clear soup for a few days after a bout of food poisoning has run its course, learning the hard lesson and coming back stronger. Or they can eat another couple of chili dogs at the first sign of feeling better and get sick all over again.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
August 28, 2021 // 14 Comments »
Who should we blame for losing Afghanistan? Why blame anyone?
Did anyone expect the U.S. war in Afghanistan to end cleanly? If so, you bought the lies all along and the cold water now is hitting sharp. While the actual ending is particularly harsh and clearly spliced together from old clips of Saigon 1975, those are simply details.
Why blame Biden? He played his part as a Senator and VP keeping the war going, but his role today is just being the last guy in a long line of people to blame, a pawn in the game. That Biden is willing to be the “president who lost Afghanistan” is all the proof you need he does not intend to run again for anything. Kind of an ironic version of a young John Kerry’s take on Vietnam “how do you ask the last man to die for a mistake?” Turns out, it’s easy: call Joe.
Blame Trump for the deal? One of the saddest things about the brutal ending of the U.S.-Afghan war is we would have gotten the same deal — just leave it to the Taliban and go home — at basically any point during the last 20 years. That makes every death and every dollar a waste. Afghanistan is simply reverting, quickly, to more or less status quo 9/10/01 and everything between then and now, including lost opportunities, will have been wasted.
Blame the NeoCons? No one in Washington who supported this war was ever called out, with the possible exception of Donald Rumsfeld who, if there is a hell, now cleans truck stop toilets there. Dick Cheney walks free. The generals and diplomats who ran the war have nice think tank or university jobs, if they are not still in government making equally bad decisions. No one has been legally, financially, or professionally disadvantaged by the blood on their hands. Some of the era’s senior leaders — Blinken, Rice, Power, Nuland — are now working in better jobs for Biden. I’d like to hope they have trouble sleeping at night, but I doubt it.
George Bush is a cuddly grandpa today, not the man who drove the United States into building a global prison archipelago to torture people. Barack Obama, who kept much of that system in place and added the drone killing of American citizens to his resume, remains a Democratic rock god. Neither man nor any of his significant underlings has expressed any regret or remorse.
For example, I just listened to Ryan Crocker, our former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, on CNN. Making myself listen to him was about as fun as sticking my tongue in a wood chipper. Same for former general David Petraeus and the usual gang of idiots. None of them, the ones who made the decisions, accept any blame. Instead. they seem settled on blaming Trump because, well, everything bad is Trump’s fault even if he came into all this in the middle of the movie.
In the end the only people punished were the whistleblowers.
No one in the who is to blame community seems willing to take the story back to its beginning, at least the beginning for America’s latest round in the Graveyard of Empires (talk about missing an early clue.) This is what makes Blame Trump and Blame Biden so absurd. America’s modern involvement in this war began in 1979 when Jimmy Carter, overreacting to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up what was already a pro-Soviet puppet government, began arming and organizing Islamic warriors we now collectively know as “The Taliban.”
People who want to only see trees they can chop down and purposely want to miss the vastness of the forest ahead at this point try to sideline things by claiming there never was a single entity called “The Taliban” and the young Saudis who flocked to jihad to kill Russians technically weren’t funded by the U.S. (it was indirectly through Pakistan) or that the turning point was the 1991 Gulf War, etc. Quibbles and distractions.
If Carter’s baby steps to pay for Islamic warriors to fight the Red Army was playing with matches, Ronald Reagan poured gas, then jet fuel, on the fire. Under the Reagan administration the U.S. funded the warriors (called mujaheddin if not freedom fighters back then), armed them, invited their ilk to the White House, helped lead them, worked with the Saudis to send in even more money, and fanned the flames of jihad to ensure a steady stream of new recruits.
When we “won” it was hailed as the beginning of the real end of the Evil Empire. The U.S. defeated the mighty Red Army by sending over some covert operators to fight alongside stooge Islam warriors for whom a washing machine was high technology. Pundits saw it as a new low-cost model for executing American imperial will.
We paid little attention to events as we broke up the band and cut off the warriors post-Soviet withdrawal (soon enough some bozo at the State Department declared “the end of history.” He teaches at Stanford now) until the blowback from this all nipped us in the largely unsuccessful World Trade Center bombing of 1993, followed by the very successful World Trade Center bombing on September 11, 2001. Seems like there was still some history left to go.
How did U.S. intelligence know who the 9/11 culprits were so quickly? Several of them had been on our payroll, or received financing via proxies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or were inspired by what had happened in Afghanistan, the defeat of the infidels (again; check Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Mughal Empire, various Persian Empires, the Sikhs, the British, et al.)
If post-9/11 the U.S. had limited itself to a vengeful hissy fit in Afghanistan, ending with Bush’s 2003 declaration of “Mission Accomplished,” things would have been different. If the U.S. had used the assassination of Osama bin Laden, living “undiscovered” in the shadow of Pakistan’s military academy, as an excuse of sorts to call it a day in Afghanistan, things would have been different.
Instead Afghanistan became a petri dish to try out the worst NeoCon wet dream, nation-building across the Middle East. Our best and brightest would not just bomb Afghanistan into the stone age, they would then phoenix-it from the rubble as a functioning democracy. There was something for everyone: a military task to displace post-Cold War budget cuts, a pork-laden reconstruction program for contractors and diplomats, even a plan to empower Afghan women to placate the left.
Though many claim Bush pulling resources away from Afghanistan for Iraq doomed the big plans, it was never just a matter of not enough resources. Afghanistan was never a country in any modern sense to begin with, just an association of tribal entities who hated each other almost as much as they hated the west. The underpinnings of the society were a virulent strain of Islam, about as far away from any western political and social ideas as possible. Absent a few turbaned Uncle Toms, nobody in Afghanistan was asking to be freed by the United States anyway.
Pakistan, America’s “ally” in all this, was a principal funder and friend of the Taliban, always more focused on the perceived threat from India, seeing a failed state in Afghanistan as a buffer zone. Afghanistan was a narco-state with its only real export heroin. Not only did this mean the U.S. wanted to build a modern economy on a base of crime, the U.S. in different periods actually encouraged/ignored the drug trade into American cities in favor of the cash flow.
The Afghan puppet government and military the U.S. formed were uniformly corrupt, and encouraged by the endless inflow of American money to get more corrupt all the time. They had no support from the people and could care less. The Afghans in general and the Afghan military in particular did not fail to hold up their end of the fighting; they never signed up for the fight in the first place. No Afghan wanted to be the last man to die in service to American foreign policy.
There was no way to win. The “turning point” was starting the war at all. Afghanistan had to fail. There was no other path for it, other than being propped up at ever-higher costs. That was American policy for two decades: prop up things and hope something might change. It was like sending more money to a Nigerian cyber-scammer hoping to recoup your original loss.
Everything significant our government, the military, and the MSM told us about Afghanistan was a lie. They filled and refilled the bag with bullhockey and Americans bought it every time expecting candy canes. Keep that in mind when you decide who to listen to next time, because of course there will be a next time. Who has not by now realized that? We just passively watched 20 years of Vietnam all over again, including the sad ending. So really, who’s to blame?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
July 31, 2021 // 14 Comments »
See if you think this is funny.
He called himself a QAnon Tier I Ranger SEAL Operator, and had the 17 tabs down one sleeve overflowing with velcro to prove it. “In a situation like this, you, Embed, stick to me and I’ll get you home, brother. Unless the GPS gets us lost again.”
Behind the wheel of his F-150 looking for parking near the state capitol, I knew he meant it. The eyes, always the eyes. In the backseat was his AR-15 gun with the handle on top, equipped with several dozen accessories from Bass Pro. His personal gear said he was ready, clothing half in arctic-urban-backyard camo, half blaze orange. “I can’t afford this sh*t unless I can get two seasons out of it,” he said. He asked I call him “Mike,” though I found out on Facebook his real name is Michael. His tactical hair gel caught the light as he spoke.
“The plan goes down like this. If we find free parking we approach from the east. If we have to feed the meter, I come in from the north and the guys coming by city bus will enter east. The radio rang. “Honey, I told you it’ll be after 6pm… I don’t know, get a pizza,” he said in some sort of code.
“The mission today is simple. Occupy the space in front of the CNN camera crew and dominate the interviews. The CNN crew will ID themselves by removing their heads from their own butts, so watch for the signal. Stay frosty in case we spot Maddow and I call an audible. And bunch up so it looks like there’re more of us.”
Hah, pretty funny, yeah? I made that up. But this is true: Daily Beast published a “scoop” revealing one of the men charged in the January 6 riot had a fully assembled Lego model of the Capitol in his home, which the FBI insinuated was used as a tactical planning tool and thus seized as evidence. It formed part of the prosecution’s argument against bail. The problem is even that wasn’t true; the man merely had the unopened Lego set and the prosecutors lied. “In original detention memoranda, the undersigned stated that law enforcement found a ‘fully constructed U.S. Capitol Lego set.’ The Lego set was in a box and not fully constructed at the time of the search,” the new filing says. Meanwhile the accused rioter remains in jail. The Lego Capitol set, once sold in the Capitol gift shop, is still available on Amazon.
And this is true and not so funny. Most of the 538 people arrested for the January riot did not commit acts of violence, and face accusations of little more than gussied up trespassing. Many were charged simply with violating a 6 pm curfew imposed that day. Yet almost all have been denied bail and are being held in solitary in Washington, D.C. city jails as a “safety measure.” The result is the accused find themselves in lockdown 23 hours a day before their trials even start.
In any other context such treatment of innocent people would raise a woke storm. The ACLU claims “prolonged solitary confinement is torture and certainly should not be used as a punitive tool to intimidate or extract cooperation.” Except that it is in what has become a punitive political prosecution. The decision maker on the accused’s jail conditions? Biden’s Attorney General.
Meanwhile, after six months, the first person was finally tried. She turned out to be a woman who plead to a misdemeanor charge of “parading in the Capitol building” and was given probation. The second prosecution ended with time served on a misdemeanor charge. Next up was a yet-unsentenced plea to “obstructing Congress.” Another trespasser had his bail revoked and was sent to solitary for leaving a voicemail referencing “the size of his genitalia.” In a Zoom hearing, the same fellow “wore sweatpants and ate breakfast on the call,” and in February sent a “vulgar” email where he called an FBI agent “fat necked.” Brownshirt stuff, amiright?
In another pending case involving no violence or vandalism, prosecutors demanded maximum penalties, stating though “individuals convicted of such behavior may have no criminal history, their beliefs make them unique among criminals in the likelihood of recidivism.” In other words, a thought crime. The single felony conviction out of all of this led to only an 8 month sentence for “obstructing an official proceeding.” Prosecutors had demanded a much greater sentence by claiming the action was a bombastic “assault on democracy.” As a metric, Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison following his attempted “beer hall putsch.”
Only 533 cases more to go to see justice. Rarely have so many resources been used to accomplish so little.
This is also true but not so funny. The day after the Capitol riots, the FBI asked Americans “to step up” and identify people who participated. Not only did friends and relatives rat each other out, but armies of unrelated people jumped at the chance to roleplay Stasi. Even somewhat news organization CNN helped ID people on behalf of the FBI. The NYT published a guide to militia symbols so would-be sleuths could tell their Oathkeepers from their QAnons. The AP called these citizens “sedition hunters” as America weaponized Kancel Kulture Kids into an e-mob.
“I put my emotions behind me to do what I thought was right,” said Jackson Reffitt, whose GoFundMe hit $140k after he turned in his own father to the FBI. Himmler’s heart grew three times in size seeing the zeal of ordinary people to get with the pogram.
Tech found its niche. While the mob was still in the Capitol building multiple groups, including Bellingcat, started to scrape everything posted to build evidence for the FBI. Reddit users created a 12GB tranche of videos. Intelligence X (whose customers are “companies of all sizes and governments”) has 1,300 files. The goal is to crowdsource IDing so no rioter escapes. “If you look at the history and incidents like the 1812 breach of the Capitol as well as the 1933 German Reichstag fire it highlights the need for accurate and original data in historical context,” said Intelligence X’s CEO. Wired reminds us in the context of 1/6 how “Previously, third-party groups archiving video and photo evidence has been crucial in the process of identifying war crimes happening in Syria.” The 1812 breach was by the British Army in time of war. There was no fire, Reichstag or otherwise, on January 6, and no certainly no war crimes.
Further extending the private sector’s reach into Americans’ civil rights and privacy, the Department of Justice hired a contractor (Deloitte @ $6.1 million) to categorize all this tech-collected data, surrendering the decision of who is prosecutable to private industry. A judge has currently put the project on hold.
Working the other side of the operation, Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube deleted live streams of the Capitol riot and demonetized the accounts. Twitter went further, tagging Trump’s tweets about the riot with a warning, deactivated most engagement “due to a risk of violence,” all before removing the Trump material completely. For next time, Facebook revealed it has a tool called CrowdTangle which tracks users’ high engagement levels with whatever the hell Facebook thinks is a right-wing media source. The tool is available only to selected academics and journalists, of course.
And this is not funny at all. The FBI published a manual for citizens to use to report on each other for “displaying a readiness to commit a
violent act” or even “displaying a mindset oriented toward committing a violent act.” Most of it is recycled from some post-9/11 “How to Spot an Islamic Terrorist Under Your Bed” campaign, making it even more obvious white militia is to be this generation’s jihadi boogie man. Though a jaunty warning reminds many of the FBI’s “indicators” are also constitutionally protected actions, such as owning a gun and criticizing the government, the main point is when in doubt, turn them, Citizen, Your Government will sort them out from inside solitary.
Lot of laffs there. Funny as it is, despite the wishes of Democrats, their FBI, and their MSM, the January 6 riot just was not an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government or change an election. The rioters had absolutely no path to doing that, no mechanism for stopping Joe Biden becoming president. They hardly even qualified as vandals: no fires set, no destruction of priceless paintings or statues, no ransacking of files. They dispersed relatively quickly and simply went home. In contrast, BLM riots took dozens of lives and did millions of dollars in damage across the nation for months.
The Democrats also have a larger goal in mind, to get people used to working to further political law enforcement, and to become more comfortable with if not demanding of unequal law enforcement as a political tool. So no surprise the Biden administration just unveiled a national strategy to combat “domestic extremism,” calling for ideological screening of government employees for ties to “hate groups.” The plan highlights a shift in the government’s approach to counterterrorism, which for decades prioritized fighting foreign terrorists. Those same tools of war will now be turned inward, on us. And that for sure is not funny.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Trump
