The stench of rot at the DoJ and FBI must be unflinchingly faced

 An editorial at National Review lays out in comprehensible fashion the sum total of what daily news reports have been dribbling out with lots of arcane details but little in the way of a coherent narrative. I'll be excerpting generously from it here. 

The introductory paragraphs spell out the three conclusions we must unavoidably draw from what we know so far:

The compelling congressional testimony of two IRS whistleblower agents has established three things.

First, the investigation into Biden corruption — millions of dollars pouring into the family coffers from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes seeking to buy Joe Biden’s political influence — is real and has been thwarted by the Biden Justice Department. Second, the president’s son Hunter Biden received preferential treatment, and, next week, a federal judge should reject the sweetheart plea deal he was given by the Justice Department. Third, Attorney General Merrick Garland owes the country an explanation for why the Biden investigation has been sabotaged from within, even as he maintains publicly that it was conducted with independence and integrity.

The whistleblowers' frustration was palpable to the House committee they've been working with:

The two whistleblowers — supervisory agent Gary Shapley and the Biden investigation’s main case agent, Joseph Ziegler — began cooperating with the House Ways and Means Committee several weeks back. While Shapley went public in June, Ziegler was not publicly identified until Wednesday’s hearing. Their revelations have been jaw-dropping.

The agents recounted being blocked at every turn by Justice Department prosecutors as they tried to go about the routine steps investigators would take in any case — or, at least, any case not involving politically connected suspects. The investigation was slow-walked by prosecutors from the office of Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, to whom the case was assigned in 2018.

And let's head off at the pass any notion that Weiss being a Trump appointee bears any weight:

Garland and congressional Democrats never tire of branding Weiss a Trump-appointee — it’s Garland’s rationalization for not appointing a special counsel. Conveniently omitted from this story is the fact that Weiss could not have been confirmed absent the support of Delaware’s two Democratic senators, Biden allies Tom Carper and Chris Coons. More to the point, Weiss reports to Garland and, because the Hunter Biden matter is a tax case, DOJ rules dictate that any tax charges must be approved by the Tax Division at Main Justice — run by Biden appointees. Most obviously, Weiss’s appointment by Trump does nothing to eradicate the conflict of interest inherent in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of the president’s son over conduct in which the president himself is implicated.

Weiss and his underlings used the pendency of the 2020 presidential campaign as an excuse to instruct the IRS and FBI agents on the case not to take measures that might call attention to the investigation and thus influence the election. Note that, simultaneously, according to tech executives and Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, FBI agents were signaling that the pre-election emergence of derogatory information about the Bidens — e.g., the Hunter laptop and the influx of money from foreign sources — was likely the result of a Russian intelligence operation.

After Biden was elected, Shapley and Ziegler recalled being undermined in attempting to uncover evidence. The day before they planned to conduct interviews of Hunter Biden and other investigative subjects, the FBI alerted the Secret Service, which tipped off the Biden transition team. As a result, lawyers for Hunter and most other subjects refused to speak to the IRS. In connection with interviews that were later planned, the lead prosecutor from Weiss’s office, Lesley Wolf, forbade them from pursuing investigative leads that could potentially connect the president himself to the Biden family business — instructing them not to ask questions about Hunter’s “dad,” or about “the big guy” (as we now know several investigative subjects referred to the now-president).

Wolf told the agents that issuing a warrant based on the laptop evidence would be bad optics, doncha know:

In 2019, the FBI obtained Hunter’s laptop, teeming with data about the Bidens’ lucrative foreign transactions and Joe Biden’s potential connections to them; yet Weiss’s office denied the IRS agents access to this evidence. In early September 2020, Wolf agreed with the agents that there was more than enough probable cause to support a warrant to search a guest house at the Bidens’ Wilmington residence where Hunter was living; still, she is said to have declined to seek the warrant because “the optics” would be bad. After the election, the agents learned that Hunter had moved documents from his business office in Washington, D.C., to a commercial storage unit in northern Virginia. They convinced Weiss, over Wolf’s objection, to allow them to seek a search warrant if Hunter did not access the unit for 30 days. But, while the agents were preparing the warrant, Wolf precluded them by alerting Hunter’s defense lawyers about the existence of the storage unit, again putting the evidence out of the investigators’ reach.

Shapley and Ziegler are among the IRS’s most experienced and accomplished agents. Despite the strictures placed on them, they built a compelling tax case against Hunter Biden — even the limited evidence, according to Ziegler, showed that Hunter had evaded roughly $2.2 million in taxes on $8.3 million in foreign income between 2014 and 2019. The agents and the line lawyers in DOJ’s Tax Division and Weiss’s office all agreed that a felony prosecution was called for.

There was much evading about where charges could be filed, based on where the tax-evading occurred. Conveniently, it outlasted the statute of limitiations. 

And the money being hidden from the IRS came from bribes:

The 2014 and 2015 tax years included Hunter’s lavish, undeclared income from his sinecure at the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. This period is crucial to the potential corruption scheme. According to information provided to the FBI by an informant with a reliable track record (and released yesterday by Senator Chuck Grassley), after speaking with then–Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky placed Hunter on the company’s board and paid him over $80,000 per month (a rate that, reportedly, was roughly halved once Joe Biden was no longer vice president). The informant added that Zlochevsky told him he’d paid then–Vice President Biden and his son a combined $10 million bribe to use Biden’s influence on Burisma’s behalf, and had made the payments through a byzantine array of companies and accounts that he bragged would take investigators a decade to trace to Joe Biden. This alleged scheme strongly resembles the pattern uncovered by House investigators showing foreign actors paying Biden family members (including grandchildren) millions of dollars through labyrinthine channels that included some 20 obscure business entities, most of which Hunter set up while Joe was vice president.

And consider the Attorney General's role in all this. I'd say this country dodged a bullet when Mitch McConnell took a pass on the Senate advising and consenting on this guy when Obama nominated him for the Supreme Court:

Garland’s story is a crock. He asserts that Weiss would have been given any necessary authority — he only needed to ask. But the U.S. attorneys for Washington and California work for Garland; they couldn’t have blocked Weiss without the attorney general’s support. And it’s not a district U.S. attorney’s job to ask the attorney general for special-counsel authority — which would be tantamount to asking to be fired since, by regulation, a special counsel must be a lawyer “from outside the United States Government.” Rather, it is the attorney general’s duty to appoint a special counsel if there is a conflict of interest that prevents the Justice Department from investigating in the normal course.

And funny business seems to follow Hunter Biden wherever he goes, even though he's supposed to be well along in his recovery and immersed in his painting activities. I still think it's damn odd that the Secret Service couldn't determine where the White House cocaine came from. 

And what kind of guy safeguarding his precarious recovery hires a lawyer like this?

Hunter Biden visited his 'sugar brother' Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris – who was photographed appearing to smoke from a bong.

The First Son took a trip from his Malibu pad to the Pacific Palisades on Thursday to visit his attorney, after agreeing to plead guilty to federal tax crimes last month.

While Hunter was at the house, Morris was snapped on a balcony in plain view of the public street appearing to huff from a white bong, in photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com.

And who is the babe in the yellow floral dress Hunter is photographed hugging as he arrives?

The 60-year-old Hollywood attorney is known for his hard-driving tactics and high-profile cases, but appeared relaxed on the sunny balcony in a purple short-sleeved shirt.

Hunter arrived in the afternoon in a black SUV, escorted by Secret Service bodyguards and dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and aviator sunglasses favored by both him and his father. He was greeted at the Los Angeles home by a woman in a yellow floral dress.

Now, as is always necessary in 2023 post-America, LITD must addresses any questions of a whataboutism. 

The Very Stable Genius has already been indicted twice and more indictments are coming, and they're all entirely justified. 

Now, does anybody still want to get behind the look-it's-going-to-be-one-or-the-other-of-them argument at this late date?

True, the law-enforcement apparatus has done itself no favors, given the obvious corruption outlined above. But Donald Trump's unfitness for office is now unavoidably clear. Even those who began to drool uncontrollably and quake with adulation when he descended the escalator in 2015 have not even the flimsiest of reasons why we should usher this charlatan back in.

So what's to be done?

The first step is to ask how we as a country became so spiritually sick as to give ourselves this choice.

This will be the subject of a Precipice post I intend to write today. 

 

 

 

 

Gohmert's outburst

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing today to look into how Attorney General William Barr has behaved in his position - namely, that he has used it to advance President Trump's political fortunes.

Barr is one of those figures to whom I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt. He'd served in a policy position in the Reagan White House, had a confirmation hearing to be Attorney General under Bush 41 that's been described as "unusually placid" and was well-regarded by both Democrats and Republicans when he served in that position the first time. Amassed considerable business-law experience in the private sector. I resonate with his view on how Roe v. Wade was decided. I even resonated with his rather fiery October 2019 speech about religious freedom and the Biblical roots of American notions about freedom at Notre Dame law school, which ticked off all the right people (atheists and identity-politics militants).

But this year, he's really demonstrated the kind of lockstep personal loyalty to the Very Stable Genius that has been the dismaying moral downfall of so many I'd regarded as principled conservatives.

And that's what today's hearing is about.

Now, opening remarks were given by Donald Ayer, a Republican jurist who had also been appointed by Reagan and Bush 41 to various positions. In fact, he was succeeded by Barr as Deputy Attorney in the early 1990s. In fact, earlier, he and Barr had both clerked for DC US Court of Appeals Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey.

Ayer has clearly soured on Barr of late. He's written two Atlantic articles on Barr's disturbing behavior.

So he makes a pretty obvious choice on committee chair Jerold Nadler's part to give opening remarks.

And that's where Gohmert comes in. Given that it's not unusual for opening remarks at hearings to go over the allotted time limit, it seems likely that the Texas congressman's real peeve was with the content of Ayer's speech:

While Ayer was speaking, Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert began tapping on his desk to disrupt Ayer's opening remarks because he had gone over his time limit. When Democratic lawmakers asked Gohmert to stop, he responded, "There's no rules about when you can make noise."

Nadler replied that he would enforce the five-minute rule for opening statements, but Gohmert pushed back, "Mr. Chairman, this is outrageous. Do you have no respect for the rules whatsoever?"

"He's two minutes beyond concluding, and you don't let us have that kind of time, you gavel down immediately, you're being grossly unfair," Gohmert continued, addressing Nadler. "This man has a written statement and he knew to cut it to five minutes, he couldn't do it. Either we have rules or we don't."

"The gentleman will suspend, the witness will continue," Nadler said.

"Then we can keep making noise," Gohmert responded, and began rapping his desk again.

The hearing briefly devolved into chaos as Gohmert and Republicans continued interrupting Ayer's testimony, and Democrats emphasized that it's fairly routine for opening statements to go over their allotted time limit.

Gohmert, to put it plainly, made an ass of himself.

Now, Gohmert has taken positions I align with on many issues (abortion, climate, hate crimes), but he has a history of flamboyant statements and outrageous behavior - the kind of thing that makes it not too much of a surprise that he has taken on a pretty strong Trumpist odor in recent times.

His stunt today mainly has the effect of reinforcing in the public mind the notion that the yee-haw  element has irrevocably taken over the Republican Party. He has not served what ostensibly are - or at least once were - his core principles well.

He created the image of Trumpism trying to shut actual conservatism up.

 

Trump administration folks usually wait to get this candid until they leave

Wednesday, in the course of a post on the double whammy of the Roger Stone sentence-reduction controversy and Trump "musing" that the Pentagon might want to take disciplinary action against Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, I sad this about Attorney General William Barr:

I'd tried hard to see Barr as one of the few remaining principled figures in the Trump administration. I was mightily impressed with his speech at the Notre Dame Law School last October, in which he defended our society's Christian underpinnings against militant secularists. He was well-regarded around Washington. His confirmation hearing for his first stint as Attorney General in 1991 went smoothly, with both Democrats and Republicans speaking well of him.

But he seems to have come under the VSG's sway. Trump's been leaning on him just like he did Jeff Sessions. And now a precedent has been set. The independence of the Justice Department is always going to be in question.

But maybe not. He showed some noteworthy spine in this ABC News interview:

In an exclusive interview, Attorney General Bill Barr told ABC News on Thursday that President Donald Trump "has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case” but should stop tweeting about the Justice Department because his tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

Barr’s comments are a rare break with a president who the attorney general has aligned himself with and fiercely defended. But it also puts Barr in line with many of Trump’s supporters on Capitol Hill who say they support the president but wish he’d cut back on his tweets.

“I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” Barr told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.

When asked if he was prepared for the consequences of criticizing the president – his boss – Barr said “of course” because his job is to run the Justice Department and make decisions on “what I think is the right thing to do.”

Most folks wait until they've left the administration to talk like that.

I just don't think he's an out and out lapdog.

People love to come to immediate conclusions and then filter everything else that they encounter through that confirmation bias.

Another such conclusion is that the jury was tainted because the fore-lady, Tomeka Hart, a former school-board chair in Memphis, has been found to have strong objections to Trump.

Not so fast, says David French in his newsletter, which I get in my email. He sets the table by acknowledging that she does indeed have some pretty strong views:

One of the jurors, a woman named Tomeka Hart, wrote a Facebook post defending the four prosecutors who withdrew from the case in protest after their superiors at the Department of Justice reversed their sentencing recommendation (more on that below).  The instant Hart outed herself, conservative journalists combed through her social media history and found that she’s not just a Democrat, she’s a former Democratic congressional candidate, a frequent donor to Democratic campaigns, and before the trial tweeted multiple times not just against Trump but also about the Mueller investigation.

But check out the exhaustive questioning Hart went through when she was being selected:

Neither the law nor the known facts support the claim. At least not yet. The law does not require judges to sideline potential jurors who have strong political beliefs. Democrats can sit in judgment on Republicans, and Republicans can sit in judgment on Democrats. The key question isn’t whether a person is partisan but rather whether they’re capable of setting aside political bias to decide questions of fact fairly and impartially. And, believe it or not, this happens all the time in the United States of America. It’s happened in my own cases. Moreover, the jury selection process (called voir dire) provides attorneys with a limited number of peremptory challenges—which permit attorneys to strike jurors without showing cause—and ample opportunity to challenge jurors for cause. In the Stone case, the trial court struck at least 40 jurors for cause (38 in response to the defense team’s initial requests and two more after a request for reconsideration).  The voir dire process is vitally important. If the prospective juror discloses all relevant material facts in response to questions from the judge and/or opposing counsel, and the judge is still satisfied that the juror can set aside any political bias to render a fair verdict, their decision will rarely be reversed. If, however, the juror is deceptive in voir dire, then the defendant may well be denied a fair trial. In a 1984 case called McDonough Power Equipment v. Greenwood, the Supreme Court succinctly explained the standard: We hold that to obtain a new trial in such a situation, a party must first demonstrate that a juror failed to answer honestly a material question on voir dire, and then further show that a correct response would have provided a valid basis for a challenge for cause. The motives for concealing information may vary, but only those reasons that affect a juror's impartiality can truly be said to affect the fairness of a trial. Did Hart truthfully answer every material question on voir dire? If so, then these “revelations” aren’t revelations at all, and the likelihood that they could form the foundation of a new trial are slim to none. Fortunately, there’s a transcript of the oral voir dire, and the transcript does not help Roger Stone.  Hart (identified only as Juror 1261, but identifiable by her statement that she ran for Congress and other biographical details) was questioned by the trial judge and by defense counsel. After first asking questions about Hart’s prior service on a grand jury, the judge asked a series of key questions: THE COURT: You've also indicated a fair amount of paying attention to news and social media including about political things? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: Yes. THE COURT: And when we asked what you read or heard about the defendant, you do understand that he was involved in Mr. Trump's campaign in some way? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: Yes. THE COURT: Is there anything about that that affects your ability to judge him fairly and impartially sitting here right now in this courtroom? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: Absolutely not. THE COURT: What is it that you have read or heard about him? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: So nothing that I can recall specifically. I do watch sometimes paying attention but sometimes in the background CNN. So I recall just hearing about him being part of the campaign and some belief or reporting around interaction with the Russian probe and interaction with him and people in the country, but I don't have a whole lot of details. I don't pay that close attention or watch C-SPAN. THE COURT: Can you kind of wipe the slate clean and learn what you need to learn in this case from the evidence presented in the courtroom and no other source? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: Yes. THE COURT: You actually have had some interest in Congress yourself? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: Yes. THE COURT: Does the fact that this case involves allegations of not being truthful to Congress, is that something that you think that the nature of the allegations alone would make it hard for you to be fair? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: No. The prosecution declined to ask Hart any questions. Then, defense counsel had its turn: MR. BUSCHEL: Did you ever work for anyone in Congress? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: No. MR. BUSCHEL: You've worked on campaigns for Congress people running for Congress? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: I ran for Congress. MR. BUSCHEL: You ran for Congress? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: I worked on my own campaign. MR. BUSCHEL: And you have friends who worked for other congressmen? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: Yes. MR. BUSCHEL: Do you have any political aspirations now? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: I don't know, not federal. MR. BUSCHEL: What might they be? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: My home state in Tennessee. No local. MR. BUSCHEL: Just recognize that there might be some media— What are your aspirations? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: I served, can I just say I served in political office in Memphis in a local office on the school board. So I, one day I wake up and say I run for, you know, office again in Memphis to impact education. One day I wake up and say no way in the world would I do that. So I don't have an immediate plan to run for office. MR. BUSCHEL: The fact that you run for an office, you're affiliated with a political party. Roger Stone is affiliated with the Republican party, Donald Trump. You understand what I'm saying and getting at? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: I do. MR. BUSCHEL: How do you feel about that? MR. KRAVIS: Objection. THE COURT: Can you make that question a little bit more crisp? Is there anything about his affiliation with the Trump campaign and the Republican party in general that gives you any reason to pause or hesitate or think that you couldn't fairly evaluate the evidence against him? PROSPECTIVE JUROR: No. MR. BUSCHEL: Thank you, ma'am. THE COURT: All right, you can step out. R. BUSCHEL: Thank you, ma'am. THE COURT: All right, you can step out. (Prospective juror leaves courtroom.) THE COURT: Mr. Buschel, you have a motion? MR. BUSCHEL: No. THE COURT: Okay, let's bring in the next juror.

So it's a little early to shout "Bingo! She was biased!", which is what Trump basically did via Twitter, which is what has Barr irritated.

And so it goes in VSG world.

 

The Very Stable Genius unrestrained

This:

The Justice Department submitted a new sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone on Tuesday, overruling career prosecutors who requested in a court filing Monday that the former Trump adviser serve 7–9 years in prison.

Driving the news: President Trump acknowledged in a Wednesday morning tweet that Attorney General Bill Barr had intervened in the matter, congratulating him for "taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought."

What they're saying: The new sentencing memo states, "While it remains the position of the United States that a sentence of incarceration is warranted here, the government respectfully submits that the range of 87 to 108 months presented as the applicable advisory Guidelines range would not be appropriate or serve the interests of justice in this case."

• It argues that the witness Stone was convicted of attempting to intimidate, Randy Credico, claims that he "did not perceive a genuine threat."
• It also points to Stone's "advanced age, health, personal circumstances and lack of criminal history" as mitigating factors.
• The department did not offer a specific sentence recommendation, noting that it would defer to the court.

Why it matters: The downgraded sentencing recommendation is sure to prompt allegations of political interference. All four prosecutors who tried Stone in November — Aaron Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed and Michael Marando — withdrew from the case on Tuesday afternoon. Zelinsky and Kravis resigned from their positions as special assistant U.S. attorney and assistant U.S. attorney in D.C., respectively.

The big picture: Trump tweeted early Tuesday that the recommendation is a "miscarriage of justice" that he "cannot allow," claiming that the "real crimes were on the other side." He later told reporters that he didn't speak to the Justice Department about the case, but that he would have "the absolute right" to.

• Justice Department spokesperson Kerri Kupec told The Daily Beast that DOJ officials did not consult with the White House and that the decision to change the recommendation came before Trump's tweet.
• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to the Justice Department inspector general requesting an investigation into the reduced sentencing recommendation, writing: "This situation has all the indicia of improper political interference in a criminal prosecution."
• The president posted a tweet later criticizing the judge presiding over Stone's case, Amy Berman Jackson, after it was pointed out that she had dealt with cases involving the Mueller investigation — including that of the now-imprisoned former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Background: Stone, one of several Trump associates to be indicted as a result of the Mueller investigation, was found guilty in November on seven counts related to his attempts to learn more about when WikiLeaks would publish damaging emails about 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

• The self-proclaimed "dirty trickster" was convicted of crimes that include obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering.
• The Justice Department's original memo, which recommended that he be hit with a sentence in line with the advisory guidelines, accused Stone of displaying "contempt for this Court and the rule of law."

And this:

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the Pentagon could look at disciplinary action against U.S. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a key figure who testified in the Ukraine impeachment saga.

On Friday, Vindman, a former National Security Council staffer, was escorted out of his third-floor office across from the White House. The Senate had acquitted Trump of two impeachment articles, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, on Wednesday.

“We’re going to have to see, but if you look at what happened, they’re going to certainly, I would imagine, they’re going to take a look at that,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Tuesday, when he was asked whether the Defense Department would seek disciplinary action against Vindman.

“He is over with the military,” Trump added from the Oval Office. “We sent him on his way to a much different location and the military can handle him any way they want,” Trump said, referring to Vindman’s reassignment from the White House to the Department of the Army.

I'd tried hard to see Barr as one of the few remaining principled figures in the Trump administration. I was mightily impressed with his speech at the Notre Dame Law School last October, in which he defended our society's Christian underpinnings against militant secularists. He was well-regarded around Washington. His confirmation hearing for his first stint as Attorney General in 1991 went smoothly, with both Democrats and Republicans speaking well of him.

But he seems to have come under the VSG's sway. Trump's been leaning on him just like he did Jeff Sessions. And now a precedent has been set. The independence of the Justice Department is always going to be in question.

And the same principle applies regarding the Pentagon. How unseemly is it for the VSG to be commenting on military personnel matters? And just what has Vindman done that would warrant some kind of punishment?

This is the level of scorched-earth vindictiveness that is going to be routine going forward. Anything less than total loyalty is going to be grounds for ruination, and demonstrations of loyalty, no matter how illegal, are going to be rewarded.

A few thoughts about the IG report

First, LITD's broadest conclusion: As is so often the case in this fallen world, there is no unassailable good guy.

The FBI has exhibited squirrelliness going back at least to James Comey's July 2016 presser in which he spent about fifteen minutes enumerating reasons why Hillary Clinton ought to have been indicted for her email-server recklessness, and then concluded by saying he wasn't going to recommend indictment to the DoJ. There are those Peter Stzrok - Lisa Page emails that make it plain that some FBI personnel did indeed have a burning desire to do whatever they could to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.

Now, along comes this IG report (which is going to be followed by Durham's report when he's done with his investigation) that says that there was no political agenda. It concludes that, while there was no nefarious intent on the FBI's part (in fact, the agency had an "authorized purpose"), the Bureau sure was incompetent. 17 errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications. Big-time reliance on the just plain bizarre Steele dossier. Bruce Ohr meeting with Steele without authorization. Ohr's wife Nellie working for Fusion GPS, the firm hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign to sniff around and find something fishy about the Trump campaign.

Adam Schiff's February 2018 memo  now looks like a flimsy partisan attempt to portray the FBI as having done a stellar job. And remember that Schiff's memo was a response to a memo by Devin Nunes, who is a tribalist of the opposite stripe (pro-Trump instead of anti).

Bill Barr, who is the one who has sent John Durham on his mission, seems a little too keen to blast the IG report, given that an Attorney General's interest is supposed to be in impartially upholding the law. Then again, Durham is using a wider array of sources, and may truly be able to refute the IG report's portrayal of the FBI as merely bumbling.

Okay, that's it. These ever-mounting layers of investigation may establish certain facts for the record, but they are not going to have significant impact on the unfolding political events of the coming year. With a rocking economy and a field of Democratic presidential candidates consisting entirely of radical yet entirely unexciting leftists, the smart money is on another four years of the Very Stable Genius bringing embarrassment to post-America and making a train wreck of its foreign policy.

Barr's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing - initial thoughts

The spiritual grotesqueness of the Democrats was on full display, that's for sure. Especially in Mazie Hirono's spew of venom, which, true to form, dod not allow for the Attorney General getting in a word edgewise.

The New York Times has an editorial about it this morning, calling the note Mueller sent to Barr about Barr's summary of the report - a note Barr characterized as "snotty" - an "extraordinary letter."

My tail end.

The letter doesn't even specify anything inherently objectionable about the way Barr proceeded (issuing a summary in advance of the report). The uneasiness Mueller expresses is over how the media would deal with the manner and pace of the release of the report.

An important thing to keep front and center is that everybody at the hearing had the full Mueller report in front of them, and it clearly states that no one involved with Trump's 2016 campaign collided with Russia to influence the election.

And so, regarding this business of obstruction of justice, how is anything being obstructed when the charge that had been investigated is now moot?

The bottom line in all of this is that Democrats absolutely cannot stand the fact that Donald Trump is president. It makes them jump out of their skins. It's constant torture to them.

I'm not unmitigatedly enthused about it myself. We could have had all the great policy moves and judicial appointments we've experienced without the shallowness, bombast and inconsistency.

But unless a president has done something plainly illegal, the recourse is to oust him at the ballot box next time.

And the Dems haven't the first clue as to why their huge field of clowns and totalitarians is sorely wanting in effectiveness for that task.

Memo to the leftists in Congress and the media: enough with the feigned case of the vapors over Barr saying the FBI spied on the Trump campaign

Pelosi, Blumenthal, Schumer and Schiff really need to knock it off. The FBI quite clearly spied:

It is a fact that in October 2016 the FBI wiretapped Carter Page, who had earlier been a short-term foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. The bureau's application to a secret court for that wiretapping is public. It is heavily redacted but is clearly focused on Page and "the Russian government's attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election." Page was wiretapped because of his connection with the Trump campaign.

Some critics have noted that the wiretap authorization came after Page left the campaign. But the surveillance order allowed authorities to intercept Page's electronic communications both going forward from the day of the order and backward, as well. Investigators could see Page's emails and texts going back to his time in the campaign. 

So there is simply no doubt that the FBI wiretapped a Trump campaign figure. Is a wiretap "spying"? It is hard to imagine a practice, whether approved by a court or not, more associated with spying.

That alone is enough to back up Barr's remark. But it is also known that the FBI engaged at least one informant, a professor named Stefan Halper, to penetrate the Trump campaign. The New York Times recently reported, "Agents involved in the Russia investigation asked Mr. Halper, an American academic who teaches in Britain, to gather information on Mr. Page and George Papadopoulos, another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser."

Halper went beyond Page and Papadopoulos, also contacting and seeking information from Trump campaign aide Sam Clovis. "It was not clear whether Mr. Halper had the FBI's blessing to contact Mr. Clovis," the Times said.

The Halper case is more evidence that "spying did occur" on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. At least in the cases of Page and Papadopoulos, the information gathering was done by an informant engaged by the FBI.

Was the FBI justified in spying? Consider that the FISA application was based in part on the Steele dossier.

In a saner world, this would be a huge deal.

Beautiful and glorious!

Good on ya, DoJ:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday announced that it is siding with a district court ruling that found the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.

The move is an escalation of the Trump administration's legal battle against the health care law.

The DOJ previously argued in court that the law's pre-existing condition protections should be struck down. Now, the administration argues the entire law should be invalidated.

U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled in December that the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate is unconstitutional and that the rest of law is therefore invalid.

The DOJ said Monday that it agrees the decision should stand as the case works its way through the appeals process in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

"The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s judgment should be affirmed," the department said in a short letter to the appeals court.

The notion of the government making people buy a particular product was always as offensive and counter to everything about America's essence as anything ever foisted on the nation. Ditto the notion of the government making private organizations offer particular products and price them according to governmental dictates.

Now, can we please try an actual free-market approach?

 

The Mueller report release - initial thoughts

Its main effect is going to be to pull the puppet strings of the two main types of knee-jerk tribalists in post-America - the Leftists and the throne-sniffers.

 The Leftists, as exemplified by their standard-bearers in Congress, are already launching their own investigations, the tiresome nature of which will ensure an ever-shrinking interested public.

The throne-sniffers will crow. Their king will be insufferable. 

That's about it. 

As actually important stuff happens in the world, this whole thing will recede from the national radar.

Wednesday roundup

Just no. Who in the hell within the Hoosier BMV signed off on this?

Hoosiers will soon have a third option for gender on their driver’s license or state ID card.

The Times of Northwest Indiana reports that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles will be offering a ‘non-specified’ gender option to residents. The ID will be marked as an ‘X’ for those who identify as neither male or female.

Those looking to apply for the designation must provide a birth certificate or a signed physician’s statement confirming a permanent gender change.

At least five other states offer a non-binary option on driver’s licenses.

Richard Fernandez' piece at PJ Media on how grim things have gotten in Venezuela, and how post-American millennials still get excited over socialism even with such an apocalyptic picture of its end product in their faces, is jarring reading.

Great Ben Shapiro tweet:

An electronics company manufactured the microphone into which AOC is speaking. Why shouldn't they be held responsible for the stupid crap she says into the microphone?

Sarah Lawrence College is yet another example of a school administration taking exactly the wrong approach in dealing with a campus group of snot-nosed brats. If these punks with crania full of dog vomit weren't demanding anything beyond detergent pods, it might be possible to write them off as too ridiculous to have any impact. But, as you'll see, they are savages. And the school president is a shameful coward:

And here are the first three demands in their, ahem, laundry list:

 

1. Sarah Lawrence must commit to actualizing the value that housing is a human right.
   The College must provide winter housing to students at no charge. This housing must include a communal kitchen with dry goods from the food pantry available for all students.In the extreme case that housing cannot be provided to students during break due to housing probation, the school must provide a list of local low-cost, free, and/or accessible housing options for students.
2. The College will designate housing with a minimum capacity for thirty students of color that is not contingent on the students expending any work or labor for the college. This housing option will be permanent and increase in space and size based on interest.
3. All campus laundry rooms are to supply laundry detergent and softener on a consistent basis for all students, faculty and staff.

So housing is a human right and thus, students should be provided free housing (demand #1) without working for it (demand #2). Students should also be given free detergent and fabric softener (demand #3) so maybe this is also a human right? Or maybe it’s an emanation from the penumbra of the right not to smell like marijuana and patchouli oil? They’ll work all of that out later. But for now, it’s simple: Tide pods for the people!

It’s worth mentioning that Sarah Lawrence College is one of the most expensive schools in the country with an annual tuition of $52,600 as of last year (ranking it 20th nationwide).

All of this would be amusing if it weren’t for some more disturbing demands that pop up later in the list. The protesters make it clear they want professors who are in strict ideological agreement with the principles of intersectionality:

• We demand that the College offer classes that embody intersectionality, as defined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and address the racial diversity of the LGBTQ+ community instead of centering whiteness.
• The aforementioned classes must be taught by professors who are a part of the culture they are teaching about.

Then the group singles out a conservative professor who wrote something they didn’t like. The group demands that he be put up for tenure review before a group made of of their members (despite that fact that he already has tenure) and demands he issue a public apology [Emphasis in the original]:

On October 16, 2018, politics professor Samuel Abrams published an op-ed entitled “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators” in The New York Times. The article revealed the anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-woman bigotry of Abrams…We demand that Samuel Abrams’ position at the College be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color. In addition, the College must issue a statement condemning the harm that Abrams has caused to the college community, specifically queer, Black, and female students, whilst apologizing for its refusal to protect marginalized students wounded by his op-ed and the ignorant dialogue that followed. Abrams must issue a public apology to the broader SLC community and cease to target Black people, queer people, and women.

As Reason’s Robby Soave has pointed out, professor Abrams office door was vandalized after his article appeared in the NY Times:

Abrams’ office door was vandalized on October 16, hours after the op-ed’s publication. The perpetrators posted a sign on the door that read, “Our right to exist is not ‘ideological,’ asshole,” and was signed “transsexual fag.” Another flyer demanded that he apologize to residence life staff and the director of campus diversity, students of color, queer students, trans students, and other marginalized persons. Multiple messages instructed Abrams to “quit,” and one told him to “go teach somewhere else, maybe Charlottesville.”…

Several of Abrams’ colleagues met with [president Cristle Collins] Judd to discuss the vandalism and express their view that such acts could not be tolerated. Judd agreed, but did not pledge to take any further actions. These professors thought she seemed scared that the students might hold more protests, creating a public relations disaster, according to Abrams.

Professor Abrams spoke with President Judd to discuss the situation during which she told him he had created a “hostile work environment.” When they met in person, Judd suggested Abrams was back in the job market, despite the fact that he is a tenured professor. This is all starting to seem very reminiscent of what happened at Evergreen State College. President Judd may want to look into Evergreen’s subsequent enrollment numbers before she commits fully to backing the protesters.

Still, muckety-muck playpens for the unhinged colleges and universities are seen by some as essential to a worthwhile life. Jim Geraghty at NRO on the scandal involving two TV celebrities and a number of other wealthy west-coasters using outrageously unethical means to get their kids into prestigious schools.

Were those parents crazy? Or were they just astute about the risk-reward analysis and long-term benefits of getting into one of the top 25 schools, instead of one of the top 50 or top 100?

We’ve heard all the stories about the “Harvard mafia.” A few years ago, Ross Douthat wrote “elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.”

A line that appears a little further up his piece is as apt here as there:

If you wanted to pour gasoline onto the fires of populism, this is how you do it!

His essential point:

Sure, all of those wealthy parents indicted yesterday stand accused of breaking the law. But they were also pretty obviously responding to incentives. If a society turns getting into one of the top 25 schools in the country into the Willie Wonka ticket, the Holy Grail, the alchemical formula — the one thing that parents believe will ensure their children will have a happy, financially comfortable, and successful life — then people will go to absurd and illegal lengths to get it.

Why didn't the FBI go after Madame Bleachbit in 2016?

 

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page admitted under questioning from Texas Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe last summer that "the FBI was ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross negligence in the handling of classified information," the congressman alleged in a social media post late Tuesday, citing a newly unearthed transcript of Page's closed-door testimony.

Page and since-fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, who were romantically involved, exchanged numerous anti-Trump text messages in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, and Republicans have long accused the bureau of political bias. But Page's testimony was perhaps the most salient evidence yet that the Justice Department improperly interfered with the FBI's supposedly independent conclusions on Clinton's criminal culpability, Ratcliffe alleged.

"So let me if I can, I know I’m testing your memory," Ratcliffe began as he questioned Page under oath, according to a transcript excerpt he posted on Twitter. "But when you say advice you got from the Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to —"

Page interrupted: "That is correct," as Ratcliffe finished his sentence, " -- bring a case based on that."

The document dump was part of a major release by House Judiciary Committee Republicans, who on Tuesday released hundreds of pages of transcripts from last year's closed-door interview with Page, revealing new details about the bureau's controversial internal discussions regarding an “insurance policy” against then-candidate Donald Trump. Fox News has previously reviewed portions of Page's testimony.

Timothy P. Carney (whose new book Alienated America is on my want-to-read-soon list) at the Washington Examiner on the upside of Tucker Carlson's remarks when Carlson was a guest on Bubba the Love Sponge years ago:

. . . the upside is that now we’re allowed to discuss the real harms of flippant attitudes towards sex and the sexualization of women.

If you tried to bring up those issues eight years ago, you would have been chased off the stage as a backwards prude dedicated to sexual repression. Consider that very recently — before we had a president who bragged about sexual assault — we had a president whose top asset on the campaign trail was rapper Jay-Z. Somehow, this seemed okay at the time. 

“You know I thug em, f--k em, love em, leave em,” Obama’s favorite fundraiser explained in "Big Pimpin,'" “Cause I don't f--kin need em."

"Put your two lips on my wood and kiss it, could ya,” Obama’s good friend Jay-Z explained on another occasion. 

The Obama White House also elevated vulgar sex columnist Dan Savage to be a crusader against bullying. Savage’s entire shtick was sexual depravity. 

Even today, our press corps accepts as one of its colleagues a White House correspondent from Playboy, literally a smut publication.

Pornographic depravity, reducing sexuality to materialistic hedonism — in a word, debauchery — has been aggressively tolerated by the media elites. Chastise that debauchery and risk getting branded a prude. Hell, social scientists have even promulgated bogus studies arguing that sexual conservatism kills kids.

But now that someone has dragged up Tucker’s old bawdy remarks, we’re allowed, finally, to speak the truth: Modern American culture needs to treat sex more seriously. Our public discourse is far too lewd, and its lewdness is detrimental.

The irony is that much of Tucker’s current critique of today’s elites lead us towards this truth. The Left’s elites are constantly bashing the morality of the 1950s traditional family and small town, and constantly attacking the institutions (most importantly church institutions) that preserve, defend, and build the family and community. Then those same elites go home to Chevy Chase and Park Slope for supper with their intact families and bustling Little Leagues. They retire in the evening to the life they spent their workday undermining for others.

These are the elites Carlson is dedicated to challenging. But it’s not their conservative lifestyles that need challenging. It’s their unconservative assault on the norms and institutions that have historically helped the regular guy make good life decisions.

So here’s a salutary, contrarian, and provocative move for Carlson: Apologize, but not on the Left’s terms. Instead, apologize for appearing to endorse sexual licentiousness that violates moral law. Maybe begin by saying that sex is properly reserved for marriage, and so the jokes he made about a teenager sleeping with his teacher were immoral. Also, grant that the talk he indulged of teenage lesbians was indecent in seeming to endorse a hedonistic concept of sexuality.

Great Ben Shapiro column at the Daily Wire entitled "Government Isn't the Social Fabric." This is something that occasionally comes up in LITD comment threads. It's sometimes asserted that "government" is an interchangeable term with "society" or "the people." It is not. They are distinct critters and that distinction is crucial to always maintain.