Maxine Waters did her identity-politics militant buddies no favors

 You've probably heard about her incendiary exhortations the other day:

California Representative Maxine Waters joined protesters in Minnesota  as demonstrations entered a seventh night on Saturday after the death of Daunte Wright.

Waters told the protesters at Brooklyn Center that she will fight for justice on their behalf and urged them to 'to get more confrontational' - just one day after protests descended into violence.

'I am not happy that we have talked about police reform for so long,' Waters said. 'We're looking for a guilty verdict,' she added in regards to the Derek Chauvin trial. 'If we don't, we cannot go away.'

'We gotta stay on the street,' Waters was recorded saying, adding that protesters needed 'to get more confrontational' and they should ignore the curfew in place.

The remarks caught the ear of the judge presiding over the Chauvin case:

Once the jury left the courtroom for the day, defense attorney Eric Nelson called for a mistrial, citing immense media exposure, particularly a comment by Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters over the weekend in which the California Democrat said while in the Twin Cities that protesters should get "more confrontational" if there is no guilty verdict.

"I'll give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result on this whole trial being overturned," Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill said, denying the motion while acknowledging that Nelson's concerns were legitimate.

"This goes back to what I've been saying from the beginning," the judge said. "I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that is disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch and our function.

"I think if they want to give their opinions, they should do so in a respectful and in a manner that is consistent with their oath to the Constitution to respect a coequal branch of government. Their failure to do so I think is abhorrent, but I don't think it has prejudiced us with additional material that would prejudice this jury," Cahill said, adding that the jury has been repeatedly told to not to follow the news.

If I were an identity-politics militant, I'd be saying, "Thanks for nothin', Maxine." 

 

 

Congress has to be tireless in getting to the bottom of the Comey affair

There was a time when I had high regard for FBI director James Comey. To this day, it seems to me he comports himself like a man of integrity and substance.

But we have to look at the way he has handled the matter of the Clinton Machine's emails:

 he not only held back critical details about his investigation, he repeatedly misrepresented his actions and findings.

In his July 7 testimony, Comey assured Congress that he examined all the evidence of Clinton’s lawyers and aides deleting her e-mails, and concluded they weren’t trying to hide anything. “We did not find evidence to indicate that they did the erasure to conceal things of any sort,” he swore. “We didn’t find evidence of evil intent to obstruct justice there.”

“In his statements before Congress, Director Comey repeatedly assured us that the FBI investigated whether charges of obstruction of justice and intentional destruction of records were merited,” the chairmen of three House committees and a Senate committee complained last week in a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “The facts of this investigation call those assertions into question.”

Congress has now obtained letters detailing unprecedented immunity agreements and side deals with multiple witnesses in the case — including one in which Comey agreed to prevent his investigators from reviewing any e-mails from Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills to Clinton’s server administrator Paul Combetta generated in late 2014 and early 2015. The off-limits correspondence, the chairmen point out, could reveal information “directing the destruction or concealment of federal records.”

Astonishingly, before Comey agreed to the June side deal with Mills’ attorney, he “already knew of the conference calls between Secretary Clinton’s attorneys and Mr. Combetta, his use of BleachBit, and the resulting deletions, further casting doubt on why the FBI would enter into such a limited evidentiary scope of review.”

In other words, Comey never really investigated Clinton and her aides for obstruction of justice, as he claimed. Lacking access to key evidence, he couldn’t have explored the possibility, though the circumstances were beyond suspicious.

“The sequence of events leading up to the destruction of Secretary Clinton’s e-mails — the conference call, the work ticket, the use of BleachBit, and [Combetta’s] subsequent refusal to discuss the conference call with the FBI — raises questions about whether Secretary Clinton, acting through her attorneys [including Mills], instructed [Combetta] to destroy records relevant to the then-ongoing congressional investigations,” noted House Oversight Committee Chair­man Jason Chaffetz.

In his July testimony, Comey said it was unclear if anyone had helped Clinton’s lawyers delete e-mails — yet he had to have known that Combetta, in his final interview under his immunity deal, had admitted destroying evidence under subpoena.

Comey also swore his team asked Clinton if she knew her lawyers had wiped clean the devices containing her e-mail archives, when it seems clear from the summary of her interview that agents did not ask her that question.

“Did you ask that question?” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked.

“Yes,” Comey replied.

In 4½ hours of testimony, Comey never once mentioned that he’d agreed to give Mills, Combetta and three other key subjects of his investigation immunity from prosecution. Also belying his pronouncements of “transparency,” he failed to reveal the unusual side deals that severely limited the scope of his probe.

Congressional investigators only learned about the deals weeks later, and still have not obtained all of the documents.

Lynch and Comey have redacted parts of the side-deal letters, including the names of all Justice Department and FBI personnel. They have also restricted access to the letters to certain members of Congress, while prohibiting even those members from removing them from the secure viewing room where they are kept. They’re also barred from taking notes.

“These onerous restrictions are not consistent with the high degree of transparency you and director Comey promised to Congress,” the chairmen complained.

Though Comey has turned over some 250 pages of investigative-case summaries and witness-interview summaries known as FBI 302s, he’s still withholding summaries of interviews with some 30 other witnesses.

Somebody has been leaning on Comey real hard for some time. Who? It's not going to be a task for the faint-hearted to get the answer to that question.

Pagliano's officially in trouble

Falling on one's sword for Madame BleachBit has repercussions:

Members of the House Oversight Committee voted Thursday to hold Hillary Clinton's former IT aide in contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply with a subpoena for documents and testimony.

Bryan Pagliano, the aide who set up Clinton's private email server, failed to appear before the committee on Sept. 13 and declined to provide a copy of the immunity agreement given to him by the Justice Department during the year-long FBI investigation of Clinton's email network.

"Subpoenas are not optional," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the Oversight Committee, at a hearing Thursday to consider Pagliano's fate.

Pagliano worked on Clinton's 2008 campaign before following her to the State Department. Clinton reportedly paid the IT specialist out of her own pocket to operate the private server in her basement through a personal arrangement that was not initially disclosed to the government.

Last year, Pagliano's involvement in the email controversy raised eyebrows when invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer questions when called before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The IT aide has never spoken about the server network in any setting other than his interview with FBI agents.

Three other technology specialists who worked on the email server appeared before the committee last week, but two pleaded their Fifth Amendment rights and walked out of the hearing room. 

Spill the beans, Bryan. You're in nothin'-left-to-lose mode.

Even in post-America, sometimes that which is good, just and true can still prevail

Take the positive development that just transpired in that moral sewer called Baltimore:

A Baltimore officer was acquitted of assault and other charges Monday in the arrest of Freddie Gray, dealing prosecutors a second straight blow in their bid to hold police accountable for the black man’s death from spinal injuries suffered in the back of a police van.

The judge who decided Officer Edward Nero’s fate in the non-jury trial concluded Nero played little role in the arrest and wasn’t responsible for the failure by police to buckle Gray in during the jolting ride.

Upon hearing the verdict, Nero hugged his attorney and appeared to wipe away a tear.

Nero, who is white, was the second of six officers charged in the racially combustible case to stand trial. The manslaughter case against Officer William Porter ended in a mistrial in December when the jury deadlocked. Prosecutors plan to retry him at some point.

Truth is like life. It will sprout up between the cracks in the sidewalks of even the most blighted and benighted environments. May Officer Nero be able to put his life back together speedily and with much support.

The problem isn't full jails, it's an increase in violent crime

In today's WSJ, Heather MacDonald has a powerful, I-strongly-urge-you-to-read-the-whole-thing piece on the recent push to reduce sentences for a range of crimes. The Most Equal Comrade has a front-and-center role in the effort, but even some righties I generally respect have gotten on board to varying degrees.
It's predicated on some faulty notions. One is the "Systemic racism" meme that constitutes Black Lives Matter's raison d'être. Another is that the jails are full of fine people who happen to have penchants for recreational drug use, end of story.

The reality is different and much starker:

Pace Mr. Obama, the state-prison population (which accounts for 87% of the nation’s prisoners) is dominated by violent criminals and serial thieves. In 2013 drug offenders made up less than 16% of the state-prison population; violent felons were 54% and property offenders 19%. Reducing drug-related admissions to 15 large state penitentiaries by half would lower those states’ prison count by only 7%, according to the Urban Institute.

In federal prisons—which hold only 13% of the nation’s prisoners—drug offenders make up half of the inmate population. But these offenders aren’t casual drug users; overwhelmingly, they are serious traffickers. Fewer than 1% of drug offenders sentenced in federal court in 2014 were convicted of simple drug possession, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Most of those possession convictions were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges.

Another myth promoted by the deincarceration movement is that blacks are disproportionately targeted by federal drug prosecutions. The numbers tell a different story: Hispanics made up 48% of drug offenders sentenced in federal court in 2013; blacks were 27%, and whites 22%.

Even on the state level, drug-possession convicts are rare. In 2013 only 3.6% of state prisoners were serving time for drug possession—again, often the result of a plea bargain on more serious charges—compared with 12% of prisoners convicted of trafficking. Virtually all the possession offenders had long prior arrest and conviction records. 

Nor is it true that rising drug prosecutions drove the increase in the prison population from the late 1970s to today. Even during the most rapid period of prison growth—from 1980 to 1990—violent prisoners accounted for 36% of the rise in the state prison population, compared with 33% from drug offenders. From 1990 to 2000, violent offenders accounted for 53% of the census increase and all of the increase from 1999 to 2004.

MacDonald goes on to demonstrate how the criminal justice system actually pukes all over itself to employ alternatives to incarceration, resulting in a whole lot of violent crime that goes unpunished, much less unprevented.

Again, as we noted in yesterday's post about Hillionaire's appearance before the House select committee on Benghazi, the left has perpetuated a meme that appeals to well-meaning people's sense of "social justice." So that just as with such lies as that the goal climate is in some kind of trouble, or that there was, circa 2008, some kind of crisis in health-care access in America, or that Islamic radicalism isn't the specific problem regarding terror threats, we are asked to swallow hooey that hobbles and imperils our once-great nation.