Could we have had them four decades earlier?
I don’t think they’re all that great even today. I only use mine when I have no other choice. But I work from home.
Category Archives: Law
The Comey Hearing
The way it should have gone
Your statements about President Trump draw on these memos. The same four members of the bipartisan Senate Judiciary Committee wrote you on May 26, asking for answers by June 2 to seven questions about (a) who outside the Justice Department you discussed either the investigations of Trump associates’ alleged connections with Russia or the Clinton email investigation; (b) whether you created any memos about your interactions on the same two topics with Deputy Attorneys General Rosenstein, Boente and Yates, Attorneys General Sessions and Lynch, and Presidents Trump and Obama, and who you provided copies to; (c) whether you discussed or shared such memos with anyone either inside or outside the Justice Department; and, (d) whether you retained copies or access to such memos.
As we proceed, we would like to remind you, sir, that the FBI is a law enforcement tool created by the Congress to assist the president in the carrying out of his constitutional duty to execute the laws of the United States. It has no power apart from the powers we have granted it and it is answerable, only, to the president himself.
Why did you submit a formal refusal to answer those questions which are central to your claims against President Trump in recent weeks, saying you are now a private citizen, when others, such as former CIA Director Brennan, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Clapper and Deputy Attorney General Yates all have testified in recent weeks after leaving office? Your behavior can only be described as stonewalling and self-serving since the memos are “government work product.” Why do you think you are entitled to be treated with less accountability? Why do you deserve a forum here to give your public statement without being responsive to requests from Congressional committees?
They could still call him back.
Meanwhile, does Mueller now have a clear conflict of interest?
Whether they were just close professional friends, or consider themselves personally friendly, the fact is that they are not at arms length. This relationship, at least as reported, appears to be much more than the routine interactions you might expect two law enforcement officers to have had in the regular course of business.
Something doesn’t seem right here. Comey manipulated the system into getting his friend appointed Special Counsel, and now that friend will be investigating matters in which Comey is a key witness. More than that, Comey’s own actions in leaking government property raise legal issues as to whether Comey himself violated the law.
Even assuming Mueller is able to separate his past with Comey from his present investigation, that relationship damages the whole purpose of having a Special Counsel who is completely independent in fact and appearance.
In a truly independent investigation, friends shouldn’t be investigating friends. Mueller should step aside to remove the taint on the Special Counsel investigation created by friend and witness James Comey.
Byron York has been looking into it.
Is that a conflict? Should a prosecutor pursue a case in which the star witness is a close friend? And when the friend is not only a witness but also arguably a victim — of firing — by the target of the investigation? And when the prosecutor might also be called on to investigate some of his friend’s actions? The case would be difficult enough even without the complicating friendship.
This is by no means a definitive answer, but I put that question to five Washington lawyers Sunday — lawyers in private practice, on Capitol Hill, in think tanks, some of them veterans of the Justice Department. The verdict came back mixed. But the answers made clear this is a question that will have to be answered in the course of the Mueller investigation.
“This is very odd,” said one big-firm lawyer and Justice Department veteran Sunday.
You don’t say.
[Noon update]
James Comey has a long history of questionable obstruction cases:
Let’s begin with the case of one Frank Quattrone, a banker who Comey pursued relentlessly on banking related charges without fruition. But while he couldn’t find any wrong-doing on criminal conduct, he went after him for supposed “obstruction of justice” because of a single ambiguous email. Sound familiar?
Before he was indicted, Comey made false statements about Quattrone and his intent. The first trial ended in a hung jury but the second one got a conviction.
That conviction was overturned in 2006. Quattrone was so scarred by the harassment, he began funding projects designed to help innocent people who are victims of prosecutorial overreach or other problems. He said his motivation for supporting such projects was that at the very moment he was found guilty in the second trial, he realized there must be innocent people in prisons who lacked the financial resources to fight for justice. He also started the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Quattrone has noted with interest the disparities in how he was treated by Comey for a single email compared to his handling of the Hillary Clinton email server scandal.
You might remember Martha Stewart being sent to jail. You might not remember that James Comey was the man who put her there, and not because he was able to charge her for anything he began investigating her for. The original investigation was into whether Stewart had engaged in insider trading. They didn’t even try to get her on that charge.
The more I learn about this guy, the more of a scumbucket he seems to be.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Yes, Mueller should recuse himself from any investigations involving Comey. The question is: Can Comey be sufficiently separated from the mess for him to be able to investigate at all?
Unelected Bureaucrats
Are running our lives.
And in many cases, ruining them.
Why Comey Didn’t Prosecute Hillary
Because he would have had to find the president guilty as well:
As I explained in February, when it emerged that the White House was refusing to disclose at least 22 communications Obama had exchanged with then-secretary Clinton over the latter’s private e-mail account, we knew that Obama had knowingly engaged in the same misconduct that was the focus of the Clinton probe: the reckless mishandling of classified information.
To be sure, he did so on a smaller scale. Clinton’s recklessness was systematic: She intentionally set up a non-secure, non-government communications framework, making it inevitable that classified information would be mishandled, and that federal record-keeping laws would be flouted. Obama’s recklessness, at least as far as we know, was confined to communications with Clinton — although the revelation that the man presiding over the “most transparent administration in history” set up a pseudonym to conceal his communications obviously suggests that his recklessness may have been more widespread.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. And I’ll bet that some of Lerner’s missing emails about IRS targeting are also between her and the president. and they would reveal offenses of the nature that Nixon had to resign for even attempting.
The Comey Saga
It seems to be coming to a sad end:
How pathetic Comey sounded during his testimony. A weak man who couldn’t even muster the courage to tell Donald Trump to his face when he thought Trump had crossed a line. Instead, Comey schemed behind the scenes to document conduct which even Comey will not publicly claim was criminal.
Trump’s distrust of Comey ultimate[ly] was vindicated by what we now know about Comey.
Pathetic also was the word that came to mind when Comey described how he succumbed to pressure from then Attorney General Loretta Lynch to call the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server a “matter.” That was how the Clinton campaign wanted it portrayed. From an electoral perspective, they dreaded the accurate description that Hillary was under “investigation.” The Attorney General served as the functional equivalent of a campaign enforcer in the campaign against Trump.
It all puts the secret meeting between Lynch and Bill Clinton in a new perspective, and should result in a re-opened investigation not only of Hillary’s server but a new investigation of Lynch.
Yes, it should. It should also result in a proper investigation of Hillary Clinton and her server, and finally, after all these decades of Clinton corruption, indictments. History indicates that it probably won’t, though.
Here's a summary of 10 things we learned from former FBI Director Comey's testimony today. pic.twitter.com/eWrJiFZimS
— /pol/ News Forever (@polNewsForever) June 9, 2017
[Mid-morning update]
Mr. Comey’s not very good day:
The Donald was revealed again as a man who talks too much, with a gift for the memorable insult, the demand to have his ego stroked. But didn’t we already know that? What we know now about James Comey, only suspected earlier, is that he’s what the British call “wet,” a wimp under pressure. He offered evidence at last of collusion, but it was only evidence of his eagerness to collude with his own emotions. He was incapable of standing up to Donald Trump, beyond the instinctive deference everyone accords a president.
He’s guided by his feelings, which perhaps explains why he has become a late hero of the present age. He testified that he “felt” “directed” to terminate the investigation into the activities of Mike Flynn. “I mean, this is the president of the United States, with me alone, saying, ‘I hope this.’ I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.”
One of the most telling moments of the day was an exchange with Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat, asking the question that Republicans have raised over the weeks of rumor and not much real news. When he “felt” that Mr. Trump was asking him to throttle his investigation, she asked: “Why didn’t you stop, and say, ‘Mr. President, this is wrong?’““That’s a great question,” Mr. Comey replied. “Maybe if I were stronger, I would have.”
This is the rough and tough G-man, scourge of killers, robbers, rapists, terrorists and purveyors of wicked mayhem the world over. “Maybe if I were stronger, I would have.” That’s a real man that real men would follow anywhere.
My non-hot take from the Comey hearing: Comey continues to behave…strangely.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 9, 2017
Fine by me. https://t.co/jf1GZBtgdb
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 9, 2017
[Update a few minutes later]
This is from before the testimony, but an interesting read: James Comey, novelist.
[Update late morning]
Trey Gowdy is taking over the House Oversight Committee. He seems like just the guy to get to the bottom of Lynch’s obstruction of justice.
[Update just before noon]
Did Comey’s leaks violate the FBI Employee Agreement?
Probably.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Comey came to indict Trump, but he may have indicted himself:
Congress criminalizes lying to Congress under oath. The relevant statutes are 18 USC 1621 and 18 USC 1001. Section 1621 requires a person first, be making a statement under a sworn oath; second, that statement be “material” to the proceeding; third, the statement be false; and fourth, the statement be knowingly and willfully false. Section 1001 mirrors those elements, without the same tribunal prerequisites: it also requires the government prove a person willfully made a materially false statements. In either case, the primary focus is: first, a false statement; second, a false statement as material to the matter; third, the false statement be made knowingly and willfully. A statement is not false if it can be interpreted in a completely innocent manner. A statement is not material if it is not particularly relevant or pertain to the subject of the matter. Willfully remains a very high standard of proof in the criminal law, though less in perjury cases than in tax cases: it requires the person know they are lying.
Sadly, for Comey, Sessions has the smoking gun: Sessions’ own email sent and read by Comey, according to the Department of Justice statement, showing Comey in fact did know “the parameters of the Attorney General’s recusal” despite his repeated comments to the contrary to Senator Kamala Harris’ questions.
Oops.
[Saturday-morning update]
The damaging case against James Comey. And Trump committed no crime. Get over it.
[Bumped]
“Hate Speech”
Another reminder, this time from @Popehat, that there is no such thing, in terms of the First Amendment. Warning, pop-up ads.
No, This Is Not Terrorism In England
It’s a protracted insurgency. It’s war, regardless of how much people want to deny it:
Britons trying to remain optimistic note that they survived and eventually defeated Irish nationalist terrorism not all that long ago. But this is a flawed analogy. In the first place, at any given time during the Troubles, the number of active Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorists seldom exceeded a hundred. Moreover, the PIRA was a “normal” terrorist group with rational political motives, not a religiously-motivated death cult, and it generally eschewed killing civilians for its own sake. Indeed, atrocities like the 1987 Enniskillen attack, which murdered 10 innocents, proved a black mark for the group, even among staunch republicans. Therefore, comparing the PIRA to ISIS and its murderous Western wannabes isn’t much help to practical counterterrorism.
That said, if Britain doesn’t soon devise tough countermeasures to its vast domestic jihadism problem, many of its cities may come to resemble Northern Ireland a generation ago, with armed soldiers in battle gear patrolling the streets as “aid to civil power” while enforcing frequent security checks on average citizens with the aim of stopping terrorists.
In their historically recent unwillingness to allow Britons to defend themselves (appalling, considering that we inherited our notions about the Second Amendment from ancient English Common Law), the contradictions of their multi-culturalism will become untenable.
[Update a few minutes later]
Counterterrorism lessons from America’s Civil War:
Destroying ISIS, al-Qaeda and other Muslim terror groups is not particularly difficult, far less difficult than Sherman or Sheridan’s task during the Civil War. It simply requires doing some disgusting things. Western intelligence doesn’t have to infiltrate terror groups, tap phones, mine social media postings and so forth (although these doubtless are worth doing). Muslim communities in the West will inform on the terrorists. They will tell police when someone has packed up and gone to Syria, and when he has returned. They will tell police who is talking about killing westerners, who has a suspicious amount of cash, who is listening to broadcasts from Salafist preachers.
They will tell western security services everything they need to know, provided that western security services ask in the right way. I mean in Phil Sheridan’s way. Like the victorious Union generals of the Civil War, the West does not have to be particularly clever. It simply needs to understand what kind of war is is fighting.
Yes, ultimately, the only way to victory is to make them fear us. As Mark Steyn has said, the question is not “Why do they hate us,” but “Why do they despise us”? It is because they have no respect for us, and given the behavior of the “elites,” it’s hard to blame them.
[Early-afternoon update]
In the face of terror, Londoners told to “Run, Hide, Tell.”
Contrast this with the London of eight decades ago.
Paris Agreement Advocates
Glenn Reynolds says they should practice what they preach, by government force if necessary:
First, we need to tax the “blue zones.” That is, we need to impose steep taxes on property in coastal areas that will be flooded by the sea-level increases that global warming is supposed to bring. By discouraging people from living or building there now, we’ll save ourselves from big problems in the future. Sure it’ll drive down property values, but those values should go down — they’re values for property that’s going to be flooded anyway, remember?
Second, we need to ban taxpayer-funded air travel to conferences. State legislatures could ban reimbursement for travel outside their states; Congress could require that no federal grant money be spent on air travel to conferences and similar events. A lot of academic conferences would fail, but that’s a small price to pay for saving the planet. And besides, it will encourage the development of Internet-based conference alternatives. A whole new industry might result: Green jobs!
Donald Trump can strengthen America by dumping Paris agreement: Sen. Inhofe
Third, we need to ban private jet travel. At first I thought about just taxing it heavily, but with the planet at stake, that might not be enough. It’s nice that John Travolta can have his own Boeing 707, or that Leonardo DiCaprio can jet around the world speaking against climate change, but the carbon emissions involved set a bad example that outweighs anything he might say. So no more private jets. Bigshots will just have to fly commercial like everyone else, the way they did in the 1950s. (And sorry, Leo, but massive yachts have to go, too). Politicians, too, should have to fly commercial. No more government-funded “executive jets” for them.Fourth, we need a luxury tax on mansions. Any home more than twice the size of the average American home should be taxed at 25% of its value per year. Celebrities and the rich enjoy great powers of persuasion — but with great power comes great responsibility, and they have a great responsibility to set a good example for the rest of us on climate change!
As he says, it seems like a modest proposal.
The House Subpoenas For Brennan, Power, And Rice
As I have previously explained, the CIA, NSA, and FBI are the investigative components of the 17-component “community” of intelligence agencies. It is those three agencies that collect raw intelligence and that make decisions about what identities should be unmasked. Those decisions are reflected in the content of the polished intelligence reports that are generated from the raw intelligence.
Under the rules that apply to foreign-intelligence-collection, there is a presumption against revealing the names of American citizens. But there are significant loopholes: The names may be unmasked if intelligence officials determine that knowing the identity of an American is necessary in order to understand and exploit the intelligence value of the information collected.
Thus, as I’ve also outlined, it is unlikely that any single instance of unmasking would be found to be a violation of law — and, indeed, it would not violate any penal statute (it would violate court-ordered “minimization” procedures). Nevertheless, were a pattern of unmasking established, divorced from any proper foreign-intelligence purpose, that would be a profound abuse of power in the nature of a “high crime and misdemeanor” — the Constitution’s predicate for impeachment.
Which is a moot point, since they’re now out of office. But as I’ve often said, the Obama administration boldly got away with things that Nixon could only dream of.
[Update a while later]
Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama’s “silent coup” against Trump.
And more thoughts from the Journal‘s editors:
Ms. Power’s job was diplomacy. Unmaskings are supposed to be rare, and if the mere ambassador to the U.N. could demand them, what privacy protection was the Obama White House really offering U.S. citizens? The House subpoenas should provide fascinating details about how often Ms. Power and her mates requested unmaskings, on which Trump officials, and with what justification. The public deserves to know given that unmasked details have been leaked to the press in violation of the law and privacy.
Meantime, we learned from Circa News last week of a declassified document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which excoriated the National Security Agency for an “institutional lack of candor.” The court explained that Obama officials had often violated U.S. privacy protections while looking at foreign intelligence but did not disclose these incidents until the waning days of Mr. Obama’s tenure.
So they spied, and lied.
[Late-morning update]
Andrew McCarthy is on fire today: The real collusion:
There is abundant cause for concern that the Obama administration tore down the wall between the missions of law-enforcement and foreign-intelligence, on one side, and partisan politics, on the other. The White House and its politicized security services wanted Hillary Clinton to become president, and they do not want to let Donald Trump be president.
There’s a collusion story here, but it’s got nothing to do with Russia.
Can we expand Mueller’s charter to look into that?
From A Former Drug Warrior
Michelle Malkin says it’s time to end the War on (Some) Drugs.
This really should be the conservative position. It’s a shame that she had to go through what she did with her daughter to come to it, though.