RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18033/president-privilege

A former spouse, a lawyer’s former client, and a penitent’s former priest can claim privilege — and so could a former member of Congress and a former judge. The relevant issue is whether the communication was privileged at the time it was made. If so, it should be an enduring privilege that encourages confidential communications during their incumbency.

According to The New York Times, this is what [the House’s lawyer] said: “The Constitution does draw a clear line between a president and an ex-president. An ex-president is somebody who rejoins the great unwashed” — by which he apparently means you and me, who never had any executive privilege.

The issue is an open one that will likely be decided by the Supreme Court. I doubt that justices who are now retired or intend someday to retire — and join the “unwashed” — would be thrilled if Congress were to subpoena their former law clerks to disclose their confidential discussions about decisions they wrote while they were still among the washed.

They [the January 6th Committee] should seek to have the courts rule first on the constitutional issue, and if Meadows then refuses to comply with a judicial order, they can seek criminal penalties. This chronology is especially required because Meadows has said that he would comply with court orders.

Seeking a court order first is also required by the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.

Finally, criminal indictments should never be used to determine what the law is. It should only be used against individuals who know that they are violating existing law that is already clear.

The Constitution provides no clear answer to whether a former president can claim executive privilege over communications that occurred while he was president. Both policy and analogy to other privileges would suggest an affirmative answer. A former spouse, a lawyer’s former client, and a penitent’s former priest can claim privilege — and so could a former member of Congress and a former judge. The relevant issue is whether the communication was privileged at the time it was made. If so, it should be an enduring privilege that encourages confidential communications during their incumbency.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/the_show_trial_taking_place_in_dc.html

Tucker Carlson was on fire Tuesday night, for he launched a scathing attack on the grotesque show trial taking place in the House of Representatives, ostensibly to expose the “truth” about the “insurrection” on January 6 but, in reality, to destroy political enemies and preempt Trump’s effort to regain the White House in 2024. To frame the attack, Tucker lit into Liz Cheney, and a more deserving target it’s hard to imagine.

The monologue opens with Tucker pointing out that, for unexplained reasons, Liz Cheney showed up in Manchester, New Hampshire, last month. Well, unexplained only if you don’t know that it’s the place people go when they’re investigating running for president.

To normal people, Liz Cheney’s constituency for a presidential run is a bit of a mystery. Trump supporters despise her and Democrats do too—although they’re perfectly happy to use her to attack Trump.

However, it seems that Cheney is raking in millions of dollars, so someone supports her. Tucker suggests that her supporters are political “dynamos” such as Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, and Jeb Bush. To Tucker, these are all neocons who live to get Americans involved in wars that kill and maim our sons and daughters without conferring any benefit on America. Looking back on the last 20 years, I must agree.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/the-latest-theories-of-criminally-prosecuting-donald-trump-remain-flimsy/

No, it is still not likely that Donald Trump can be indicted for January 6.

L ike Captain Ahab, the full-time Trump haters have fixated yet again on an idea for criminally prosecuting our 45th president. By “full-time Trump haters” I do not mean those of us who have remained consistently critical of Donald Trump, want him out of our politics, and have called for him to be held properly accountable, but rather the left-leaning Resistance and the former conservatives who have let the Never Trump slogan consume their entire political identity. Neither group can let Trump go, even for a little while, even at the cost of neglecting many of the other serious domestic and foreign issues facing the nation.

The obsessives have yet again been issuing flurries of “the walls are closing in” tweets and cable-news segments eagerly anticipating a criminal indictment of Trump. But tweets are no substitute for reading the law.

In a televised hearing on Monday, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was reviewing a set of text messages produced by White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, mainly detailing his communications on January 6 with people outside the Trump administration. The text messages underline the case for Trump’s political and moral responsibility for the January 6 Capitol riot. But where is the crime?

Liz Cheney, homing in on Trump’s failure during the critical hours to talk down the rioters or take more vigorous action to enforce the law, asked:

These texts leave no doubt: The White House knew exactly what was happening at the Capitol. Members of Congress, the press, and others wrote to Mark Meadows as the attack was under way. . . . Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s proceedings?

If it sounds as if Cheney was quoting or paraphrasing a legal standard, it’s because she was. A number of commentators, including Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, and Daily Beast political-investigations reporter Jose Pagiery, have suggested that Cheney was making a case for prosecuting Trump under 18 U.S.C. § 1505.

If so, that’s a very difficult charge to make stick. There are two problems: It’s unclear whether that charge even applies and, if it did, it’s unclear whether Trump did anything that could violate it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/denial-river-runs-through-left-don-feder/

What do the following have in common: tornadoes which wreaked havoc in the Midwest, the Smollett and Rittenhouse verdicts, the crime wave inundating our cities, chaos at the border and the highest inflation rate in 39 years? Each is relevant only if it serves the left’s worldview.

Biden says the twisters which devastated parts of four states are further evidence of what he calls the ‘climate crisis.” Tornadoes in the Midwest? What’s next, hurricanes in Louisiana, blizzards in North Dakota and a heat wave in July?

As her Kansas farmhouse was swept up in a dust cloud, Dorothy Gale was heard to remark: “Damn those Republicans for opposing the Green New Deal!”

Jussie Smollett concocted a hate crime story so preposterous that it strained credulity –white men in MAGA hats wandering around Chicago at 2 AM in the dead of winter looking for minorities to victimize.

But Biden, Harris and most of the left swallowed it to the last absurd detail. Last week, Smollett was convicted on five charges related to the hoax, including lying to the police.

When Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with fatally shooting two people and wounding a third in the course of a 2020 riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Biden said it was because of Trump’s alleged refusal to “disavow white supremacy.” At trial, Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all charges.

The difference? Rittenhouse was a white man with a gun protecting property and himself during a BLM riot, so he had to be guilty. Smollett is a gay, black actor, (and a friend of Maxine Waters), so his allegations had to be believable, no matter how fantastic.

A few days ago, Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s radical DA said there’s no crime crisis in the City of Cain and Able — no crisis of “crime,” “lawlessness” or “violence.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/word-games-and-fake-diversity-left-bruce-thornton/

Years ago at a block party in my old neighborhood, my next-door neighbor, a Mexican-American named Lawrence, introduced himself to a new resident, a white self-proclaimed activist lawyer. “No, no!” she scolded him. “Lorenzo!”

The chutzpah of a white woman telling a Mexican-American man how to say his own name still epitomizes for me the white elite Left’s obtuseness about their own patronizing arrogance, particularly when it comes to the ethnic “other” they supposedly champion. And it also reveals the way identity politics uses language to encode its reduction of complex, unique individuals into crude political caricatures that they label “diversity.”

I remembered this encounter last week when I read about a poll that found only 2% of Hispanics/Latinos used the clunky neologism “Latinx,” and 40% are offended by it.  Invented by mostly white, university educated “woke” activists and race-mongers, the word is a virtue-signaling totem for the Left’s exquisite sensitivity to how language allegedly reinforces sexism in order to further the nefarious designs of the “patriarchy” that, as the cliché goes, wants to keep women, especially women “of color,” “pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen.”

In the case of “Latinx,” the “woke” complaint is that “Latino” is a masculine noun, and so its use to describe people of both sexes is demeaning and exclusive of Latina women. But this pretext assumes that native speakers of Spanish, or any other European gendered dialect of Latin, will hear the word and immediately think of males and notice the exclusion of females.

Similarly, grammatical usage such as defaulting to the masculine when describing mixed-sex groups has been so common for so many centuries that most native speakers won’t even notice a word’s gender, any more than they think about biological males and females when they hear masculine or feminine nouns that have nothing to do with biological sex. It’s doubtful that a Spanish-speaker thinks the word for song, “canción,” which is feminine, has some meaningful connection to women or is exclusive of males.

The politico-linguistic dynamic behind “Latinx” was started by feminism over half a century ago in the case of the English suffix “-man” to describe a non sex specific activity or profession. Until feminist activists started complaining, most speakers of English would hear a word like “chairman,” “spokesman,” or “Congressman,” and would not notice its biological sex implications any more than they would other suffixes like “-ing” or “-ed.” Moreover, the same tenacity of usage, the power of linguistic habit that makes grammatical gender unexceptional, explains why words in English like “human” and “woman,” despite the efforts of feminist language commissars, are still in common use.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-and-on-and-on-11639523755?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The chair of the South African Medical Association, who helped alert the world to Covid’s Omicron variant, is still trying to persuade the British government not to panic about it. Dr. Angelique Coetzee writes this week in the Daily Mail:

As a general practitioner for more than 33 years, I am one of the foot soldiers who sees patients first. We clinicians deal day-to-day with real people, not statistical projections, and I can reassure you that the symptoms presenting in those with Omicron are very, very mild compared with those we see with the far more dangerous Delta variant…
In the part of South Africa where I work, there haven’t been many patients admitted to hospital with Omicron, and most have been treated at home, using anti-inflammatories, such as ibuprofen, and low doses of cortisone.
Bear in mind, too, that most of those who contract Omicron here are unvaccinated (only 26 per cent of South Africans are fully vaccinated). While this is certainly not an argument against vaccination — I cannot stress the importance of that enough — it’s reassuring to know that even unprotected bodies fight off this variant much more easily than Delta. Current data indicates that the majority of cases admitted to ICUs are unvaccinated people.

Meanwhile in Washington, government medical authorities are sounding especially fearful again. The Washington Post’s Lena Sun, Joel Achenbach, Laurie McGinley and Tyler Pager report today:

Top federal health officials warned in a briefing Tuesday morning that the omicron variant is rapidly spreading in the United States and could peak in a massive wave of infections as soon as January, according to new modeling from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.