RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The title of this essay comes from Stanley Kramer’s 1963 mad-cap comedy. With his dying words Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) mentions a stash of loot buried under the “Big W.” The movie is about a bunch of crazies’ search for the money, reminding one of today’s political scene and the race for the Presidency.

We are not living a Hollywood film; but an alien from another planet would be excused for laughing. The ridiculousness of what is being said and done justifies a belly laugh. Writing recently in City Journal, Heather MacDonald noted: “Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatic, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. ‘The university would rather see us dead than divest,’ said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X.” Yascha Mounk, an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, wrote in a recent issue of The Spectator of some “absurdist moments” at Columbia. Student protesters demanded the university deliver food and drink to them: “When a surprised journalist asked why the university should have such an obligation towards people engaged in blatantly illegal activity, she insisted they had a moral right to ‘basic humanitarian aid.’”

Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, quoted the Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawaii, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.” Really? Do the citizens of Ireland, Puerto Rico and Hawaii know they are colonized? Who besides Haitians and Koreans have colonized Haiti and Korea in recent years? And Mr. Boot asks: “What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was the name used by some indigenous groups for Central and North America.” Do wizards at Columbia expect descendants of settlers to abandon the farms, towns and cities they and their ancestors have now lived on and in – in some cases for 400 years – so progeny of those long dead can occupy them?

More than seven million illegal (sorry, undocumented) migrants have crossed the southern border since Biden took office, roughly triple the number under President Trump. But this is not a crisis, according to the Biden White House. It is a “challenge,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2024/05/15/cohen-testimony-cross-x-n4929037

Even after five weeks, the Trump bookkeeping case in Manhattan is a “Potemkin Village,” according to law professor Jonathan Turley. That means it has all the appearance of being real, but upon closer inspection, there’s no there there. Indeed, the indictment of former President Donald Trump on 34 counts of bookkeeping errors, statute-expired misdemeanors that have been miraculously spun into a series of felonies, is the Seinfeld of criminal cases. But a jury could still find him guilty. “It’s Trump,” Manhattan jurors could say to themselves. “Of course, Cheeto-man must be guilty of something.” 

But after the prosecutors told Judge Juan Merchan that their case-in-chief was wrapped, though not officially rested yet, after Michael Cohen’s direct examination on Tuesday, there’s still confusion over what crimes Trump is alleged to have committed. It’s not a good look for the prosecutors and it’s disqualifying for a judge to allow this farce. If wizened legal minds can’t figure out the game prosecutors are playing, then what is the jury supposed to do with this smoke-and-mirrors monstrosity?

The running theory is that “election denier” District Attorney Alvin Bragg believes that Donald Trump stole the election from Hillary Clinton, and, to further that aim, paid lawyer fees to Michael Cohen who carried out the task of getting nondisclosure agreements from people telling bad stories and paying them to keep quiet. That part of the story isn’t illegal. What prosecutors allege is Trump knew that by putting these in the books as lawyer fees, he was committing a federal campaign finance violation. 

At least that’s what we think is going on. We’re left to wonder because the conspiracy they’ve told the jury they’ll reveal to prove fraudulent intent isn’t charged. Indeed, the case so far has shown that Trump had a hands-off policy on money issues, letting his CFO handle all of it. The case is a teetering Jenga-like mess with a sexy mattress actress and provable liar thrown in for background color. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20639/televise-trump-trials

The result of making us rely on partisan secondary sources rather than our own direct observations is inevitable distrust in the justice system. If “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” lack of visibility is a major source of distrust.

The framers of the Constitution intended all judicial proceedings to be public – no secret trials. At the time of the framing, public meant open to print journalists. Today, public means audio and video publication.

The New York trial of Trump is a national scandal. There is no real crime. The judge has allowed testimony that is highly prejudicial and irrelevant. He has made numerous unfair rulings, of which the prosecution has taken advantage. The public has the right to see this abuse… so that we all can judge for ourselves and not allow possibly biased reporters to judge for us.

If you were flipping between CNN and Fox News following the cross-examination of Stormy Daniels in the New York criminal case against former President Donald Trump, you would have had the impression that the CNN commentator, who professed to be reporting what happened in the courtroom, described a completely different event from what the Fox News reporter, who was also in the courtroom, described. It was as if they had seen two different witnesses and two different lawyers.

The CNN commentator reported that Daniels had done a great job holding up against the incompetent cross-examination of Trump’s lawyer. The Fox News commentator reported that the extraordinarily effective Trump lawyer had totally destroyed Daniels’ credibility. Who were you to believe? The CNN commentator was an experienced lawyer who was purporting to describe accurately what had happened without bias or subjectivity. The Fox News commentator was a former judge and prosecutor with vast experience, who also claimed to be describing the cross-examination without bias. Neither of the commentators even pretended to paint a gray picture. One was starkly black, the other unambiguously white. No nuance in either account.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-must-the-jury-be-thinking-about-why-trump-is-on-trial/

With former president Trump’s criminal trial now in its fourth week of testimony, I wonder what the Manhattan jury must be thinking about the resources the elected Democratic district attorney is devoting to it.

The majority of crime goes unreported. Of that which is reported, the number of crime cases that are “solved” — what police call the “clearance rate” — is alarmingly low. That is especially the case in Manhattan. Last week, the Manhattan Institute’s Tim Rosenberger noted in the City Journal that less than three in ten cases (29.8 percent) are cleared.

In New York City in 2022 (the last year for which there are complete annual stats), there were over 156,000 arrests. A little less than half of them, about 72,000, were felony arrests — nearly 29,000 categorized as violent felonies. All of these arrests resulted in less than 12,000 indictments. More disturbing, still, is the bottom line: Those 156,000 arrests yielded a grand total of just 4,375 prison sentences — i.e., sentences of incarceration were imposed in less than 3 percent of arrest cases.

As you think about that, bear in mind that many attacks that normal people would consider violent are deemed non-violent in New York if no serious injuries result. Consequently, many forcible attacks that result in arrests are charged by prosecutors as misdemeanor assaults. The Manhattan Institute’s Hannah Meyers points out on X/Twitter that many misdemeanor assault cases are “disposed” by simply being dismissed: Last year, the dismissal rate in New York City was 66 percent, having surged from 45 percent a decade ago.

Meyers further reports that recidivism is at its highest level in seven years — a fact acknowledged by NYPD Crime Control Strategies Chief Michael Lipetri, correcting false claims of improvement by public advocate and gubernatorial hopeful Jumaane Williams, one of the city’s many progressive champions of criminal-justice “reform.” An extraordinary amount of crime is committed by repeat offenders, who are on the streets rather than behind bars because of Democratic-dominated New York’s hostility to prosecution and imprisonment.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/riot-tactics-redux

The City of Seattle has long been a laboratory for the radical Left. Activists experiment with concepts, language, techniques, and policies that eventually appear in other cities. For this reason, Seattle law enforcement often gets early insight into the evolving tactics of left-wing street protesters. The city’s officers have had decades of experience dealing with Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and anarchist movements, which culminated in the George Floyd riots of 2020.

To understand the latest chaos at American universities, I spoke with Christopher Young, who served as an officer and detective for the Seattle Police Department, including working undercover for a long stretch during the season of George Floyd. Young has since retired and has greater liberty to speak about the current campus unrest and how police departments should respond.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Christopher Rufo: I sense that 2024 might play out as a variation on the theme of 2020, with dramatic political and civil unrest. From a law-enforcement perspective, what has changed?

Christopher Young: The activists are not stupid. They learned a lot during the George Floyd riots. I think the most effective lesson they learned was to pathologize safe and effective riot-control tactics. They say that it’s a “war crime” to use tear gas, but they never say that the cops shouldn’t have riot batons. The reason is that they want to provoke the cops into hitting somebody with a baton, which looks bad on camera.

I worked undercover during the George Floyd riots. I’ve been gassed hundreds of times, which is scary and unpleasant. But it’s better than getting hit with a stick or shot with pepper balls.

Rufo: What is the attitude in police departments in response to the current pro-Hamas campus unrest?

Young: For the most part, the university police can’t really remove the protesters. So, they have to get the city to do it, but the cities are not eager to step in because there’s no upside for them. The university administrations give the protesters an inch, and the protestors take a mile. Then they want the city to come in and deal with the consequences. It’s putting the municipal police departments in an impossible situation, where they’re going to get hit with litigation for routine arrests: “You put the cuffs on too tight. You didn’t read their rights soon enough.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lawyer-cohen-testifies-about-covertly-recording-client-trump/

In Manhattan criminal court today, Michael Cohen testified about a recording the jury had already heard in the criminal trial of former president Donald Trump. It was a recording of a conversation between Cohen and Trump on September 6, 2016 (about two months before Election Day). At the time, Cohen was a lawyer working for Trump and the Trump organization. (He has since been disbarred following his sundry convictions for perjury and fraud.)

It is ethically dicey, to say the least, for a lawyer secretly to record a client. An attorney has a duty of fealty to the client — one that continues even after the representation ends. It would obviously be preferable for a lawyer to inform his client that he is recording their conversation; for such recording to be proper, with or without notice given to the client, the recording would have to be in the service of the client’s interests — the legitimate purpose of the attorney–client relationship. It could not be done to undermine the client, such as to have something to hold over the client.

Cohen has testified that Trump was unaware he was being recorded on Cohen’s iPhone as Cohen sat across from him. In the conversation, they discussed the need for Trump to reimburse David Pecker, then the CEO of American Media Inc., after AMI (which then owned the National Enquirer) had laid out $150,000 for the exclusive rights to Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story about a 2006 affair with Trump.

Cohen claims that he made the recording to keep Pecker “loyal” to Trump by easing his mind that Trump did plan to reimburse him. In the accounts I’ve read of today’s testimony, it’s not clear to me that Cohen ever played the recording for Pecker, just that he now says that’s why he recorded it. It seems to me at least equally likely that Cohen wanted some protection for himself in case Trump later tried to stiff him — i.e., that Cohen, a highly self-interested operator, recorded the conversation for his own benefit, not for Pecker’s and certainly not for Trump’s.

This demonstrates in small compass the weirdness of this case.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/09/coalition-of-22-state-ags-call-on-biden-to-reject-treaty-drastically-expanding-who-authority/

A coalition of 22 state attorneys general have sent a letter to Joe Biden voicing their opposition to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) proposed pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).

Attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia, led by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, raised concerns that the proposed agreement threatens U.S. sovereignty by giving the WHO “unprecedented and unconstitutional powers over the people of the United States.”

Critics say that the proposed “pandemic accord” and IHR amendments would give the WHO sweeping new powers over national governments and public health authorities in the event of a new pandemic, and would help set up a global system of “digital health passports.”

In a press release Wednesday, Knudsen asserted that the proposed amendments would give the organization “authority over United States public health policy after failing to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its lies during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

https://nypost.com/2024/05/12/opinion/this-may-be-the-week-alvin-braggs-case-against-trump-falls-apart/

Even for those of us who have long been critics of the “hush money” case against Donald Trump and its dubious legal theory, it has been surprising to see that the prosecutors had no more evidence than we previously knew about.

The assumption was that no rational prosecutor would base a major criminal case almost entirely on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who was recently denounced by a judge as a serial perjurer peddling “perverse” theories in court.

The calculus of Alvin Bragg is now obvious. He is counting on the jury convicting Trump regardless of the evidence.

Which is also why Bragg likely fears that the judge, not the jury, will decide the case. After the government closes its evidence this week, the defense will move for a direct verdict by the judge on the basis that the evidence is insufficient to sustain a conviction.

Many of us agree with that assessment. After three weeks of testimony, there is still confusion on what crime Trump allegedly committed.

Bragg has vaguely referred to the labelling of payments to Stormy Daniels as “legal expenses” as a fraud committed to steal the election.

However, the election was over when those denotations were made.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/13/the-fall-of-the-house-of-presidential-persecutions/

None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people.

These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential candidate in lieu of opposing him in transparent elections.

As such, the current lawfare joins the Mueller investigation of the Russian-collusion hoax. It is a continuation of the laptop disinformation caper and the “51 intelligence authorities” who lied about its Russian origins. It logically follows from the two impeachments, the Senate trial of Trump as a private citizen, and states’ efforts to remove him from their ballots.

The E. Jean Carroll case, the Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis local and state trials, and the Smith federal indictment share various embarrassments.

Suspension of statutes of limitations: Carroll and Bragg could only go to court through the legal gymnastics of enlisting sympathetic judges and legislators to change or amend the law to suspend the statute of limitations as a veritable bill of attainder to go after Trump.

Violations of the Bill of Rights: In the Bragg case, Judge Merchan’s selective and asymmetrical gag order likely violates the First Amendment (prohibiting “abridging the freedom of speech”). Bragg violated the Sixth Amendment by denying Trump the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation”. Judge Engoron, in the juryless James case, violated the Eighth Amendment (“nor excessive fines imposed”) in assessing Donald Trump an unheard of $354 million fine for supposedly overstating the value of real estate collateral for loans, while violating the Sixth Amendment as well (“the accused shall enjoy the right … to trial by an impartial jury”). The FBI likely violated the Fourth Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”) by raiding Trump’s private residence, seizing his papers and effects (many of them private), and then lying about its own shenanigans of rearranging the seized classified files to incriminate Trump.

The invention of crimes: The indictments of Bragg, James, Willis, and Smith had no prior precedents. These cases will likely never be seen again. Bragg bootstrapped a federal campaign violation allegation onto a state crime. Yet still, he has never explained exactly how Trump violated any particular law.