RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/an-almost-runaway-prosecutor-decides-to-follow/91169/

“What Would Happen If Trump Refused to Leave Office?” That question is bruited in a headline the Atlantic issued a few months back. It’s been echoing around the Democratic press for months. The answer is that it would be an unsustainable constitutional affront. And what would happen were a United States federal prosecutor to refuse to leave office? We came awfully close to finding out this weekend.

The would-be runaway prosecutor was the United States attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey Berman. He was appointed in 2018 by the judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. They acted under Section 546 of Title 28 of the United States Code. In certain circumstances, it allows a federal district court to appoint a U.S. attorney to serve “until the vacancy is filled.”

Mr. Berman seemed to think that language meant he could stay in his post until the Senate confirmed a replacement, which could have run past the election. Mr. Berman also seemed to think the president’s constitutional power of removal applies only to prosecutors whom the president has appointed and the Senate confirmed. Mr. Berman reckoned prosecutors appointed by court may be removed only by the court.

He faced a problem, though. It turns out that when President Carter was in office, his Justice Department took a look at that precise question. It issued an opinion memorandum by Assistant Attorney General John Harmon. Its subject was “Removal of Court-Appointed U.S. Attorney.” It found that a court-appointed federal attorney could be removed only by the court — unless Congress enacted a law saying otherwise.

And guess what? Congress did enact precisely such a law, Title 28’s Section 541. That section says: “Each United States attorney is subject to removal by the President.” It establishes no exceptions. The Carter-era memo endorsed the point, citing a federal court ruling in New York holding that the law “clearly authorizes the executive to remove any United States Attorney, regardless of the nature of his appointment.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/president-trump-fires-us-attorney-geoffrey-berman/

In a Friday night fray, AG Barr announced that Geoffrey Berman had “stepped down.” When Berman defiantly refused to go, Trump canned him.

Well, we don’t call it the Sovereign District of New York for nothin’ …

There is tumult in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where I proudly spent nearly 20 years as a prosecutor. In a nutshell, after the two men met in Manhattan on Friday, Attorney General Bill Barr announced that evening that SDNY U.S. Attorney Geoff Berman was stepping down. Later during the night, Berman issued a statement essentially saying, “Like hell I am!”

Inevitably, President Trump fired Berman on Saturday afternoon, as announced by Barr. That should end the legal dispute over the job, though it may not. And the controversy has only just begun. It would seem strange to accuse the AG of interfering in the work of the Department he is sworn to run; yet, Democrats and the media darkly accuse Barr of impeding SDNY investigations that could negatively impact the president’s reelection bid. That claim seems overwrought, for reasons we’ll come to.

Still, the sudden removal of Berman just four months before the election raises questions. Practically speaking, there is no way the president’s nominee to replace Berman, current SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, would be confirmed before Election Day. There was, moreover, a significant issue regarding the legal eligibility of the prosecutor whom Barr initially named as Berman’s “acting” replacement — Craig Carpentino, currently the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey (DNJ). Wisely rethinking that plan, the AG announced on Saturday that the SDNY would be run by Berman’s deputy, Audrey Strauss, until the Senate confirms a new U.S. Attorney.

The SDNY has a richly deserved reputation for independence from Main Justice in Washington. The office has always had a vigorous public-corruption unit, and boasts other units (major crimes, securities fraud, even occasionally organized crime) that sometimes target and sometimes stumble upon officials great and small, tied to both political parties. These characters are zealously prosecuted, without regard to whether their names are followed by “R.” or “D.” (By the way, corruption is the most bipartisan of political enterprises, and those enmeshed in it tend to see their party affiliation as more a racket than an indicator of allegiance or ideology.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dept-of-coronavirus-good-news-11592606957?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Alarming headlines about surging Covid-19 cases in some states dominated the news this week, but there was some good news: A University of Oxford drug trial found that a low-cost steroid can substantially reduce deaths in severely ill patients. As results from more studies roll in this summer, improved treatments could blunt the impact of any second wave.

The randomized trial compared 2,100 hospitalized patients who received the steroid dexamethasone at low-to-moderate doses for 10 days with 4,300 controls receiving standard hospital care. Dexamethasone reduced fatalities among patients receiving supplemental oxygen by 20% and by a third among those on mechanical ventilators. The drug had no impact on less sick patients.

Oxford researchers estimated that the drug could have prevented 5,000 deaths in the United Kingdom had doctors used it to treat the sickest patients at the outset of the pandemic. “For less than £50 (US$63), you can treat eight patients and save one life,” said Oxford epidemiologist Martin Landray. Dexamethasone is the first drug shown in a large clinical trial to significantly reduce Covid deaths among the severely ill. Another trial last month found that Gilead’s antiviral drug remdesivir reduced the duration of hospitalization on average to 11 days from 15 but did not reduce deaths.

Remdesivir could help make more hospital beds available in hot spots, but antivirals probably won’t be able to save severely ill patients experiencing a hyperactive immune response known as “cytokine storms.” Dexamethasone and other anti-inflammatory drugs that are being studied in Covid patients can help tamp down the immune system.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/brooks-shooting-the-political-prosecutor-caves-in-to-the-mob/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Capital murder charges conform to the slanderous anti-cop narrative, not the facts in this case.

If you broadcast that you are willing to be bullied, then you invite the mob to rule. When the mob rules, you get brass-knuckles politics, not justice.

You get a hyper-political county prosecutor, under the corruption microscope as he desperately seeks reelection, filing trumped-up, mob-driven charges before the actual investigators have a chance to finish their work.

You get a capital murder charge against a police officer who returned fire after being shot at with a taser by a fleeing suspect.

A taser that the fleeing suspect, a criminal with a violent history, stole from the police while they attempted to arrest him on a well-founded charge.

A taser being the very weapon that the same prosecutor, just days earlier, had deemed a deadly weapon under Georgia State law. But of course, that was then, when the same prosecutor was addressing the use of tasers by police. This is now, when a criminal used a stolen taser on police. In mob-stricken Atlanta, the prosecutor says the latter use of deadly force is no threat at all.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/06/16/why-washington-dc-is-i

Local politicians in Washington, D.C. claim a $1.5 billion budget deficit due to the coronavirus pandemic. So, they’re lobbying Congress for a two-year $3.15 billion bailout.

But the city’s financial woes aren’t stopping nearly 8,000 city government employees – including the mayor and city council – from bringing home six-figure salaries and higher.

Washington’s leaders try and fail each year in their application for statehood, but they’re already out-earning their state counterparts.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that Mayor Muriel Bowser earned $220,000 last year – an amount exceeding every governor of the 50 states ($202,000).

What’s more, DC city councilmembers ($141,282) out-earned members of every state legislature – including New York ($130,000). DC city council chairman Philip Mendelson ($210,000) out-earned all members of Congress except for Speaker Nancy Pelosi ($223,500).

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/corporations-can-also-undermine-freedom/

Libertarians have a habit of acting as if the impartial application of rights inevitably yields a morally neutral outcome. Here is Reason’s Stephanie Slade — who I’m probably in philosophical agreement with on most issues — commenting on this week’s demonetization of the Federalist by Google:

Today conservatives are up in arms because Google made a business decision that reflects its moral convictions because they, they conservatives, find those convictions misguided or abhorrent. What am I missing here?

Slade is right that Google can do what it wants. But she misses the fact that marketplace decisions can also be fundamentally illiberal and abhorrent, and that it’s completely reasonable for people to object to them — even if they don’t believe that tech companies should be compelled by the state to change their behavior.

If a bunch of Americans were “up in arms” over an example of industry-wide racism, the modern libertarian’s first instinct wouldn’t be to ask, “why is everyone so mad about these totally legitimate business decisions that reflect the moral convictions of these companies?” Rather, it would be to note that speaking up is the best way to precipitate changes in the marketplace, and that racism, even if it is protected, is antithetical to the ideals of a free nation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16121/racism-skin-color

We should not allow ourselves to fall into the crude trap of this debilitating racialization.

The first problem is collective responsibility; the idea that responsibility for the crimes of a few extends to all members of a group, both criminals and victims…. As Larry Elder, an American radio host, author and attorney, recently noted: “Reparations are the extraction of money from those who were never slave owners to be given to those who were never slaves.”

The second problem is responsibility through the generations: the idea that the passage of time does not change anything. Children who are not yet born, are, in advance, responsible for the crimes and abuses of their ancestors — and all the ancestors of the “group” to which they belong.

Reducing human beings to their skin color marks the supreme defeat in humanistic and political thought.

The political left in the United States now seems to embrace the most openly racist ideas perhaps since German National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Their racist view, according to which the color of skin is the measure of all reality, truth, hierarchy and moral values, marks a startling regression.

During recent riots, shop fronts and synagogues in the United States were defaced with antisemitic slogans. It is argued in vain that these threats should not be exaggerated; a protester in New York City seemed comfortable openly declaring on Fox News that he intended to lead his peers, laden with cheap gasoline, to set fire to a neighborhood, the “Diamond District,” where many Jews are known to work.

The doctrine that reduces human beings to the color of their skin does not befit any society, especially a multiracial one.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-covid-models-get-wrong-11592435169?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Here we go again. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has issued a new forecast that Covid-19 fatalities would spike over the summer in states that have moved faster to reopen. Cue the media drumbeat for another lockdown. Maybe someone should first explain why the models were wrong about so much the last time.

Take New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo locked down the state in mid-March based on dire warnings. His public health experts projected the state would need as many as 140,000 hospital beds and 40,000 intensive care units—two to three times more regular hospital beds and 10 times more ICU beds than were available. The UW model forecast that 49,000 regular beds and 8,000 ICU beds would be needed at the peak.

New York was hit hard, but Covid-19 hospital bed utilization in New York peaked at 18,825 and 5,225 for ICUs in mid-April. Even in New York City, hospital utilization never exceeded 85% of capacity and 89% for ICUs. Government-run hospitals in low-income neighborhoods with the most cases were unprepared, but they were ill-managed before the pandemic.

New York was the country’s frontline in the coronavirus attack, and caution was needed in the early days because so little was known about the virus. The original UW model, which was based on the experiences in Italy and Wuhan, assumed that strict lockdowns would curb infections, reduce hospitalizations and lower deaths faster than they actually did in the Northeast.

Asked last month about when fatalities and hospitalizations would meet state thresholds for reopening, Mr. Cuomo responded: “All the early national experts, ‘Here’s my projection model.’ . . . They were all wrong. They were all wrong. . . . There are a lot of variables. I understand that. We didn’t know what the social distancing would actually amount to. I get it, but we were all wrong.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/17/corporate-americas-strategy-of-mob-appeasement-will-destroy-it-just-as-it-always-has/

Twenty-six years ago, Morgan Stanley hired Marilyn Booker as their first diversity director, charged with overseeing corporate efforts from the firm’s New York City headquarters, a 685-foot, glass, Times Square skyscraper. Ten years ago, Booker left that post to work in their financial wealth management division. Seven months ago, Booker was fired.

But that was before video aired of George Floyd’s death, and spreading, national protests escalated into riots, violence, church burning, monument defacing, and occupations. How quickly things change. Now Booker is leading a group of black women in suing the company that employed her for a quarter-century, charging that the firm systematically discriminates against black employees.

The suit comes after a notably active week for the investment bank’s activism. Since Black Lives Matter blasted back into our Alzheimer’s-addled news cycle, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, James Gorman, committed $25 million to a new internal “diversity” effort, sent $5 million to the NAACP, promoted two black women, and sent an email about it all to staff. For his efforts, he was personally named in Booker’s lawsuit.

But Morgan Stanley is not uniquely stupid for empowering an activist whose sole job was to call them racists. For decades, corporate America has launched similar efforts in the vain hope that money, press releases, and choice divestments could virtue-signal them out of the mob’s cross-hairs and even hurt their competitors. None of it saves them. On the contrary, moves to embrace the mob have placed corporations more clearly in their sights than they were before.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/coronavirus-arizona-reopening-media-distort-numbers/

Yes, they’re up, but the media is rushing to deem the state’s reopening a catastrophe.

 A rizona is the latest focus of the reopening debate, with national headlines about the state heading for a COVID disaster.

The state’s positivity rate — the percentage of tests that are positive — and hospitalizations are up, key metrics that are more meaningful than simply having more confirmed cases (which can be simply a function of more testing).

There’s no doubt that there’s increased community spread in Arizona, a trend that bears watching. But the rush to push the state into shutting down and deem it a cautionary tale of the perils of reopening is simplistic at best and skips over details crucial to understanding Arizona’s true situation.

“We’ve been pretty clear to everyone that we don’t think Arizona’s immune to COVID-19,” says an Arizona official. “We know that we will see cases just like we had elsewhere in the country.”

Arizona hasn’t been particularly hard hit by COVID. It sits between Indiana and Tennessee in total cases, at about 39,000.

On a per capita basis, it’s roughly in the same place as neighboring states. It has 538 confirmed cases per 100,000, while Colorado has 511, New Mexico has 474, and Utah 470. Colorado and New Mexico have slightly more deaths per 100,000.