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The Michael Cohen Raid The Mueller probe now stretches to include the Stormy Daniels payment.

Posted By on April 11th, 2018

The FBI raid Monday on lawyer Michael Cohen raises the political and legal stakes in the vast prosecutorial investigation into Donald J. Trump. The probe into allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia has careened into a dive into the dumpster of a payoff to a porn actress to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump. This is the way of special prosecutors, and Washington now seems headed toward a fight-to-the-end between the President and his enemies.

The press is reporting that Mr. Cohen is being investigated for possible bank fraud and campaign-finance violations in connection to his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford ) in October 2016. Mr. Cohen said he made the payment as a personal favor for his friend and client, Mr. Trump.

But if the payment was intended to silence the actress to help Mr. Trump win the election, then it could be considered a campaign contribution that exceeded the donation limit in 2016. As Bradley Smith notes nearby, proving such a crime would be difficult, and former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was acquitted in a similar case. But these days in politics anything can be criminalized.

The raid is especially notable, and troubling, for piercing the attorney-client relationship between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump. That is a serious step legally, and it typically requires significant evidence to justify. It would also require the approval at senior levels of the Justice Department. The warrant came at the request of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan on a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller, who could use whatever information the raid generates.

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“Firewalls” and “Taint Teams” Do Not Protect Fourth and Sixth Amendment Rights by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on April 11th, 2018

The Fourth and Sixth Amendments prohibit government officials from in any way intruding on the privacy of lawyer/client confidential rights of citizens.

The very fact that this material is seen or read by a government official constitutes a core violation. It would be the same if the government surreptitiously recorded a confession of a penitent to a priest, or a description of symptoms by a patient to a doctor, or a discussion of their sex life between a husband and wife.

The recourses for intrusions on the Fourth and Sixth Amendments are multifold: the victim of the intrusion can sue for damages; he or she can exclude it from use by the government in criminal or civil cases; or the victim can demand the material back. But none of these remedies undo the harm to privacy and confidentiality done to the citizen by the government’s intrusion into his private and confidential affairs.

Many TV pundits are telling viewers not to worry about the government’s intrusion into possible lawyer/client privileged communications between President Trump and his lawyer, since prosecutors will not get to see or use any privileged material. This is because prosecutors and FBI agents create firewalls and taint teams to preclude privileged information from being used against the client in a criminal case. But that analysis completely misses the point and ignores the distinction between the Fifth Amendment on the one hand, and the Fourth and Sixth Amendments on the other.

The Fifth Amendment is an exclusionary rule. By its terms, it prevents material obtained in violation of the privilege of self-incrimination from being used to incriminate a defendant – that is to convict him of a crime. But the Fourth and Sixth Amendments provide far broader protections: they prohibit government officials from in any way intruding on the privacy of lawyer/client confidential rights of citizens. In other words, if the government improperly seizes private or privileged material, the violation has already occurred, even if the government never uses the material from the person from whom it was seized.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy By Robert Curry

Posted By on April 10th, 2018

The American Left has made it a full-time job to cover for the Obama administration’s mishandling of our national security. This is only possible with the creation of an alternative reality that defies not only the facts but any semblance of common sense.

Do you remember the July 2008 New Yorker cover that portrayed then-senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama dressed in Muslim garb fist-bumping his wife Michelle, who is wearing an outfit reminiscent of the Black Panthers, in the Oval Office with an American flag burning in the fireplace?

Editor David Remnick explained the cover was intended as satire. “The fact is, it’s not a satire about Obama—it’s a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.” Always playing defense, Republicans immediately distanced themselves from any such “distortions.” Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) called the cover “totally inappropriate.” The erstwhile conservative blog Little Green Footballs joined in, actually taking up the Remnick line: “The cover is obviously a moonbat parody of what they think are right-wing ideas about their messiah.”

Despite the fact that Obama’s middle name is “Hussein,” that he spent his formative years in a Muslim country with a Muslim stepfather, that his book “Dreams From My Father” is much about a man with the same Muslim name as his and who was a Muslim, the possibility that Obama might have Muslim sympathies was ruled out of bounds. By the time of the New Yorker cover, entertaining that possibility became akin to a hate crime.

And it has stayed that way ever since. By and large, people who criticize Obama’s foreign policy from the right have been careful to avoid stepping on the Muslim landmine in order to avoid the accusations of “racism” and “Islamophobia” sure to follow.

But the Obama Administration’s relationship to the Islamic world defined that presidency. The results were tragic for the region and for American interests. Donald Trump is trying to fix the mess Obama left him, but these things are not going to be fixed overnight. In the meantime, let’s see Obama for what he is.

We have been told again and again that the crowning achievement of Obama’s foreign policy was the Iran deal. So let’s begin by considering it.

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Five Catastrophic Decisions By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 10th, 2018

1) The Obama administration’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to come into Syria ostensibly to stop the use of weapons of mass destruction. The latter did not happen, but after an over 40-year Russian hiatus in the Middle East, Putin has recalibrated the region, and Russia will be far harder to expel than it was to invite in. John Kerry did not get rid of WMD; he ensured that he got more of it.

2) The Ben Rhodes/John Kerry/Barack Obama Iran Deal. It was a disaster precisely because a) it was unneeded, given the ongoing strangulation of the Iranian economy due to tardy but finally tough sanctions, and b) it was embedded within so many side deals and payoffs, mostly stealthy, that it became a caricature, from nocturnal hostage ransom payments that helped fuel terrorists to whole areas of the Iran nuclear project exempt from spot inspections.

3) The FBI and DOJ blanket exemptions given to Clinton skullduggery over the Obama administration. For eight years, one or both of the Clintons cashed in and felt that they could run the family foundation as a rogue entity, play wink and nod quid pro quo with the reset Russians on commercial deals like Uranium One, set up an illegal server, and, when caught, destroy communications and electronic devices, encourage subordinates to mislead investigators, compromise the attorney general, warp the DNC to massage a primary and town-hall debate process, hire opposition researchers to smear a political opponent, drawing on paid-for Russian sources, and collude with obsequious media to direct its furor elsewhere.

4) The panicked appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. There was good evidence in Mueller’s past concerning the Bulger scandal and the anthrax scare that he was mostly incapable of self-reflection and prone to zealotry; and when the Comey gambit paid off and Mueller assembled his “dream team” of partisans, it was clear that mythical “collusion” was merely a useful key to open every imaginable door of inquiry to stymie a president — on the theory that threats of imprisonment and financial ruin are great ways to flip minor subordinates to say something, anything useful, and if one digs deeply enough, every American has something to hide. Mueller reversed his mandate: Assuming first that a citizen was guilty, his mission became finding any sort of crime to prove it.

5) Assassination chic. Once the Resistance encouraged as acceptable all types of pushback to Donald Trump, it became a nonstop race to the bottom to outdo one another in macabre crudity, as everyone from Kathy Griffin, Snoop Dog, and Madonna to a Shakespearean troupe, Johnny Depp, David Crosby, and Kamala Harris has gotten in on finding both overt and “cute” ways to suggest that the president might be decapitated, stabbed, shot, blown up, burned alive, or eliminated in an elevator. Is the new normal that it is okay for celebrities and politicians now to imagine out loud the death of the president, but that it was not acceptable in the past and easily will not be again in the future — and that the omnipresence of such assassination chic will have no effect on normalizing in the mind of a zealot such an actual scenario?

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Brown University Now Features ‘Safe Spaces for Men’ By Toni Airaksinen

Posted By on April 10th, 2018

Brown University costs $73,000 per year to attend.

The Brown University Health Services office now offers “safe spaces for men” to help them “unlearn toxic masculinity” and combat traditional notions of “what it means to be a man.”

Viewing masculinity as if it were a public health crisis, “Unlearning Toxic Masculinity” offers a three-pronged approach for helping male students recover: a weekly discussion group to unlearn “toxic masculine norms,” a biannual magazine, and a video series.

The crux of the programming revolves around Masculinity 101 Peer Education, a peer-to-peer weekly discussion group that convenes male students to talk about issues such as “Cultivating Empathy” and “Harm and Healing.”

Eight students have already been hired to facilitate these workshops, PJ Media has learned. According to the program description, the workshops vow to teach students what “healthier norms of masculinity can and should look like.”

Warns Brown University: “Modern society is quick to bestow unearned privilege on men … there is nothing in place to teach men — young men especially — how to avoid abusing that privilege or how to leverage it for good.”

Unlike programming at other schools, the Masculinity 101 Peer Education program notes that it is open to all students regardless of gender, and especially since its programming also is dedicated to destroying the male-female gender binary.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Ideology of Illegal Immigration By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 10th, 2018

Gang members next door and dead dogs dumped in your yard? Don’t complain, or you’ll be called racist.

Illegal immigration has become so deeply embedded for so long within contemporary power politics, demography, and cultural change, so charged with accusations of racism, nativism, and xenophobia, that we have forgotten its intrinsic contradictions.

We saw a glimpse of reality with the recent “caravan” of Central Americans. With a strong wink and nod from their Mexican hosts, the travelers assumed an intrinsic right to march northward into the United States. Had they done so, they would have confirmed the impression, advanced during the last administration, that the border is porous and that a sovereign United States and its citizenry have scant legal right to secure it.

How did we get to such a point of absurdity?

The ideology of illegal immigration rests on certain illogical assumptions that must not be questioned. Immigration exactly is one-way. But why exactly do we simply accept that without inquiry? What is it about a free-market, constitutional, transparent, and law-abiding America that draws in millions desperate to abandon their homes in otherwise naturally rich landscapes in Mexico and Central America?

In the absence of intellectual honesty about the need for political and economic reform in Latin America, mythologies can abound. Millions are desperate to enter a country antithetical to the protocols of their own. They are even more desperate to stay here — even as many mask that paradox by expressing ethnic and cultural chauvinism, along with anger at their hosts. Witness the signs, flags, and symbols of many open-borders, anti-immigration-enforcement rallies. Apparently, nations that create conditions that drive out their own can be the objects of romance, but only at a safe distance.

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Alan Dershowitz: Targeting Trump’s lawyer should worry us all

Posted By on April 10th, 2018

There is much speculation as to the significance of the search of the offices and hotel room of President Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen. To obtain a search warrant, prosecutors must demonstrate to a judge that they have probable cause to believe that the premises to be searched contain evidence of crime. They must also specify the area to be searched, the items to be seized and, in searches of computers, the word searches to be used.

At least that’s the constitutional requirement in theory, especially where the Sixth Amendment right to counsel is involved, in addition to the general Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches. Yet, in practice, judges often give the FBI considerable latitude, relying on the “firewalls” and “taint teams” they set up to protect the subject of the search from violation of his or her constitutional rights.

But the firewalls and taint teams are comprised of government agents who themselves may not be entitled to read or review many of the items seized. It is an imperfect protection of important constitutional rights. That’s why Justice Department officials must be careful to limit the searching of lawyers’ offices to compelling cases involving serious crimes. We don’t know at this point what the prosecutors are looking for but, if it relates to payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels, that would not seem to justify so potentially intrusive a search of Cohen’s confidential lawyer-client files.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Fear and Loathing at DC’s ‘Israel Lobby’ Conference Andrew Harrod

Posted By on April 10th, 2018

This conference was really nuts.

http://newenglishreview.com/blog_direct_link.cfm?blog_id=67285

“What stops Israel from launching a similar final solution to the Palestinian people,” asked an audience member while recalling Islamic State genocide at Washington, DC’s recent “Israel Lobby and American Policy” conference (videos and transcripts). Meanwhile, a 9/11 Truther asked about the “possibilities of a 9/11 Mossad op-type strike to propel us into Iran like it did in Iraq.” These conspiratorial questions—fielded by conference organizer Delinda Hanley, editor of the anti-Israel Washington Report on Middle East Affairs—exemplified the fanatical bigotry that drew about 180 people to the National Press Club’s main hall.

Accordingly, anti-Israel conspiracy theorist and William & Mary University Professor Lawrence Wilkerson regurgitated the oft refuted calumny that Israeli aircraft deliberately attacked the U.S.S. Liberty during the 1967 Six Day War, and that President Lyndon Johnson “knew the gory details.” Wilkerson described Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman as “a latent version of Joseph Stalin” or an “agent of Vladimir Putin.” Elsewhere, he claimed that Iran’s Jewish population “lives in Iran in reasonable peace.”

Southern Illinois University-Carbondale Professor Virginia Tilley delivered an equally vitriolic presentation denouncing Israeli “apartheid.” She asserted that a supposed Israeli opposition to sexual relations between Arabs and Jews, or “racial mixing,” precluded any future Palestinian state. “When you have people mixing, they make babies,” she proclaimed, a situation that creates the “death-knell for any racial state.”

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How Our Politicians Measure Up on Equal Pay Day By Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on April 10th, 2018

It’s Equal Pay Day – an opportunity for activists to raise awareness about the perceived pay gap between America’s working men and women. It’s also an opportunity for politicians to attack gender bias in private companies, as they do throughout the year.

In October, we published our OpenTheBooks Oversight Report – Federal and State Government’s Gender Hiring Gap Oversight Report analyzing payrolls from federal agencies, Congress, the White House, and government positions at the state and local levels. We found it’s still a man’s world in government. Across the board, we found that men significantly outnumber women in the top-paid government positions.

However, it’s important to note that we didn’t find any evidence that men and women in the same position were paid differently – that would be illegal. We didn’t find a gender pay gap, but a gender hiring gap, meaning men far outnumber women in highly compensated executive positions.

For example, in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio issues Equal Pay Day proclamations, and, last year, made quite a spectacle hugging the “Fearless Girl” statute that faces the Charging Bull on Wall Street. Yet, 197 out of the 200 top-paid New York City workers are men. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s controlled payroll has just 12 females out of the top 100 most highly compensated city employees.

Here’s how some members of Congress are doing on their own executive-controlled payrolls:

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A Quiet Place – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on April 10th, 2018

Horror films usually fall into two categories: those that are filled with monsters that threaten us from the outside, and those that are full of psychological resonance and an important interior logic. In the second category belong films by Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick – master manipulators of the form. John Krasinski’s new box office hit belongs squarely in the realm of the arbitrary imposition of an alien force on a defenseless population. A Quiet Place concerns a family with three children trying to survive in a state with blind predators who resemble aliens or dinosaurs and respond only to sound, instantly devouring what they hear and conquer. The family must use sign language to communicate and clearly exist in a state of perpetual fear.

The withholding of conversation, television, music, telephone is an interesting concept for contemporary torture but it’s mitigated by a soundtrack that works against that fundamental plot point. The audience hears constant music and special effects – robbing us of the ability to empathize with the characters’ predicament. Without spoiling the most significant moments, I can tell you that the movie soon becomes a veritable pile-on of unbelievable occurrences. Emily Blunt (Mrs Krasinski) gives a sensitive portrayal of the pregnant mother but even she cannot rescue the suspension of disbelief for a scene in which she punctures her bare foot on a sharp nail, goes into labor, sees the creature enter her basement space, delivers a baby who cries and finds herself in a flooded zone with the creature inches away from the newborn , yet somehow they will be around for the rest of the movie.

This is lazy screenwriting since we have watched the creature’s M.O. several times before and there’s no rhyme or reason for its behavior here. Other scenes follow with similar disregard for common sense on the part of the family members. In general, it’s much too easy to instill fear where children are involved – it’s an amateur’s way of raising your heartbeat without earning that reward. A Quiet Place is a film for those who are not aficionados of the art of horror, but those who are content to take their reaction cues from the sound effects acting as the puppeteer. I recommend watching any of the masters available on Netflix or TCM or re-reading the stories of Edgar Allan Poe – preferably OUT LOUD.