This is what every Trump voter voted for. Boy are Trump voters evil idiots.
Friday, December 20, 2024
Thursday, December 19, 2024
Appeals Court Disqualifies Fani Willis From Prosecuting Georgia Trump Case
Appeals Court Disqualifies Fani Willis From Prosecuting Georgia Trump Case
“The panel overruled the trial judge, who had allowed Fani T. Willis to keep the case despite a romantic relationship that defendants said created a conflict of interest.
Georgia’s Court of Appeals on Thursday disqualified the Atlanta prosecutor who brought an election interference case against President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies, a surprise move that threw the entire case into disarray.
In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel reversed the decision of the trial judge, who in March allowed Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., to keep the case, despite revelations about a romantic relationship she had with the lawyer whom she hired to manage the prosecution.
All three of the appeals judges were appointed by Republicans. Ms. Willis’s office swiftly filed court papers indicating that it would appeal the decision to the Georgia Supreme Court, which is also dominated by Republican-appointed judges.
If the lower court’s decision stands, it could doom the case, which is the last active criminal prosecution involving charges against Mr. Trump. The Department of Justice recently moved to dismiss two criminal cases against the president-elect since it has a policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, and sentencing has been delayed in another.
In the Georgia case, Mr. Trump and 14 of his allies are charged with conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Judge Scott McAfee, the trial court judge, had rejected a defense claim that Ms. Willis’s relationship with the lawyer she hired had given her a financial stake in the case. But he found that the relationship had raised “a significant appearance of impropriety” that needed to be addressed, and he effectively forced Ms. Willis to dismiss the lawyer, Nathan J. Wade.
The appeals panel’s majority decision, written by Judge Trenton Brown, said that Judge McAfee’s decision “did not cure the already existing appearance of impropriety.”
The ruling came as a surprise, in part because Judge McAfee has a conservative record and was originally appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican. In a dissent, Judge Benjamin A. Land of the Court of Appeals, another Kemp appointee, wrote that he was “particularly troubled by the fact that the majority has taken what has long been a discretionary decision for the trial court to make and converted it to something else entirely.”
“If this Court was the trier of fact and had the discretion to choose a remedy based on our own observations, assessment of the credibility of the witnesses, and weighing of the evidence,” Judge Land continued, “then perhaps we would be justified in reaching the result declared by the majority.” He added: “But we are not trial judges, and we lack that authority.”
The Trump camp celebrated the win. In a statement, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said: “In granting President Trump an overwhelming mandate, the American people have demanded an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all the witch hunts against him.”
Steve Sadow, Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer in the Georgia case, said “as the court rightfully noted, only the remedy of disqualification will suffice to restore public confidence.”
“This decision puts an end to a politically motivated persecution of the next president of the United States,” he added.
Ms. Willis’s office did not comment beyond its appeal.
Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat, began her investigation of Mr. Trump and his allies nearly four years ago, but her case could be effectively dead if her office is not able to preserve its hold on the case. When a case is stripped from Georgia prosecutors, its fate is decided by a Republican-controlled state panel.
That panel already decided not to bring charges against Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, who acted as a fake elector for Mr. Trump in 2020. Ms. Willis and her office were barred from bringing charges against Mr. Jones as part of the Trump election interference case, because she had headlined a fund-raiser for one of his political rivals.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, called the ruling “exceptionally bad” in a series of posts on X and said that the appellate judges were encroaching on the trial court’s job.
Chris Timmons, a former Georgia prosecutor who has followed the case closely, said that “it’s a tough call to say whether the Court of Appeals got it right,” adding that “their reasoning was that the people lost confidence in the case.”
But he noted that Ms. Willis recently “won re-election in a landslide, suggesting that Fulton County at least has confidence in her.”
The prosecution was upended in January after a lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants revealed in a court filing that Ms. Willis had engaged in a romantic relationship with Mr. Wade. Defense attorneys accused Ms. Willis of “self-dealing” because she took a number of vacations with Mr. Wade after hiring him, while using public funds to pay him more than $650,000 for his work on the case.
“Although reasonable minds could differ, I think that it’s very reasonable for the Court of Appeals to feel that public confidence in the district attorney’s office has been irreparably damaged in relation to this case,” said Clark D. Cunningham, an expert in legal ethics and a law professor at Georgia State University.
While not all of the 15 defendants took part in the appeal, Mr. Cunningham said that he expected all of the remaining defendants to now join it and that their chances of success were good.
Mr. Trump’s legal outlook has improved considerably since the November election. While Mr. Trump was convicted earlier this year of 34 felonies in a Manhattan case related to falsifying business records, the judge recently put off the sentencing, and prosecutors have signaled a willingness to freeze the case while Mr. Trump holds office.
Besides Georgia, four other states are pursuing criminal cases related to efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to cling to power after his 2020 election loss. But Georgia is the only state to have brought charges against Mr. Trump himself.“
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
The BRUTAL Things Committed By Every European Colonial Empire
Please watch this. They leave this out of history classes in Western schools. These Europeans were the greatest savages of all time making the German holocaust look like small potatoes.
In South Korea, a Blueprint for Resisting Autocracy? | The New Yorker
In South Korea, a Blueprint for Resisting Autocracy?
"After President Yoon Suk-yeol ordered martial law, the legislature voted to impeach him. But it could take months to remove him from office, and uncertainties remain.
On Saturday evening, a week and a half after South Korea’s President, Yoon Suk-yeol, declared martial law and deployed soldiers outfitted for war against citizens and lawmakers in his own country, the National Assembly voted to remove him from power. Two-thirds of the legislative body—including at least twelve members of Yoon’s party—voted in favor of impeachment, as more than a million Koreans surrounded the parliamentary complex, in Seoul, chanting, singing K-pop, and waving glow sticks and signs (“Arrest Yoon Suk-yeol for treason!”) in the shivering cold. “Historically, politics has followed the public square,” Lee Chang-geun, an autoworker and union organizer who travelled from another province to attend the demonstration, told me. “This has been a dangerous situation, but I believe in the Korean democracy, in the basic functioning of the system.”
The impeachment now goes to the Constitutional Court, which could take several months to review it and issue a final decision. “Although I am stopping for now,” Yoon said, in a televised speech, “I will never give up.” Since taking office in 2022, Yoon has faced one controversy after the next. As a Presidential candidate with the People Power Party, he appealed to young male voters by promising to dissolve a ministry that had been created in the late nineteen-nineties to improve the status of women in Korean society. He relocated the President’s office to the headquarters of the defense ministry and advocated for a potential “preëmptive strike” if North Korea were to launch missiles toward the South. As President, he has overseen the repeat prosecution of Lee Jae-myung, his main opponent in the Democratic Party; his appointees were blamed when more than a hundred and fifty people were killed in a Halloween crowd crush in 2022. He and his wife have been accused of receiving favors from a pollster and interfering in a local election, which they deny. A majority of Koreans had been calling for Yoon’s impeachment before this recent, failed self-coup. In the days to come, watchful celebrations and protests will no doubt continue. Those of us in other countries where democracy feels imperilled should pay attention, too.
When I first wrote about the events of December 3rd—Yoon’s late-night imposition of martial law, which he justified with specious allusions to threats from North Korea and other “anti-state forces,” and its quick reversal, ordered by the legislature a few hours later—the overriding impression among the Koreans I interviewed was absolute shock. Older generations lived under the violent military dictatorships of the nineteen-sixties, seventies, and eighties, and young people are aware of this legacy. (The Korean novelist Han Kang explores the postwar period in some of her books; her recent Nobel Prize win has revived discussions of it.) Even Yoon’s sharpest critics could not have imagined that he would go so far. We have since learned that Yoon, a former prosecutor, had outlined the plan with military advisers for several weeks; that he had ordered raids on government offices, in addition to dispatching troops to block off the National Assembly (a failed bid to prevent legislators from voting to overturn the decree, per the constitution); that he had authorized the arrest of a judge, a journalist, opposition politicians, and even the head of his own party.
In the end, the army opted not to obey these commands: they did not make any arrests or fully carry out the raids. They did not use serious force on anyone trying to enter the National Assembly. Some soldiers, when sent to ransack an office that oversees elections, ate instant ramen at a convenience store instead. Three days later, Yoon apologized for the episode, then changed his mind, proclaiming that the opposition was “going berserk” and, despite growing calls for him to step down, that he would “stand firm” and “fight to the end,” meaning 2027, when his single five-year term expires. Many of his advisers and cabinet members resigned. Defense and law-enforcement officials were arrested for their role in the chaos; one tried to kill himself. The top leaders in Yoon’s party quit, leaving it unable to function. “We’re lucky that we were able to resolve this crisis in a peaceful way,” Cha Ji-ho, a legislator with the Democratic Party, told me after the vote to impeach Yoon. “From the beginning, it was the citizens who came out and blocked the soldiers from entering the National Assembly, and the soldiers and police acted as citizens, too. There was a shared understanding that we can’t let this happen, we have to resist.”
On Saturday, Han Duck-soo, the Prime Minister, who is now serving as acting President, vowed to “stabilize the confusion in state affairs and let people return to their precious everyday lives.” Han, who had been notified of Yoon’s intent to declare martial law and failed to stop it, seems to be about as popular as the President—who is polling at around eleven per cent—but, unlike Yoon, he’s a career politician, a known quantity, in a moment of upheaval. One of his first priorities may be to fill three empty seats on the Constitutional Court; only six of nine justices are currently in place, and six votes are required to affirm a legislative impeachment. (Under Korean law, the National Assembly, the President, and the chief justice are each responsible for recommending three justices, whom the President appoints. The three seats nominated by the legislature have been vacant since October, when those justices retired.) The court must hear evidence and decide whether to dismiss or restore Yoon within the next hundred and eighty days. If he is removed, the country will hold a snap election to select a new President.
South Korea has been here before, sort of. In 2004, the National Assembly impeached the liberal President Roh Moo-hyun on accusations of corruption that were ultimately rejected as grounds for removal by the Constitutional Court. Then, in 2016, the conservative President Park Geun-hye was impeached after weeks of demonstrations in response to a series of scandals: she had failed to respond as the Sewol ferry was sinking, in an accident that killed hundreds of passengers, and she had colluded in bribery and shared confidential documents with a shaman-like adviser. The court upheld Park’s impeachment. Both Roh’s and Park’s cases were criticized for being politically motivated. The allegations against Yoon—of violating the constitution and a separate statute constraining the imposition of emergency martial law—arguably amount to “criminal acts of treason,” Baik Tae-ung, a visiting scholar at Korea University and a law professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told me. “People are aware that he directly targeted the heart of democracy, so the seriousness of this protest, the anger, is much greater than what we saw under President Park.” (As a student activist in the minjung movement of the nineteen-eighties, which turned South Korea into a democracy, Baik was imprisoned.)
Earlier this week, a poll found that seventy-five per cent of respondents support Yoon’s impeachment. The rallies, signature-gathering campaigns, and online forums indicate something of a consensus across gender, age, class, and political affiliation. The large presence of young women has been particularly striking. According to Laura Gamboa, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and the author of “Resisting Backsliding,” which explores the strategies used to oppose autocratic turns in Colombia, Venezuela, and other countries, public participation is essential. “If the narrative around impeachment is weak—for example, with Donald Trump—and the impeachment fails, it can help the leader present himself as a martyr,” she told me. “If the narrative is solid, has strong democratic justifications, and it succeeds, it’s a good way to stop democratic backsliding. In the South Korean context, the narrative that Yoon actually committed a punishable offense is fairly solid.”
Can a democracy be simultaneously brawny and brittle? A single man managed to fling a nation of fifty-two million back in time, toward authoritarianism. Yet ordinary Koreans resisted and a range of institutional backstops held. Legislators scaled the walls of the National Assembly to vote against the martial-law decree, Yoon was impeached, and, late Saturday night, the Constitutional Court convened to start the clock on its review. All of it, together, amounts to a rescue of South Korean democracy, at least for now. “Constitutional courts, federalism, international institutions—almost anything can, under the right circumstances, stand in the way of the consolidation of authoritarian power,” Mark Tushnet, of Harvard Law School, told me. “The problem is, you never know which one is going to work.” In both South Korea and the United States, for example, a civilian—the President—controls the military, which is meant to keep the armed forces in check. “Then comes along someone like Yoon,” Tushnet explained, who is willing to use the military for an unlawful purpose. Or Trump, “who wanted to send troops out on January 6th.” Having a civilian Commander-in-Chief in those instances was actually bad for democracy. The fact that no violence erupted during Yoon’s short-lived martial law, on December 3rd, amounted mostly to luck.
That night, Ahn Gwi-ryeong, a spokesperson for the Democratic Party, tussled with a special-forces soldier outside the National Assembly. At one point, she grabbed the tip of his rifle and yelled in an informal register, as though addressing a younger sibling, “Aren’t you embarrassed? Aren’t you embarrassed?” Baik, the law professor and former dissident, wondered what Americans might be willing to do if similar encroachments on democracy and human rights occur during Trump’s second term. “I hope people in the U.S. will see what’s going on in Korea,” he told me, hours before going to protest at the National Assembly. “We should watch what’s happening here, what the U.S. could encounter.” ♦
Donald Trump’s disturbing war on the press has now escalated | Lloyd Green | The Guardian
Donald Trump’s disturbing war on the press has now escalated | Lloyd Green
"The Donald Trump vengeance tour is on the road and the media is in its crosshairs. “It should have been the justice department or somebody else, but I have to do it,” the president-elect intoned on Monday. “It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press.”
“Our press is very corrupt,” he continued. “Almost as corrupt as our elections.”
Also on Monday, a 15-year-old student in Wisconsin killed two people, injured six others, and took her own life with a 9mm pistol. The US supreme court, however, accords firearms the same constitutional protections as speech and worship. In Trumpworld, guns and the second amendment rock, the press not so much.
Not missing a beat, the president-elect put his money where his mouth is. Hours after the press conference and shooting, he filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register newspaper, its parent Gannett, and the political pollster J Ann Selzer in connection with a pre-election poll that showed Kamala Harris leading in Iowa by three points, 47-44. On election day, Trump actually triumphed there by double digits.
His complaint alleges that the defendants, in publishing the results of Selzer’s poll, violated Iowa’s consumer fraud laws and committed election interference. Not necessarily known for accuracy, Trump, through his lawyers, embarked on another fantasy.
“The November 5 election was a monumental victory for President Trump in both the electoral college and the popular vote, an overwhelming mandate for his America First principles,” the pleadings declared.
Not exactly.
By the numbers, Trump’s actual popular vote plurality stands at 1.48%. He also received less than half of all votes cast, because of third-party and write-in votes. Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton all won by larger margins. Then again, this is the same Trump who persistently insinuated Obama was foreign-born.
Beyond that, Trump stands liable to E Jean Carroll for more than $85m after he lost two civil defamation and sexual abuse cases in Manhattan federal court.
But his message remains clear: bend the knee or else.
On that score, portions of the media have already internalized Trump’s expectations. Days after the election, “Morning Joe” Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, his wife and co-host, raced down to Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump.
For the record, in 2017 Trump branded Scarborough as a “psycho” and lambasted Brzezinski as “low-IQ Crazy Mika” while deriding her for “bleeding badly from a face-lift”. Time and fear heal all wounds, apparently.
Then there is ABC News. The network recently agreed to pay $15m to settle a Trump defamation suit. Last spring George Stephanopoulos, its Sunday talkshow host, repeatedly said Trump was liable for rape when a jury had actually found him liable for abuse.
But there is more to it than that. In August 2023, Trump lost his counter-claim for defamation against Carroll. Dismissing the Trump counter-claim, a judge in New York, Lewis A Kaplan, said that when Carroll repeated her allegation that Trump raped her, her words were “substantially true”. Kaplan also set out in detail why it may be said that Trump raped Carroll.
In May, Stephanopoulos said he would not be “cowed out of doing my job”. This weekend, however, he and ABC expressed collective “regret” over his choice of words. However you look at it, the network caved. With ABC having folded under pressure, expect the president-elect to be emboldened.
Trump has also filed a $10bn action against CBS for purportedly doctoring its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Pending in a federal court in Texas, that lawsuit too is predicated upon alleged violation of a state consumer fraud law. Earlier this month, CBS moved to dismiss the case.
For Trump and his allies, however, overturning New York Times v Sullivan, the US supreme court’s unanimous 1964 landmark ruling on press freedoms, is the ultimate prize. In their view, public figures facing off against the press should be aided by a lower burden of proof. They should no longer be required to demonstrate “actual malice”. The fact that more than half a century has passed since the decision means little.
Justice Clarence Thomas has branded Sullivan and its progeny as “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law”. Justice Neil Gorsuch more subtly contends that the emergence of cable television, the internet, and the 24/7 news cycle warrant re-examination of the “actual malice” standard.
In his words: “In 1964, the court may have seen the actual malice standard as necessary ‘to ensure that dissenting or critical voices are not crowded out of public debate’. But if that justification had force in a world with comparatively few platforms for speech, it’s less obvious what force it has in a world in which everyone carries a soapbox in their hands.”
All this brings us back to Trump’s attack on the Des Moines Register. What’s sauce for the goose has a way of becoming sauce for the gander. In late September, just weeks before the 2024 election, news surfaced that Rasmussen Reports, a polling operation, shared its results with the senior members of the Trump campaign.
One email also revealed “close collaboration between the Trump campaign, Rasmussen, and the Heartland Institute”, a 501(c)3 non-profit, according to American Muckrakers and the New Republic. This raises potential legal issues and headaches. Turnabout is fair play. Trump may have inadvertently opened the door for attacks on his friends.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992"
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Monday, December 16, 2024
How Would Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?
How Would Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?
“If Trump’s pick to lead the F.B.I. gets confirmed, the Bureau could be politicized in ways that even its notorious first director would have rejected.
Since the announcement of Patel’s nomination, most concern has centered on the idea that, under his leadership, the F.B.I. would launch criminal investigations of Trump’s political opponents and media critics.Photograph by Nathan Howard / Bloomberg / Getty
Since President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention of appointing his political loyalist Kash Patel as the director of the F.B.I., critics have warned that we’re heading back to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I. should be so lucky.
Hoover, for all his many faults and abuses of power, was nevertheless an institution builder; he believed in the F.B.I.’s nonpartisan independence. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he grew up imbued with the idea that career-long government service was one of life’s noblest aspirations. As a D.C. resident, Hoover could not vote, and though he was a staunch conservative, he never joined a political party. Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the F.B.I. as a partisan force to protect Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies. If such naked politicization happens to undermine public faith in the F.B.I., so much the better. In Patel’s book “Government Gangsters,” published last year, he describes the Bureau’s top officials—along with other “Deep State” executives—as a group of “spiteful mandarins” hell-bent on destroying the country in service of their “uniformly left wing” desires. He warns, “Democrats and the Deep State are on the same team.”
The idea that people who work at the F.B.I. are closet leftists conspiring to bring down the Republic has to be one of the more bizarre takes in a political moment with no shortage of them. But such is the state of our politics, in which self-proclaimed protectors of “law and order” attack the national-security establishment, while reluctant liberals defend its professionalism and autonomy. Hoover would agree with Patel that what happens at the F.B.I. matters. However, the similarities mostly end there. Hoover used to describe the Bureau as the “one bulwark” against a hidden left-wing conspiracy that penetrated all corners of American life. In Patel’s world, the F.B.I. is the conspiracy.
Hoover became the director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation exactly a century ago, under Harlan Fiske Stone, who was then the Attorney General. Stone wanted to clean up a division of the department that had become infamous for spying on dissidents and deploying its agents as political enforcers for the corrupt Harding Administration. Hoover had started at the Justice Department right out of law school. He rose quickly, was promoted to head the department’s new Radical Division in 1919, at the age of twenty-four, then given the position of assistant director of the Bureau at twenty-six. Though Hoover was tainted by the department’s controversies, Stone believed that he was a reformer at heart. The appointment process was simple at the time; the Attorney General, not the President, chose the director, without any need for Senate confirmation. Nobody at the time imagined that the Bureau, staffed with just a few hundred ill-trained agents, would grow into a federal colossus—or that Hoover would want to stay in the job for the next forty-eight years.
On the surface, Patel shares some of that reformist energy. The son of Indian immigrants, he grew up in a household of “dispositional conservatism,” as he put it in “Government Gangsters,” with parents who believed in hard work and the American Dream. He became a lawyer more or less on a whim, after caddying for a group of defense lawyers at a Long Island golf course. With no lucrative offers from white-shoe firms, he went to work for the government—first as a public defender, then as a prosecutor in the D.O.J.’s national-security division. After Trump’s election, he took a job as an aide to the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Devin Nunes (now the C.E.O. of Trump Media). That position and others he held in the Trump Administration gave Patel a front-row seat at what he describes as the “extended shitstorm” of the Administration’s tangles with the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. His book name-checks just about every far-right grievance of the era: Benghazi, the Steele dossier, the Russia investigation, “men” in “girls’ bathrooms,” Hunter Biden’s laptop, January 6th, and critical race theory. What it all amounted to, in Patel’s view, was a need to contain, reform, and discipline the Bureau and the other intelligence agencies. As he wrote in his book, nothing less than “the survival of the American Republic is at stake.”
Hoover spent his first decade as director focussed on internal reforms: firing patronage appointees, writing up a policy manual, and refining the Bureau’s hub-and-spoke system, with headquarters in Washington and field offices across the country. At Stone’s behest, he curtailed the most controversial forms of investigation, including the surveillance of elected officials, and promoted the Bureau’s nonpartisan reputation. To fill out his agent corps, he hired a new generation of college-educated lawyers and accountants, chosen for their professional bona fides but also for their ability to conform to Hoover’s preferred agent type: tall, trim, white, and male. He envisioned the Bureau as both a model and a helpmeet for local law enforcement, able to perform high-level scientific and analytical work beyond the capacities of local cops. He also established many of the programs that still define the F.B.I. in our cultural imagination, such as its cutting-edge forensics lab and its academy at Quantico.
Hoover emphasized internal reform partly because he didn’t have much else to do. At the time, federal law gave the Bureau a strange grab bag of investigative duties, ranging from interstate prostitution to antitrust violations. Its jurisdiction expanded in the mid-nineteen-thirties, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, when it got a new name: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Roosevelt was worried about crime; specifically, the wave of kidnappings and bank robberies that rocked Depression-era America. So he announced a war on crime, and backed new laws expanding the Bureau’s powers. Hoover made the most of that opportunity, creating a publicity unit to tout the F.B.I.’s crime-fighting triumphs.
A few years later, with an actual war on the horizon, Roosevelt turned to the Bureau again, putting Hoover in charge of the country’s nascent domestic-intelligence system, which included hunting spies and saboteurs as well as monitoring the political opinions and activities of American citizens. Thus was born the hybrid architecture of today’s F.B.I.: part law-enforcement agency, part domestic-intelligence agency, with a single powerful director at the top.
Since the announcement of Patel’s nomination, most concern has centered on the idea that, under his leadership, the F.B.I. would launch criminal investigations of Trump’s political opponents and media critics. That may well happen, producing a chill on speech and a major headache for everyone involved. But the worst abuses of F.B.I. power have usually come through its intelligence and surveillance operations. Making a criminal case in court is hard; there are laws and procedures and evidentiary standards. Intelligence investigations operate in a more nebulous realm. If Hoover had never moved into intelligence work, we might remember him as the scourge of John Dillinger and not much else. Instead, he became the chief of the nation’s political police, with an enormous secret bureaucracy at his disposal.
Hoover’s earliest targets, in the run-up to the Second World War, were alleged Nazis and communists. With the end of the war, the Nazis faded, but the communists remained. In public, Hoover still claimed to be the great avatar of the administrative state, devoted to law and professionalism and restraint. Behind the scenes, though, he defined his national-security authority in the broadest possible terms. The F.B.I. was defending an “American way of life,” as he conceived it, so almost anyone who sought, as he saw it, to upend the status quo became a legitimate intelligence target. Alongside the surveillance of dissidents, Hoover built up files on politicians, members of the press, and celebrities who criticized the F.B.I. or otherwise disagreed with him. His agents deployed bugs, wiretaps, informants, and disruptive operations on a scale unprecedented in the United States, but most of it was never revealed during Hoover’s lifetime. He maintained tight control over the Bureau’s files. When he chose to share details of operations—with Congress, the Attorney General, the White House, or anyone else—it was because the disclosure served his own purposes. During his tenure, there was no effective Freedom of Information Act, no FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court, no congressional committee with the right (or the courage) to demand information from the Bureau.
The F.B.I.’s investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr., provides a case study in how quickly such practices could spiral out of control. The inquiry began with a narrow claim that King’s inner circle included men with ties to the Communist Party. Within a few years, the Bureau was bugging King’s hotel rooms, recording his sexual encounters, and using what it found to threaten King and attempt to discredit him in the press. But at no time did anyone think, or even suggest, that King had committed any sort of serious crime.
The King investigation stands out for its sheer outrageousness, but a similar defense of the status quo drove the F.B.I.’s investigations of the Black Panthers, the antiwar movement, and the New Left. It also led the Bureau to conduct disruptive operations against the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups, who were thought to threaten the social order from the right. Hoover styled himself the great defender of the Washington consensus, and the last best hope of a republic under siege. To resist the F.B.I.—or to criticize Hoover—was to attack America itself.
Trump shares Hoover’s toxic blend of megalomania and political ruthlessness. So does Patel, who has published a children’s-book series lauding a Trump look-alike as “King Donald.” But Hoover was never partisan in the ways that Trump and Patel are. He did not much care who won elections, as long as the winner promised to support the F.B.I. He ended up serving under four Republican and four Democratic Presidents, along with a rotating cast of Attorneys General. He often performed political operations for those Presidents, but he was mostly an equal-opportunity offender. The F.B.I. spied on civil-rights protesters at the 1964 Democratic National Convention at Lyndon Johnson’s request. But Hoover also wiretapped White House staffers and members of the press as a personal favor to Richard Nixon.
No President dared to fire Hoover; he died, still on the job, in 1972, near the end of Nixon’s first term. At that point, the chief critique of the F.B.I. was that Hoover had amassed far too much power, with almost no accountability. Laws passed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies dictated that the director was to be appointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate, and limited to a ten-year term. After Hoover’s death, the Senate’s Church Committee conducted sweeping hearings into the civil-liberties abuses and covert activities of federal intelligence agencies, precipitating another wave of reform. Many of the accountability mechanisms that still govern intelligence operations came out of that era, including the FISA court, the congressional intelligence committees, and an expanded Freedom of Information Act.
Patel, in his demand for immediate reform of the deep state, can sound a bit like a nineteen-seventies civil libertarian. In “Government Gangsters,” he writes, “Our goal is not to destroy federal law enforcement.” Rather, he insists, “it’s to stop federal law enforcement powers from being abused for corrupt ends.” He wants public defenders at secret FISA-court proceedings to protect intelligence targets from the whims of federal officials. He thinks that we need to shrink the agencies and to increase transparency. He also believes that too many government documents are being classified, often for the wrong reasons. (Patel is not, in fact, the most extreme critic among Trump’s nominees. As a Republican primary candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy—slated to be a co-head, with Elon Musk, of the Department of Government Efficiency—recommended that the Bureau be abolished.)
The impetus behind these urgent calls is, of course, not merely an abstract concern over the proper balance between liberty and security; it’s the fact that the F.B.I. investigated Trump. In Trumpworld’s narrative, the Russia investigation, the prosecution of January 6th participants, and the hunt for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago all constitute an abuse of power. The attacks on the F.B.I. also fit nicely with Trump’s self-declared war on the administrative state. In earlier generations, conservatives and Republicans were often at pains to explain which parts of the federal government they liked (the military and the intelligence agencies) and which parts were tyrannical (mostly, the social-welfare agencies). Now the anti-state critique includes all branches of the federal bureaucracy, from the Department of Education to the U.S. Army.
Since the F.B.I. is nonetheless likely to survive, Patel has not been entirely absolved of making distinctions about which parts should stay and which should go. His big idea is to shut down the Bureau’s D.C. headquarters—currently the J. Edgar Hoover Building—and send the personnel out to the field offices. The building, which was opened after Hoover’s death, is already slated for obsolescence; the F.B.I. intends to construct a new headquarters in Greenbelt, Maryland. During the campaign, Trump called for the headquarters to remain in D.C., instead, as part of a “plan to totally renovate and rebuild our capital city.” Patel, though, is advocating a more far-flung location—or, perhaps, for no fixed headquarters. He has suggested turning the old building into a Museum of the Deep State (an idea that, as a historian, I could theoretically get behind, though I suspect we’d have different visions). His claim is that the rot comes from the top, while the agents out there working hard and fighting crime are still American heroes. “You’re cops,” he declared on a recent podcast. “Go be cops.” As political messaging, it’s a crafty way to maintain “law and order” righteousness while railing against the Washington élites.
Can he pull it off? The F.B.I. may be especially vulnerable to a tear-it-down approach, since it came into existence through an administrative decision within the Justice Department, and thus has no founding congressional charter outlining its purpose and duties. Patel is well aware that many constraints on what the Bureau says and does are governed by institutional norms and internal policy—and can, in theory, be changed as needed. Nonetheless, his own analysis of the deep state suggests that making fundamental change in a large, secretive bureaucracy will be hard. Hoover spent decades cultivating a loyal agent corps and designing procedures to serve his needs. As an outsider and a newcomer, Patel has no such advantages, and his obvious scorn for the Bureau’s leadership probably won’t help.
Half a century ago, another President tried to install a political loyalist as F.B.I. director. It did not go well. In 1972, Nixon appointed his longtime ally, the D.O.J. official L. Patrick Gray, to succeed Hoover as acting director. Inside the Bureau, career officials resisted. Within a few months, the F.B.I. executive W. Mark Felt was leaking details about Watergate to the Washington Post, earning the nickname Deep Throat. By mid-1973, Gray had left office. Nixon did the same in 1974.
Trump has already shown his ability to withstand far greater pressure than even Nixon faced. Indeed, part of his genius is that all the denunciations and impeachments and indictments seem only to have increased his power and popularity. During his first term, it took him four months to fire James Comey, who had been nominated as F.B.I. director by Barack Obama. Trump’s stated complaint—an amusing bit of political theatre—was that Comey had been unfair to Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, but it was understood that Trump was worried about the Russia investigation. This time, he has already promised to get rid of the director, Christopher Wray, even though he is the one who picked Wray in the first place.
If Trump does remove Wray, it will violate a long-standing norm distinguishing F.B.I. directors from other Presidential nominations; since they may have to investigate the Administration itself, they are supposed to be more independent and less subject to White House pressure. Patel’s approval by the Senate is not at all assured. But, if the Senate concedes to Trump’s wishes, Patel will no doubt try to use the Bureau to serve “King Donald”; potential targets are right to be worried. Perhaps he’ll succeed in shutting down the F.B.I. headquarters and dispersing its thousands of employees to the winds. Even if none of that happens, though, Patel will be able to declare a victory of sorts. By his own logic, resistance to his ideas or his appointment will merely prove that the deep state is even more nefarious than he feared. ♦“
Jury in Las Vegas Awards Woman $34 Million for Wrongful Conviction - The New York Times
Jury Awards Woman $34 Million for Wrongful Conviction
"Kirstin Blaise Lobato sued the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and two detectives after she spent nearly 16 years in prison for a murder she did not commit.
Kirstin Blaise Lobato, who spent nearly 16 years in prison for a murder she did not commit, was awarded more than $34 million by a federal jury in Nevada on Thursday.
Ms. Lobato had sued the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and two detectives, who the suit said misrepresented her statements and ignored evidence that proved her innocence.
After the civil verdict was announced, Ms. Lobato repeatedly hugged her lawyers outside the courtroom and told reporters that her search for justice had been an “uphill battle,” The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
“I have no idea what the rest of my life is going to look like,” Ms. Lobato told reporters. “All I know is what the past has looked like, and it was pretty bad.”
Ms. Lobato’s lawyers said that the jury’s verdict brought an end to an ordeal that began when she was 18 and arrested in the murder of Duran Bailey, 44, who was found dead on the west side of Las Vegas on July 8, 2001.
Mr. Bailey had been badly beaten and stabbed, and his body had been mutilated, the lawsuit said. His penis had been severed and his body had been covered with trash.
Two detectives, Thomas Thowsen and James LaRochelle, linked Ms. Lobato to the murder after they were told that she had defended herself when a man tried to rape her in the parking lot of a hotel in east Las Vegas, the lawsuit said.
They did not find physical evidence that connected Ms. Lobato to Mr. Bailey’s killing, according to the lawsuit.
The police department and a lawyer for the two detectives, who are retired, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday. The jury also found each of the two detectives liable for $10,000 in punitive damages.
Ms. Lobato was convicted of first-degree murder in Mr. Bailey’s death in May 2002.
The conviction was reversed on appeal, leading to a second trial. Ms. Lobato was convicted in October 2006 of voluntary manslaughter with use of a deadly weapon and sexual penetration of a dead body, and was sentenced to 13 to 45 years in prison.
A Nevada state court vacated her conviction in December 2017 because of ineffective legal representation. She was released from prison early the next month. This year, the court removed the conviction from her records and provided Ms. Lobato with a certificate of innocence.
In July 2019, she filed the lawsuit against the police department and the detectives.
The lawsuit said that when Mr. Bailey was killed in 2001, Ms. Lobato was at her parents’ home in Panaca, Nev., which is nearly 170 miles northeast of Las Vegas. When Ms. Lobato was in Panaca, she told several people that she had been assaulted in May and had described defending herself.
She had been carrying a small knife and reached toward the man’s groin and cut him once, but did not sever his penis, the lawsuit said.
One of the people Ms. Lobato described the assault to told a Lincoln County probation officer about the attack. Ms. Lobato had not reported the attempted rape to the police because she did not think they would do anything about it, according to the lawsuit.
On July 20, 2001, that probation officer called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and was directed to the two detectives, who “instantly became convinced that they had just solved the murder,” the lawsuit said.
The detectives drove to Panaca that day and interviewed Ms. Lobato at her parents’ home, the lawsuit said.
She thought the detectives were investigating the attempted rape and was unaware that they were questioning her about the killing of Mr. Bailey, which she did not know about.
The detectives recorded a portion of the interrogation, but not all of it, and wrote in their police reports that the attack Ms. Lobato described was the murder of Mr. Bailey, according to the lawsuit. The detectives arrested her that day.
Several witnesses contacted the detectives and said Ms. Lobato was in Panaca on the day Mr. Bailey was killed, but they ignored the information, the lawsuit said. One witness gave them phone records that showed Ms. Lobato had been in Panaca from July 2 to July 9.
“Detectives not only framed Blaise Lobato for murder, but they actually used the trauma of her earlier, unrelated sexual assault to do it,” Elizabeth Wang, one of Ms. Lobato’s lawyers, said in a statement. “Blaise was a vulnerable teenager, and the criminal justice system failed her.”
Judge Denies Trump’s Bid to Throw Out Conviction Over Immunity Ruling - The New York Times
Judge Denies Trump’s Bid to Throw Out Conviction Over Immunity Ruling
"Justice Juan M. Merchan thwarted one of several attempts by Donald J. Trump to clear his record of 34 felonies before returning to the White House.
A judge on Monday rejected Donald J. Trump’s argument that a recent Supreme Court ruling had nullified his criminal case in New York, upholding the former and future president’s felony conviction for falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal.
The judge’s ruling preserves, at least for now, the stain of Mr. Trump’s criminal conviction. And if it withstands Mr. Trump’s appeal, it will make him the first felon to serve as president.
The ruling, which addressed the Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents broad immunity for their official actions, thwarted only the first of several legal maneuvers Mr. Trump has concocted to clear his record of 34 felonies before returning to the White House.
Prosecutors had argued that the Supreme Court’s decision had “no bearing on this prosecution,” noting that Mr. Trump was convicted of orchestrating a scheme involving a personal and political crisis that predated his presidency.
But Mr. Trump’s lawyers seized on a particularly contentious portion of the high court’s ruling, which prohibited prosecutors from introducing evidence involving a president’s official acts even in a case about private misconduct. They argued that testimony from former White House employees had contaminated the verdict.
In the first significant interpretation of that polarizing opinion, the New York judge who oversaw the trial sided with prosecutors, concluding that the testimony centered on Mr. Trump’s unofficial conduct.
“The People’s use of these acts as evidence of the decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch,” the judge, Juan M. Merchan, wrote in a 41-page decision.
And even if the evidence was “admitted in error, such error was harmless,” he added, noting the “overwhelming evidence of guilt” introduced at trial.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies."
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