"Elites Value Mellifluous Illegality over Crass Lawfulness."

Good headline at National Review for this, by Victor Davis Hanson. Excerpt:

We live in such strange times that the media ignored the most blatant examples of presidential campaign-cycle collusion in memory, while seeking to invent it where it never existed. Remember, Barack Obama on a hot mic not only got caught reiterating to a Russian leader the conditions of Putin-Obama election-cycle collusion, but he also spelled out the exact quid pro quo: promised Russian quietude abroad during Obama’s reelection campaign was in exchange for “flexibility” (i.e., cancellation) of U.S.-Eastern European missile-defense projects. Should Trump ever be caught making the same “deal” in 2020, he would probably be impeached.

I ran into that new piece because I was looking for something else written by Victor Davis Hanson that Meade was reading to me last night.

Ah! Here it is. It's at American Greatness:

Imagine that it is now summer 2024. A 78-year-old lame-duck President Trump is winding down his second term, basking in positive polls. His dutiful vice president in waiting, Mike Pence, is at last getting his chance to run for president. Imagine also that Pence is a shoo-in, facing long-shot, hard-leftist, and octogenarian Senator Bernie Sanders. Polls show an impending Pence landslide.

Team Trump is nevertheless horrified about the slight chance that the nation could conceivably elect an ossified, self-proclaimed socialist....

There follows a very elaborate visualization of the Trump administration doing to Sanders the equivalent of what the Obama administration did to Trump in 2016. We're used to these flips, of course, but this one was very striking to me because time after time I experience weird surprise to see (in flipped form) the things that really happened.

I'd excerpt some of the detail, but it's best experienced as a torrent of outrageous behavior.

"Page wrote to Strzok on Sept. 2, 2016, about prepping Comey because 'potus wants to know everything we're doing."

"According to a newly released Senate report, this text raises questions about Obama's personal involvement in the Clinton email investigation."

From "FBI lovers' latest text messages: Obama 'wants to know everything'" (Fox News).

"If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent."

"In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges. That is why such an indictment of Hillary Clinton was never going to happen. The latest jaw-dropping disclosures of text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, illustrate this point."

"Clinton–Obama Emails: The Key to Understanding Why Hillary Wasn’t Indicted" by Andrew McCarthy (National Review).

"It looks like Obama did spy on Trump, just as he apparently did to me."

Writes Sharyl Attkisson.

The government ... got caught monitoring journalists at Fox News, The Associated Press, and, as I allege in a federal lawsuit, my computers while I worked as an investigative correspondent at CBS News....

Then, as now, instead of getting the bigger story, some in the news media and quasi-news media published false and misleading narratives pushed by government interests. They implied the computer intrusions were the stuff of vivid imagination, conveniently dismissed forensic evidence from three independent examinations that they didn’t review. All seemed happy enough to let news of the government’s alleged unlawful behavior fade away, rather than get to the bottom of it....

Officials involved in the surveillance and unmasking of U.S. citizens have said their actions were legal and not politically motivated. And there are certainly legitimate areas of inquiry to be made by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But look at the patterns. It seems that government monitoring of journalists, members of Congress and political enemies — under multiple administrations — has become more common than anyone would have imagined two decades ago. So has the unmasking of sensitive and highly protected names by political officials....

NYT uncovers ATF scandal that began in 2011 and has something to do with Fast and Furious.

" Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives used a secret, off-the-books bank account to rent a $21,000 suite at a Nascar race, take a trip to Las Vegas and donate money to the school of one of the agent’s children, according to records and interviews...."

Government spending typically requires a strict audit trail, but the money deposited in the bank account came from an unlikely source. A.T.F. agents told the informants to buy untaxed cigarettes, mark up the cost and sell them at a profit. The sales made millions of dollars, which poured into the account....

It is not clear whether Obama administration officials authorized the unorthodox account, which was opened at a time when the A.T.F. said it was tightening restrictions on undercover operations. The agency was also moving to improve its management after a botched gun trafficking investigation known as Fast and Furious.

Normally, agents use government-controlled funds known as “churning accounts” to finance tobacco smuggling investigations. The new rules imposed greater oversight over churning accounts. By using the secret bank account, agents in Bristol avoided that oversight....

"Two expressions that became especially popular with CBS News brass, [Sharyl Attkisson] says, were 'incremental' and 'piling on.'"

"These are code for 'excuses for stories they really don’t want, even as we observe that developments on stories they like are aired in the tiniest of increments.'..."

The administration, with the full cooperation of the media, has successfully turned “Benghazi” into a word associated with nutters, like “Roswell” or “grassy knoll,” but Attkisson notes that “the truth is that most of the damaging information came from Obama administration insiders. From government documents. From sources who were outraged by their own government’s behavior and what they viewed as a coverup.”...

She notes that the program, which under previous hosts Dan Rather, Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer largely gave her free rein, became so hostile to real reporting that investigative journalist Armen Keteyian and his producer Keith Summa asked for their unit to be taken off the program’s budget (so they could pitch stories to other CBS News programs), then Summa left the network entirely.

When Attkisson had an exclusive, on-camera interview lined up with Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the YouTube filmmaker Hillary Clinton blamed for the Benghazi attacks, CBS News president Rhodes nixed the idea: “That’s kind of old news, isn’t it?” he said.

"Secret Service Director Julia Pierson Was a Victim of the 'Glass Cliff.'"

Headline at The New Republic.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether, ultimately, she deserved to lose her job or whether anyone in charge during such an incident would have to resign. But it’s probably not pure chance that Pierson, who held that position for just a year-and-a-half, was a woman. Time and again, women are put in charge only when there’s a mess, and if they can’t engineer a quick cleanup, they’re shoved out the door. The academics Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam even coined a term for this phenomenon: They call it getting pushed over the glass cliff.

Pierson was, in fact, explicitly brought in to clean up a mess. When President Obama nominated her last year, it was on the heels of news that Secret Service employees hired prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia ahead of the president’s arrival. Pierson was meant to be a breath of fresh feminine air to clear out the macho cobwebs still dogging the agency....

In other words, put the blame where it belongs. Pierson didn't hire herself. As I put it yesterday: "It's as if they thought having a female director would fix — image-fix — their women-related problems." It's really quite gross that they brought a women to clean up after the prostitutes in the hotel room. Like she's the maid!

Breath of fresh feminine air, indeed. There was stale feminine air in the room, those horrible prostitutes. But I don't want to hear about feminine "air." Men had a problem, men chose to make a woman look like the solution, men continued to screw up, and men chose to the political theater of ousting the woman in another effort at a solution.

I'm not sure if all my uses of the word "men" in that last sentence are correct. I'm sure the first one is, and I'm pretty sure the third one is, but the second and fourth ones are iffy. There is at least one man, however, who should be held responsible for the choice to hire Pierson and the choice to oust her, and that is Obama. I don't know who else was in on that choice, and Obama being a man with quite a few female advisers, I don't really think they were all men.

Finally, someone in the Obama administration resigns in the face of scandal.

It's Julia Pierson, director of the Secret Service.

Ms. Pierson, a 30-year veteran of the Secret Service, was supposed to have been the one to repair the agency’s reputation after scandals involving drinking and prostitution during foreign trips.

It's as if they thought having a female director would fix — image-fix — their women-related problems. There's more to the Secret Service than just making it seem as if someone is stopping them from whoring. Did she even succeed at that? Or were we just supposed to feel better about it?

In the context of the (arguably) destroyed IRS email, let's revisit an old question: Why didn't Richard Nixon destroy the Watergate tapes?

I've taught the Watergate Tapes case — United States v. Nixon — for 20 years, and I think I always include what I believe is a central question about that case and about law more generally: Why didn't Richard Nixon destroy the Watergate tapes?

Nixon had possession of the tapes, and no physical force prevented his people from starting an "accidental" fire or causing a chance encounter with magnets... Yeah, bitch, magnets....



Here's the description in the book "The Brethren" of how Nixon reacted to the news of the Supreme Court's decision:

His Chief of Staff, Alexander M. Haig, told him that the Supreme Court decision had just come down. Nixon had seriously contemplated not complying if he lost, or merely turning over excerpts of the tapes or edited transcripts. He had counted on there being some exception for national security matters, and at least one dissent. He had hoped there would be some “air” in the opinion. 

“Unanimous?” Nixon guessed.

“Unanimous,” Haig said. “There is no air in it at all.”

“None at all?” Nixon asked.

“It’s tight as a drum.”

After a few hours spent complaining to his aides about the Court and the Justices, Nixon decided that he had no choice but to comply. Seventeen days later, he resigned.

So, why didn't Richard Nixon destroy the Watergate tapes? 3 ideas for an answer:

1. Nixon was part of the American culture of the rule of law that had grown and deepened over the years. We were long past the days when Andrew Jackson (supposedly) said: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" This is the answer I've always liked, and I can see that if I like it too much I'm falling prey to the age-old human foible of believing what you want to believe.

2. Nixon knew that if he said the tapes were destroyed, no one would accept any attempt to explain it away as a mishap, and he'd be impeached forthwith. It was nothing other than the best self-serving political move he could make at that point.

3. Nixon was, in fact, a fool not to destroy the tapes.

"I had bad advice, bad advice from well-intentioned lawyers who had sort of a cockeyed notion that I would be destroying evidence," Nixon said years later in a videotaped interview. "I should have destroyed them."

Let's compare the IRS email story. There are some differences:

1. Nixon was more hated and people weren't apt to cut him any slack, and Obama, whatever he does, is relentlessly liked.

2. The press was bearing down hard on Nixon — "They're after me! The president. They hate my guts. That's what they're after." — and the press is ever ready to give Obama a boost.

3. Nixon seemed tricky and shifty, unlike Obama, whose lies seem less... lie-like.

4. Tapes are bigger, bulkier objects, and email is evanescent.

5. Nixon, actually, at some level, felt shame about transgressing what another branch of government says is the law, and Obama has great confidence in asserting his view of the law and sticking to it. 

6. The Watergate scandal was about unlawful actions intended to help reelect the President, and... oh, wait... that's not a difference.

I thought of a clever argument that could be used to sell the story that some computer snafu ate all that Lois Lerner email.

It seems as though no one — not even the administration's fans in the mainstream media — accepts the explanation, which demands that we believe that the IRS's approach to handling email was mind-bogglingly incompetent.

Here's my idea for an argument: Call attention to the big screw-up with the Obamacare website. You wouldn't have believed that a computer system that big, that important, and that well-funded would be so abysmally bad, but we know it was.

Think about it. If you hadn't yet seen that atrocious roll out of the Obamacare website, and you heard a prediction of what it would be like — and that prediction was what we now know happened — you would have said: That's ridiculous! It cannot be that bad.

It was that bad!

Okay. That's my free advice to IRS-scandal fighters. Go ahead and use it. And feel free to use the larger version of this argument whenever you get in trouble: We're not evil. We're just terribly incompetent.

ADDED: Today, there are new claims that of computer crashes destroying more email from additional IRS investigation targets.

The news of nothing.

Drudge has looked like this for quite a while:



That links to a Daily Mail story — "Obama rules OUT sending troops back into combat in Iraq but promises to review military options – including air strikes" — that includes an effort to extract a comment from George W. Bush:

Former President George W. Bush has been reluctant to weigh in on the latest developments in the region where he spent years deploying military assets that Obama would later pull back.

A request for comment from the former president was met with a non-response from his communications director Freddy Ford, who told MailOnline: 'I don’t have a comment for you. When he left office President Bush decided not to criticize his successor.'

Everyone already knew that, but the Mail made it into something that could be reported, and Drudge is featuring what is, essentially, the news of nothing.

With so many newsworthy things happening right now — the VA scandal eclipsed, the Bratquake reduced to a 1-day story, the Lois Lerner spoliation, Bergdahl (Bergdahl? Who's Bergdahl?), Hillary snapped — the news of nothing rises to the top and just sits there.

What is the ever-enigmatic Drudge trying to say?

Nothing?

"Did The IRS Really Lose Lois Lerner's Emails? Let a Special Prosecutor Find Them."

That headline — at the National Journal — says exactly what needs to be said.

For decades the received wisdom has been it's not the crime, it's the coverup. And here we see evidence of a coverup. What kind of crime must there be that after all these years of warnings that it's the coverup that will get you, we've got a glaring, egregious coverup?!

Oh? Do they say maybe it's not a coverup? Maybe Lois Lerner's emails really did disappear in a computer crash? We need a neutral prosecutor to find out what happened. There's zero reason to take that on faith.

How could it possibly be that government operates this way, with high-level government officials working with one computer that could crash and take everything with it? Aren't there central computers, backed up multiple times, with a record of everything?

We're talking about the IRS. Doesn't it have multiple, backed up records on all of us taxpayers?

Give us a special prosecutor, because it's not acceptable to tell us we're supposed to believe this story of disappearing evidence....

"Shinseki resigns after VA scandal."

WaPo headline — apparently true, but not yet supported by the accompanying text, which begins:

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki apologized publicly Friday for what he called an “indefensible” lack of integrity among some senior leaders of the VA health-care system, and he announced several remedial steps, including a process to remove top officials at the troubled VA medical center in Phoenix.

Shinseki gave no indication that he intends to resign, despite growing calls for him to step down because of the scandal.

"The Obama administration hasn’t been distinguished by cool, cerebral, sure-footed professionalism, but by something closer to amateur hour."

"From the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act to the bloody aftermath of the intervention in Libya, from enabling political witch-hunts at the IRS to being repeatedly outmaneuvered by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, from swelling the debt he was going to reduce to embittering the politics he promised to detoxify, Obama’s performance has been a lurching series of screw-ups and disappointments."

From "Obama fails to show his vaunted ‘competence,'" by Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe.

Who put "acute political pressure" on Lois Lerner "to crack down on conservative-leaning organizations," and why did Lerner need a "plan" to avoid "a per se political project"?

Former IRS official Lois Lerner has decided she will testify before the House Oversight Committee, the committee chair Darrell Issa revealed on "Fox News Sunday" this morning. Previously, Lerner had refused to testify, citing the Fifth Amendment right not to be a witness against oneself, so what changed?

Issa notes that the Committee's position is that Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights by testifying up to a point before invoking her privilege and assures us that they have not given her immunity in exchange for her testimony. Conceivably, she has come to accept that the privilege has been waived and that she needs to testify or be held in contempt.

The Fox News moderator, Chris Wallace, quoted the report by the Republicans on Issa's committee, which said that Lerner "was keenly aware of acute political pressure to crack down on conservative-leaning organizations." Who put this pressure on Lerner?

ISSA: That's one of our questions. She says things like they put pressure. So e-mails indicate that there was pressure. We don't know whether it was the president shaking his fingers at the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court over Citizens United or whether it was...

WALLACE: During the State of the Union Address?

ISSA: During the State of the Union, where she felt the pressure. Only she can tell us where she thought that pressure was.

WALLACE: The report also cites a newly discovered e-mail from September 16th, 2010, in which Lerner discusses how to check whether groups seeking tax exempt status are engaged in improper political activity. This is an e-mail to other people in the IRS. And she says, quote, "We need to have a plan. We need to be caution so it isn't a per se political project." What do you think that e-mail shouts?

Shouts? Wallace leaned hard on that. And I put it in boldface. (That's me shouting.) I think it must mean that it was a political project and they were hard at work figuring out how to make it not look like what she knew it was. That's a smoking gun. Here's how Issa put it:

ISSA: It's a series of e-mails. And when you read them in context, what you realize is she's trying to walk back any kind of ability for someone to look at the record and say, aha, this was political targeting. And, yet, it clearly is political targeting.

In case you want to hear an interviewer who feels free to continually interrupt the President of the United States to turn up the heat.

Here's Bill O'Reilly interviewing Barack Obama. Full video and transcript at the link. I'll just excerpt the part about the IRS scandal, and I invite you to consider — in addition to the substance — whether this kind of interruption is unacceptably disrespectful or justifiable to prevent the interviewee from running out the clock with propaganda:

When you're hanging out in your café and you get told "the president will be stopping by... You’re welcome to stay, but one of our agents will be coming around to swipe you."

You get swiped. You find that "ignoring [the President] in person is as easy as ignoring a TV." You see that he's good lofting a baby. You experience the details of his handshake... "like the rough surface of your favorite baseball." You try to eavesdrop, but the only interesting thing you get is: "It seems like they don’t use Facebook anymore." But you're not sure who "they" are. Probably young people, maybe the 18 to 34 year-olds who need more prompting to buy insurance.

Also, you hear that the President's wife watches the TV show "Scandal," and that the White House isn't as exciting as that because they "don’t have enough time to engage in too much scandalous behavior." By "scandalous behavior," he didn't mean to touch off rejoinders about the IRS, the NSA, and Benghazi, and so forth. He meant sexual things.

Which amusingly resonates with Rush yesterday saying, "Why can't we have Obama running around on Michelle or some, good, old-fashioned, just... just wishful thinking, just for the media. You know how the Drive-Bys love to have exciting things happening in the news. I mean, wouldn't that be a much better scandal than Christie and bridge lane closures, for crying out loud?  Now, this Hollande guy, he's not even married, and he's in a love-triangle scandal."

"Hey, this is kinda like 'Bridgegate,' only national in scale..."

"... and targeted at children."

ADDED: I love Bridgegate. Acknowledge what a terrible thing it was to do. Don't back off. Welcome it. Lay it down as foundational: This is exactly what politicians should not do with the power we've trusted them with. Hardcore. Stick to it. No excuses.

Now, what can be built on that foundation? What else is like Bridgegate?

My advice to Republicans: Don't defend Chris Christie.

Let him twist slowly in the wind — as you used to say in the Nixon era. Let him stew in his own juice — which seems like the appropriate metaphor to me. Here's my thinking:

1. Don't justify or qualify the wrongness he's balled up in, because it is wrong, and clarity about right and wrong is good, and it's a good that has been and still can be associated with conservatism.

2. The wrongness is similar to some wrongness you need to be able to criticize Obama about, notably the IRS scandal. Don't lose the footing you need for that fight.

3. Defending Christie prolongs the news story. The giant, globular body of Christie has eclipsed the Obamacare debacle and the revelations in the Gates memoir (which come just as Fallujah and Ramadi fall to al Qaeda). The stories of the failings of the Obama administration are not merely useful to the GOP, they are far more important to the American people.

4. Whoever created this Christie myth in the first place? Pollsters? Christie polled well because people knew about him. He has had name recognition because he's loud and memorable, and because the media promoted him because he walked with Obama during the Sandy storm and because he delivered the keynote address at the Republican Convention and — to the delight of liberals — without praising the GOP candidate, Mitt Romney.

5. Let Christie sunset and see who else rises. If the donors are making decisions about where the money will flow and therefore who will have a chance to become the GOP candidate in 2016, then let the oversized Christie move out of the way, so you can see who else can serve. Certainly, conservative principles can be better upheld by someone other than Christie. Don't slow the departure of the large loudmouth who — with the help of the liberal media — has made it hard to hear from more modest, more conservative voices. And I don't just mean Scott Walker, whom we need here in Wisconsin. I mean all the potential candidates of that type who are hard to see when there's one big celebrity swanning about.

Enough! Too much! Let him go. He was never good for you anyway.

This is the post where I paraphrase 10 things in the NYT article "Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash."

Here's the text, by Eric Lipson, Ian Austen, and Sharon LaFraniere. I'm blocking and indenting their text and boldfacing key words that made me feel compelled to paraphrase so I could see what they were muting or failing to pursue with investigative vigor.

1. Government officials and its contractors were in conflict, and some people — who? — made questionable decisions and demonstrated poor leadership.

[T]ensions between the government and its contractors, questionable decisions and weak leadership within the Medicare agency turned the rollout of the president’s signature program into a major humiliation.

2.The Obama administration, dazzled by its grandiose idea of making a dazzling website, refused even to engage with the reality that was plaguing the computer technicians: It was impossible to meet the deadline with a website that even worked.