Meeropol = Ivy Meeropol, the documentarian who made a movie about the man, Roy Cohn, who "helped to send her grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair, leaving her father orphaned at the age of ten." Now, Meeropol has a movie about E. Jean Carroll.
A few days ago, Carroll finally received the $5.6 million she won in her lawsuit against Trump, and Meeropol said: "This historic moment shows that our legal system — established almost 250 years ago to serve as a check against absolute power — still works. E Jean used to sign off from her television show in the mid-Nineties saying, 'Fate loves the fearless,' and it couldn’t be more appropriate today...."
Much has been made of the fact that Carroll is not a perfect MeToo victim.
"And they'll say, aha, here's this is analogous or this is analogous or this is analogous. And then they expand and extend and move way beyond that precedent. But then when challenged on it, they can go back and say, well, Clinton did X or Obama did Y. Now two things are true at once. Number one, Clinton often did X or Obama often did do Y.... That doesn't excuse Donald Trump at all. And it doesn't mean that... what Donald Trump is doing is the same level of wrongness. It can be more wrongness. But what he does tactically and what he tries to do legally, which often doesn't fly, but what often flies tactically, especially with his base, is he's constantly pulling from these prior examples that are scattered all throughout modern American history.... [I]f you're an administration that is pulling all of the wrongdoing from say five previous administrations, putting it under one administration and then amplifying all of it, then you do have an issue.... But guys, political fandom should be over, let's not do this, okay?"
The whole discussion there is very good, examining many legal issues and precedents. I'm just selecting that one thing, which is something I've observed again and again. It's not Trump's way to say it stops with me, I see what's wrong, and I'm going to set us straight and get back to what is soundly legal and in line with the intent of the Framers. That might seem to fit his slogan "Make American Great Again," but that's not what he does. He's in the middle of a big fight, and he's going tit for tat and beyond. He's one of those guys who say "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."
"Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way!"
I've got to give Edwards credit for writing. I like "a complex chapter in my heart that I will never stop reading." It was enough to make me look up where he went to college. Wikipedia says he "attended" Blue Ridge Community College. I think "attended" means he did not graduate. I asked A.I. if that sentence was likely to have been written by A.I., and the answer was no. I'm told that sentence is "poetic but not overly generic or perfectly balanced like much AI romantic prose."
I wondered which party has the burden of this problematic member of Congress and it took me so long to find the answer that I assumed he was a Democrat, but no, he's a Republican. You only get the info in the second-to-last sentence, which tells us that "Edwards... is a top Democratic target in November." I misread that at first.
Edwards succeeded Madison Cawthorn. He was a complex chapter. Remember?
ADDED: I'm not making a new tag for Chuck Edwards, but I already had a tag for Madison Cawthorn. The last time I used it was October 10, 2024, and in that post, as in this one, I asked if you remember him. That was right before the last election, when Elon Musk was proclaiming "I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark MAGA!" At that time, Wikipedia said that Dark MAGA was "a belief promoted by former U.S. representative Madison Cawthorn that former president Trump would return to power 'with a vengeance.'" And: "Railing against 'the cowardly and weak members of our own party,' Cawthorn wrote [in May 2022]: 'It's time for the rise of the new right, it's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command.'"
Does anyone say "Dark MAGA" anymore? Maybe our eyes have gotten used to the dark. Trump did return to power with a vengeance.
By the way, Cawthorn is currently running to get back into Congress, but this time it's a different district, Florida's 19th congressional district. His old district was North Carolina's 11th district, so Edwards's difficulties are no help to him.
"Trump is the 47th president; '86' can mean banning or removing someone, but it can also be slang for killing a person. Comey quickly removed the post after receiving criticism that the phrase could be used to communicate the threat of violence."
The post title was a Grok prompt. Additional prompts: "Compare that to how Trump was treated for telling protesters on January 6th, 2021 to walk 'peacefully and patriotically' to the Capitol" and "I'm interested in the difference in seeing violence in words and consider that Comey, like Trump, has loyalists who might hear direction and take it."
"I do not think they would have wanted to see their son castigated as he has been.... Even in conversation with me, a person they had dined with only a few times, Rob and Michele Reiner recognized the depth of their son’s suffering as a call for their own compassion, and they recognized that Nick’s behavior was often outside his control.... The law proposes that he either knew, or could not know, right from wrong. But psychotic logic does not translate this way.... [H]is crime is itself his punishment; the horror of awakening to one’s own psychotic acts exceeds any third-party punishment. Under the Trump administration, aggressive 'justice' and judgmental positions that ignore scientific expertise are in fashion.... His case will be heard in California, where, one can hope, understanding of human suffering can still sometimes outstrip rageful cruelty. Nick Reiner’s parents were not vengeful people; no one need be vengeful on their behalf."
Writes Andrew Solomon, a professor of medical clinical psychology, in "My Hope for Nick Reiner" (NYT).
Yesterday, Peter Doocy prompted Trump with the same question Obama recently answered: "Barack Obama said that aliens are real. Have you seen any evidence of non-human visitors to Earth?"
Trump did not answer the question asked:
Trump focused on Obama's behavior: "Well, he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that."
The reporter's mind cranked quickly through the implications: "So aliens are real?!!"
Trump: "Well, I don't know if they're real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information. No, I don't have an opinion on it. I don't talk about it."
There's a lot going on there. Trump continued to try to put the focus on Obama's behavior.
Federal prosecutors in Washington sought and failed on Tuesday to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video this fall that enraged President Trump by reminding active-duty members of the military and intelligence community that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders, four people familiar with the matter said. It was remarkable that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington — led by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s — authorized prosecutors to go into a grand jury and ask for an indictment of the six members of Congress, all of whom had served in the military or the nation’s spy agencies.
But it was even more remarkable that a group of ordinary citizens sitting on the grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington forcefully rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to label their expression of dissent as a criminal act warranting prosecution.
I agree that it was remarkable (and awful) to seek this indictment. It was an ugly abnormality that needs to be rejected. But what the grand jury did was — or should be — the norm.
Someone in the comments questioned my use of quotation marks around "heroic father," but I absolutely meant to do that. I said the father "behaved instinctively and even if he thought about [it, he did] pretty much all the only thing he could do to avoid a life of terrible pain and shame if the girl had died after he let her fall in.."
The grand jury was like the father. Not remarkable. Normal.
"Some Trump allies rationalize what’s happening by saying that they can escalate to deescalate — that is, respond to the legal attacks on Trump with wilder legal attacks on his enemies, thus deterring conflict in the future... Republicans are naïve if they’re confident they can deliver the final blow or that Trump can stop the cycle with blanket preemptive pardons come January 2029...."
"... a what-goes-around-comes-around pattern more familiar in authoritarian countries than in developed Western democracies. Even presidents more restrained than Mr. Trump may succumb to the temptation to follow at least some of his example."
"Even presidents more restrained than Mr. Trump"? You mean, like Biden?
But, we'll be told, what Biden did to Trump is different. I mean, it wasn't "ushering in a cycle of retaliation." That's something that can only be done by someone who didn't start it.
Comey will continue to be vilified and lionized by different parts of the population. Yet, this is an ignoble moment that he helped bring about.... Now the man who bragged about nailing Michael Flynn will face the same false statement charge. The man who celebrated the charging of Donald Trump (including obstruction-related charges) will face his own obstruction charge. Whether karma or lawfare, Comey will now have his day in court.
"These were stretched charges, charges that were literally read in unique ways for the first time in order to go after him. So should you be surprised that Donald Trump is now doing this to the people he believes targeted him in the first place? He promised this was going to happen. It’s not exactly a shock. It is the reality that these methods were used against him. Now, the thing about Trump that frustrates so many people on the left is that he’s not genteel about doing this sort of stuff. Joe Biden would lie."
... but it was Comey who, last May, Instagrammed a photo — with shells in the sand in the form of "8647" — and the cavalier caption "Cool shell formation on my beach walk."
At the time, Trump said: "He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant. If you're the FBI director and you don't know what that meant, that meant assassination."
"... that carved a destructive path straight through them: cracking down on speech, abandoning the norms of journalistic objectivity, making unprecedented use of prosecutorial power. These were bad ideas in their own right, and they did absolutely nothing to stop Trump."
Bad ideas... and they did absolutely nothing to stop Trump. But what if they had stopped Trump? That was the biggest of the ideas, and it might have worked. McArdle asserts that now — now that Trump is back with a vengeance — now we should see that neutral principles are best. If only the lawfare hadn't backfired, it would have been delightful to go on ignoring them.
Delightful for whom? Who are we talking about? Not McArdle herself. She's reporting on what she'd "been hearing" for 10 years. She also says "it was depressing watching so many people on the left thrill to this abusive lawfare." Well, "so many people on the left" think a lot of awful things, including that the so-called "rule of law" is a con.
Did the ordinary liberals of America buy into the fight-fire-with-fire approach? Let them take responsibility, not merely gesture at the "many people on the left." But it's not as though admitting you were wrong now will carry any weight. You played a game of tit for tat and now you're sad that the game continues.
Headline at The Washington Post. I'd make that a free-access link, but I only have 4 left to give this month and it's only the 18th. And it's one of these 31-day months, too, so I've got to be extra stingy.
I'll cherry-pick the lawprof talk:
“They have little options here in terms of protecting their interests,” said Jonathan Shaub, who teaches law at the University of Kentucky and has advised previous White Houses on the use of executive privilege. “Some have claimed the Fifth Amendment, even though I don’t think they actually think that they have committed any crimes. But given the language that has been used and the insinuations, I can understand why their counsel would say, ‘Just don’t say anything, because we don’t know what they’re willing to do and what they’re willing to prosecute.’”
You don't think they actually think that they have committed any crimes. But what do they need to believe? Is it enough that they believe that the current administration will do anything to get revenge on political adversaries? Professor Shaub can understand why their counsel would say they should plead the Fifth, but would he advise his clients to plead the Fifth based on the idea of not knowing what the Trump administration is willing to do?
Is there video of Joe Biden saying that on his own, perhaps sitting with a serious journalist who is permitted to probe with questions about specific actions taken under his name?
Oh, no! I see we're told it was "a statement"! His denial that things were done by others using his name is another thing that might have been done by others using his name!
Does that make me a conspiracy theorist — an outlandish conspiracy theorist — in the eyes of the New York Times?
I'm suspicious of Biden's denial, but that doesn't mean I support the new President investigating the previous President. But that's what Biden did to Trump. Or was that really Biden? I understand Trump's motive of revenge, but I wish he'd concentrate on achieving great things, not raking over the wrongs of the past. And yet I rankle at the accusation that one is a conspiracy theorist — an outlandish conspiracy theorist! — to believe that there were these wrongs in the past.
In an executive order, Mr. Trump put the power and resources of the federal government to work examining whether some of Mr. Biden’s presidential actions were legally invalid because his aides had enacted those policies without his knowledge. The executive order came after Mr. Trump shared a social media post over the weekend that claimed Mr. Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, following a pattern of suggestions by the president and his allies that Mr. Biden was a mentally incapacitated puppet of his aides....
Some outlandish things are not outlandish, and some outlandish things are humor. Should a President use humor? Not to confuse people, but he doesn't need to eschew humor for the sake of those who are willfully blind to humor. In this case, the "robotic clone" expresses a justified doubt that the entity called Joe Biden was making his own decisions and exercising the power entrusted to him by the people.
By the way, even if we assume Biden said those words quoted in the post title and let's even add the assumption that he said them in all sincerity, the question remains: How could he know what decisions were made during his presidency? He says he "made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations." Which ones? All of them? Sit him down for a serious interview with someone who will ask him about particular decisions and see if he recognizes them! This is the man who asserted that he "beat Medicare."
"... of President Trump’s first investigation into one of his foremost adversaries. The head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency sent a criminal referral letter to the Department of Justice this week, saying that Ms. James 'appeared to have falsified records' related to properties she owns in Virginia and New York in order to receive favorable loan terms.... When purchasing the Virginia residence, Ms. James signed notarized paperwork attesting that she would use it as a principal residence.... The referral letter also accused Ms. James of misrepresenting the number of units in a Brooklyn home she purchased in 2001, possibly in order to receive better interest rates.....The month before Ms. James’s lawsuit against Mr. Trump went to trial, anonymous complainants began to file documents with New York City’s Department of Buildings, several of them related to the number of units in the home.... One of the complaints, in October 2024, asked why Ms. James was 'NOT being prosecuted for fraud and filling false documents when other people have been persecuted for far less crimes,' then added a pointed question: 'a Double Standard???'"
"... and a range of other people whom Mr. Trump sees as his political enemies, because they were signed using an autopen device.... But Mr. Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric. Implicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated."
The NYT writer — Shawn McCreesh — observes "There is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon, and there is no exception to pardons signed by autopen," but to say that is to look past the question whether there was a pardon. Even if a pardon can't be undone, how do we know it was ever done? We have a piece of writing, signed by autopen, and maybe it can be shown to have originated within the White House. The power that is in the Constitution is given to "The President," so, interpreting that clause, one might question whether his hand must do the signing... and whether his mind comprehended what he was doing.
But I can't believe courts would entertain challenges like that. It's the ultimate can of worms. Consider the parallel problem in the exercise of power within the judicial branch. We assume that the judicial opinions that emerge from the usual channels are signed/"signed" by the judges whose names appear on them and that the judges minds made the decisions that appear in the words of the text. We may well suspect that law clerks wrote the some of the opinions and even that some of the judges don't understand "their" own opinions. But we accept that they are what they purport to be. Beyond that lies chaos.
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