SUNY Buffalo State University decided to expel 44 migrants from its dorms after parents voiced concern over student safety following two alleged sexual assaults by migrants.
According to The Daily Wire, the university abruptly canceled an agreement with a local community group that placed the migrants in the student housing.
“As we are welcoming our students back to campus Tuesday, we wanted to ensure the best possible learning environment for our students and smooth functioning of our university operations,” Buffalo State President Bonita Durand said in a statement. “I made the difficult decision to discontinue the revocable permit and want to reassure our university community that, as our students return to campus Tuesday, they will find their learning environment as they expected.”
Dr. Myron Glick, Jericho Road Community Health Center’s founder and CEO, told The Buffalo Newsthat SUNY Buffalo State had agreed to shelter migrants in dorms beginning in May because Jericho Road’s migrant shelter was over capacity.
“We live in a community where there’s prejudice,” Glick told The Buffalo News. “And this decision was made, really, in my opinion, as – what’s the right word? – in reaction to that prejudice.”
The school’s decision comes after parents expressed alarm about two separate alleged sexual assaults that involved migrants in the nearby town of Cheektowaga.
“I felt compelled to speak out about this action by Buffalo State because it was discriminatory against these asylum-seekers who are human beings just like you and me,” Glick said. “We do worse by the families we are serving if we don’t speak up for them. They need to know we stand with them as fellow human beings. We cannot be silent in the face of injustice.”
Durand did not mention the alleged sexual assaults in commenting about the decision.
Authorities announced on Aug. 8 that a Venezuelan migrant was charged with raping a woman in front of a 3-year-old child. The alleged incident occurred after the suspect had traveled to Erie County from New York City.
Three days later, a second migrant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo was arrested and charged with sex abuse and unlawful imprisonment for allegedly sexually assaulting a 27-year-old woman who had been working with a community group to aid the migrants.
In the wake of the alleged sexual assaults, Erie County, which includes Buffalo, demanded New York City Mayor Eric Adams stop transporting migrants to the area.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the Democrat mayor “agreed and informed me they will not send any additional persons to Erie County at this time.”
The two New York officials also reportedly discussed “the need for a new and improved security plan.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said this month that Erie County will receive more New York National Guard personnel and assets to help with the migrants. More than 1,800 National Guard members are already deployed across the state to assist with the migrant crisis, according to the governor’s office.
Approximately 540 migrants have been relocated to Erie County thus far.
Roquishia Lewis stepped in front of a row of TV cameras Monday and braced herself to talk about her only child, Tyler, who was stabbed to death in October on the University at Buffalo North Campus.
There were signs, subtle but unmistakable, that Hunter Biden’s high-stakes plea agreement with federal prosecutors might be on shaky ground hours before it went public in June, according to emails sent by his legal team to the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware.
When one of Mr. Biden’s lawyers sent over the draft of the statement they intended to share with the news media, a top deputy to David C. Weiss, who had overseen the inquiry since 2018, asked to remove two words describing the status of the investigation, according to interviews and internal correspondence on the deal obtained by The New York Times. “Concluded” and “conclusion” should be replaced with the weaker “resolved,” the deputy said.
Six weeks later, the federal judge presiding over a hearing on the agreement would expose even deeper divisions and the deal imploded, prompting Mr. Weiss to seek appointment as special counsel with the freedom to expand the inquiry and bring new charges.
The deal’s collapse — chronicled in over 200 pages of confidential correspondence between Mr. Weiss’s office and Mr. Biden’s legal team, and interviews with those close to Mr. Biden, lawyers involved in the case and Justice Department officials — came after intense negotiations that started with the prospect that Mr. Biden would not be charged at all and now could end in his possible indictment and trial.
Earlier this year, The Times found, Mr. Weiss appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. But the correspondence reveals that his position, relayed through his staff, changed in the spring, around the time a pair of I.R.S. officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation. Mr. Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.
Now, the I.R.S. agents and their Republican allies say they believe the evidence they brought forward, at the precise time they did, played a role in influencing the outcome, a claim senior law enforcement officials dispute. While Mr. Biden’s legal team agrees that the I.R.S. agents affected the deal, his lawyers have contended to the Justice Department that by disclosing details about the investigation to Congress, they broke the law and should be prosecuted.
“It appears that if it weren’t for the courageous actions of these whistle-blowers, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, Hunter Biden would never have been charged at all,” a team of lawyers for one of the I.R.S. agents said in a statement, adding that the initial agreement reflected preferential treatment.
A spokesman for Mr. Weiss had no comment. He is legally barred from discussing an open investigation, and a senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the situation pushed back on the idea that Mr. Weiss had been influenced by outside pressures, and ascribed any shifts to the typical ebb and flow of negotiations.
The documents and interviews also show that the relationship between Mr. Biden’s legal team and Mr. Weiss’s office reached a breaking point at a crucial moment after one of his top deputies — who had become a target of the I.R.S. agents and Republican allies — left the team for reasons that remain unclear.
Above all, this inside chronicle of the agreement vividly illustrates the difficulty of the task facing Justice Department officials like Mr. Weiss, who have been called upon to investigate prominent figures at a time of extreme polarization, when the nation’s political and criminal justice systems are intertwining in treacherous and unpredictable ways.
No one supervising a comparable inquiry in recent years — like those who oversaw the investigations into Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump — managed to smoothly unwind their investigations when they chose not to indict their targets.
Precisely what happens next is unclear. Mr. Biden’s top lawyer has quit, and accused prosecutors of reneging on their commitments. And Republicans, who waged an all-out war to discredit the deal, are seeking to maximize the political damage to President Biden, seeing it as a counter to the four criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, their party’s presidential front-runner.
Mr. Weiss had a few reasons to ask Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to appoint him special counsel. The status could grant him greater authority to pursue leads around the country, and could provide him with added leverage in a revamped deal with Mr. Biden. But he was also motivated by a requirement to produce a report that would allow him to answer critics, according to people with knowledge of the situation — an accounting that could become public before the 2024 election.
An Opening Bid
In January, Christopher J. Clark, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, arrived in Wilmington, Del., to push Mr. Weiss to end the investigation into the president’s troubled son that had, at that point, dragged on for more than four years.
Mr. Clark began by telling Mr. Weiss that his legacy would be defined by how he handled this decision.
If his host somehow missed the message, Mr. Clark followed up with an even more dramatic gesture, reading a quote from a Supreme Court justice, Robert Jackson, who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials: Prosecutors could always find “a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone” but should never succumb to pressure from the powerful.
That first face-to-face interaction, between a fiery white-collar defense lawyer who has represented Elon Musk and a late-career federal prosecutor known for keeping his gray-haired head down, set into motion months of intense negotiations that led to an agreement that appeared to end Mr. Biden’s tax and firearms violations, only to derail over the extent of his immunity from future prosecution.
Mr. Biden’s foreign business ventures, especially when his father was vice president and later when he was addicted to crack cocaine, had long raised ethical and legal concerns. In 2018, Mr. Weiss was quietly assigned the Hunter Biden investigation and then kept on by Justice Department officials in the Biden administration to complete the job.
Mr. Weiss cast a wide net from the start, examining a range of Mr. Biden’s business dealings, his finances and personal conduct. But the inquiry eventually narrowed.
By late 2022, Mr. Weiss — who relied on the work of I.R.S. investigators, the F.B.I. and lawyers in the Justice Department’s tax division — had found some evidence but determined that he did not have sufficient grounds to indict Mr. Biden for major felonies, according to several people familiar with the situation.
Mr. Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses. (A senior law enforcement official forcefully denied the account.)
But in January, the two sides hunkered down on the business at hand. Mr. Clark first tried to undermine the gun case, arguing that the charge was likely unconstitutional and citing recent legal challenges after the Supreme Court’s decision last year expanding gun rights.
Then he took on the tax case, laying out with slides how Mr. Trump’s longtime confidant, Roger J. Stone Jr., had failed to pay his taxes for several more years than Mr. Biden but had been allowed to deal with it civilly and had faced no criminal punishment. Mr. Weiss seemed noncommittal.
If he chose not to charge, members of Mr. Biden’s legal team believed Mr. Weiss still wanted something from Mr. Biden — like an agreement to never own a gun again — to show there was some accountability after his long-running inquiry. Mr. Clark would have to wait awhile to find out.
Four months later, on Monday, May 15, a familiar figure reached out to Mr. Clark: Lesley Wolf, a top Weiss deputy with whom Mr. Clark had developed a rapport over the previous two years. In a conference call with the Biden legal team, she acknowledged Mr. Clark’s core demand: that his client never be asked to plead guilty to anything.
She then made a proposition — a deal in which Mr. Biden would not plead guilty, but would agree to what is known as a deferred prosecution agreement.
Such a deal allows a person charged with a crime to avoid entering a formal plea if he or she agrees to abide by a series of conditions, like enrolling in drug treatment or anti-violence programs, relinquishing ownership of weapons or forgoing alcohol.
The agreements, widely used to avoid clogging courts and jails with low-level offenders, have legal teeth. If the terms are violated, a person can be charged with the original crimes.
Mr. Clark — knowing Mr. Biden wanted to bring an end to the investigation that had hovered over him, his family and the Biden White House — was amenable. He told Ms. Wolf he would draft language for such an agreement, an opening bid that would kick off final talks.
By Thursday, Mr. Clark and his legal team sent Ms. Wolf their version of an agreement. It made no mention of a guilty plea, but included a promise that Mr. Biden would never again possess a gun and a pledge that he would pay his taxes.
Ms. Wolf suggested additions, including a demand for a statement of facts, a detailed and unflattering narrative of an individual’s conduct that had been investigated.
The parties then turned to the most important provision of all, an issue that would ultimately unravel the deal: Mr. Clark’s sweeping request for immunity not only for all potential crimes investigated by Mr. Weiss, but also for “any other federal crimes relating to matters investigated by the United States” he might have ever committed.
Ms. Wolf appears to have discarded Mr. Clark’s language. Mr. Clark pushed back in a call with Mr. Weiss and the language was replaced with a narrower promise not to prosecute for any of the offenses “encompassed” in the statement of facts.
The end seemed in sight. When the basic outline was hashed out, Mr. Clark asked Ms. Wolf if she was serious about finalizing the agreement — if so, he would fly out to California to explain the terms to his nervous client. Take the trip, she said.
Mr. Clark ran all of this by Mr. Biden in a meeting at his Malibu house — in a garage where he works on his paintings. He approved the plan.
That Friday, Mr. Clark asked Ms. Wolf if he should stay in California to finalize the deal in Mr. Biden’s presence over the weekend.
No, she replied, it would take her a few more days.
Mr. Clark, believing that they were on the brink of a deal, flew back to New York.
Outcry on Capitol Hill
But on Capitol Hill, the efforts to upend a resolution were gaining momentum.
While Mr. Weiss concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge Mr. Biden with major crimes, not all his colleagues shared that opinion. The perception that Mr. Biden was being treated too softly spurred resistance among some investigators who believed that his office had blocked them from following all leads.
Few were more frustrated than Gary Shapley. A veteran I.R.S. investigator, he had worked major cases and helped take on big bankers. But every time he said he tried to pursue what he believed could be a major break in the Biden investigation, he felt stymied.
When investigators went to interview Hunter Biden, they were told they couldn’t approach the house. An attempt to serve a search warrant on Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s guesthouse? Denied. The request to search a storage unit belonging to Hunter Biden? Derailed.
Finally, he reached out to Mark Lytle, a former federal prosecutor, and the men eventually connected with former Republican staff members who had worked for Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and had knowledge of federal whistle-blower protections.
Mr. Shapley had been raising concerns internally since at least the fall of 2022, but that winter, he took his allegations to the Justice Department’s watchdog, lodging a complaint in February.
By April, Mr. Shapley offered to share insider details with House Republican committee investigators, including his claim that Mr. Weiss had told him that federal prosecutors in Washington and California had refused to bring tax charges against Mr. Biden. His most startling allegation: Mr. Weiss had been so frustrated that he had considered asking Mr. Garland to appoint him as special counsel in late 2022. (Mr. Weiss and Mr. Garland have both denied that account.)
Mr. Shapley requested special protections to bypass legal restrictions on discussing ongoing federal investigations.
It all began to explode into public view on May 15 — the same day Ms. Wolf contacted Mr. Clark — when it was reported that the investigative team that had worked on the case, including Mr. Shapley, had been removed. The next day the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee fired off a letter to the I.R.S. commissioner demanding an explanation.
Around that time, lawyers for a second tax investigator sent a letter to the I.R.S. commissioner, claiming the team of investigators on the case had been removed after expressing concerns about political interference from the Justice Department.
The letter was quickly made public. The agents’ claims were the breakthrough House Republicans had long been seeking.
The I.R.S. investigators had given Congress something genuinely new: summaries of WhatsApp messages that appeared to show Hunter Biden involved in a shakedown in which he had invoked his father, firsthand testimony from people who had reviewed Mr. Biden’s finances and the credibility of their long careers at the tax agency.
On May 24, CBS aired an interview with one of the agents. Two days later, he testified behind closed doors before the House Ways and Means Committee, creating buzz on Capitol Hill. The second man testified on June 1. Three weeks later, the committee voted to publicly release transcripts of the testimony, leading to even more news coverage.
Shifting Ground
As the testimony from the I.R.S. agents took hold, Mr. Biden’s legal team felt the ground shift beneath them. The U.S. attorney’s office suddenly went quiet.
Early in the negotiations, Ms. Wolf included what seemed like a boilerplate disclaimer in an email, that her team “had not discussed or obtained approval” from her superiors for the terms of the final agreement.
On Tuesday, May 23, after four days of silence, Ms. Wolf delivered unwelcome news. Mr. Weiss had revised what he wanted in the deal, now demanding that Mr. Biden plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes. It crossed a red line for Mr. Clark.
Erupting in anger, Mr. Clark accused Ms. Wolf of misleading him. He renounced the possibility of any deal, but after consulting with Mr. Biden, reversed course and told Ms. Wolf that Mr. Biden was willing to go along.
Mr. Clark then went to Wilmington to meet the prosecutors, where they hammered out the details of the deal.
By the middle of June, both sides were prepared to announce a deal.
Under the agreement, Mr. Biden would plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and avert prosecution on the gun charge by enrolling in a diversion program.
Mr. Biden’s legal team was eager to issue a statement claiming that the agreement represented the conclusion of the government’s investigation. That Monday, June 19, Mr. Clark sent a draft to Shannon Hanson, another Weiss deputy, which clearly stated the investigation was over.
“I can confirm that the five-year long, extensive federal investigation into my client, Hunter Biden, has been concluded through agreements with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware,” it read.
“With the conclusion of this investigation, he looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward,” it continued.
Ms. Hanson suggested the edit from “has been concluded” to “resolved,” and she also asked Mr. Clark to strike the phrase “With the conclusion of this investigation.”
But hours after the agreement was announced, confusion set in. In a news release, Mr. Weiss’s office said that the investigation was “ongoing,” taking Mr. Biden and officials at Justice Department headquarters by surprise.
It was at this critical juncture that Ms. Wolf began to take a significantly reduced role, although it is unclear whether that had anything to do with the Biden case.
In their testimony, the I.R.S. whistle-blowers claimed that Ms. Wolf — who had made a couple of campaign donations to Democrats — had discouraged them from pursuing lines of inquiry that could lead to the elder Mr. Biden.
Around this time, Leo Wise — a senior prosecutor who had spent nearly two decades in the Baltimore U.S. attorney’s office — was quietly transferred to the department’s criminal division, then detailed to Delaware to add legal firepower to the relatively small Delaware office.
It was his name, not Ms. Wolf’s, that appeared on the plea deal. And it was Mr. Wise who was responsible for defending the deal, one he had not negotiated, in front of a federal judge who proved to be unforgiving.
A Deal Upended
Hunter Biden walked into the Wilmington federal courthouse on July 26, with the expectation that his long legal odyssey was nearing an end.
But there were signs all was not well. Hours earlier, the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means committee had made one final stab at scuttling the agreement, urging the court to consider the whistle-blowers’ testimony.
It turned out to be unnecessary.
Judge Maryellen Noreika,, repeatedly informed the two sides that she would be no “rubber stamp.” She picked apart the deal, exposing substantial disagreements over the extent of the immunity provision.
Mr. Clark said the deal indemnified his client not merely for the tax and gun offenses uncovered during the inquiry, but for other possible offenses stemming from his lucrative consulting deals. Mr. Wise said it was far narrower — and suggested the government was still considering charges against Mr. Biden under laws regulating foreign lobbying.
The two sides tried to salvage it, Judge Noreika was not convinced, and Mr. Biden silently left the courthouse under a hail of shouted questions.
The question is an urgent one due to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s election interference case against Donald Trump and 18 others, which she has dubiously framed as a racketeering conspiracy.
Why has DA Willis invoked Georgia’s version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which is typically applied to mobsters engaged in the familiar rackets of murder, extortion, trafficking in narcotics and stolen goods, gambling, prostitution and so on? Because there’s a giant hole in her case: the lack of a clear crime to which Trump and his co-defendants can plausibly be said to have agreed.
Let’s put RICO to the side for a moment and focus on conspiracy. Very simply, a conspiracy is an agreement to violate a criminal statute. It takes two to tango, so a conspiracy must minimally involve a pair of people. Beyond that, though, it can involve three people, 19 people, 100 people — any number. Regardless of how many people are said to be implicated, however, there is always one requirement: There must be a meeting of the minds about the crime that is the objective of the conspiracy.
If prosecutors allege a large-scale conspiracy, various conspirators may play different roles. In a conspiracy to sell cocaine, for example, some people may handle importation; others handle sales or security, and still others, accounting and management of the cash proceeds. But what unites these role-players in a single conspiracy is the criminal objective — in our example, to sell cocaine. If there is no agreement about a crime, there is no conspiracy.
Usually, this is not a problem for prosecutors. While constitutional due process guarantees that every American is presumed innocent, it also dictates that no American can be charged with a crime and forced to stand trial unless there is probable cause that a crime has been committed.
As a result, even though prosecutors bear the burden of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt before there can be a conviction, we can easily understand why the defendants have been charged. If they are charged with conspiracy, the indictment will clearly state the crime they allegedly agreed to commit — e.g., drug trafficking, bank robbery, murder, extortion. Whatever the objective crime may be, we understand that the prosecutors, the police, and the grand jury have established to the court’s satisfaction that there is enough evidence to establish probable cause that the alleged conspirators agreed to commit a crime.
Willis’s indictment. She alleges that the 19 people named in her indictment are guilty of conspiracy because they agreed to try to keep Donald Trump in power as president — specifically, to “change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.” Maybe they shared such an aim, maybe their 19 minds met regarding that objective, but in and of itself, trying to reverse the result of an election is not a crime. You may have noticed that neither Al Gore nor Stacey Abrams was ever led away in handcuffs.
To be clear, it’s entirely possible that people can perform criminal acts in the pursuit of a lawful objective. If they do, they may be charged with those crimes — and if the crimes are serious, they should be charged. That, however, does not mean their overarching objective was a crime. And again, if you don’t have two or more people agreeing on an objective that is a crime, you don’t have a conspiracy.
Willis tries to get around this inconvenience in two ways, neither of which works.
The first is a tautology: She conclusively asserts, on page 14 of the indictment, that this was a “conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.” That is, the lawful objective of changing the election outcome somehow becomes unlawful because she invokes the apparently talismanic word “unlawful.” But there is no crime of unlawfully trying to change an election outcome — not in Georgia law nor any other American law.
Trying to change an election outcome is legal; the end doesn’t become illegal if pursued by illegal means — instead, those illegal means can be charged as crimes. But there is no conspiracy unless the objective itself is clearly a crime. You don’t see prosecutors alleging, say, that defendants were in a “conspiracy to unlawfully” commit murder or robbery. Murder and robbery are crimes. If two or more people agree to commit murder or robbery, that is an agreement to commit a crime — a conspiracy. To the contrary, an agreement to try to reverse the result of an election is not an agreement to commit a crime.
Willis thus turns to her second artifice, the RICO conspiracy charge. RICO is unique in the criminal law because, instead of targeting crimes, it targets entities — associations of people, referred to as enterprises — that generate revenue through the commission of crimes. The offense is not so much the crimes (referred to as the pattern of racketeering activity), but the enterprise (such as a mafia family) that carries out the crimes. A RICO conspiracy is an agreement to participate in such an enterprise — to belong to the group and sustain the group so that it continues to generate power and profits.
That doesn’t fit the Georgia case. Trump and his 18 co-defendants did not intend or desire to belong to a group, or even see themselves as a group. Their objective allegedly was to maintain Trump in power, not to participate in an enterprise. And unlike a RICO enterprise, the 19 defendants had no intention of sustaining their group — if it even was a unified group. Their only objective allegedly was to keep Trump in office. By Jan. 20, 2021, that objective was either going to succeed or fail, but whatever the outcome, the group would then cease to exist as such. By contrast, a real RICO enterprise must be a continuing threat — one that labors to preserve its existence and operations.
The defendants indicted by Willis did not have an overarching agreement to commit a crime, and they were the antithesis of a RICO enterprise. If, as the DA alleges, they committed discrete crimes in the effort to reverse the election result — such as forgery, false statements, solicitation of others to commit felonies, or hacking into election systems — then they should be prosecuted for those crimes.
But an agreement to do something legal — to reverse the result of an election — is not a conspiracy. And if the presumption of innocence means anything, we must presume people are innocent if the prosecutor fails to allege that they agreed to do something that was actually a crime.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, contributing editor at National Review, and a Fox News contributor.
Court Tosses Jan. 6 Sentence; Ruling May Impact Other Cases.
A federal appeals court on Friday ordered a new sentence for a North Carolina man who pleaded guilty to a petty offense in the Capitol riot — a ruling that could impact dozens of low-level cases in the massive Jan. 6, 2021 prosecution.
The appeals court in Washington said James Little was wrongly sentenced for his conviction on a misdemeanor offense to both prison time and probation, which is court-ordered monitoring of defendants who are not behind bars.
Little, who entered the Capitol but didn’t join in any destruction or violence, pleaded guilty in 2021 to a charge that carries up to six months behind bars. He was sentenced last year to 60 days in prison followed by three years of probation.
But the 2-1 opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that probation and imprisonment “may not be imposed as a single sentence” for a petty offense, adding “there are separate options on the menu.” Judge Robert Wilkins, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, dissented.
The decision could invalidate the sentences of dozens of Jan. 6 defendants who received what is known as a “split sentence” for a petty offense. More than 80 other Jan. 6 defendants have been sentenced to both prison time and probation for the same misdemeanor offense as Little, according to an Associated Press analysis.
The practical effect, however, may be limited as almost all of them have likely already served their prison terms long ago. Little’s attorney had asked the appeals court to simply order an end to his probation monitoring since he already served his 60 days behind bars.
An attorney for Little declined to comment on Friday. The Justice Department could appeal the decision. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington said: “We are reviewing the Court’s ruling and will determine our next steps in accordance with the law.”
Some judges who have imposed such sentences in misdemeanor cases have stressed the need to keep tabs on Jan. 6 defendants after they serve their time to prevent them from engaging in such conduct during the next election. While on probation, defendants have to check in with a probation officer and follow certain conditions.
“The Court must not only punish Little for his conduct but also ensure that he will not engage in similar conduct again during the next election,” the judge who sentenced Little, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, wrote in a ruling last year.
“Some term of imprisonment may serve sentencing’s retributive goals. But only a longer-term period of probation is adequate to ensure that Little will not become an active participant in another riot,” he wrote.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Little went to President Donald Trump’s speech ahead of the riot and then walked to the Capitol, where he fist-bumped other rioters and went into the Senate Gallery, according to court records. After leaving the Capitol, he and others prayed on the Capitol steps and sang “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” by Twisted Sister, according to court documents.
More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Jan. 6 riot. More than 600 of them have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials decided by a jury or judge. About 600 have been sentenced, with over half getting terms of imprisonment ranging from three days to 18 years.
Conservative commentator Larry Elder recently appeared on ‘The Breakfast Club’ and gave host Charlamagne tha God a history lesson on Joe Biden’s racist actions and remarks.
CHARLEMAGNE THA GOD: Have you ever heard the term ‘n—– wake-up’ call? LARRY ELDER: No.
CHARLEMAGNE: It’s an incident where a person of color forgets that they are of color and are reminded rather brutally by an unexpected act of racism. Have you ever had that? ELDER: Oh brother. CHARLEMAGNE: I’m just asking.
ELDER: I’m acutely aware Charlemagne that I am a Black person, just as you are a Black person and when Joe Biden insulted you by saying ‘you ain’t really Black you don’t know whether or not you want to vote for me or vote for Donald Trump.’ It seems to me that should’ve been a wake up call on your part. He came in here and insult you, a Black man and tell you that you got to think a certain way. I’m amazed that you weren’t mad about that.
CHARLEMAGNE: I’m not going to say that upset me, just like I’m not going to let you upset me. You know? I don’t seem to get upset about those things.
ELDER: Well you just talked about a n—- wake up call and it seemed to me that should’ve been a wake up call on your part. To have a white guy come in here, who also said by the way about Mitt Romney, because he didn’t want to put up more regulation on Wall Street he was going to ‘put y’all back in chains.’ And Joe Biden has lied for decades on his civil rights record, claiming he desegregated movie theaters and restaurants in Wilmington, Delaware. He didn’t do any of that. He lied and said he tried to visit Nelson Mandela during apartheid South Africa, he did not. He came in here and told you that you aren’t black unless you think in a certain kind of way? It seems to me that should have been a n—- wake up call for you, but it wasn’t.
CNN host Jake Tapper admitted that former President Donald Trump “was right” during the 2020 presidential debates when he accused then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden of accepting large amounts of foreign money.
Jake Tapper admits ‘Trump was right,’ ‘Biden was wrong’ about Hunter Biden in 2020 presidential debate.
CNN host and chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper admitted that former President Donald Trump “was right” when he accused then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden of accepting large amounts of foreign money during the 2020 presidential debates.
On CNN’s “The Lead” Thursday, Tapper also declared that Biden “was wrong” during the match-ups between the two candidates three years ago, when the then-Democratic nominee denied Trump’s allegations that his son made “a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow and various other places.”
At the time Biden flatly rejected the claim, saying, “None of that is true.” Tapper gave Biden the benefit of the doubt in his commentary, stating he didn’t know whether the then-candidate was “lying” at the time.
In a Thursday segment, CNN anchor Jake Tapper admitted “Trump was right” when he accused Hunter Biden of accepting large amounts of foreign money during the 2020 presidential debates.(Screenshot/CNN)
Tapper played a compilation of the two debate exchanges and compared them with a recent report from Washington Post chief-fact checker Glenn Kessler showing Biden to be wrong.
The host stated, “Glenn Kessler from the Washington Post had a fact check about Joe Biden from earlier this month noting that Hunter Biden admitted in court in July that he was in fact paid substantial sums from Chinese companies.”
Citing the piece, Tapper said, “Kessler wrote, ‘Hunter Biden reported nearly 2.4 million in income in 2017 and 2.2 million in income in 2018,’ most of which came from Chinese or Ukrainian interests.”
He then took a swipe at Biden’s 2020 claims, before playing footage from the debates, “This directly goes against what Joe Biden said in the debate in 2020 with Donald Trump. Take a listen.”
After playing the footage of then-President Trump’s allegations and Biden’s denial, Tapper admitted that Trump was correct about Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
“So this is from two different debates but, I mean, Trump was right. I mean, he did make a fortune from China and Joe Biden was wrong,” Tapper declared.
President Biden has snapped at reporters who have asked him about alleged corruption involving him and his son, Hunter Biden, who’s been engaged in several controversial foreign business deals.(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
About Biden’s denial, he added, “I don’t know that he was lying about it. He might not have been told by Hunter, but this blind spot is a problem.”
Though Biden denied his son’s alleged corrupt business dealings while on the presidential campaign trail, CNN recently mentioned that the president has been “very obsessed” with the topic and sensitive to how it’s being portrayed in the media.
Earlier on Thursday, CNN’s John Avlon stated, “And in private also, I’ve heard reports that he’s very obsessed with the negative coverage of Hunter. He’s concerned about it, it’s an irritant. And that’s understandable. But not one that allies around him want to raise because it will derail a conversation.” Edited.
The Georgia Indictment Was Triggered by Fake News.
The indictment against President Donald Trump and 18 lawyers, aides, and supporters has been widely criticized, but even many of the critics have missed the most important flaw: the fact that the entire grand jury investigation began with a bit of fake news.
The fake news was reporting that Trump had told Georgia officials, by telephone, to fabricate votes.
In early January 2020, for example, Trump was reported to have told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to win.
Actually, what Trump said was: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state” (emphasis added).
Trump was not giving an order. He was talking about his own feelings. And as Scott Adams noted this week, Trump was speaking in the context of believing he had already won the state. He believed the proof was out there; he didn’t need to make anything up.
As George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley has noted: “While others have portrayed the statement as a raw call for fabricating the votes, it seems more likely that Trump was swatting back claims that there was no value to a statewide recount by pointing out that he wouldn’t have to find a statistically high number of votes to change the outcome of the election. It is telling that many politicians and pundits refuse to even acknowledge that obvious alternate meaning.”
The term “find” is also used colloquially, and often, in the context of counting votes. Political analysts on television routinely say that a candidate needs to “find” votes in one area or another, having already been cast, as results are reported by local precincts.
A week later, there was a mistaken report in the Washington Post on Jan. 9, 2021, that Trump had urged a Georgia election investigator, later named as Frances Watson, to “find the fraud.” The original headline was: “‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.”
The Post later had to issue a correction: “Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there.” But the inaccurate version of the Post‘s original story was repeated throughout the mainstream media before the correction was made.
That does not mean Trump’s conduct was praiseworthy. But there was nothing in his conversations — properly reported, at least — to suggest that he had done anything illegal, especially given that he knew lawyers and skeptical officials were listening to him.
Nevertheless, these reports were partly what prompted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to launch her investigation, starting with a “special grand jury” and leading to the current indictment.
CNN recently reported that the conversation with Brad Raffensperger were what “kicked off the local district attorney’s investigation.” That conversation, and others, were reported — and misquoted — in a highly partisan context, when Democrats were looking for any way to punish Trump and his supporters.
In Trump’s second impeachment trial, for example, which centered on the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, the Democrats’ House impeachment managers presented the fake “find the fraud” quote as if it were real, effectively falsifying evidence in the Senate.
It was not the first time fake news had factored into an impeachment.
Trump’s first impeachment was prompted by misleading, second-hand, anonymous media reports about his telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The transcript, which Trump declassified and released, showed that there had been no “quid pro quo” for an investigation into (accurate, it turns out) suspicions of Joe Biden’s role in Ukraine. But Democrats stuck with the fake news, even making up a fake transcript.
The pattern in both cases was the same: incriminating media reports, based on leaks that likely came from anti-Trump sources, triggered an investigation that had too much political momentum to be stopped once the contrary, first-hand evidence emerged.
Another fake news story that helped launch an investigation was the claim that Trump asked Russia to hack into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails. Trump joked about Russia finding Clinton’s emails during a press conference in July 2017. His critics claimed that his rather obvious attempt at humor was, in fact, an invitation to a geopolitical rival to commit espionage.
That prompted then-CIA director John Brennan to start a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. That investigation fed the “Russia collusion” hoax, which became an attempt to undo the results of the 2016 election. No major figure — not Clinton, nor her lawyers, nor the officials responsible for pushing the lie — was indicted, though Special Counsel John H. Durham convicted an FBI lawyer of falsifying an email (and lost two other cases, likely, in part, because of jury nullification).
It is unclear whether the “special grand jury” in Georgia heard about the calls to Raffensperger and Watson, though it reportedly heard recordings of another call, with Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives David Ralston.
All three calls are referred to in the indictment approved by a formal, subsequent grand jury on Monday. But the indictment does not cite the falsely reported quotes from those calls, or even an accurate version of Trump’s statement to Raffensperger, which launched Willis’s investigation.
That is because the actual quotes from those calls are, arguably, exculpatory, just like the Ukraine transcript. But it is too late.
Once again, the partisan media, amplifying the political prejudices of anti-Trump officials, has brought the country to the brink.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Inside the progressive war on the Supreme Court. The longer the spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds.
In the basement of a Washington, DC restaurant, 200 ticket-purchasing fans have gathered to witness the live recording of a multifaceted conversation about the villainy and corruption of the Supreme Court, and one justice in particular. It only seems appropriate to order the shrimp and grits: it costs $19.99 and comes with a white-wine tomato sauce. This may seem rather hifalutin, but it also comes in a glass mason jar that references tired hipster kitsch — perfectly suitable for a live podcast hosted by Slate.
Shrimp and grits are the uptown incarnation of staples from the Carolina Lowcountry, where the Gullah Geechee people, who live on the Sea Islands along the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, would catch small creek shrimp in their bare hands to eat themselves or sell on the streets of the cities and towns. Grits, from ground dried corn, have a more troublesome history: they were distributed by slaveholders as part of slaves’ food allowances. Historical records show Carolina slave children would get one pint of grits a day for most of the year, with salt.
Clarence Thomas’s mother tongue was not English, but Gullah — a lilting language that sounds like music, a mysterious linguistic cocktail of English, Creole and West African. (Experts disagree on its exact origin.) Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, the second child of Leola Williams. His father abandoned them when he was two. When he was six, his younger brother accidentally burned down the shack they lived in, and they were both sent to be raised by his grandfather in Savannah.
This is the origin story of today’s most hated Supreme Court justice, if you poll the Slate audience. It is also the main focus for a well-funded, well-organized Democratic campaign to put the Supreme Court under siege — not just in the press, but in the public too. And many on the left seem to like it that way. If you can’t transform the judiciary through the process of government, transform it by making it a job people are afraid to take.
In March 2020 Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer stood surrounded by protesters and pointed at the Supreme Court Building, bellowing: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Since then, the last of the three branches of government with respect for norms has indeed been at the center of a whirlwind — even as Democrats repeatedly claim to be the stalwart defenders of democracy, norms, the Constitution and the rule of law.
When the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the most significant culture-war decision in a generation — was leaked, the justices’ families and children were mapped and targeted, and their homes picketed illegally without any reaction from Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice. A twenty-six-year-old man even traveled across the country intending to murder Brett Kavanaugh and his family. He showed up on the justice’s suburban street with a Glock-17 and a plethora of tools — zip ties, duct tape, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a crowbar and padded boots for stealth. With last-minute misgivings, he called 911 and told the operator he had traveled from California “to kill a specific United States Supreme Court justice.” His online messages showed he had wanted to kill as many as three; he had conducted internet searches for “most effective place to stab someone,” “assassin skills,” “assassin equipment” and “assassinations.” He was arrested and indicted — he pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. (Authorities still claim to have no idea who leaked the opinion.)
In the opening episode of a podcast series focused on Clarence Thomas, Slate host Joel Anderson begins with his own peaceful version of a home confrontation. In “America’s Blackest Child,” he knocks on the screened-porch door of a modest single-story white house on a Savannah street. The ninety-four-year-old Leola Williams, happy to oblige a visitor, welcomes Anderson inside, where he discovers the shocking scene you would expect from any proud Southern mother: pictures of her family, including her son Clarence, covering the walls.
Anderson sounds awkward in the podcast audio from Mrs. Williams’s home, as if he knows he’s crossed a line. But he showed no such qualms when he appeared on television with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan to promote the episode, instead expressing surprise there was no security to stop him outside the house. “If they had had a chance to tell me to not come, they probably would have, but when you show up it’s hard to turn someone away from your front door,” he said. The MSNBC segment is mostly devoted to accusing Thomas of being a hypocrite for his anticipated ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v. Harvard. (Thomas joined the 6-3 majority in the decision announced on June 29.) Speculating on his likely vote, Hasan described it as an example of a minority “pulling up the drawbridge after themselves.” Asked why Thomas would choose to become a member of the “radical right,” Anderson had the answer: “He wanted to make money.”
Money is central to the story the left wants to tell about Thomas and the Supreme Court more generally. As is this little white house in Savannah. A ProPublica investigation revealed this spring that billionaire conservative Harlan Crow bought the property from Thomas and his family several years ago.
The relationship between Thomas and Crow, a major Republican donor the justice and his wife Virginia say is a close friend they’ve known for years, has been the primary focus of ProPublica’s “Friends of the Court” series, which seeks to pin all manner of ethical lapses and alleged inappropriate and illegal behavior on conservative justices.
ProPublica’s work has been the centerpiece of a flood of reporting across multiple media outlets focusing on what is being framed as a Supreme Court irrevocably compromised by relationships with well-heeled benefactors. The original series is a slog of filings and reports interspersed with vacation photos dug up from corners of the internet and quotes from various ethics experts — who also are of the left — denouncing the dire nature of a corrupt court.
At first glance, many of these stories look pretty bad. They paint a picture of lifetime-appointed justices palling around with powerful billionaires who shepherd them on fishing trips and to hunting lodges, take them on vacations to exotic locales and contribute indirectly or directly to supporting their legacies. It’s not a pretty picture. Yet even slightly closer inspection reveals that there are enormous reasons to take the breathless reporting with a pinch of salt.
The best example yet of the absurdly disproportionate reporting came in an over-the-top piece by Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian. The article revealed that seven Washington attorneys had used Venmo to send Christmas party money to a top aide of Thomas’s. Noticeably absent from the hair-on-fire “conflict of interest!” piece were the amounts in question, which turned out, according to one of the payers, to be $20 for an annual “lunch buffet consisting of hot dogs, hamburgers and chicken tenders” held for Thomas’s former clerks. Scandalous!
Then there’s the travel. The Judicial Conference, the administrative body which sets the rules for things such as travel disclosures, requires justices to report where they go, when they went and the nature of expenses, but not total costs. They are not required to disclose “any food, lodging or entertainment received as ‘personal hospitality of any individual.’” The rules further define the scope of hospitality: “hospitality extended for a non-business purpose by one, not a corporation or organization… on property or facilities owned by [a] person.”
The argument that the loophole should be smaller might be valid, but the rules are what they are. Demanding justices retroactively report something they weren’t required to report at the time is absurd — ex post facto rulemaking, if you will — and implying they were doing something untoward by following the rules as written is disingenuous. And it’s clear enough that justices of many stripes have long proceeded by the ethics rules as they stand.
The New York Times acknowledged in their editorial on the issue that “Justice Stephen Breyer took at least 225 subsidized trips from 2004 to 2018, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, including trips to Europe, Japan, India and Hawaii… Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got a private tour of Israel in 2018 that was paid for by an Israeli billionaire, Morris Kahn, who has had business before the court.” And OpenSecrets reported that the top two trip-getters in 2021 and 2022 were tied, with Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan both at eight. So yes, both sides do it.
In fact, the single most overlooked story in recent years may relate to the Notorious RBG. According to the Washington Free Beacon, a $1 million prize given to her by the left-leaning globalist Berggruen Institute raised eyebrows (the Judicial Conference limits honoraria to $2,000), but RBG said she would instead donate the amount to a variety of charities. Only later did it become clear that she had wanted the list of recipients to remain hidden, and Berggruen complied on its requisite Form 990 — preventing the public from knowing if any of the recipients had business before the court.
Republican senator Mike Lee raised the issue in a July Judiciary Committee hearing on a court-targeting bill backed by Democratic senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin. “This might have some very significant ramifications if she was still serving on the court,” Lee said. “We don’t yet know exactly what was done with that, whether she carried out the apparent intention of the stated purpose of intent at the outset to donate it to charity.”
As for that house in Georgia: Crow’s spokesman has said he ultimately wants to turn Thomas’s childhood home into a museum, “telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court justice.” Thomas’s share of the sale was a third of $133,000, and it’s still not entirely clear if he even reported it incorrectly, though he reportedly intends to amend it as necessary.
The longer this spasm of investigative reporting goes on, the more desperate it sounds. The Washington Post devoted a 3,300-word hit piece on the effort spearheaded by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to honor Thomas on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment. The public relations campaign was designed to push back against a fictionalized HBO glorification of Anita Hill, who testified against Thomas during his confirmation hearings, and included the promotion of a documentary, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.
The Post paints this entirely typical PR campaign in dark, secretive terms, even drilling down to investigate a “Justice Thomas Fan Account” which posted clips and quotes from the justice. “The account’s posts about the justice generated nearly 21,000 impressions,” the Post reports — a laughably small amount, no offense to the earnest creator.
The Post has yet to conduct a similar deep dive into the promotional campaign around the 2018 documentary RBG, which was acquired and distributed by Participant Media, a production company with an explicitly leftist activist mission founded by Canadian billionaire and former eBay president Jeff Skoll, who has given millions to leftist causes. Nor have they shown any interest in investigating the promotion and creation of the 2018 dramatic film, On the Basis of Sex, based on a script by Ginsburg’s nephew, and starring Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer (though the Post’s Style section did publish a meet-cute piece titled “That time Ruth Bader Ginsburg checked out Armie Hammer,” doing their part to promote the film’s Washington premiere). Participant Media also produced this laudatory fictionalized biopic for roughly $20 million, though it’s unclear if that amount also paid for the movie’s promotional pop rap “Here Comes the Change” performed by Ke$ha, with official artwork by Shepard Fairey, or the Jonas Åkerlund-directed music video, which as of this writing has 818,000 views on YouTube — tragically, the fewest of any Ke$ha music video.
Stepping back from all of this, what we see is a series of breathless reports designed to inflate perceptions of bias without the facts necessary to establish anything of the sort. At most, justices may have to refile forms or clarify their reporting to the ethics body. Due to a change in policy by the Judicial Conference this spring, they’ll also have to report when they fly on a private jet — something they didn’t have to do before. But if that’s all you think it takes to buy a Supreme Court justice, imagine what Hunter Biden could get you for $5 million.
“All these breathless ‘investigations’ amount to nothingburger concern-trolling of justices whose opinions progressive activists don’t like,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court. “The left simply can’t stand that a majority of the Supreme Court is finally, after decades of hand-waving, interpreting the Constitution based on what it says instead of nebulous conceptions of social justice.”
At the Slate podcast taping, Anderson’s first guest of the night was Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of course — his Democratic colleague, Illinois senator Dick Durbin, was supposed to be there too, but he came down with Covid. Anderson’s first question jumped right to the point: given all the horrible things now established about Clarence Thomas, he asked: “So Senator Whitehouse, do you think he should resign?”
“In all decency, he should,” Whitehouse said, to applause. “But there’s just no world in which that happens that I can foresee. He’s just that determined to stay there and make his points and exercise his resentments.”
“I told my caucus, the Senate caucus, that we have a problem with the Supreme Court: it’s now a political organization, we have to treat it as such. And I basically got booed back into my chair,” Whitehouse said. “I got told ‘oh, no, no, the Supreme Court relies on public confidence, we can’t possibly do that.’ So I realized I had to do my homework. And that’s where… the book and all of that came from. Prove your case, write your prosecution memo.”
In Whitehouse’s frame, an “omertà” of secretive groups funded by malevolent billionaires — whom he tags as fossil-fuel interests bent on preventing bipartisan climate-change policy — are operating the court like shabby robed puppets.
“We don’t know all of that yet,” Whitehouse said. “I think we’re going to find out a lot more.” Invited to make the case for his latest piece of legislation targeting all of this (is this a Slate podcast or a Democratic activism group?), Whitehouse calls it “one of the silver linings of this set of really sickening revelations about the Supreme Court.”
“This is a multi-front battle,” Whitehouse said. “Moving the legislation forward, I think we’ll hit tipping points as the behavior of the Supreme Court justices becomes more well known, as further revelations come. We’re preparing for that moment.”
There’s little subtlety in Whitehouse’s comments to a friendly DC crowd about the degree to which the activity swirling around the Supreme Court is an ideological information operation. Democratic politicians have all the reason in the world to promote the effort to do so: the biggest funders of their partisan priorities are all paying for it.
Of the justices targeted in the recent spate of hit pieces, Samuel Alito has been the most aggressive in pushing back. He wrote a prebuttal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal after ProPublica sent him a series of questions inquiring about a fishing trip he took as a guest of right-leaning billionaire Paul Singer. Alito’s response was thorough and ruthless, detailing the skewed and inaccurate framing of the piece and prompting ProPublica’s story to be redrafted, with an explainer for the “Unprecedented Wall Street Journal Pre-buttal.”
If leaking Alito’s opinion in Dobbs was supposed to have cowed the justice, it clearly hasn’t. “Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” he told the Journal in April. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.” The experience prompted the justice to be more confrontational. If he were a meme, one former clerk joked, Alito would be Michael Jordan in The Last Dance: “And I took that personally.”
Whitehouse and his fellow leftists would do anything to alter the conservative course the court has taken in recent years — even radical steps like court-packing. In the fall of 2019, along with four other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Whitehouse sent a brief to the court on a New York gun rights case. “The Supreme Court is not well, and the people know it,” they warned. “Perhaps the court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured.’”
For Whitehouse and those who would blow up the Supreme Court, dark money spent to this end is the good kind, and the activist groups and the journalists they push to echo their priorities are the noble pursuers of truth. The Judicial Crisis Network is a conspiracy, but progressive organizations like Fix the Court and Demand Justice are pure crusaders. The conservative Federalist Society is evil, but the leftist American Constitution Society is good. What this effort seeks to establish is a mutually justifying feedback loop. Democratic senators level severe allegations, activists parcel fever swamp stories to the press who then report on it, allowing the senators to point to these reports as legitimizing what was claimed in the first place.
Assisting in this effort are multiple billionaire-funded advocacy groups, bent on echoing the case for extreme measures to transform the court. They include Fix the Court, a spinoff from the New Venture Fund, managed by for-profit company Arabella Advisors, the center of the left’s dark money network — it spent over $1 billion in liberal efforts in 2020. Demand Justice, another Soros-backed group, was more explicitly focused on the push to pack the court — its board includes Elie Mystal, an MSNBC commentator who is most famous for calling the Constitution “trash.”
“While Whitehouse is championing supposed ‘ethics reform’ at the Supreme Court, he himself has sponsored environmental legislation pushed by the Ocean Conservancy, a group that has paid his wife as a consultant and policy advisor for years,” JCN president Carrie Severino said. “This isn’t about ethics for Whitehouse, but rather increasing the number of tools the left has at its disposal to intimidate the conservative members of the court.”
The central role of ProPublica should not escape notice. It was founded and continues to be funded by the Sandler family of San Francisco, who sold their bank Golden West to Wachovia right before its ludicrously profitable collection of dubious adjustable-rate mortgages played a central role in the 2008 financial crisis. Their family foundation is a huge backer of leftist causes, including the Center for American Progress, Human Rights Watch and Earthjustice.
Today ProPublica is also backed by a who’s-who of partisan Democratic billionaire donors, including George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Laurene Powell Jobs, Donald Sussman and, until it was compelled to return the first tranche of a $5 million donation, notorious crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried. All this billionaire largesse helps ProPublica pay top dollar for staff — its editor in chief currently makes more than $100,000 more each year than a justice of the Supreme Court.
For some reason, these billionaires don’t raise the hackles of Sheldon Whitehouse or Joel Anderson, or lots of others who are likely to tune into a multipart Slate podcast framing Clarence Thomas as a man who sold out black people for white money. Or, as one of the night’s other guests proclaimed of Thomas’s long ago divorce, “trading the black doll for the white doll.” There are hoots, laughs and murmurs in response.
At the opening of the show, Anderson led off with an odd extended monologue focused on Thomas’s high-school sports prowess, interspersed with audio from interviews with multiple figures from his past, most of whom spoke in praise of his arm strength with a football and gift for quick passing on the basketball court. The audience laughed when they are told he tried out for the Holy Cross football team but that he struggled taking hits; Anderson closes by expressing skepticism that the 5’8” Clarence could ever dunk. The audience claps.
They clap to confirm each other in their viewpoints. To remind each other that anger at the Supreme Court, over abortion or affirmative action or everything else, isn’t a mark of Democratic impotence or foolish mismanagement of the filibuster or RBG’s refusal to retire under Obama, you see — it’s those evil fossil-fuel billionaires like Harlan Crow who are to blame. Because as the good Senator Whitehouse, a son and grandson of ambassadors and bishops, assured them at the podcast party, it’s Thomas who is a creature of “resentments.” It’s the skinny Gullah kid who ran through the Lowcountry scrub, the place where his ancestors ate their pint of grits and the creek shrimp they could catch, boiled in the brackish salt water for flavor. That kid is the one who took the wrong lesson from the American experience, who wants to pull up the drawbridge behind him. You see, you understand. He’s the resentful one. We can all agree about that.
There is no apparent awareness that the persecution of Thomas is rooted in their resentments: not of his rulings as such, but the fact that he survived the full force of their apparatus, that his origin story is his survival. They have to destroy him because he exists: because the force of the counterexample shows them to be impotent, shows there is another path. It is a species of derangement. As a threat, Clarence Thomas is literally existential. Of course Clarence Thomas can dunk. He’s been dunking on these folks for years. All they can do is podcast about it.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2023 World edition.
Yes, Virginia Joey Boy used an Alias not a Pseudonym to hide his secret conversations. Biden was using fake names and a different e-mail address when he was chatting with the folks in the Ukraine. Not just one, but three.
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) demanded Thursday that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) hand over all documents and communications in which then-Vice President Joe Biden used pseudonyms such as “Robert Peters,” “Robin Ware,” and “JRB Ware.”
One email, which Comer says the committee has already seen, includes an attachment with the vice president’s schedule, indicating that he had spoken by phone to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The email was sent to a “Robert L. Peters” and cc’ed to the vice president’s son, Hunter Biden.
Joe Biden was the designated foreign policy point person to Ukraine during the Obama administration. The House Oversight Committee argues that Joe Biden threatened to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine in 2015 until the president of Ukraine fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had jurisdiction for an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
Radical Leftists Block Doors of California Capitol Chanting “Shut It Down!” – Someone Call the DOJ and Launch the Early Morning Raids!
Attention Merrick Garland’s DOJ: We have another insurrection to report.
Radical leftists blocked the entrance to the California Capitol on Wednesday. They were chanting, “Shut it down!” and blocking all access to the building.
Bill Essayli tweeted: “The California Capitol was stormed today by radical leftists. They’re yelling “shut it down” which is a direct attempt to obstruct official proceedings. No word yet from DOJ on how many have been indicted for insurrection. I’ll wait…”
State worker protest is now blocking the front doors of the CA Capitol legislative swing space. Multiple hearings are happening inside. pic.twitter.com/k1Md0Ldhqe