Annals of Intelligence

 

Director of Central Intelligence lies to Senator Ossoff.

Unsurprisingly, Pete Hegseth's first instinct was to lie about the thing, brazenly, and about the messenger, Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, suggesting that he'd somehow made the story up:

“I've heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said shortly after landing for a layover in Hawaii on a trip to Asia.

Hegseth criticized Goldberg as “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the, I don't know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides, hopes, or suckers and losers.”

“This is the guy that pedals [sic] in garbage. This is what he does,” he added.

It's true that Goldberg scooped a bunch of news about Trump's contempt for America's war dead ("Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers"), but it's not as if there were any doubt about the truth of that, given his publicly undisguised contempt for Vietnam POW John McCain, and World War II hero George H.W. Bush (shot down as a Navy pilot by Japanese), and the parents of Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004, etc. And if Goldberg was an early proponent, in summer 2016, of the idea that Trump might be a "de facto" Putin agent, he plainly meant not a Putin agent—

Netanyahyu's Other War. III

 

Following the Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, October 28, 2024. Photo by AFP via Times of Israel.

At a certain point Biden reached a conclusion: that the only way to stop the Gaza war and prevent a wider war all around the Middle East was to get rid of Netanyahu. I don't know when that happened, though an incident reported by Franklin Foer looks to me like a likely candidate, in late 2023, when Biden was entreating Netanyahu to turn over to the Palestinian Authority the tax money that Israel collects in the West Bank to finance the PA's work, such as it is (I'm not going to claim it's a very effective government), but Netanyahu doesn't care about the fact that it's the PA's money: on December 23

Biden called Netanyahu with a long list of concerns, urging him to release tax revenue that Israel owed to the Palestinian Authority, the government in the West Bank, which Netanyahu was always trying to undermine in his quest to prevent the establishment of an autonomous, fully functioning state there.

“You can’t let the PA collapse,” Biden told him. “We’re going to have a West Bank catastrophe to go with the Gaza catastrophe.”

As Netanyahu began to push back, Biden couldn’t contain his pique and barked into the phone, We’re done.

They wouldn’t speak again for almost a month.

That rhymes, in a way, with the story of Biden's worst blowup with Netanyahu, back during his vice presidency. That was about the West Bank too, as remembered by Michael Hirsh in Politico Magazine:

This Would Itself Be Seen as Terrorism

Photo by Atia Mohammed/Flash90.

I've been suggesting without a lot of actual evidence that I know the Israeli bombing of Gaza, especially in the northern part of the strip, has been indiscriminate and in violation of the IDF's own targeting rules, let alone international law, ever since October 19, 9 days into the campaign, when The Economist published an assessment of the damage up to that point based on satellite images from the first five days: 11,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. In the rigorous standard procedure, an airstrike cannot go ahead until it is individually approved by an advisor outside the military deciding that the possible civilian casualties are outweighed by the value of the target; I couldn't believe it was possible to do that for 6,000 bombs in 120 hours (50 strikes per hour or about one every 72 seconds).

Now some reporting has emerged, by Yuval Abraham in the great Israeli online newsmagazine +972, based on interviews with seven current and former members of the intelligence community including some directly involved in the operations, and it's pretty disturbing: IDF has indeed loosened the rules relating the number of potential civilian casualties, they've expanded authorization for hitting nonmilitary targets, and they're using an AI system to generate targets—I was right about the number of targets being a clue, there were literally too many of them for humans to decide on unassisted.

The nonmilitary targets include private residences and high-rise apartment blocks (all those shattered buildings we see in the videos where whole floors have slipped off their supports) along with public buildings and infrastructure, and called "power targets" (matarot otzem), and what it means to say they are nonmilitary is that striking them isn't aimed at a military objective—killing combatants or destroying their facilities—but at frightening the civilian population:

Teenager in the Room

Image via CityWatchLA.

Pushing the snooze button solves nothing, because these same losers will try to pull the same shit in 45 days. I voted yes tonight to keep the government open, but I’m done normalizing this dysfunction. This is not entertainment, it’s governance. 

—Senator John Fetterman

“There has to be an adult in the room,” the speaker said. He suggested that the group of 15 to 20 GOP holdouts who regularly sabotaged Republican-backed votes act like political children.

Actually, apparently unknown to McCarthy, there were dozens and dozens of adults in the room. Whether he actually decided to join them and be an adult himself is up for debate, but I'm not buying it. I think Fetterman's analogy fits better. McCarthy is the teenager in the room, grousing: "Mom, it's not even healthy to get up this early. You're stunting my growth! I had to do a whole impeachment thingy already this week!"

Now the babies in the room have fired him, and there's no Speaker in the House at all. I'm finding that hilarious, as apparently is John Boehner, who made it out of  a similar pickle with a good deal more dignity, though dignity was never his own strong suit:

Javi and Chita

 

You know how I've been screaming at the political punditry for a few years now over their theory of the Latin voting bloc becoming more Republican over time as the community's inherent conservatism asserts itself, because

1. It's not a bloc, and
2. that's hiding what's happening

—and hiding from it, of course—it's about race. As with Allan Sherman's upwardly mobile young Jews in the early 1960s who

Traded their used MG
for a new XKE
switched to the GOP
that's the way things go

it's about the social construction of whiteness.

But I didn't really have any data for it, or know how to find it or whether it could possibly exist, until I saw this message from Jonathan Chait: 

It's not the fat lady singing, but the Orchestra is on the move

First Kadyrov's fighters already in Rostov pic.twitter.com/FYqbCbR5ye

— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) June 24, 2023

Six weeks ago or so I wrote, with the strongest sense that what I was writing was completely insane,

I know it's absolutely improbable, but I can't shake the thought that so many irregular forces commanded from outside the Defense Ministry, unable to achieve their assigned objectives in Ukraine, and increasingly at odds with the Kremlin officials whose incompetence is getting them killed, are not a healthy phenomenon back in the motherland. Prigozhin has up till now been pretty careful about attacking Putin himself, but is that certain to last?

I'm really imagining a situation like that of China in the late 1920s, a warlord state, and the potential for real civil war, not necessarily ideological, but rather driven by the presence of too many armies, all struggling to feed themselves off the lands they occupied. Or even Russia during the Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century, torn among armies of the Polish-Lithuanian confederation, Swedish mercenaries backing one new tsar or another (the throne changed hands six times between 1598 and 1613), Crimean Tatars capturing civilians to sell as slaves, and forces loyal to one court faction or another.

Now we seem to have gotten there, with Yevgeny Prigozhin and 25,000 ex-convicts having left Ukraine, and, without a shot fired, apparently occupied the southwestern city of Rostov na Donu, Rostov-on-the-Don, which is the military post from which Russian forces have mostly run and supplied the Ukraine war. After (first) denouncing the defense minister for starting the war on a fake pretext to aggrandize himself

Victory Laps

Time for another victory lap, or two. I told you so, doubters:

Seven counts, and, says The Guardian, and the other papers,

At least some of the counts filed in federal district court in Miami by the office of special counsel Jack Smith include the willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, false statements and concealment under title 18 of the US criminal code, the person said.

"Willful retention of national defense information" is espionage, in the definition provided by the Espionage Act, if you missed that. For what it's worth. I'm afraid it's not espionage in the everyday sense of the word: that's acquiring national defense information with a specific motivation:

with the intent for that information to be used against the United States or for the gain of any foreign nation  

which doesn't seem to be alleged here; it's not going to be selling stuff to the Russians or the Chinese or the Saudis. Which is not to say that he necessarily didn't do that but that the special counsel's office doesn't have proof of it. I, as you know, don't think spying in that sense is a significant part of what Trump was doing with the document collection (though I still think Jared Kushner must have been supplying information from the President's Daily Briefing to Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and I know PDBs were included in the stuff squirreled away in Trump's Palm Beach place), so I'm not surprised, but I do hope, narratologically speaking, that they won't make this a bloodless legalist argument about whether the conditions of the statute are met, but rather work to show what Trump and his goons were trying to accomplish by the thefts.

That, as I was just saying a while back, could be part of the prosecutorial point of that Bedminster audio of his interview with Meadows's ghostwriters, that it illustrates him trying to use the stolen documents to implicate his enemies, who included not just those FBI persecutors but also, for instance, General Milley, and Susan Glasser's article showing Milley restraining him from committing war crimes in the final days. CNN has now gotten hold of a transcript:

“Well, with Milley – uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump says, according to the transcript. “They presented me this – this is off the record, but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”

Trump continues: “All sorts of stuff – pages long, look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”

"I just found" this classified report sitting on my desk that happens to prove my point but you're not allowed to look at it. And then the ghostwriters dutifully added the lie to the book:

Meadows’ autobiography includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.”

And Kash Patel continually teased the classified documents that would reveal the plots of which Trump was a victim, throughout 2021 and 2022, without ever showing them, as he told "Clay and Buck":

“And what [Trump] did was on his way out of the White House, he declassified — made available to every American citizen in the world — large volumes of information relating, not just to Russiagate, but to national security matters, to the Ukraine impeachment, to his impeachment one, impeachment two.”

They had to be classified documents to explain why the reporters never got a chance to look!

Speaking of Meadows and, not coincidentally, of stolen classified documents, does anybody remember our discovery last January in the J6 Committee testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson that Meadows was a document thief too, receiving classified materials from the House Intelligence Committee passed to him by Devin Nunes, photocopying them in the White House and taking a bunch of them home, where he intended to get them to fascist journalists John Solomon (now Trump's designated representative along with Patel with the National Archives) and Mollie Hemingway? 

I'd pretty much given up hope that anybody professional was ever going to go there, but Hutchinson's testimony has now been discovered by the great Murray Waas, who has posted his findings on Substack, proving, at least, that I wasn't hallucinating this stuff, so I'm giving myself a victory lap on that too.

Namely, in late January, I wrote:

Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to The Independent and the great Murray Waas:

Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.

A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took “thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.

I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side.

That's now happened. Waas's treatment misses some important details, I think, and I'll be posting something on that at Substack before too long. In the meantime, a happy Indictment Weekend to you all!

On Not Negotiating With Terrorists

American hostages in Tehran, 1979, via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

From comments on Friday's post (in which it looks like I turned out to be right):

emjayay 21 hours ago

Any money cut from the increased IRS funding will actually cost multiples of the amount cut with wealthy individuals and corporations getting away with continued cheating.

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  Yastreblyansky Mod emjayay18 hours ago

  Sure, but one eighth is a lot less than all of it.

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    Jeff Ryan  Yastreblyansky16 hours ago

    But they could never cut all of it. So why are we laying down?

    I thought we didn't deal with terrorists...

Actually, we always deal with terrorists and extortionists. As you're reading this, there's probably somebody in Washington thinking about the next step in trying to get that Wall Street Journal reporter out of Lefortovo prison. Evan Gershkovich. And whoever is stuck in Iran. Every major police force has people specifically trained to talk down bombers and hostage takers. As far as I know, it's actually effective sometimes, and when it is, it saves lives, sometimes on a massive scale. I was thinking about this the whole time, even as I was using the expression myself, cheering Democrats on in their justified anger, but I wasn't thinking hard enough.  

"We don't negotiate with terrorists" means something, but it isn't exactly what it sounds like. It means more or less "This negotiation isn't going anywhere if you can't give me some reason to think of you as not a terrorist."

You Never Talk to Rudy About a Pardon

Donald and Rudes at the groundbreaking of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Columbus Circle in 1995, the year (The New York Times notes) he would declare losses of $915.7 million in his federal tax return. Photo by Francis Specker/New York Post Archives, via NYP Holdings, Inc., via Getty Images.

A note on Rudolph and the claim of his rape victim Noelle Dunphy that he told her he was selling presidential pardons at two million dollars a pop and then splitting the proceeds with the president: I remembered some talk of pardon lobbying among the scandals of Trump's last month in office—of people taking money to intercede with Trump for a pardon, with no guarantees—in the informal process, run by Jared Kushner, of doling them out to Trump allies like Manafort and Stone, somehow including Kushner's father, and was Giuliani involved in that?

In fact I did a pretty good post myself about it at the time, which repays rereading (especially the bit about Trump's former personal attorney John Dowd, who also seems to have been in charge of offering pardons to criminals from Mike Flynn to Lev Parnas in exchange for silence on the subject of their activities on Trump's behalf), and sure enough, there was Giuliani in the mix, marketing a pardon to John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who'd been busted for outing the name of a fellow officer involved in the torture of an Al-Qa'eda fighter captured in Pakistan in 2002, for which he served 30 months in 2013-15. What's especially interesting right now is Giuliani's price tag:

Santos

 

Via NBC News.

To my amazement, I find I've never written a blogpost on Congressman George Santos. How could that be?

I've given him plenty of attention on Twitter, in any case, mostly to the effect that his hilarious tall tales, from the story of his having been on a championship Baruch College volleyball team to his having been a producer of the doomed Spiderman musical to his mother's having actually died on two separate occasions, a pretty unique experience, are of far less importance in the broad scheme of things than the corruption involved in his getting into Congress, the fraudulent fundraising, the misuse of campaign funds for his own personal enjoyment, and the feeding of really large amounts of money from secret sources, all of which play roles in the federal indictments that arrived today from New York's Eastern District in an Islip courtroom.

Four-minute story on NPR this morning predicted he'd serve full term and be up for reelection in '24, without even once mentioning these campaign-finance issues. I'm glad somebody's in the legacy media is starting to notice.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) February 13, 2023

Going For Woke

Via Vox.

I'm always pleased to see somebody I admire catching up with some ideas I've been cherishing for a while, even more so when they're using words I might well have used myself, as in this from Washington Post's Greg Sargent on dated concepts of the US working class:

In the emerging Democratic reading, the old vision of a White, male, breadwinning working class concentrated in burly jobs shapes much political analysis, but it’s a pundit fiction. With service, retail and health-care sectors growing as manufacturing and mining jobs dwindle, the new working class is far more ethnically and culturally diverse — and more socially liberal — than commonly supposed.

What he's commenting on is the remarkable string of progressive legislation that's been coming out of Michigan all year since Democrats captured the state legislature in spite of its gerrymandering, most recently when they repealed the state's "right-to-work" law, enacted in 2012 to combat unions by disallowing closed shops so that workers could benefit from union contracts without paying union dues. 

Narratology: White Whale

Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to The Independent and the great Murray Waas:

Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.

A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took “thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.

I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side. We've known something about these documents for a long time—Trump started claiming he had already declassified a stash of documents on the subject as early as a Tweet of October 2020—

“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

 —which, like so many Trump statements, was more aspiration than fact; it wasn't, in fact, until January 19 2021, the day before the Biden inauguration, that, with some documents in hand, in a "binder" he'd received from the Justice Department on December 30, he finally issued a memorandum to the attorney general, DNI, and DCI directing them to declassify it, with the redactions demanded by the FBI. I don't think it's been reported whether they obeyed this order, but it also seems certain that at least one copy of those materials, probably without redactions and with intact classification markings, was among the stuff stolen and sent to Trump's Palm Beach club that day, along with at least one copy of the classified stuff stolen from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by Chairman Nunes and Chief of Staff Meadows that the staff had made so many photocopies of on the same day. 

What I'm saying is that Jack Smith seems to have come to the same conclusion as I did on a motive for at least some of the Mar-a-Lago document theft—his long quest to avenge himself on the FBI and everyone who exposed his collusion with Russian intelligence in the 2016 election, and (taking it, as I always do, just a notch farther than the reported story) that will be the basis on which Trump is indicted in this case. As, I think, I've been telling you.

Not only that, but also this week is the wonderful reporting in The New York Times by Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner that shows former attorney general Billy Barr pushing special counsel John Durham on the same quest to incriminate the FBI and others over the Crossfire Hurricane and Robert Mueller investigations in the face of the fact that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing to begin with, and of course practically none squeezed out after millions of dollars and years of effort (one minor deception in the filing of the third renewal request on the surveillance order against Carter Page, discovered not by the special counsel but the FBI inspector general. Corroborating what I've been telling you since October 2019  at least, including anticipations of this week's stories in

• that snipe hunt for evidence in Italy where Barr and Durham came up dry, in October 2019, and the switch to a criminal investigation, of which I wrote at the time

"It's about Trump, and the idée fixe of Trump's increasing paranoia: that he must get to his enemies by using their weapons, of saying "bad things" and getting "dirt". Investigate them all! Lock them up! And its failure so far, which has been accelerating in recent weeks, as Barr's meta-investigation falls apart. "

• the pressure on inspector general Horowitz to come up with the stuff in April 2020, with a nod to John Solomon's participation in the effort going back to August 2019

"My [i.e., Solomon's] reporting, including interviews with four dozen U.S. officials over the last several months, actually identifies a much larger collection of documents — about a dozen all together — that, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by Democrats"

• the use of Russian intelligence disinformation to hint at a bogus case against Hillary Clinton "to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service" in October 2020 (with a guest appearance by the big binder mentioned above, delivered by DNI John Ratcliffe to Barr's DOJ)

It's always seemed me that this was one big story, starring mad Trump as Captain Ahab after the white whale of the FBI, and all Trump's henchmen from Solomon and Patel back to Bully Barr as the Pequod's doomed crew (Cassie Hutchinson is Ishmael, alone escaped to tell thee?), only it's not a ship but a criminal outfit. And now the news narrative is finally coalescing to my point, under Jack Smith's guidance. I think there could be a lot of indictments, though sadly not of Barr and Durham, who are in some ways the most reprehensible of all (committing some of the exact same crimes of which they falsely allowed Hillary Clinton, together with Comey, McCabe, Mueller, and others, to be accused), and it's looking as if I've had pretty good instincts on this up to now.

And Here's Where the Bodies Are Buried

From Kyle Cheney at Politico:

A proposed subcommittee to investigate “weaponization” of the federal government — a key demand of House conservatives who delivered Speaker Kevin McCarthy the gavel — would be given sweeping investigatory powers that include explicit authority to review “ongoing criminal investigations.”

The language of the proposed “select subcommittee,” which would operate under the Judiciary Committee expected to be chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), also gives the panel power to access any information shared with the House Intelligence Committee. That panel typically receives the highest-level classified intelligence and briefings of any committee in Congress.

That's that "Church Committee". This is how they plan to stop Special Counsel Jack Smith from investigating Perry, Biggs, Gosar, Gaetz, Boebert, and of course Jordan himself. The document, Cheney writes, was last modified at 5:40 PM yesterday.

Emptywheel noticed the significance right away, and MSNBC legal expert Barb McQuade notes that the provisions could not pass constitutional muster in a normal world.

Narratology: New on the Mar-a-Lago Documents

 

Happy New Year!

Hutchinson testified on May 17 that “boxes of documents on dollies” were delivered from the Intel Committee to Meadows, and that he copied them and gave some to people in the private sector. This was when she was describing how Meadows also burned documents in the fireplace.

— Diana Manister (@DianaCialino) December 31, 2022

I really wasn't planning to take on any new cases from the January 6 Committee releases, at least not right away. There's so much to read! And the interview transcripts aren't even searchable, at least this one isn't.  But Mark Meadows doing something funky—trafficking?—with classified documents in the White House was too much to resist, and I had to look. What kind of classified documents? What kind of folks in the private sector? What the hell?

Obviously I had to take a look, and I did find something that may be pretty significant, in regard to an issue we're already officially interested in, and literally nobody knows about it other than probably Liz Cheney and her colleagues on the Committee, who, if I'm getting this right, want us, or Jack Smith, to figure it out without their having to say it out loud. Serious, it looks an answer to some pretty big questions.

It's from the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony, as noted, and it seems to be a conversation about Meadows doing stuff with papers incuding throwing them into the fireplace, specifically things having to do with "the vice president's role on January 6th" and a conversation with Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania congressman at the center of the conspiracy to make Jeffrey Clark the attorney general and IMO the most likely candidate in the House for an indictment, and then it takes a kind of startling turn:

Merrick Garland Did Something

 

Via The New York Times.

My narratological take is that it started on Friday, when ABC reporters spotted Marc Short, Mike Pence's vice presidential chief of staff, coming out of a federal courthouse in Washington with his lawyer. They asked him if he'd been testifying to the January 6 grand jury meeting there, and of course he had indeed, though he wasn't allowed to say about what. Then over the weekend The New York Times learned that another Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had been testifying as well, making it clear to anybody who's been thinking about it that the Justice Department has indeed been looking at Donald Trump's activities as part of its criminal investigation, because what else would they be talking about with Short (who'd testified to the Select Committee on Pence's January 4 meeting with  Trump and Eastman where Trump screamed at Pence, calling him a wimp and a pussy) or Jacob (who'd testified to telling Pence that Eastman's scheme for refusing to certify the election results was illegal)?

And after that the dam seems to have broken, and by last night we were all learning that that was in fact the case, not just recently in the wake of the House Select Committee's TV appearances but quite a bit earlier:

Battle

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) — who raised his fist in support of the Capitol insurrectionists earlier in the day — runs for his life from the rioters inside the building in never-before-seen video. pic.twitter.com/GU1L8ttN8u

— The Recount (@therecount) July 22, 2022

About an hour into last night's hearing I began to think I was seeing signs of a narrative arc that was leading to a particular place; the repeated juxtapositions between Trump in the West Wing dining room refusing to respond to everybody's entreaties and the carnage ongoing in the Capitol (to which his TV was tuned) were leading inexorably to the moment when he finally consented to go out to the Rose Garden and make the video:

Putting a prediction on the record: When Trump decides to shoot the video calling off the insurgents, is going to be the moment when it's clear to CNN or whatever he's watching that they can't win the Capitol, or that Pence is safe--something like that.

— Woke Mob For Disempowering Joe Manchin--Vote '22! (@Yastreblyansky) July 22, 2022

If, as I wrote after a previous hearing,

We Are Not a Lawyer

WNYC's Brian Lehrer on the radio yesterday morning, previewing the hearing, reminding us as a "devil's advocate" that Trump asked his audience in the Ellipse speech "to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" in their march on the Capitol, so maybe his intentions weren't violent at all, and I felt I needed to send him a tweet, as I do from time to time:

@brianlehrer the "peacefully and patriotically" line was probably written by Stephen Miller--trademark alliteration. The "fight like hell" language was Trump's own improvisation.

— Woke Mob For Constitutional Right to Choose (@Yastreblyansky) July 12, 2022

Well, Brian never responds to my tweets anyway, but I got something better than that in the afternoon; a fairly vivid account of how my speculation was exactly right, featuring Miller himself, on videotape, telling the January Six committee how he drafted the speech, with Trump demanding the insertion of denunciations of Vice President Pence, and Miller trying to pull them back out on the advice of counsel, in Rep. Stephanie Murphy's retelling:

Opinions: Postscript

Ruta graveolens, rue, meaning "repentenance", though as Ophelia says "we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays." Photo via BardGarden.

I found a terrific piece of actual scholarship, as opposed to bloggy poking around in the evidence, in support of my guesses on the legal status of abortion in early modern England, in Carla Spivack, "To 'Bring Down the Flowers': The Cultural Context of Abortion Law in Early Modern England", in William and Mary Journal of Women and Law XIV/1 (2007), which took on the 2006 book by Joseph Dellapenna that may well have been Alito's basic source, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, and its assertion that

contrary to Justice Blackmun's historic analysis in Roe, "abortion was considered a serious crime throughout most of European history" and that "courts did... punish abortions before quickening during the Middle Ages."

On the contrary, Spivack shows,