Lawfare

 

Drawing by Lin Rui for Renmin Ribao/The People's Daily, 

When Trump starts ranting about rigged trials and the "weaponized" Justice Department, everybody needs to understand that he knows what he's talking about, and he's lying, rather than just bullshitting.

I mean, he knows because he's worked at doing it, during his time as president. "Lawfare" as they call it (because it's warfare continued by other means, as Clausewitz didn't say) is the one government-related thing he devoted the most of his time and energy to when he was in the White House, at first defensively, to save himself from being held to account for his earlier crimes and protect his illegal business activities from government interference, then aggressively, to punish the law enforcement figures who had menaced him, and eventually try to cripple his main political rival and establish himself as presidentissimo-for-life; and while the defensive use was remarkably successful, when you think about it, the aggressive use really wasn't.

He found that it's really hard, in the US, to pervert the justice system into an army for vanquishing your enemies. He was able to stop Comey and McCabe and Strzok etc. from investigating him, by firing them, but when he tried to sic the IRS on them, along with John O. Brennan, Hillary Clinton, and Jeff Bezos, his chief of staff, John Kelly, refused to cooperate, according to Kelly's sworn statement, and most important, when Comey and McCabe really were subjected to an intrusive IRS audit (I guess when Mick Mulvaney or Mark Meadows was chief of staff), the agency was unable to punish them, because neither man had done anything wrong.

And McCabe even got his stolen pension back when he sued. (Settlements of Lisa Page's and Peter Strzok's suits against the Justice Department are expected to be announced by the end of this month.)

Similarly, when Trump finally found "his Roy Cohn" in the person of Attorney General William Barr, Barr was able to protect him from the consequences of the Mueller investigation by issuing his own bogus summary of the report a month before the report itself was published, but when Trump wanted the investigators hunted down and disgraced for conspiring to bring him down, in two investigations, one by the inspector general Michael Horowitz and one by the infamous special counsel John Durham, but they hadn't actually conspired to bring Trump down, and Durham was unable to charge them with anything.

Asian Is Not a Virus, Covid Is

Demonstrators in San Francisco making my point in February. Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times.

This is nuts, from NYPD, reported in our terrific online newspaper Gothamist:

“F–king Chinese coronavirus,” a teenager shouted at a 59-year-old man before allegedly kicking him in the back on Madison Avenue in March 2020.

“Where the f--k is your mask?! You f---ing Chinese!” raged a man accused of attacking a 47-year-old Asian man in front of his 10-year-old son that month.

Despite the racial invective, the NYPD didn’t treat either incident as an anti-Asian hate crime — instead, it classified them under a new “anti-COVID” category, which tracks attackers who allegedly believed their victims had COVID-19 at the time of the underlying crime. The NYPD says that with this category of offense the motive is really about the victim’s disability status, not race.

The effect of this policy, apparently it was a kind of policy, was to reduce the number of anti-Asian hate crimes in the department's statistics. The attackers weren't acting out of any bias against Asians, they were acting out of hatred of imaginary Covid that Asians suffer from, not that they suffer from it, the only symptom is looking like an Asian, which is usually a symptom of being Asian, not of being infected with Covid, but the attackers weren't aware of that, so it's clearly not a matter of race. Really?

In 2020, the police logged just four anti-Asian crimes in New York, versus 25 anti-Covid crimes, 24 of which involved Asian victims. 

It looks as if they have stopped doing this now, since the establishment of the Asian Hate Crimes Task Force in August—this year the department has registered 31 anti-Asian hate crimes and just three "anti-Covid crimes"—so maybe it's mean-spirited to complain, but it's taken them time to get there: just three weeks ago they were telling the Daily News there'd been no anti-Asian crimes at all in the first three months of 2020, and it seems to be only a challenge from the paper that got them to correct the falsehood, though not before a clueless commissioner had gotten himself caught bullshitting:

Asked moments later by a Gothamist/WNYC reporter whether Corey’s number of zero was accurate, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea blamed victims for not reporting crimes.

“I don’t think there’s any way that that’s an accurate number,” Shea said, apparently unaware of the irony. “It’s an underreporting of crimes.”

But you have to ask yourself how it happened, or who thought it was a good idea to claim that Covid-19 is a "disability" that a person could think they could punish by kicking another person in the back without any evidence that the person they were kicking even had it, or what they thought could be the benefit to the city or the police force from denying that hate crime existed. And you have to ask yourself how much NYPD's famous data-collecting process is corrupted by this kind of idiocy.

Non-Hot Take

Quito, via National Geographic.

One thing I think everybody needs to note about the Assange story is that at this point it's not about the United States, not about Sweden, not about WikiLeaks—not driven by the preoccupations of these people we think about when we think about Julian Assange. It's really, at the moment, an Ecuador story.

That is: the previous president, hero of free speech Rafael Correa*, left his chosen successor, the less heroic Lenín Boltaire Moreno (yes, he's named after the Bolshevik leader, as well as Voltaire, only his parents spelled the latter wrong), with a problem in the country's London embassy in the form of Assange squatting there, failing to clean the bathroom or change the kitty litter, while avoiding extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted on rape charges, and from where he claimed he would be extradited to the US and buried like the Man in the Iron Mask. Moreno has been trying to get rid of this national embarrassment since he took office almost two years ago (one of the things that has enraged his former patron Correa), and he's finally succeeded, and that is the story, and it's not even all that interesting.


*Some Ecuadoreans have an alternative view on Correa's commitment to free speech:

Correa had a poor record on free speech at home. In 2011, he closed a string of radio and television stations in a bid to silence critics. According to Human Rights Watch, five journalists were jailed for “disrespecting” the government between 2008 and 2011.