For the Record: Hippies Corner

 

Left to right, Tommy Smothers, John Lennon, Timothy Leary, and Yoko Ono, at a 1969 Bed-In, via Wikipedia.

Some thoughts on civilian casualties in World War II lead, improbably, to a wan little glimmer of hope.

Re Gaza,there are lots of people with very bad moral sensibilities who are just on the wrong side for very stupid reasons. But there are some who acknowledge that Israel is on the "right" side, but just have a fantasy that there is some way of beating a determined, immoral enemy…

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) November 12, 2023

But I’m not talking about fire, bombing cities, or intentionally targeting civilians, these were just people who died in the course of urban warfare, or the Normandy invasion. Maybe more care could’ve reduced civilian casualties somewhat, but only that

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) November 12, 2023

Literary Corner: Perfect

 

The Worthless Clause

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I have a clause in there
that says, don't believe the statement,
go out and do your own work:
this statement is worthless.
It means nothing. Well,
they call it a "disclaimer"--
they call it "worthless clause" too,
because it makes the statement worthless.

I hate to be boring and tell you this.
When you have the worthless clause
on a piece of paper and the first--
literally the first page
you're reading about how
this is a worthless statement
from the standpoint of your using it
as a bank or whatever--
whoever may be using it, you tend
not to get overly excited about it.
I think it had very little impact,
if any impact on the banks.

Arranged from the text of Trump's sworn deposition in the case of People of New York State vs. Donald Trump et al., as quoted in Judge Arthur F. Engoron's response to motions on both sides for summary judgment, released, I guess, on Tuesday (granting it in part, as you probably know by now, to the people, and denying it to the Trump, who is now in the first phase of losing the right to do business in New York State, which will mean he and his children and his 500 LLCs and the Trump Organization also have to give up a lot of properties run from New York, including Mar-a-Lago, the Aberdeenshire golf club, and golf courses in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and I don't know how many more, unless he manages to absorb them into a reconstituted Trump Organization in Delaware, which Attorney General James has been trying to stop him from doing), on Trump's poetic theory of the "worthless clause", actually a whole bunch of clauses, of boilerplate that the organization prefixes to its annual Statement of Financial Conditions, which is used by financial organizations to figure out how risky it is to work with them:

And Then There Were Four

 

I don't know why no. 4 pleases me so much, or actually I do, I just want to savor it more. It was such an exciting day starting with the story of an indictment with Trump's name appearing on the Atlanta docket and then getting withdrawn again. Everybody understood that today was going to be the earliest possible date for an indictment, and then the last witnesses were told they weren't going to be needed, and in the early evening NBC found that grand jury was in the process of voting, and then if you had TV on you could be watching Judge McBurney, a man of great panache, shuffling papers and affixing his signature to some of them, and you realized if you stayed up late enough you'd see the thing. It wasn't even particularly late when it happened.

It's the best indictment so far because of the RICO element (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), which is so much the best way to think of Trump's organization, as a racket, or organization devoted to doing any number of things, some of them not necessarily criminal, in pursuit of some particular shared criminal goal. Each defendant is charged with racketing (count 1 in the Trump indictment) and a minimum of two predicate offenses within the organization's general program (counts 2 through 41), though many, of course, are charged with more than two (Trump's got thirteen). (I've heard TV reporters suggest that "Willis only has to prove two crimes" for the entire trial, which is not true at all.)

Why can't there be a federal RICO indictment? Most of the reporters telling you about the difference between federal and Georgia law evidently don't know, and try to get away with saying vaguely that the Georgia statute is "broader", but that's not it. One important answer, in an explainer from Al Jazeera, isn't from the statutes themselves but court interpretations: the Supreme Court had held that federal racketeering cases have to deal with conduct over an "extended" period of time (establishing the existence of the association as a real gang, like a Mafia family, with a history of up to ten years), not just a few weeks or months, and Georgia's supreme court has found that doesn't apply to the state law. The attempt to overturn the Georgia election, taking place almost entirely between November 2020 and January 2021, doesn't qualify in federal court.

My dream RICO indictment for Trump World would start with crimes or preparations for crimes in 2016, with the interactions of the various actors (Flynn, Papadopoulos, Caputo, Stone, Donald Junior, Manafort) with their various Russian or Russia-related interlocutors, and the history of Trump's obstruction efforts to hide this stuff; and at the same time Trump's and Stone's preparations for a Stop the Steal movement after their expected loss in the 2016 election. 

From there it would move on to the Ukraine matter starting with the plans proposed by Manafort, and later Sater and Cohen, and Giuliani's activities, up through the extortion effort on Ukraine for which Trump was impeached, which is where the criming begins to focus clearly on the 2020 election and the expected Biden candidacy. It's about how a real estate organization with longstanding political connections (Stone, Manafort, and Giuliani) and a long history of very ordinary real estate crime (bank fraud and tax fraud) takes a turn toward politics that the boss has long contemplated out of sheer vanity, and without any very clear aims beyond his plans for flagship hotels in Moscow and D.C., and maybe the idea of using Congress to make his tax position easier, while his confederates had ambitions of their own, which adds up to a long-term effort on the part of the gang to take over the US government.

And did take over the Republican Party, most of which was generally pretty ready for it, though I'm constantly shocked at the self-humiliation of figures like Kevin McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel and the amount of power they've been willing to relinquish, especially over the party finances.

That indictment is certainly not what we're ever going to get for Trump, I'm sorry to say, in any court, though maybe it will make its way into historiography, and the snapshot provided by Fani Willis may well have to suffice. But it's cheering to see the picture taking shape.

Hi, It's Stupid: Beware of Sykes Bearing Gifts

 

GORGEOUS 3 BD 2 FULL BTH 2 HALF BTH COUNTRY FARM HOUSE W/HEATED AND COOLED 700 SQ FT OFFICE/STUDIO OVER 3 CAR GARAGE, IN-GRD HEATED POOL, 5 STALL BARN ON OVER 7 ACRES IN THE HEART OF BEDMINSTER. $6,000 month as opposed to almost three times that if Secret Service is writing the check. Via Zillow.

New Substack post on that 14th Amendment theory.

Speedy Trial

 

A couple of weeks ago, just after Trump announced his receipt of a target letter, I started a "Hey, it's Stupid" post to suggest a reason why the special counsel was putting this thing out now, and why none of the other conspiracy suspects seemed to be getting target letters of their own: to get as much of the material out to the public, preferably to hold the trial itself, before the election, so that voters would have every opportunity to factor it in to their November decision, and make it as simple as possible, with just the single defendant, putting his confederates on trial later in less of a hurry. 

But I got stuck in some legalistic weeds and never wrote it; not having the indictment in hand yet, I couldn't hack my way out of an opening paragraph, and abandoned the thing. Now we do have the indictment, and it's not even Stupid any more. I think more or less everybody is clear that this is exactly what Garland and Smith have in mind, including the Trumpies—Donald himself keeps calling out "election interference" as if it was being directed from the Kremlin, or from a Justice Department stacked, as his people intend to stack it if he's reelected, with his personal supporters and sycophants under the terms of his so-called "Schedule F" order:

Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.

It's funny how these Republicans enjoy complaining about the "weaponization" of government under the Biden administration even as they're laying out these elaborate prescriptions for how do do it—among Biden's first orders in office was the one rescinding Trump's Schedule F, literally depriving himself of the tools you'd need to reshape the federal civil service in your party's image.

Sue me, sue me, what can you do me?

Faith Prince and Nathan Lane. If you don't know the show, what makes it sublime is that he really does have to go to a prayer meeting, not because he's got religion but because he's lost a bet.

All right, explain this to me like I'm a five-year-old. I mean with a fairly big vocabulary for a five-year-old, but some innocence:

Rudy Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for former president Donald Trump, is no longer contesting as a legal matter that he made false and defamatory statements about two former Georgia election workers — but argues in a new court filing that what amounted to false claims about vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election was constitutionally protected speech and did not damage the workers.

"So I made a bunch of false and defamatory statements about you, that's some kind of reason for taking me to court?"

Yes, Rudolf, that's supposedly how it works. He was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the mother and daughter working on the Fulton County ballot count who were seen on video doing something Giuliani described as pulling fake ballots out of suitcases, like drug dealers "passing out dope", and "crooks" who "obviously" stuffed ballots, an accusation subsequently taken up by then-president Donald Trump, with the result that the two women's lives were completely upended, as they told the House January 6 committee a little over a year later: 

Literary Corner: Memorandum Opinion

 

Juan Gris, Still Life With a Guitar, 1913. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Memorandum Opinion Denying Defendant's Rule 59 Motion

by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan

The jury in this case did not
reach "a seriously erroneous result."

Its verdict is not
"a miscarriage of justice."

Mr. Trump's motion for for a new trial
on damages or remittitur (Dkt 204)
is denied. SO ORDERED.

Literary Corner: Vital Caselaw (of Which There Is Much)

 

You're welcome!

A No, No!

by Donald J. Trump. 45th President of the United States of America

Vital caselaw, of which there is much,
further confirms that the Presidential Records Act (PRA)
is the only statute which applies
to Presidents and their records.
These cases build on the Clinton Socks case
in making it clear that Presidents have
complete latitude and authority
when it comes to documents, as well as that
the PRA has no criminal enforcement mechanism.
Deranged Jack Smith knows this, but refuses
to even mention the words "Presidential Records Act'"
in his Scam Indictment of Biden's Political Opponent
(who is leading by a lot) in the middle of a Campaign —
a No, No!

It's the Law

The thing that's making me grumpiest at the moment is when defendant Trump says, "the Presidential Records Act says they belong to me," and all the Republicans chime in, when that's in fact the exact opposite of what the Presidential Records Act says, according to the FAQ at the National Archives website:

Recent media reports have generated a large number of queries about Presidential records and the Presidential Records Act (PRA), 44 U.S.C. 2201-2209. The PRA requires that all records created by Presidents (and Vice-Presidents) be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at the end of their administrations. Below is additional information about how NARA carries out its responsibilities under the PRA. Please note that the PRA treats the records of the President and those of the Vice President in almost the same manner such that, in most cases below, President and Vice President can be used interchangeably. 

It's understood that a president or vice president probably has some personal documents that don't belong in the National Archives, though I suppose all of Trump's relationships are so transactional that it's hard to tell the difference

DJT: Hey Malenia can u fit me in for blowie thurs betw 11 11:30?

MKT: Ok daddy car need new transmission pls send deposit also Slov ambassador deep concern Austrian trrop concentration near Ljubljana

But the president is required to sort those out before the new person is inaugurated, and leave the non-personal docs where they are or arrange for their transfer to their new owners, the American people, as represented by the Archive.

There is no history, practice, or provision in law for presidents to take official records with them when they leave office to sort through, such as for a two-year period as described in some reports. If a former President or Vice President finds Presidential records among personal materials, he or she is expected to contact NARA in a timely manner to secure the transfer of those Presidential records to NARA. 

But he can't keep the

[TS//SI//NF//FISA] Undated document concerning military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States, with handwritten annotation in black marker

just because he wrote on it with his Sharpie, and he can't keep the doctored hurricane map either.  He couldn't legally have kept the first one if he had succeeded in declassifying it, for that matter. He can't keep any of the 337 documents with classification markings regardless of whether they're still classified. He can't keep most of the 13,000 unclassified documents in the 80 boxes. They all belong to us and NARA.

I can understand why they didn't charge this as a crime. The theft itself occurred in DC, and they decided to file the charges in Florida's Southern District. Moreover, the Presidential Records Act, like so many laws the president is supposed to follow, as we learned to our horror during the Trump administration, suggest any way of enforcing it or penalties for breaking it. (Even though it was Nixon's behavior in trying to sell presidential records that convinced Congress to pass the law in the first place.)

And the indictment rightfully focuses on classified documents among the 31 the prosecutors chose for filing charges, because those are the ones with which Trump really did endanger national security, and/or offer Trump opportunities for cashing in with some of his preferred foreign-government clients (looking at Lawfare's annotated list, I'm guessing typically Saudi Arabia or Turkey, but there are no doubt others).

But I wish they'd managed to say somewhere in there that Trump doesn't have any right whatsoever to any of them, and cited the law that says so, because it's true.

All My Trials

 

Breaking wind ground in Aberdeen. Nobody seems to know how to credit this photo of TFG keeping his ears covered, may have originated here. 

While Donald Trump hides in Scotland from the trial for the defamation and battery (under New York's new Adult Survivor Law) of the writer E. Jean Carroll for raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and then lying about it 20 years later—as it winds toward its close (today Lisa Birnbach, the writer friend Carroll called after the rape, and Jessica Leeds, the woman he assaulted in the first-class section of a flying plane, offered their testimony), I thought it might be fun to do a quick survey of where he stands in his legal situation and, given that there are now a few declared Republican presidential candidates, what effect it might have on the race.

I don't see how there's any possibility he wins this first case. The witness testimony is really compelling, Trump's attorney is nasty and disrespectful, both to plaintiff and to judge (evidently following his client's instructions) and looks like a thug, Trump won't be testifying at all, not that it would help him if he did, and since it's a civil trial the jury's doesn't need to be convinced "beyond a reasonable doubt" but only "by a preponderance of the evidence." On the other hand I imagine he files an appeal immediately, or a whole raft of appeals, indefinitely delaying the actual end of the case, and I'm afraid we won't really feel it's over for months or years.

Tucker? I hardly know 'er!

 

Everybody has to put in their take on Tucker, I guess, including his pal Glenn Greenwald:

Can't decide whether Grindelwald here is so focused on advancing the Russian program that he can't see anything else or so anxious to change the subject from white nationalism that he can't do anything else https://t.co/KACHRT8PEz

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) April 25, 2023

Or I guess it must be opposite sides of the same coin, Glenn's leftist Putinism (the story that the bloodthirsty US started the war in Ukraine by forcing pacifist Putin to launch another involuntary invasion like those in 2014 or in Georgia in 2008) serving as a beard for the fascist Putinism (Tucker's) he can't quit associating with.

That's basically Glenn's theory of why Carlson was axed at Fox—specifically, over Carlson's "passionate defense" of the four members of the African People's Socialist Front in Florida charged a couple of weeks ago with taking money from Russia's FSB foreign intelligence agency to "covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda, and interfere illegally in U.S. elections", or as Glenn puts it, being "dissidents" against US support for Ukraine. 

The Man in the Net

I think what I'm going to be using the Substack for might be less bloggy, more formally organized approaches to things I've touched on here, as in this piece, on the current legal situation of the Former Guy. The literary work is literary, but supposed to be clarifying the material, not making it fancier. The work involved in tightening it up somehow generates new stuff, whether it's new metaphors or new bibliographical references. Still free!

For the Record: Del Rio

 

Screenshot from El Paso Times.

Thing that's not being mentioned now is that they were all Haitians, refugees from the 2010 earthquake, that's TWELVE years ago who had found communities in Chile and Brazil, where they were feeling unwelcome, and drawn by a rumor that Del Rio was a good place to crosss into US.

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

... deporting practically everyone without hearings on the bogus Title 42 policy that treated all migrants as likely COVID cases who would spread disease into Texas (where COVID was already raging worse than it was in Mexico, in other words it was a fraud)

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

N

And also very Trumpy in its complete arbritrariness, since some people did indeed make it into the courtry and had a chance to tell their story to a judge, and you could never tell why some did and most didn't—it felt completely random to tha Haitians And let's pause to note how extremely bad the situation in Haiti was at that point, just a few months after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, with a nonfunctioning parliament and an unelected prime minister governing by decree and the

loss of government control over strategic areas to the hands of dangerous armed gangs, widely believed to be financed by politicians and to have police officers on their payroll. Violence has worsened an already severe humanitarian crisis.

Well, of course, here we are in the US of A, where the governor of Florida seems able to commandeer the assistance of federal officials in the Department of Homeland Security and facilities at Lackland Air Force Base in his project of kidnapping 50 people in Texas—people whose asylum applications are already under consideration and who are thus not just legally in the US but officially under federal protection—maybe we've got a bit of a Haiti-style problem of our own. 

Becuase, angry as I might have been with Biden on this issue, he did try to get rid of the Title 42 idiocy and the "Remain in Mexico" imposture, and was repeatedly stopped by federal courts whose judges seem themselves to have lost interest in the rule of law. It's only now, a year after Del Rio, that he seems to have acquired some ability to have the law obeyed, and we've learned recently that there are now a million new asylum seekers in the country awaiting hearings (which, under the current situation, will be some seven years from now for most of them, during which they won't even it's a hit-or-miss proposition whether they'll even be able to get temporary working papers [see Redhand in comments], even as employers all over the country complain about a desperate shortage of workers, which is contributing the the inflation they all care so passionately about... Faugh.

On the American side too, hundreds found shelter in El Paso,https://t.co/Wgfv5raZOR but it was Mexico that really came through https://t.co/TmHgDeblkT

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

Anyway, it's clear that this small (but real) crisis of a year ago occupies an enormous place in Republican minds for one reason and one reason only: because these asylum seekers were Black. And that's why they keep bringing it up--it's a dog whistle.

/fin

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

For the Record: Punk'D by Ron DeSantis

That George Wallace–era prank Texas governor Greg Abbot has been playing and Florida governor Ron DeSantis has attempted to emulate rreally isn't any funnier than it was in 1962

There are no new ideas https://t.co/nLmASZYQQK

— big dicta energy (@BigDictaEnergy) September 15, 2022

if you recognize how frightened and bewildered the people they're using must feel, but that obviously doesn't bother DeSantis

Jeez, Ron, you don't act as if you take it seriously. You act like you're running an episode of Punk'D https://t.co/NShd37exnw

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 15, 2022

But it's re-raising a bunch of issues that haven't gotten the attention they really deserve; just summarizing:

Opinions We Never Finished Reading. III

 

Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins' The Discovery of Witches (1647), showing witches identifying their familiar spirits for the Witch Finder. Via Wikipedia.

Hi, it's Stupid to criticize Justice Alito for citing a 17th-century jurist just because the jurist, Lord Edward Coke, happened to be an advocate of marital rape and had ordered women to be executed for witchcraft. After all, marital rape and the execution of witches are deeply rooted in our nation's history and traditions too! Besides, why should we suppose his views on these matters are even relevant in any way to his views on abortion?

Alito notes that

The “eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like),” Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U.S. __, —_ (2020) (slip op., at 7), all describe abortion after quickening as criminal. Henry de Bracton's 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has “struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused an abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide.” H. Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae...

Although what Coke says, in fact, contra Bracton, is that it is not homicide, unless the child dies after being born, because while within the womb the fetus isn't really a person, a "reasonable creature", a thing in rerum natura, in the world of natural beings, and under the King's peace, that is a member of society:

For the Record: This Week in IOKIYAR

 

Drawing by Neal Obermeyer, September 2009.

I guess it's because everybody knows at some level everybody knows Republican concern with "law and order" is aimed at criminals of color, not "people like us" who always have presumption of innocence and mitigating factors like their mom was mean to them.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 6, 2022

For the Record: Don't Make a Federal Case of It (or Try If You Want to, But You'll Fail)

 

That's pretty ridiculous, right? The video is mocking January 6 organizers inside the House, like Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar!

Somebody on Gosar's staff is a regular Jonathan Swift!

— Toxic Positivity (@Yastreblyansky) November 18, 2021

Because personally, if I'm a member of Congress and somebody portrays me as a cartoon serial murderer, I'm not going to think it's making fun of somebody else. If I were involved in it, of course, I'd put it more in the old Warner Brothers style than anime—that looks more satirical to me—putting Gosar's face on Elmer Fudd. And he'd fail to get his kill, that's a lot funnier, trust me.

And in Sinemascope

Today Donald Trump Became Anti-President

 

Ali Mohammed Hafedh Kinani at 9, in 2007, when he was murdered by the Blackwater goons Trump pardoned last night, via The Nation.

No, really, it's as if he's not even part of the executive branch any more, after Congress passed that "stimulus" with overwhelming, veto-proof majorities, and he responded:

"I'm asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2000, or $4000 per couple," Trump said in a video released on Twitter. "I'm also asking Congress to immediately get rid of the wasteful and unnecessary items in this legislation or to send me a suitable bill."

He refused to have anything to do with the job for seven months, turning negotiations over to Steven Mnuchin, and now that the job is done he doesn't like how it came out. Not that he's threatening to veto the monster omnibus bill and shut down the government next week (this is actually possible, even though Congress has the votes to overturn a veto, because so many members have already gone home for Christmas). He may just allow it to become law without him, in ten days, delaying the checks, or he may end up signing it after all.

(Or conceivably Democrats could try to coopt the idea and force consideration of a revised bill upping the "stimulus" payments as he suggested, which is a level they'd wanted from the start, though I'd hope they won't obey his other demands on those "wasteful and unnecessary items", to zero out the foreign aid budget and to cancel funding for a couple of museum projects that fail to be centered around white men, the Smithsonian Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum; and even if Trump was willing to accept the result, it's not likely the Senate would be, and given the existence of, you know, Christmas and a shutdown deadline, it's not a great moment for this kind of game.)

But he's just denying he's involved in it in any way. As Steve M notes, Stephen Bannon is showing up in the Oval Office, along with Peter Navarro, and Mike Flynn, and Sydney Powell, and the inevitable Stephen Miller, and all these nihilists are telling him he's not the government. He's asking the waiter to take it back, as if he's only a customer in this crappy restaurant, or demanding to speak to the manager. He's not the manager.

For the Record: Affirmative Action

InterTribal Youth/Young Native Scholars visiting UC San Diego and a La Jolla beach, July 2014, via UCSD News. 

That is, they think it's a way of giving a leg up to non-white people who aren't as good as white people. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Affirmative action is meant to find talented people at all levels whose talent is masked by systemic discrimination

— Swami Vivi-ka-Newman (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2020

second-rate white people get an advantage over talented minority members, and it's not only unfair but bad for society as a whole. Affirmative action is meant to correct for those biases and make things better.

— Swami Vivi-ka-Newman (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2020

Literary Corner: Ah but I was so much wronger then

One of the most precious things about this piece (from Dersh's interview yesterday with Anderson Cooper) is the implication that 20 years ago, when he was a famous expert in constitutional law, he "didn't do research" whereas now that he's become a disreputable shyster who must publicly announce that he kept his underwear on during a massage and complain that he gets no dinner invitations on Martha's Vineyard, he does it all the time. But it gets better:

I Didn't Do Research Back Then

by Alan J. Dershowitz

I didn't do research
back then, I relied
on what professors said ... 

because that issue
was not presented
in the Clinton impeachment

Everybody knew
that he was charged
with a crime, the issue
is whether it was
a hard crime

Now the issue is
whether a crime
or criminal-like behavior
is required. I've done
the research now --

I wasn't wrong,
I am just
far more correct
now than I was then

There's some semiotic interest in the way two legitimate arguments whimper in the corner of this poem, like captured slaves being put to unspeakable uses, the arguments that "high crimes and misdemeanors" need not be statutory crimes on the one hand—there wasn't even any Federal statute law at the time the Constitution was written, so the Founders plainly couldn't have meant that—and statutory crimes aren't necessarily impeachable on the other. Both these things are indeed true, and "a lot of people don't know that" as Trump would say, but they don't do the thing he's trying to say they do.

That is, what Dershowitz said in 1998

"It certainly doesn't have to be a crime if you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don't need a technical crime," he said on "Larry King Live" at the time.

is certainly true, period, although the use of the term "technical" is pretty annoying—I'm assuming that he means a crime defined by a particular statute, but "well, technically it was a crime" is an expression used to minimize the criminality, as in the case of Trump's blocking of congressionally mandated spending in the Ukraine shakedown (though it's a crime that has never been punished). This is directly relevant to the Clinton impeachment, when Dershowitz was speaking publicly in defense of the president. He put it more intelligently and usefully in an interview with the Washington Post during Clinton's Senate trial in January 1999:

Prof. Dershowitz, this trial has been called both a legal and political proceeding. What do you see it as. And how do you regard yourself, as a legal or political actor?

Prof. Alan M. Dershowitz: None of the above. I think this is a constitutional proceeding that should not be legalistic, nor should it be crassly political. The central point is whether the allegations, if true, constitute treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.

To answer that question, we don't need testimony about who touched who where, but rather about the intent of the framers, the nature of our constitutional system and the criteria for removal of the president. This should not be a trial in the legal or political sense. It should be a great constitutional debate about the meaning of our system of checks and balances.

Since Clinton's misbehavior (giving false testimony to a grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky) did not have any relationship to his performance of his official duties, and wasn't even related to the case he was testifying in (it was Kenneth Starr's grand jury, which was supposed to be investigating the Whitewater land deal and had ended up investigating his relationship with Paula Jones instead), it could hardly be considered a "high" crime, and arguably wasn't a crime at all, not even "technically":

I am not a strong personal supporter of President Clinton [LOL, he's still using that]. I am a strong opponent of the misuse of the impeachment and removal power against him. I do not think he committed the technical crime of perjury, but nor do I think that he has shown himself to be an honest person.

In that, I guess, perjury is supposed to be when you tell a lie that's material to the matter you're testifying about, and this wasn't.

Were President Clinton to be removed, I believe this would be the first case in Anglo-American history of impeachment and removal of anyone, ever, for trying to cover up and even lying about a consensual sexual encounter. It would legitimate sexual McCarthyism and make sex a weapon in the political wars. The closest precedent we have is the House Judiciary Committee refusing to impeach President Nixon for committing perjury in his filing of a fraudulent tax return. Nixon's actions were closer to being governmental, since they involved the tax deductibility of government papers, but a bipartisan vote ruled that it was too close to the personal side to warrant impeachment.

Well put! And these are exactly the points he is skipping over in his defense of Trump: what Trump unarguably did in regard to the Zelenskyy government—and as we keep being told, there's no dispute on the facts—may or may not be a violation of this or that criminal statute, but it certainly involved the bending of US foreign policy to gratify Trump's personal urgencies, as Hamilton put it in Federalist 65,

A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

You can certainly argue that it's made up of statutory crimes (criminal bribery, wire fraud, obstruction of justice) anyway, as Schiff persuasively did last month, to say nothing of all kinds of plainly illegal "misdemeanors" like his retaliation against Maria Yovanovitch, for which any CEO in a US business could be fired, or the defiance of Congress in withholding Ukraine funds, recently declared illegal by the GAO, but nobody can argue that it isn't "criminal-like". It's as criminal-like as it gets.