Okay, this is going to be a bit of a data dump on your asses. I’ve been trying to put the finishing touches on a new novel, as well as goofing off a little, and I was compiling stuff that I was going to get to any time now, and, well, this is the result. Happy hunting!
There are some GREAT lawyers in the USA! William Barr is NOT one of them!
Sweet are the uses of adversity, more or less. We have recently learned that even conservative lawyers can have a conscience, a lesson taught in spades by the likes of Danielle Sassoon (former interim U.S. attorney for Manhattan), Hagan Scotten (a former assistant U.S. attorney in Sassoon's office), John Keller (former acting head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section), and Kevin Driscoll (former acting head of the the DOJ’s Criminal Division). All four resigned rather than drop the richly merited prosecution of Eric “Bagman” Adams, aka “Mayor Sleasebag”, aka “the Black Giuliani”, aka “Mr. Embarrassing”, in the face of the imperious command of acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove.
The rationale given by Bove for his bizarre reversal has been the subject of much comment—often explicitly derisive in nature, and deservedly so, because Bove candidly admitted that, basically, he didn’t know what he was talking about, and didn’t care:
The Justice Department [aka, “me”] has reached this conclusion [that you should drop the case] without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based, which are issues on which we defer to the U.S. Attorney's Office at this time.
Furthermore, Emil, good sport that he undoubtedly is, hastened to explain that this decision was no diss to the good folks in the U.S. attorney’s office for the southern district of New York:
Moreover, as I said during our recent meetings, this directive in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts of the line prosecutors responsible for the case, or your efforts in leading those prosecutors in connection with a matter you inherited.
No, you guys are terrific! See, the thing is, the Boss (aka “the Donald”) wants to put this Eric guy on a string, to be His guy in New York, so to speak, so He can put the screws on those Wall Street big shots and Manhattan loud mouths in the lamestream media any goddamn time He pleases, and if we have the judge dismiss charges against Little Eric without prejudice, so that, you know, we can revive them any goddamn time we choose, well, we have him by the short and curlies for like forever! Sweet!
Okay, I was, you know, “extrapolating” just a bit in that last paragraph, but I think it captures the gist. And I think I’m more than confirmed in my analysis by the response given to Bove’s abysmal epistle by its recipient, now former interim U.S. attorney for Lower Manhattan Danielle Sassoon, a response delivered in the form of a resignation letter addressed to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that will likely live in history as an example of speaking truth to power, in a manner equaled by few and surpassed by none.1 After demolishing Bose’s absurd and repulsive “justifications” for what was nothing more or less than a corrupt “deal” that would grant Adams his freedom as long as he functioned as Trump’s bitch—which, I am sure, he would be more than happy to do for all eternity—Sassoon cut to the chase (legal citations and other incidental text omitted):
Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations. As Justice Robert Jackson explained, “the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.” I understand my duty as a prosecutor to mean enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or to those who appointed me. A federal prosecutor “is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all.”
Sassoon concludes her letter to Attorney General Bondi with crushing understatement:
I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams's counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal. Mr. Bove admonished me to be mindful of my obligation to zealously defend the interests of the United States and to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration. I hope you share my view that soliciting and considering the concerns of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case serves rather than hinders that goal, and that we can find time to meet.
In the event you are unwilling to meet or to reconsider the directive in light of the problems raised by Mr. Bove's memo, I am prepared to offer my resignation. It has been, and continues to be, my honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
Of course, I very much doubt that Sassoon was really “baffled” by the manner in which the Adams case was disposed of. From her tone it is easy to guess that she well understands that Bondi is as corrupt as Bove, or, indeed Eric Adams. I have a much harder time guessing why someone as principled as Sassoon took a job with the Trump administration in the first place. I suppose she just thought to herself, “if worst comes to worst, I can always quit.” Well, she got that right.
Second Thoughts—more than a few!
I would be more than remiss if I didn’t mention another stunner of a resignation letter, this one turned by Hagen Scotten, another attorney formerly with the southern district of New York.
[A]ny assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
Feel the burn!
Sassoon is known as a “staunch” conservative, a member of the Federalist Society who clerked for Justice Scalia, whom she touchingly described in an affectionate memoir as “A mentor and a mensch”. My views on the Federalist Society were expressed in a recent “take” I authored, “How the Federalist Society Destroyed the U. S. Constitution”, while my views on Justice Scalia were expressed in any number of vitriolic outbursts of unprovoked and uncontrolled scorn and rage over more than a decade, so it is perhaps “appropriate” that I address both these issues, or at least my take on Scalia, since the “How the Federalist Society …” pretty much explains itself.
Re Justice Scalia, I find it intriguing that Sassoon, in her resignation letter, states, regarding the Trump administration’s plans for coercing Adams’ cooperation in its “kick ‘em out in chains” campaign for illegal immigrants, “Adams is an American citizen, and a local elected official, who is seeking a personal benefit—immunity from federal laws to which he is undoubtedly subject—in exchange for an act—enforcement of federal law—he has no right to refuse” (Page 3, 3rd paragraph). But according to Justice Scalia, the mayor might very well have such a right, as he wrote in the majority opinion of a now well-known case, Printz v. United States, holding that the federal government cannot simply “dragoon” (my word) state and local officials and force them to carry out its policies, using the threat of a cutoff of federal funds as a cudgel to obtain their cooperation. Printz gained added relevance in the first Trump administration over the immigration issue—see, for example, this story by Eric Levitz in New York magazine, Antonin Scalia Might Have Saved Sanctuary Cities, discussed in more detail in this 2019 article in the Texas Law Review, Making Federalism Great Again: How the Trump Administration’s Attack on Sanctuary Cities Unintentionally Strengthened Judicial Protection for State Autonomy by libertarian immigrant Antonin Scalia Law School professor Ilya Somin.
It is also “interesting” to read Scalia’s opinion in Printz a long discussion of the meaning of the Constitution, based on an extensive analysis of arguments by everybody’s favorite, the Federalist Papers. But this is the very opposite of the “originalism” that Scalia supposedly espoused—the notion that you should simply read the text of the Constitution itself to find out what the Constitution “meant”, understanding it in the intellectual context of the time in which it was written, rather than relying on what someone said it meant. Indeed, it is well known that the Federalist Papers were written as propaganda to drum up support among the states to approve the Constitution. It might be “better”, perhaps, to rely on the “anti-Federalist Papers”, or to at least consult them, to find out what the Constitution “means”—which, of course, no one ever does.
So, okay, conservatives don’t always get it right. But sometimes they do! And that’s a good thing!
Hey! What about William Barr?
Oh yeah. Forgot about that schmuck. Here’s the deal: A couple of weeks ago, New York Times reporters Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg typed their fingers to the bone to bring to you a near book-length take on Rupert n’ Sons (and daughter) titled ‘You’ve Blown a Hole in the Family’: Inside the Murdochs’ Succession Drama. If you read through the whole thing, which I obviously did, you’ll find that Rupert hired Barr to help him overturn an existing “Murdoch Family Trust” so that good son Lachlan would have full control of the Murdoch empire, and bad son James would be left out in the cold. For reasons I won’t discuss, the fate of the Murdoch empire were placed in the hands of the probate commissioner for Washoe County, Nevada, Edmund J. Gorman Jr., who, you will discover if you read to the very end, ultimately amused himself by, among other things, ruling against Rupert and also reaming poor Bill a new one, saying that his actions taken to void the Trust amounted to “an abuse of discretion and a breach of the fiduciary duties owed to the trust and its beneficiaries.” Nice lawyering, Bill! You haven’t changed one damn bit!
For more on ugly Bill, go here and here.
Donald Trump not a nice man, National Review Executive Editor Mark Antonio Wright discovers
Well, he isn’t, but somehow that fact simply failed to penetrate the neo- (or is it pseudo-?) Bucklean skull of National Review Ex Ed MAW until El Trumpo “casually tweeted” out the probably pseudo-Napoleonic motto, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” causing Mark to gasp at Trump’s Indefensible Proclamation, responding as follows:
While a president is cloaked in numerous awesome powers, he is in no sense above the law; he has no legitimate power to abrogate it. Indeed, his very office is a creation of law, of the Constitution. No matter the circumstances, no American — certainly no president — is above the law as such. No, not even to “save it.”
Any statement otherwise would have been anathema to George Washington and the Founders of our country. I now shudder to think of my fellow citizens averting their eyes, or defending, what Trump said, as many will no doubt do.
Yeah, and as most of the National Review’s staff have already been doing for the past nine or ten years!2
Second Thoughts
Not to brag, but I have been riffing on the Trump/Napoleon trope for some time now.
Yo, Jason Furman! How about gloating MODESTLY over “the failure of Bidenomics”?
Jason Furman Is Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard University and former Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017. Whether he also has a degree in unctuous condescension is something I have been unable to determine, though I consider it more than likely.
I reached this conclusion after wending my way through a recent piece of his, The Post-Neoliberal Delusion And the Tragedy of Bidenomics, which I think is well worth the wend, largely because I agree with about 90% of it—for I am, like Jason, a neoliberal, a believer in free enterprise and free trade, a neoliberal impatient with the Biden Administration’s record, a mishmash of old-fashioned Robert Reich/Robert Kuttner “lunchbucket” liberalism and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez style progressive social posturing. That being said, I clearly have a bone or two to pick with the learned professor.
First of all, one might remark that both “Bidenomics” and “Obamanomics” have a lot in common: Obamanomics brought the U.S. economy through the worst economic crisis in 75 years in better shape than any other major industrial power! Bidenomics brought the U.S. through the worst epidemic in 100 years in better shape than any other major industrial power! Not a bad day’s work! On the other hand, both men also turned over the presidency to Donald Trump, although Obama, of course, did win a second term, while Biden did not. So there’s that.
Jason’s piece bears a remarkable similarity to an August 2024 piece by Jonathan Chait appearing in New York magazine after the nomination of Kamala Harris for president, Yes, She Can Bidenism brought Kamala Harris and the Democrats to the brink of catastrophe. Obamaism can save them, both authors extolling the greatness of the Obama years and the failures of the Biden, more or less forgetting that Obama enjoyed the greatest electoral triumph of any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, with fat majorities in both houses of Congress, while Biden stumbled into the White House by a much narrower margin than anyone expected, with razor-thin majorities in both the House and the Senate. In addition, both Obama and Biden promised transformative change in America’s infrastructure—high speed rail, anyone?—and massive reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases, neither of which happened.
Furthermore, Obama, by pushing through a universal health care program that a majority of the American electorate did not want, cost the Democratic Party 63 seats in the House of Representatives and 6 seats in the Senate in the 2010 congressional elections and 13 seats in the House and 9 seats in the Senate in 2014. At the state level, the Democrats lost 6 governorships and hundreds of state legislative seats in 2010 and 3 more governorships in 2014. The party has never recovered from these losses.
The enormous frustrations created by the 2008 recession, the failure of the Obama administration to turn the recession around as quickly as they said they would, and the obvious, continuing bias of the Clinton/Obama wing of the party towards Wall Street—epitomized during the Obama years by the selection of Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury—a man who “honestly” believed that the “secret” of economic growth was to convince Wall Street whales that the Democratic Party would allow them to party like it was 1999 for the rest of their lives—seriously damaged the neoliberal case and allowed the formation of a paleolib-progressive alliance (aka “post-neoliberalism”) that almost gave the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination to non-Democrat Bernie Sanders.
Bidenomics, which Professor Furman acidly dissects, was largely a free-spending political package designed to heal/conceal the split in the party between the largely aging neolibs (like me) and the paleolib-progressive alliance, ultimately serving up an incoherent and indeed self-contradictory mélange of positions, frenziedly flourishing an enthusiasm for blue-collar unionism and “kitchen-table” issues that was almost entirely undercut by their real passions, environmentalism and “diversity”, both causes deliberately fashioned to be as impractical and “unbourgeois” as possible—scarcely differentiable, really, from a species of performance art. It’s no wonder that the administration achieved little political bang for the buck, as indeed could be said of the Obama administration as well.
And so I am squarely in Professor Furman’s corner when it comes to “Bidenonomics”. If only he could see the faults in “Obamanomics” as clearly.
I have more on the Democrats’ shortcomings here.
Second Thoughts
Professor Furman’s paper, together with a recent “letter” from former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm and neolib economist Larry Summers denouncing tariffs, provide excellent pushback from the anti-globalism sea in which we now so sadly swim. If there is one elected politician in the USA that would second their arguments, I would be surprised.
1. I “borrowed” this ringing phrase from the grave marker for General Stevens, who commanded the Culpeper Virginia Minutemen during the American Revolutionary War.
2. To be honest, which is often a habit of mine, NR’s most common strategy re Trump is the “eyes averted” approach, either regretting Trump’s “excesses” (as if excess were not his essence) or trying to figure out a way to blame the Democrats for “creating” him.
