Starfish have been mysteriously dying by the millions in recent months along the US west coast, worrying biologists who say the sea creatures are key to the marine ecosystem. Scientists first started noticing the mass deaths in June 2013. Different…
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Legal experts are now weighing in on Thursday’s bombshell, massive and months-long reporting from The New York Times that reveals, among several previously unknown allegations, that then-Attorney General Bill Barr and his special counsel, John Durham were handed apparent evidence of suspicious financial acts by Donald Trump, and proceeded to create a false public narrative that Durham’s investigation found evidence of “suspicious financial dealings” related to Trump, suggesting it was on the part of the FBI, not the president, in order to protect the president.
“On one of Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham’s trips to Europe,” The Times reveals, “according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.”
The Times adds that “Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump.”
“Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.”
Until now.
Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert who literally wrote the book on the U.S. Constitution, calls the Times’ report “jaw-dropping.”
“When Durham unexpectedly found evidence of crimes committed BY rather than AGAINST Trump, he and Barr deliberately deceived the nation into thinking the opposite! This deep dive by the NYT is as jaw-dropping as anything I’ve read in the past decade,” Tribe says.
Law professor and former President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) Sherrilyn Ifill, one of TIME’s 2021 most influential people in the world, accused Barr of “gaslighting” the public.
“Every line of this article must be read,” Ifill implored. “Horrifying breaches of professional ethics, misuse of DOJ investigative resources, and deliberate lies to, and gaslighting of the public. A grotesque perversion of the appropriate role of Attorney General.”
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, the well-known MSNBC legal contributor and professor of law, also calls it “jaw dropping.”
“Jaw dropping reporting. Lots here including an explanation of why Durham’s colleague resigned: under pressure from Barr to release an ‘interim’ report damaging Clinton & the FBI as the election drew near, Durham had a draft prepared that wasn’t factual,” she says.
Andrew Weissman, the former General Counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who spent 20 years at DOJ, including working under Special Counsel Robert Mueller, calls Barr “corrupt.”
“Can anyone really be surprised by this?” he asks. “Barr was just so corrupt and so corrupted the DOJ.”
MSNBC legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks, a former Watergate prosecutor and the first woman to serve as US General Counsel of the Army was troubled by the picture The Times painted of how close Barr and Durham were, when special counsels are supposed to have great autonomy and not be shaded by any Attorney General interference.
“Even more troubling than Barr and Durham frequently having drinks and discussing the investigation is the fact that the only crime they discovered on their foreign trip was Italian intel about crimes by Trump,” she says via Twitter. “I want to know the status of that investigation!”
Some legal experts lament that despite the bombshells in The Times’ report, it appears nothing will come of it – certainly nothing from the House Republicans.
Former Associate White House Counsel Ian Bassin sardonically asks, “Surely McCarthy and Jim Jordan’s new Select Committee on ‘the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ will focus on this story and the actions of Bill Barr, John Durham and Donald Trump. Surely, right? Right?”
Wine-Banks also points to House Republicans’ new committee investigating what they claim is “weaponization” of the federal government.
“Barr’s relationship with Durham, his pressure on him to reach a certain result and their failure to follow up on Trump’s crime revealed during the investigation is what weaponization of the DOJ looks like — not what Republicans want to investigate now.”
Pete Strzok, who spent 26 years at the FBI including as Deputy Assistant Director of the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Division, and led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States election, speaks from experience.
“I can see Barr allowing the stunning amount of craziness (a gentle choice of word) described in this article,” he writes. “But does anyone in the current OAG or ODAG care about this? Durham has reported to AG Garland for twenty two (22) months now.”
“This,” Weissman adds separately, pointing to The Times article, “is all about the Trump weaponization of the DOJ – but we know that the House Rs won’t give a damn about it.”
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I can’t end the week without mentioning the twin massacres in California. The first was in Monterey Park, near Los Angeles. Eleven were killed. The second was in Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco. Seven were killed. Both were committed by elderly Asian-American men. The mass shootings were two of 70 this month, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The usual questions arose, wrote USA Today columnist Rex Huppke: “Why? What was the shooter’s motive? Who inspired him? Who can we blame?”
For Huppke, as for me, motive is a decoy. Finding the cause of gun violence, he said, gets in the way of recognizing its outcomes: One, that “a human with enough hate to kill” had “a gun that helped that person do the killing.” Two, that “the same thing that keeps happening has happened again.”
Huppke said that if we hold off on reacting emotionally to the effects of mass gun violence until “we can blame something other than the hate in the shooter and the gun in his hand,” we’ll never stop mass gun violence.
I agree but, I don’t think inaction is a consequence of desensitization. Huppke said that “we can’t let ourselves become so inured to America’s murderous rhythm that we need to know more before we let ourselves feel.”
Perhaps feeling the suffering of others will inspire reform.
I wish it were that simply.
Sadism is never simple.
Angels dancing on pinheads
To the degree that we have become “inured” to mass death, it isn’t a result of getting used to it (though we have). It’s a consequence of having accepted mass death as an outcome of legitimate political disagreement.
As common as asking why people kill other people wholesale is the false equivalence among the newsspeakers and opiniontalkers who largely set the agenda and inform the public’s understanding of mass death. I’m not talking about “gun rights versus gun control” or “individual liberty versus public safety.” These are not false equivalences, but they are false. The real false equivalence is inferred and subliminal: “mass death versus rights.”
No one believes you have a right to kill another person, or even harm another person in direct or indirect ways. No matter how much you love the constitution, you no doubt agree that your freedom stops at another’s freedom. Rights should be protected. More important, people should be.
Yet when it comes to shooting massacres, this common sense disappears. Instead of admitting that mass death is unacceptable no matter how it happens or why, and then doing something collectively to stop it, we busy ourselves by arguing about how many angels are dancing on a pinhead.
As Huppke said: “Was it a hate crime? (How could it be driven by anything but hate?) Was the shooter liberal or conservative? (Does it matter to those mourning?) Was it random or targeted? (Does either answer help?)”
A result of these pinheads is allowing ourselves to accept mass death as a consequence of legitimate political disagreement, as if the Second Amendment, or any amendment, is a good reason to permit 70 mass shootings in less than a month, in which scores of dozens are killed. There’s no shortage of things to disagree on. Mass death shouldn’t be one of them.
Mass death-desiring
It is, though. That’s why we should face the hard truth. Mass death is a consequence of legitimate political disagreement as well as a consequence of sadists using legitimate political disagreement to mask their sadism.
Truth is, lots of Americans don’t mind mass death as long as it’s visiting “those people.” Even if it’s visiting them and their kin, however, it’s still OK. A few dead Americans are a small price for maintaining the white order.
I have talked myself blue talking about how being pro-gun is being pro-white power. My point is that desensitization – or being “insured to America’s murderous rhythms” – is not necessarily rooted in seeing terrible things happening over and over. As likely is that desensitization is rooted in indifference to suffering or even desiring to see “those people” suffer.
It’s very liberal to think that empathy is the road to gun law reform.
Perhaps liberality will win in the end. Who knows?
But it’s naive to suggest that motive-hunting is emotion-blocking is mass death-enabling. Emotion-enabling on a social scale won’t stop mass death-happening as long as there are sadists around who will use legitimate political disagreement to hide their mass death-desiring.
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As the horror of the police murder of Tyre Nichols washes across our TV screens, we’re reminded again of the crisis, it’s severity unique to America among developed nations, of police violence.
As Nichols’ stepfather, Rodney Wells, told CNN:
“When I saw the police officer, you know, they have this little like stick, this metal thing that they pull out. I saw them pull that out and started beating my son with it. And I saw officers hitting on him, I saw officers kicking him. One officer kicked him like he was kicking a football a couple of times.
“But the most telling thing about the video to me was the fact that it was maybe ten officers on the scene and nobody tried to stop it or even after they beat him and they propped him up against the car, no one rendered aid to him whatsoever. They walked around, smoking cigarettes like it was all calm and like, you know, bragging about what happened.
“He was sitting there, and then he slumped over and an officer walked over to him and said, sit back up! mother — MF you know, while he's handcuffed. So he had to — they prop him back up, and he slumped over again, and they prop him back up again, but no one was rendering aid. I saw some fire department people come out there and they just walked around and nobody showed him any aid, and they're supposed to be trained in first aid.”
You and I are 30 times more likely to be killed by police than are citizens of Germany or Great Britain. In 2018, for example, police killed over 1000 people in America. In Germany cops killed 11; in Australia 8; in Sweden 6; in the UK it was 3 people; and cops killed only 1 person in New Zealand.
The reasons for this disparity are deeply systemic.
At the top of the list is the fact that the United States is the only developed country in the world lacking national standards for hiring, training, supervising, and disciplining police across the 18,000 departments in the country.
While it takes years to become an officer on the street in most developed countries, the average cop in America spends about as much time training as a barber. Many small police agencies require little to no training.
As a simple employer in Oregon, I’m subject to federal oversight regarding minimum wages, workplace safety standards, and rules around non-discrimination. The radio stations that carry my program must answer to the FCC. Most other professions are regulated, particularly those where lives are at stake. Physicians, for example, are subject to federal HIPPA standards, among other regulations.
Not so much for the police. In part, this is because the Constitution doesn’t mention policing and the 10th Amendment implicitly hands that power to the states.
This shouldn’t be a barrier to reform, though: the Constitution doesn’t mention speed limits either, but the federal government regulates them across the nation by withholding highway money from states that don’t comply. A similar solution could apply to national standards for policing.
Another problem comes from the US being the only developed country in the world that allows policing-for-profit, a system where police departments are funded in part by the revenue generated by moving violations and other fineable petty crimes. (Canada does have some limited cases of this.)
This system incentivizes police to make traffic stops for minor offenses and those stops, in turn, often turn deadly because of our lack of the standards mentioned above.
And then there’s the militarization of our police.
In 1990, during the GHW Bush administration, Congress, lobbied by defense contractors, rolled out an initiative based on Section 1208 of the National Defense Authorization Act that made “surplus” military equipment — from high-powered sniper rifles to armored personnel carriers — available to local police departments. In 1996 it was replaced by Section 1033 which expanded the program.
This has so heavily contributed to the militarization of our police that departments that are heavy recipients of such equipment are measurably more likely to kill their citizens than departments that aren’t.
In 2017, Congressman John Ratcliff introduced legislation to end the program, provoking a group of researchers to do a deep dive into the consequences of departments participating in it. They concluded:
“[R]eceiving no military equipment corresponds with 0.287 expected civilian killings in a given county for a given year, whereas receiving the maximum amount corresponds with 0.656 killings. In other words, moving from the minimum to the maximum expenditure values, on average, increases civilian deaths by roughly 129%.”
As Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego noted, the 1033 Program is:
“[O]ne of the most absurd programs in the United States government. Community police officers are not soldiers.”
Finally, the US is the only country in the world where a corrupt Supreme Court has unconstitutionally invented out of whole cloth a doctrine of “qualified immunity” which has, on numerous occasions, protected bad cops.
When Congress tried to fix this with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House of Representatives in 2021, police unions mobilized in opposition to its provision dialing back qualified immunity and the legislation died in the Senate.
Other developed countries figured this out decades ago.
When Louise and I lived in Germany back in the 1980s, we had a couple of encounters with the German police: each time they were super-professional and courteous. This surprised me at the time, but now that I know that it takes almost 3 years of training to become a police officer in Germany, and the pay and benefits make for a high-status lifetime career, respected by the community, it makes sense.
In America, however, police behavior is scattershot: in some parts of the country police culture is very professional; in others, it’s just plain militaristic.
I know this from personal experience: at the risk of sounding like Herschel Walker or George Santos, I’m a graduate of the Georgia Police Academy and had a badge and license as a private detective.
Back in 1996, the Olympics were coming to Atlanta and the city needed more security for the Olympics than was available from local police departments.
At the time, I was writing a novel about a private detective and shadowing an Atlanta PI, a now-longtime friend named DeWitt Wannamaker, who had held a variety of jobs in law enforcement from being a small town police chief to running his own private detective agency. He was my policing mentor.
The Georgia Police Academy had opened its doors to civilians that year with an “executive protection” training course for people who’d work for Olympic athletes and visiting VIPs, and DeWitt got me into the course. I ended up not only completing the course but getting licensed for two years as a private detective in the state of Georgia.
Many of the guys going through the Academy were small-town cops who’d never had any professional training at all, and I discovered there are a lot of really good, dedicated, and smart people who aspire to work in law enforcement. Most of the top-notch people were working to join the State Police.
I also discovered that there was no shortage of yahoos who were just really, really excited about the chance to get a gun and a billy club and have the legal authority to kick the crap out of people.
I encountered one of those guys in the “hand to hand” part of the Academy’s course (Stanley was his name, and he was from a small town in south Georgia) and still remember the bruises he gave me and the way he laughed as he meted out the punishment.
We are not without solutions to America’s crisis of police violence.
— Congress should pass legislation to create national standards for policing to regulate local and state police departments so violence-prone and violence-craving individuals like Stanley don’t end up as cops.
— It should establish minimum standards for police training and certification, limit police unions to negotiating pay and benefits rather than protecting bad cops, and end the militarization of our departments through the 1033 Program.
— It should incentivize community policing and non-police alternatives to deal with mental health crises and the like. And define specific limits and responsibilities for police unions.
— Congress should also demand full funding of police departments to end for-profit policing. Traffic cameras are increasingly ubiquitous and inexpensive: across Europe and in some American cities they catch routine traffic violations and generate revenue without the need for police stops. People receive the ticket in the mail.
— Given the dimensions of this crisis, Congress could also consider creating a Cabinet-level agency answerable to the president to deal with public safety.
We’ve seen enough citizens murdered by American police: it’s well past time for genuine reform.
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