Princeton Professor of African American Studies Eddie Glaude took to MSNBC this week to comment on the announcement of President Donald Trump that his Administration will commence with widespread deportations in the coming week. Rather than address the merits of such a plan or the alternatives, Glaude showed how reasoned discourse has become little more than raw (and in this case unhinged) hyperbole. Glaude declared that the Trump announcement should be viewed as a “terroristic act.” I recently published an article on the trend from academics to advocacy on our campuses. Glaude declared just a week earlier that, with Trump, “we’ve moved beyond autocratic to almost monarchical.” It appears now that he has moved by the monarchical to the terroristic.
The scene on MSNBC has become all-too-familiar with the host first refuting Trump’s policy directly before asking Glaude a question. He then immediately declares that we should all just dismiss the arguments made by the Administration because it is obviously based not on deterrence but “cruelty.”
Glaude notably warns that people should not take his words as hyperbole: “What Donald Trump did yesterday, what he announced via Twitter — and this might sound hyperbolic to some folk — it was a terroristic act.”
I have criticized Trump for his tweet and further questioned the ability to deter undocumented migrants without enforcing these same laws as vigorously against large-scale employers.
However, it is hard to see how an enforcement policy under federal law would be an act of terrorism when ICE is saying that it will focus on those people who have failed to appear for their hearings. President Obama also heavily increased such enforcement but I do not recall Glaude calling him a terrorist. Indeed, Obama set the record for deportations.
While calling the move “horrifying,” Gould also insists that it is meaningless in that it will not likely succeed. However, he insists that it is still an act of terrorism: “This was just a political ploy. But what is he doing? He’s terrorizing families in communities who think that they’re going to be snatched from their kids, who have to walk around daily wondering whether an ICE Agent is going to show up at work and snatch them.”
The exchange on MSNBC reflects perfectly our age of rage and the lack of any serious discussion of such policies. People simply tune into shows for echo-chamber media where they will hear an academic holding a prestigious academic chair assure them that the President is little more than a terrorist and they do not have to even discuss the stated rationale by ICE for this action.
As an academic, I feel an added burden to try to add value to the national debate by bringing in detached and substantive analysis. I cannot claim to have always been successful and many can have legitimate disagreements with my understanding of the law or history. However, I believe that professors have a deep duty to the academy, their schools, and themselves to rise above the hyperbolic and reckless rhetoric that reflects our age of rage. One can disagree with this policy without joining a race to the bottom on cable news to come up with the most extreme possible description. It certainly makes for thrilling television and no small degree of popularity. However, as tenured faculty, we have the ability to offer objective analysis, even when our conclusions are neither popular nor well-received by a particular audience. Otherwise, we are just little more than credentialed members of a mob.
Once again, I share Professor Glaude’s skepticism on the ultimate success of such a program. I particularly question how we are going to move from roughly 7,000 deportations a month to such a massive deportation effort. That is a debate that would be worthy and meaningful . . . if only one could find it on any cable or network program.
I realize there have been perilous times in our nation’s past – the Civil War, the Depression – when it must have seemed that our democracy was done for, but it’s hard not to feel despair when there is a daily onslaught of mindless hostility. Has academia ever before been so viciously angry and intolerant of difference? Did so many of our politicians turn their backs on democratic capitalism? Did so many presumably educated people have little regard for for the constitutional protections of those they disagreed with? I would be grateful to hear some historical perspective.
Christopher Tremoglie writes
Everything old becomes new again, and such is the case for comparing Republican presidents to Nazis. Last weekend’s “nationwide day of protest” were filled with placards and signs insinuating so. Salon recently published an article that compared President Trump’s criticism of the media to that of Hitler. Protesters in London decried Trump and his supporters as “Nazi scum.” In April, Democratic presidential hopeful alleged that the president’s rhetoric “echoed Nazis.” On June 18th, CNN’s Don Lemon once again deployed this technique and compared President Trump to the Nazi leader. Aside from being old, tired, and untrue, this trope is nothing new. For decades, left-wing activists have compared Republican political leaders to Adolf Hitler.
As Larry Elder has recounted, liberals have compared everyone from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush to Nazis. It’s a history that dates back at least 55 years. And as Steven Hayward has recounted, even Ronald Reagan met with the calumny:
Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” The Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (later a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”
There was ample academic support for this theme. John Roth, a Holocaust scholar at Claremont College, wrote:
“I could not help remembering how 40 years ago economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism—all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I—to send the world reeling into catastrophe. . . . It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our postelection state with fear and trembling.”
Maybe the people with the problem are not Republican leaders but the ones using divisive, unsubstantiated hyperbole.
What he doesn’t say is that the Democratic Party is a latrine, and has been for decades. Their level of quality goes down every year.
OT: Some people at times point to Sweden’s socialism to demonstrate how well Sweden works, but they are far behind the time and Sweden’s failure with socialism. Sweden moved right and here is the short story from the WSJ.
How Sweden Overcame Socialism
It’s a model for the U.S., but the lesson isn’t what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks it is.
By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Lee E. Ohanian
Nearly half of millennials say they prefer socialism to capitalism, but what do they mean? “My policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told “60 Minutes.” Yet Sweden’s experiment with socialist policies was disastrous, and its economic success in recent decades is a result of market-based reforms.
Until the mid-20th century, Sweden pursued highly competitive market-based policies. By 1970 Sweden achieved the world’s fourth-highest per capita income. Then increasingly radical Social Democratic governments raised taxes, spending and regulation much more than any other Western European country. Economic performance sputtered. By the early 1990s, Sweden’s per capita income ranking had dropped to 14th. Economic growth from 1970 to the early 1990s was roughly 1 percentage point lower than in Europe and 2 points lower than in the U.S.
Before its socialist experiment, Sweden had a smaller government sector than the U.S. By the early 1990s, government spending and transfer payments ballooned to 70% of gross domestic product, and debt had increased to 80% of GDP. Between 1966 and 1974, Sweden lost some 400,000 private jobs—proportionate to 16.7 million in today’s U.S.
In 1991 a market-oriented government came to power and undertook far-reaching reforms. Policy makers have privatized parts of the health-care system, introduced for-profit schools along with school vouchers, and reduced welfare benefits. Since 1997, government ministries that propose new spending plans have been required to find offsetting cuts in their budgets. As a result, public debt has declined from 80% of GDP in the early 1990s to 41%.
To increase incentives to work, Sweden reduced unemployment benefits and introduced an earned-income tax credit in 2007. The electricity and transportation industries were deregulated in the 1990s, and even the Swedish postal system was opened up to competition in 1993. The corporate tax rate was cut from its 2009 level of 28% to 22% today, and is scheduled to decline to 20.4% in 2021.
This policy mix has earned Sweden a Heritage Foundation ranking as the 15th freest economy in the world. The U.S. is 18th. And it’s paid off. Since 1995, Swedish economic growth has exceeded that of its European Union peers by about 1 point a year. Sweden is now richer than all of the major EU countries and is within 15% of U.S. per capita GDP. While Sweden still has a larger government than the U.S., its tax code is flatter. The progressivity of the U.S. tax code distorts incentives. These distortions would become even larger under the tax-increase proposals of democratic socialists like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
There is an example for the U.S. here, but the lesson isn’t what Ms. Ocasio-Cortez thinks. Command-and-control economic policies undermined Sweden’s prosperity, and they would do the same to America’s.
Mr. Fernández-Villaverde is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ohanian is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of economics at UCLA.
Sweden has national healthcare and free college and strong unions with a generous socialist safety net for its people
Interesting how you ignored that?
People look at Scandinavia from afar and see what they want to see.
I have been to Scandinavian countries. One of my most favorite places in Europe, though I rather like all of it, especially outside the massive cities. And there i saw, Scandinavians, and also a bunch of obvious foreigners who came likely as “refugees” and are in it for the welfare.
Scandinavians see it that way more and more too, which is why the generous social benefits are going to cut cut down to size.
Scandinavians, generous to a fault, I hope they survive.
http://cphpost.dk/news/thousands-expelled-from-denmark-in-past-year.html
Good for the Danemark.
If you want ‘free college’, you need a rationing scheme other than markets. That’s going to require a method of allocating berths. Competitive examinations such as are used in France would be one way. Of course, you’ll have some Hawaiian judge telling you that’s ‘unconstitutional’.
We did have free college in California. It created Silicon Valley and was the templet for Europe.
Other states had free or nearly free college. A summer job would pay for the year including books .
Today kids are debt slaves and have to go deep into debt for an education while the rest of the civilized world recognizes that education is the path to prosperity.
No, it did not ‘create Silicon Valley’. All 50 states have public higher education systems. They’re generally overbuilt. The ratio of enrolled students to residents in the more populous states tends to be lower than in smaller states.
People who palaver about ‘free college’ seldom compare the sum of tuition, room, and board in a given year to nominal incomes in a given year. Among my circle of acquaintances is a man who was archivist of a swank private college in New York. He’ll tell you that in 1928 tuition and room and board amounted to about $600 a year. Sounds ‘nearly free’. Nominal personal income per capita at that time was about $700 per year, so the charges were about 85% of nominal personal income per capita. 85% of nominal personal income per capita in our own time is $46,000. Full sticker price at that same school (which most of their student body will not pay) is currently about $57,000 a year.
What’s changed over time is the proportion of each age cohort who enroll in higher education. In 1928, about 6% of each enrolled in four-year colleges and universities; another increment enrolled in normal schools and hospital nursing schools, schools whose functions are today performed by colleges and universities. In 1970, that proportion had increased to about 25%. In our own time, it’s about 45%. The implications of that are that your body of students are more and more drawn from strata who are ill-equipped to finance this education out of family resources and more and more drawn from strata of the secondary student population who are less equipped for rigorous intellectual work.
The question arises, of course, as to whether all this spending on higher education is socially utile. There are two crass benefits for the prospective student: labor market signaling (a college diploma as a signal of trainability) and skills acquisition. Only the latter is beneficial to the whole stock of human capital. (And there are certainly cheaper ways to ascertain trainability).
Absurd tries a slight of hand but conflating an ability to pay with an ability handle “rigorous intellectual work.”
However, maybe we can look forward to absurd holding his kids or other relatives from college education as a demonstration of the benefits of his convictions.
It appears to be policy at Correct-the-Record to tell the retainers to just keep jamming and not bother if the comment is non sequitur.
Sure absurd, take all the time you need.
The average outstanding loan balance is $37,000. Not optimal, but certainly not ‘slavery’.
Emma, Sweden moved away from socialism.
“Until the mid-20th century, Sweden pursued highly competitive market-based policies. By 1970 Sweden achieved the world’s fourth-highest per capita income. ”
” By the early 1990s, Sweden’s per capita income ranking had dropped to 14th”
“Before its socialist experiment, Sweden had a smaller government sector than the U.S. “
They have a mixed economy
If the generous benefits that they get isn’t socialist then why don’t we have national healthcare and free college and a month paid vacation etc etc etc
“If the generous benefits that they get isn’t socialist then why don’t we have national healthcare and free college and a month paid vacation etc etc etc”
The logic of your question goes something like this.
Sweden isn’t socialist therefore we should have national healthcare, free college and paid vacation.
It doesn’t make sense. That explains your moniker, anonymous.
Did this poster boy for generational welfare and affirmative action ever see “Crazy Abe” Lincoln’s plan for deportation:
“If all earthly power were given me,” said Lincoln in a speech delivered in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, “I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land.” After acknowledging that this plan’s “sudden execution is impossible,” he asked whether freed blacks should be made “politically and socially our equals?” “My own feelings will not admit of this,” he said, “and [even] if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not … We can not, then, make them equals.”
Why isn’t he embarrassed to take alms for the poor?
The quickest and most cost-effective deterrent to illegal immigration is to arrest, in droves, the employers. There are way fewer of them than illegals, and they aren’t hiding or changing their names. Raid the major hotels and restaurants. Seize their records, which will provide all the proof you need for a conviction. Beef up the laws against hiring illegals, with hefty fines for the first offense and mandatory jail time for subsequent offenses. Include a provision revoking their business licenses if it persists. They will stop coming if there’s nothing here for them, and that’s the only way to take away the incentive to come here. They’ve been convinced by Trump’s lack of any coherent policy that it’s “now or never” because they’ve been told the border is going to permanently close soon. Trump’s lack of leadership is causing this crisis.
But, the truth is, Republicans really don’t want to stop illegal immigration because illegals will work for less than minimum wage, they don’t demand overtime pay, they file way fewer workers comp, unemployment and sexual harassment claims and don’t demand benefits. They help the bottom line. What Republicans DO want is the votes of the deplorables, so they pander to them. Sure, there’ll be lots of footage of brown people doing the perp walk. The deplorables love it. They think their orange leader is strong and powerful. He’s really just a weak bully with no leadership abilities.
Trump has had 2 1/2 years to deploy the “deportation squads” he promised during the campaign. He’s threatening mass arrests now because of the launch of his campaign. The illegals who have been here for years will be frightened that if they leave home to go to work, they’ll never see their kids again. Children will be afraid to go to school, for fear that they’ll never see their parents again, and all of them will be afraid to go to a doctor or hospital. This fear is being generated for political purposes, pure and simple, and inflicting emotional distress on people for political purposes is the very definition of terrorism. That was Professor Glaude’s point.
while i reject all that hyperbole, at the bottom of the reeking pile of manure is a nugget of truth, namely, that capitalists do profit from cheap labor, and a never ending supply over 200 years of migration to America has profited each new generation of capitalist bosses in turn. at the expense of the natives
why then, do supposedly marxist Democrats, always demean the natives who oppose this dynamic?
answer: because they capitalists bought them off to. who do you think endows these universities?
“The quickest and most cost-effective deterrent to illegal immigration is to arrest, in droves, the employers. ”
I have to laugh. Arrest the employers and suddenly jobs disappear putting Americans on the unemployment rolls.
Guest worker program without citizenship.
Make the employer responsible for social costs.
Make the non citizen responsible for his family.
End social safety nets for all illegals.
The ideal number of guest workers = 0. That’s the one secure thing you can say about immigration policy anywhere this side of Kuwait.
DSS, I’m afraid we disagree on this one. There are good rationales for some guest workers at least in the present. You disagree, but you are wrong.
Nope. It’s a sop to certain economic sectors, who need to be told to make use of domestic labor, automate, or change their product mix.
Without taking a side on importing agricultural guest workers – I don’t know enough to have an opinion – absurd seems to be ignoring the regional and international competition American farmers face. If he’s fine with those farms going away, his position would be at least consistent. Is he?
Gross output in the agricultural sector in real terms has increased by 25% since 1997.
That doesn’t answer the question, even if we knew the economic consequences of that or what factors are impacting that output. Are American farms making money, growing or losing market share, benefiting or losing from preferential trade practices here and abroad, what are the future prospects, etc. We don’t need answers to all that to understand what is best policy on guest workers, but competitiveness compared to regional and international producers is critical.
what most people understand about farms is even less than what they understand about business. “american farms” what does this mean anyhow?
american farmland has been in a slow moving rollup phase of purchasing by foreigners for decades
https://www.apnews.com/e541895e692545ee80d0fc609cf40011
“CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — Foreign investors acquired at least 1.6 million acres of U.S. agricultural land in 2016, the largest increase in more than a decade, according to a review by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting of the latest available federal data.
The data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that foreign investors control — either through direct ownership or long-term leases — at least 28.3 million acres, valued at $52.2 billion. That area is about the size of the state of Ohio.
A 1978 federal law, known as the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, requires foreign entities to report transactions of farmland to the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. The data covers years 1900 through 2016.”
American farms include small family farms and agribusiness. The question about importing guest workers remains the same – and one absurd can’t answer though he has strong unsupported opinions.
For what it’s worth, I managed a small cow/calf farm for 15 years and was partners in a haying business for a few more and have some familiarity – and much sympathy – with how tough the economics are.
It does answer your question, but you pretend it doesn’t for rhetorical effect.
Sop, DSS? We presently use a lot of illegals and have essentially zero unemployment. If suddenly all these people were to disappear, what do you think would happen? Long term guest workers become debateable, but at the present it would cause too much unecessary pain for American citizens.
I can accept that as an ideal. I agree with the notion that farming labor ideally comes from the native born population. and in a big country like America there’s a greater potential to achieve that kind of native labor sourcing.
I can accept that for pretty much ever part of the domestic labor market except for goods that are precisely intended to come from foreign origins, like restaurants and certain subjects’ teachers, of course a national government should prefer to encourage and source labor from native sources. this is the kind of statement that in most countries would be self apparent, and only in America with its hallowed 200 year old tradition of imported scabs from every currently overpopulated foreign scheisshole do we question such obviously proper ideals for government policy.
I mean if you could source all labor internally, who would really be the first in government to raise their hand and say, “but we would all be better off if we had more cheap imported foreign scabs so as to undermine the wage levels of our own people!!!” of course in a business you might think that but in a government that’s supposed to strengthen the entire state and people as such, one would think that would be a bad notion to advance as any kind of laudable norm.
of course ideals and what policy should do now are often very very far apart
the native born labor force is a resource. the most critical resource for a nation really since the nation doesnt even EXIST without people in the first place, otherwise its just a patch of dirt.
In the movie Rembetiko, near the end, a character says, “the biggest tragedy was not Smyrna, It was migration.”
in context: Smyrna was a place in Asia Minor where the Turkish Republic ethnically cleansed and ousted and kiled Greeks and sent them packing off across the Hellespont to Greece. It created a lot of poor greek slums in places like near Pireaus and Athens. In those slums they played a type of music called Rembetiko. It’s Greek blues, inspired by suffering, and with a more oriental usage of tones and instruments and singing styles. The usual bouzouki music they play at “ethnic festivals” around America is similar, but a little less, well, how can I say this without offending. A little less Turkish than Rembetiko style.
but the Smyrna expulsion added a lot of people and talent to Greece that helped it through hard times to come.
Eventually, after WW2, a lot of that talent took off and moved to Chicago and places like that. Which is why the character said, migration (as in emigration) was a bigger tragedy for Greece than Smyrna (which triggered influx of Greek ethnics from turkey).
The key insight that a lot of Americans never grasp is that labor is not just a factor of production. It relates to the fundamental composition of the national polity as such. If you import a massive and different human element, the polity will no longer be the same. A fundamental change in polity, especially in a “Democracy,” should only happen by the consent of the PEOPLE who enact laws.
In the case of our “immigration laws,” the will of the PEOPLE has been flaunted by the 10, 20, or however many millions of immigrants who came or stay here illegally. and our treasonous government officials who over decades have tolerated this.
there can be a thousand good reasons to relax immigration laws or let in more workers or tourists or guests or make more citizens out of foreigners. but the PEOPLE should not be displaced by mass migration simply because one party wants more congenial voters or big business wants a cheaper source of labor than the natives.
On the issue of 0 guest workers Kurtz says: “I can accept that as an ideal.” An ideal is using rational thought. DSS’s problem is that he wishes to assume reality is the same as ideal.
I’m doing nothing of the kind. Guest workers are socially corrupting and manufacture policy dilemmas you would not otherwise have. You cannot accomplishing something with local labor, that’s because your country lacks comparative advantage in that good.
It’s not merely the guest workers and the illegal aliens. It’s the subsidized water, the subsidized credit, the publicly provided crop insurance (while other businesses are buying from Wausau), the deficiency payments, ad infinitum.
If you’re irritated by subsidies foreign governments are granting their agricultural sectors, you can place countervaling tariffs on their goods.
DSS, essentially you are changing the subject ending up on subsidies and tariffs. There is no law that guest workers have to be socially corrupting especially when each party is benfitting and the guest worker is treated like any other non citizen, student or whatever. You are focused on country’s that are despotic and have guest worker programs where the workers are essentially serfs or indentured servants. That need not be.
You are generalizing and making economic rules that do not exist.
Interesting that Obama was president for 8 years and deported more illegals than anyone else put kids into cages and didn’t get after employers.
Now democrats care?
Americans are living in the streets in California and most are one paycheck from being homeless while democrats wring their hands about illegal immigrants.
It’s not exactly breaking news when a professor says something stupid.
OT: The black ledger
Mueller used garbage again contaminated by the media reports assisted by the FBI in one circuitous trail to permit the FBI to act in a fashion that seems to me to be illegal The FBI used secondary evidence instead of primary evidence.
Dershowitz writes: ““It sounds to me like a fraud on the court, possibly a willful and deliberate fraud that should have consequences for both the court and the attorneys’ bar,””
The trail leads to a corrupt administration where investigators had their hands in the dirt even before the Trump investigations started.
FBI, warned early and often that Manafort file might be fake, used it anyway
When the final chapter of the Russia collusion caper is written, it is likely two seminal documents the FBI used to justify investigating Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign will turn out to be bunk.
And the behavior of FBI agents and federal prosecutors who promoted that faulty evidence may disturb us more than we now know.
The first, the Christopher Steele dossier, has received enormous attention. And the more scrutiny it receives, the more its truthfulness wanes. Its credibility has declined so much that many now openly question how the FBI used it to support a surveillance warrant against the Trump campaign in October 2016.
At its best, the Steele dossier is an “unverified and salacious” political research memo funded by Trump’s Democratic rivals. At worst, it may be Russian disinformation worthy of the “garbage” label given it by esteemed reporter Bob Woodward.
The second document, known as the “black cash ledger,” remarkably has escaped the same scrutiny, even though its emergence in Ukraine in the summer of 2016 forced Paul Manafort to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman and eventually face U.S. indictment.
In search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017 for bank records to prove he worked for the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.
There’s just one problem: The FBI’s public reliance on the ledger came months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and likely was a fake, according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources.
For example, Ukraine’s top anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, told me he warned the U.S. State Department’s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud.
“It was not to be considered a document of Manafort. It was not authenticated. And at that time it should not be used in any way to bring accusations against anybody,” Kholodnytsky said, recalling what he told FBI agents.
Likewise, Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake.
Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,” Kilimnik wrote in an email to a senior U.S. official on Aug. 22, 2016.
He added: “I have some questions about this black cash stuff, because those published records do not make sense. The timeframe doesn’t match anything related to payments made to Manafort. … It does not match my records. All fees Manafort got were wires, not cash.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and the FBI were given copies of Kilimnik’s warning, according to three sources familiar with the documents.
Submitting knowingly false or suspect evidence — whether historical or to support probable cause — in a federal court proceeding violates FBI rules and can be a crime under certain circumstances. “To establish probable cause, the affiant must demonstrate a basis for knowledge and belief that the facts are true,” the FBI operating manual states.
But with Manafort, the FBI and Mueller’s office did not cite the actual ledger — which would require agents to discuss their assessment of the evidence — and instead cited media reports about it. The feds assisted on one of those stories as sources.
For example, agents mentioned the ledger in an affidavit supporting a July 2017 search warrant for Manafort’s house, citing it as one of the reasons the FBI resurrected the criminal case against Manafort.
“On August 19, 2016, after public reports regarding connections between Manafort, Ukraine and Russia — including an alleged ‘black ledger’ of off-the-book payments from the Party of Regions to Manafort — Manafort left his post as chairman of the Trump Campaign,” the July 25, 2017, FBI agent’s affidavit stated.
Three months later, the FBI went further in arguing probable cause for a search warrant for Manafort’s bank records, citing a specific article about the ledger as evidence Manafort was paid to perform U.S. lobbying work for the Ukrainians.
“The April 12, 2017, Associated Press article reported that DMI [Manafort’s company] records showed at least two payments were made to DMI that correspond to payments in the ‘black ledger,’ ” an FBI agent wrote in a footnote to the affidavit.
There are two glaring problems with that assertion.
First, the agent failed to disclose that both FBI officials and Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who later became Mueller’s deputy, met with those AP reporters one day before the story was published and assisted their reporting.
An FBI record of the April 11, 2017, meeting declared that the AP reporters “were advised that they appeared to have a good understanding of Manafort’s business dealings” in Ukraine.
So, essentially, the FBI cited a leak that the government had facilitated and then used it to support the black ledger evidence, even though it had been clearly warned about the document.
Secondly, the FBI was told the ledger claimed to show cash payments to Manafort when, in fact, agents had been told since 2014 that Manafort received money only by bank wires, mostly routed through the island of Cyprus, memos show.
During the 2014 investigation, Manafort and his partner Richard Gates voluntarily identified for FBI agents tens of millions of dollars they received from Ukrainian and Russian sources and the shell companies and banks that wired the money. “Gates stated that the amounts they received would match the amounts they invoiced for services. Gates added they were always paid late, and in tranches,” FBI memos I obtained show.
Liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz said FBI affidavits almost never cite news articles as evidence. “They are supposed to cite the primary evidence and not secondary evidence,” he said.
“It sounds to me like a fraud on the court, possibly a willful and deliberate fraud that should have consequences for both the court and the attorneys’ bar,” he added.
Former FBI intelligence chief Kevin Brock was less critical. He said mentioning the ledger in an affidavit for its historical relationship to Manafort’s firing and the start of the investigation might be defensible, but any effort to use the ledger to support probable cause would be “puzzling” since it clearly was not needed to strengthen either affidavit and only risked tainting the warrant. He said it could raise questions about why the special counsel believed it necessary to refer to the ledger in the probable cause narrative.
In the end, the best proof that the FBI knew the black ledger was a sham is that prosecutors never introduced it to jurors in Manafort’s trial.
Rep. Mark Meadows, a senior Republican on the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, told me Wednesday night he is asking the Justice Department inspector general to investigate the FBI and prosecutors’ handling of the Manafort warrants, including any media leaks and evidence that the government knew the black ledger was potentially unreliable or suspect evidence.
The question of whether the Mueller team should have used the ledger in search warrant affidavits before that is for the courts to decide.
But the public has a substantial interest in questioning whether, more broadly, the FBI should have sustained a Trump-Russia collusion investigation for more than two years based on the suspect Steele dossier and black ledger.
Understandably, there isn’t much public sympathy for foreign lobbyists such as Manafort. But the FBI and prosecutors should be required to play by the rules and use solid evidence when making its cases.
It does not appear to have been the prevailing practice in the Russia collusion investigation. And that should trouble us all. __John Solomon
How about we see Trump’s financial records so we’ll know who he and his family are indebted to? What are they trying to hide, anyway? If you read the Mueller report, you’d know that the impetus for the investigation was not HRC or the Steele Dossier. It was George Papadopoulos bragging to an Australian diplomat that HRC’s and the DNC’s e-mail accounts had been hacked and that Wikileaks was going to publish the information. The Australian diplomat felt compelled to report this to the FBI. You really need to stop watching Hannity because no amount of repeating the false narrative that HRC and the Steele Dossier were the basis for investigating Trump is going to change the truth.
Actually, they were running informants on Papadapolous and the sculltebutt he’s accused of retailing came from Joseph Mifsud, one of those informants.
misfud some kind of obscure Maltese politician/ academic/ CI dude who had been paid by FBI for “training” a long time before Meuller used him. unlikely he was a “Russian asset” but a lot more likely hes what anybody could call an FBI asset
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/05/21/nunes_fbi_has_something_to_hide_on_joseph_mifsud_hes_not_a_russian_asset.html
foolish Democrats
“How about we see Trump’s financial records so we’ll know who he and his family are indebted to?”
Are you on welfare? You don’t seem to know anything about IRS declarations. You are not entitled to private records just like we weren’t entitled to the private records of Obama, Clinton, Kerry, etc.
What Natacha knows is her own emotional states. She has no capacity to articulate or apply any impersonal principle. To add to the amusement, she pretends in this forum to be a lawyer.
Absurd,
I would question if Natacha knows “her own emotional state”.
People on or beyond the lunatic fringe don’t always recognize their emotional state, but consider themselves to be the calm, rational ones.
The content and tone 🤪🤯😵 of their statements kind of works against that “calm, rational” self-image they may have.
Tom’s character judgements are as worthless as his ruminations on recent immigration legislation (2013) and negotiations (2017 & 2018). But hey, he’s Trump supporter, so how much would he know about character?
I don’t think the wholesale revealing of Trump’s financial records would be to the liking of the TDS crowd.
As it stands now, they can make wild guesses and statements about “Russian😲oligarchs”, “Kremlin-connected banks”, Putin slipping Trump 100 Ruble bills under the table when they’ve met, DuetchBank money laundering schemes, etc.
There have actually been some realistic articles (based on information obtained from financial disclosure forms and other public records) estimating the sources if financing for Trump projects.
I won’t bother posted them again, lest the more imaginative find here find it upsetting and damaging to to their pet theories (i.e., wild guesses).
Ha Tom does anybody say that? i think the ex rate is like 65:1 which would make that like a two dollar bill.
I think the easiest way, say, for a Chicom asset to bribe someone like AOC, who keep in mind has the nation’s biggest Chinatown in her district, is just pass a brown $5 thousand dollar chip or maybe a few thousand dollar yellow ones, literally, under the table. The question is, does AOC or her trusted people ever hit the casino? I doubt it but they could check the tapes at Resort World Casino near JFK. I would think the local FBI could easily develop an asset inside security there, might be worthwhile to go to the trouble.
Because, I am not sure why someone with AOC would even be worth a bribe. I can’t imagine what she could do for the PRC that would even be worth a thousand dollar tip, because, other than her tweeter following, she has no pull in Congress. Probably not worth wasting too much time on AOC, i have a feeling she won’t last.
Come to think of it prolly wouldn’t work with a brown chip they’d be watching it too closely.
Easier to pass a $500 Euro bill and then not too far of a trip to change it at JFK.
“does anybody say that”? ( about Putin slipping 100 Ruble bills under the table at meetings with Trump).
Not yet, Mr. Kurtz. I’m just trying to be helpful😇, to give them more of the kind of salacious material they like to work with.
they mostly dropped the dumb idea that just because the hotelier wanted to have a hotel in Moscow a major capital that he was being “bribed.” wow that one was a feeble ploy. what will they think of next?
when you get bribed = that was just a tip
when your adversary gets bribed = illegal corruption
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/putin-angrily-resigns-from-trumps-reelection-campaign
Mr. Kurtz,
I’ve posted this link before, but for those who are convinced that Putin got Trump elected in 2016, I want to re-assure them that it won’t happen again, now that Putin is mad at Trump.
https://weeklyworldnews.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/putin_trumpd.jpg
The concern about Putin getting Trump elected is understandable, as is demonstrated by the linked photo ( taken in early November, 2016, during the last-minute campaign blitz by Trump and friend).
some things one wishes one had not seen, lol
Lets see your credit report first OK?
Let’s see her medical records. Including a summary of the scrips she’s on.
From TIA x ?: “Let’s see her medical records. Including a summary of the scrips she’s on.”
TIA must go first. And we’ll also want documentation of his valuable work and contributions (monetary and non-monetary) over the years.
I told you Diane would move to a knew hotspot.
And now we know exactly how clueless you are, “TIA x 9.”
x 9 should be zero.
I’m not L4D or Diane, but it must make you feel good to believe it — and say it. It would seem that you miss L4D…and/or Diane.
Trump had to file financial disclosures when he declared his candidacy in 2015.
Karen recently lectured us on our countries declining moral standards and cited shop lifting as causing everyone else to pay more. Somehow her fine moral compass is thrown off by the radiation emanating from her hero, and now she defends his not showing tax returns, as if his failure to pay them – something he has done in the past – will not make us all pay more.
Anon, you are now talking about morality. Based on your comment above about taxes you obviously don’t have the slightest idea of what morality is.
Nor does heshe know much about the tax collection process and how new tax laws are crafted to raise revenue based on trends in collection and economic activity.
There’s zero evidence that Trump is guilty of tax evasion. That he engages in lawful tax avoidance he has admitted– as any rational taxpayer does.
The old NYT “Piece” (of Scheisse ) that elaborated on why Fred Trump had supposedly “cheated” on estate and gift tax was a reeking pile of dung which my law school dyed in the wool Democrat professor would have laughed at
A thousand or so of the best “private banking” type lawyers in the country who are the top experts in federal gift and estate taxes and things like the OVDP program and are probably overwhelmingly Democrats too all laughed at it so hard they barfed coffee out of their noses at the time.
it was a phony garbage propaganda piece that took a brown sludge of half truths and mixed them in with yellow journalism innuendos and the whole thing stunk like an outhouse which still reeks years later as people try to reopen the door and use it again
But insult the NYT and it’s syocphants in cyberspace corps spring into action to lick their boots with vigor!
Anon owns his own business, does his own taxes, and has never been sued. Pinky swear.
All true absurd. My brother in law attorney long ago gave me the wise advise to do whatever it takes – within reason – to stay out of court.
speaking of lawsuits
of course the low standards for telling lies about public officials which your godlings at the NYT got judicially enacted into law will allow you to say whatever you want about public officials for the most part. good luck with anybody ever proving “actual malice”
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/39
you called me a liar because I question your holey totem pole the NYT. I basically said they were slack on reporting China news. Which is a well founded generalization that applies to them and even more so to the rest of the mass media, but it fits them too. But let me say what i really think. the NYT is the King of Lies in the US, for a long time. I have actually been soft-pedaling it! Now I give them my foot!
the only thing they have going for them is better English style and the fonts. we can resort to libraries for the old copies if needed for instructional purposes, because as a timely news source they might as well shut their doors. And we will live to see that!
kurtz you are a liar, not because of your opinion of the NYTs – an opinion by definition can’t be a lie unless you stae facts within it that are not true – but because you made specific claims about what the NYTs was covering which was false, when corrected on what page they put it which was false, what you thought was their motives which was false based on an editorial from that day I presented to you.
In summation everything you said that day about the actions and motives of the NYTs on that and preceding days was proven to be flat out wrong, with no possibility of misinterpreting events.
To my surprise actually, you refused to retract your statements and doubled down on them. That makes you not only a liar, but a ridiculous liar because the evidence was so clear. If you are this bad at lying, how good an attorney can you be?
“To my surprise actually, you refused to retract your statements and doubled down on them. ….If you are this bad at lying, how good an attorney can you be?”
WOULDNT YOU LIKE TO KNOW! I’m just a humble lawyer out here in flyover. Picture me as an overweight greying old white guy in a cheap seersucker suit like Matlock if you want. But good enough I can waste an hour a day goofing around here kicking dried up turds off the sidewalk here for fun.
but I like to save money which is why I don’t pay for news I can get for free on the internet. especially not urine stained yellow journalism the likes of which comes from the NYT
“you get what you pay for”, and old saying illustrated perfectly by kurtz and the news.
LOL I suspected I knew the business but the odds are against it
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/opinion/night-falls-on-news-carriers.html
the paperboy biz just aint what it used to be
Here’s what kurtz is looking for:
Tax cheat:
Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes
as He Reaped Riches From His Father
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html
Biggest loser in America:
Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures
Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/07/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html
yes thank you that’s precisely what i was referring too. good job trying to gin up eyeballs for this failing business. do you get a nickel for that?
oh wait i hadn’t seen that may 19 article yet. oops; it’s behind the paywall. you mean, they can actually charge people for this garbage?
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/9/17671000/new-york-times-trump-subscribers-news-slower-growth
here’s a very modest criticism from someone who has actually been paid to do such work by clients, obviously. as if their opinion mattered more than a “journalist” who never took accounting 101
https://www.forbes.com/sites/berniekent/2018/10/08/new-york-times-fred-donald-trump/#78caa4393d46
“I have two major quibbles with what is otherwise a thorough and enlightening piece of investigative journalism:
While Donald Trump clearly benefited greatly from his father’s largesse, he has added significant wealth to the fortune he inherited, and
Although many of the wealth transfer techniques utilized by Fred Trump to reduce his estate and gift tax appear to be illegal, the authors went overboard in their discussion of discounts for gifts of minority ownership interests in closely-held businesses, GRATs and step-transactions.”
THAT GUY WAS SHINING THE NYT TOO. He put it quite lightly when he stated his “quibble” about them “going overboard.” they were actually just FLAT OUT WRONG.
I would explain this more to you but for that kind of advice, I charge. For my part, I’m typing here for fun.
Kurtz, Anon is a jerk. For all we know he cheats on his taxes and that is why he does his own taxes. It wouldn’t be uncommon in the construction trade. Go over him with a fine tooth comb and you will find a crook underneath all that veneer, but he would not be alone. Most of the stuff he says is inaccurate and he lies a lot. Trump has been audited so one could say that he complied with IRS rules. Most of us try to do that and unless one is stupid one doesn’t cheat the IRS in a manner that can lead to a jail term. That is something these guys with no knowledge of the law don’t seem to understand.
I think his contacts at Correct-the-Record told him to keep running the tape on continuous loop. See ‘collusion has been proven’.
Papadopolous did not mention hacked emails to the Australian diplomat Downer.
That’s one “fact” Natacha invented. Since I only skim or rapidly scroll past her crazy comments here, I won’t bother looking for other “Natacha Facts”.
Natacha, the cultists here will continue making lame excuses for why Trump should get away with lying about releasing his tax returns during the campaign as well as breaking a 40 year tradition – I guess it will have to be a law if one party is going to nominate scum bags like Trump – of major candidates releasing theirs. The fact of his desperate actions to keep his finances secret, his record of tax cheating, his grifter family with one foot in the WH and the other in doing business with their Saudi and Chinese friends, his record of cheating employees and customers, and his shaky business dealings which include declaring multiple bankruptcy as well as being the American with the greatest claimed loss one year all suggest to sane and reasonable people who haven’t drunk the Kool Aid that he’s the last person to be given a pass on financial records and those of good will should be cheering on the Congress and State of NY in their attempts at get the record on this guy.
Is there a Cliff Notes version of that last 100 word sentence?
Only Tom would need a “Cliff Notes version”…
I actually prefer the Cliff Notes version; don’t actually need those Cliff Notes, just favor them over rambling, run-on sentences and comments.
“…just favor them over rambling, run-on sentences and comments.”
Then you must “prefer” them for your own remarks, as well.
I declare the Princeton professor a TRAITOR
Trump’s announcement is not terrorism but I suspect it will fall far short of a mass anything, except a massed of trolled reactions from people like that.
Which was probably the intended effect.
As a person who really would like some border enforcement to increase, I’d like to see Trump deliver on smaller promises and not just talk up even bigger ones that can’t be fulfilled.
Princeton. The name celebrates the kings, queens, princes, princesses etc. Change the name to: Pauper U. You folks recall The Prince and the Pauper?
Princeton University is named after a very fat prince who weighed a ton.
Tiresome. The professor has a wretched fascination with freaks, but won’t call attention to the source of the freakishness.
1. ‘African American Studies’ is a nonsense discipline. It wouldn’t attract or retain anyone with serious intellectual interests. You’d be better off budgeting for parapsychologists
2. Hardly anyone majors in ‘African American Studies’. About 1.8 million baccalureate degrees are issued in this country, but fewer than 1,000 in black studies and the like.
3. Which is to say that these programs are patronage for privileged political interests. Academics do that because they actually do not have much integrity.
4. So you get black blowhards on your faculty who have no serious preparation but are there as mascots for white faculty members. You get these characters in more conventional faculties as well. The one I knew best was a risible cretinette now ensconced on the teacher-training faculty of Miami University in Ohio. You can read her published work (peer-reviewed and not) and you realize that her conception of social research is stringing together jargon. She has zero history of having published any valid empirical study, historical study, or theoretical discussion.
5. So, the black professoriate as a whole is increasingly composed of jerks who make blacks look like idiots. All of that is to help white liberals feel better about themselves. White liberals damage everything they touch.
“You can read her published work (peer-reviewed and not) and you realize that her conception of social research is stringing together jargon. She has zero history of having published any valid empirical study, historical study, or theoretical discussion.“
********************
I’ve always thought there is an inverse relationship between intellectual mastery and the use of jargon. If you understand it, you can explain it. It you don’t, you obfuscate it with jargon. Obscurantism passes for scholarship these days.
A certain amount of jargon is shorthand. In social research, the scope for that outside of statistics and linguistics (and those fragments of geography, sociology, and economics dependent on statistics or linguistics) should be exceedingly limited. You have shorthand in law too (and legal dictionaries).
The woman I’m recalling billed herself as a ‘curriculum theorist’. There was precious little in her published work ca. 2006 that had anything to do with curriculum or theory. She’d entered graduate school about 15 years earlier.
Her previous employment was in broadcasting. What was interesting about that was that you as a native speaker of American English could understand her satisfactorily one-on-one, but you had to struggle when her voice was amplified. Her reminiscence was that her career had been truncated due to ‘racism’. I don’t think she was emotionally equipped to process the reality: her elocution was wretched. Of course, having her take lessons to acquire properly clipped speech necessary for communicating with others through a microphone she might have considered ‘racism’ as well.
“You have shorthand in law too (and legal dictionaries).”
*************************
The law has its share of shorthand with “res ipsa loquitur” being just one example. That said, the law depends on popular affirmation in the form of juries and voters to survive as a functioning institution. To that end, jargon falls flat. People have to understand you to support you. When you risk that necessity with jargon, you lose them. Note how seemingly incomprehensible legalese has led to undermining the rule of law. Whatever your position on Roe v. Wade, you have to admit it’s a muddle of soft reasoning and rhetoric deciding a critical societal issue. Blackmun’s finding that the unborn aren’t persons in the constitutional context because clauses setting forth an age requirement as a prerequisite for the presidency don’t have a “prenatal application,” being just one stunning example of jargon passing for reasoning. Does he mean those under 35 aren’t persons, too, since there is likewise no “pre-35-year-old application”? This failure to understandably support a ruling is precisely why Roe remains controversial today and Brown v. Board does not.