The erosion of free speech in Russia under Vladimir Putin has been an unfolding tragedy for Russia. As is often the case, the loss of freedom of speech often goes hand-in-hand with the loss of academic freedom. However, the arrest of a Russian historian, Yuri Dmitriev, 61, is particularly chilling and raises legitimate comparisons with the Stalinist period. That is fitting given the fact that Dmitriev is being forced into psychiatric testing after writing about the discovery of thousands of bodies from the 1930s — victims of Joe Stalin. Putin has ordered a revisionist history on Stalin to glorify his reign and downplay the millions killed by the bloodsoaked dictator.
Category: Media
Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on the filing by Paul Manafort challenging the scope of the Special Counsel investigation. Manafort’s filing of a civil action is quite telling in this circumstance. As a criminal defendant, he can challenge the basis for the charges. This seems like an effort to make a public case with little likelihood of legal success. However, the public tends not to be particularly sympathetic with accused felons complaining that they were arrested by the wrong cop. It is true that Manafort would likely not have been charged absent the Special Counsel investigation. However, that is like complaining about the weather in Washington.
Here is the column:
Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is back in the news and it could not be more bizarre. This week Spitzer was accused of allegedly threatening to stab a restaurant patron’s crotch for stating that he respected Spitzer’s nemesis, Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone. Jamie Antolini says that Spitzer yelled “I’ll get a f**king knife and stab you right in your f**king cock!” Spitzer resigned as Attorney General after disclosure of his patronage of high-end prostitutes.
The New York Times is reporting that Special counsel Robert Mueller has confirmed that President Donald Trump took the extraordinary step of ordering White House counsel Don McGahn to Attorney general Jeff Sessions to prevent him from recusing himself in the Russian investigation. I was one of the earliest voices calling for Sessions to recuse himself and continue to believe that he made the right decision not only for himself and the Justice Department but Trump. The account in the Times states that Trump was irate at hearing that Sessions would follow the advice of his ethics advisors and recuse himself. He allegedly asked why he does not have an Eric Holder or Roy Cohen to protect his interests. If true, it was a grossly inappropriate decision and an even more worrisome analogy. I have been a long critic of Holder and his highly political tenure at the Justice Department. As for Roy Cohen, he is one of the most reviled and disreputable figures in history. It would be akin to a CEO asking where is his Bernie Madoff to protect profits. The accounts is based on two sources that are anonymous and we have not heard from the President. Obviously, McGahn could also deny the truth of the story but we have not heard from either McGahn or Trump’s personal counsel.
Continue reading “NYT: Trump Tried To Stop Sessions From Recusal”
I have previously written about my objections to Antifa and its anti-free speech values, including academics legitimizing efforts to violently curtail free speech on our campuses. Germany has banned an Antifa website as an extremist organization. That has not stopped Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, from posing with the handbook of the Antifa movement and giving the group a proud shout out. As Democrats seek a new identity and purpose after the debacle with Hillary Clinton, this is a worrisome signal. The Democrats will hand over another election if they simply try to run on being anti-Trump and pro-Antifa.
Continue reading “DNC Deputy Chair Gives Shout Out To Antifa”
For free speech advocates, there was another chilling development last week in the expanding censorship of social media and the criminalization of speech in the West. The government is investigating Beatrix von Storch (the deputy leader of far-right party AfD) for a tweet posted on New Year’s Eve in which she accused police of appeasing “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes of men.” The statement was barred on Twitter and Von Storch and others were barred on Twitter and Facebook. Once again, raising the free speech concerns is not an endorsement of such offensive posts. Rather, the Germans have taken their controversial speech regulations and have extended them to social media — forcing these companies to become active players in the censoring of political speech. People may have no objection (and even relish) the crackdown on the AfD but the implications for speech is far greater than these individuals.
Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on New Year’s resolutions that would bring a welcomed change in Washington for President Donald Trump, the Congress, and the media. While I have little illusions over the chances of either such resolutions being made or kept, it is worth noting that all of the major players could do well with a modicum of self-reflection with the New Year.
Continue reading “The New Year’s Resolutions For President Trump, Congress, and The Media”
Happy New Year to all of our blog community from around the world. As I mentioned yesterday, I get to celebrate both New Years and my anniversary on the 31st. Leslie and I eloped in Alexandria Virginia on New Year’s Eve in 1997 — making this our 20th anniversary. (We disagree on the number for celebrating since I count the 8 years that we dated — making this our 28th). I make our traditional soup on New Year’s: The Bowl of The Wife of Kit Carson Soup. It is a hot Turkey soup that my father Jack Turley would make every New Year and was believed to be a cure for any hangover.
As has been our tradition on this blog, with the start of 2018, I thought I would wanted to share our annual “State of The Blog” statistics.
For the last year, I have been criticizing over-wrought and at times irresponsible legal analysis proclaiming “slam dunk” criminal cases and long-sought “smoking gun” discovery sealing the fate of President Donald Trump or his close associates. This includes months in which legal analysts referred to the crime of collusion despite there being no such crime. Unfortunately, this trend continues with the recent interview of Jill Wine-Banks, a former Watergate prosecutor, who told MSNBC that Trump’s recent tweets can constitute “obstruction of justice, witness intimidation, and it’s obstructing justice by saying to agents you better not dig too deep, you better not find anything because I will attack you.” I can see little support for such a position in the criminal code or past cases.
President Donald Trump recently entered into the national debate over the NFL protests by criticizing football players taking a knee before games during the national anthem. Some were enraged and called for his impeachment — a call that I previously discussed as unfounded and dangerous. I saw no reason why the President was out of line in giving his opinion on the controversy. There is however an even more pressing matter involving an American professional athlete that would warrant a strong and public statement from President Trump. He is New York Knicks player Enes Kanter who is the subject of an abusive charge in Turkey for allegedly insulting its blood-soaked authoritarian leader President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. President Trump should publicly support Kanter and his right to exercise free speech — a right that Erdogan has curtailed in Turkey in his crackdown on dissidents and journalists alike.
Below is my column in The Hill Newspaper on the email seizure by Special Counsel Robert Mueller from the General Services Administration. As discussed yesterday, many supporters of Mueller are not contesting that this material did not constitute agency records or property, but rather that there was some type of express or implied waiver of privacy and confidentiality. While I consider this an ambiguous area, I obviously disagree with such dismissive positions.
Here is the column:
CNN guest commentator Hilary Rosen has long been something of a live wire on television as when she attacked the wife of Mitt Romney — comments that David Axelrod called “offensive” and President Obama apologized for during the campaign. She has been criticized for her sometimes no-holds-barred approach to advocacy for Democrats. We had such an exchange on NPR where she was quick to take offense as a lesbian to a discussion on Hillary Clinton’s record. She is again in the midst of a controversy and could well be sued for defamation (though I think such a lawsuit would be unwarranted). Rosen (who is Jewish) went on social media to condemn Georgetown student Michael Bakan as an anti-Semitic after he appears in a bacon outfit in this picture. She appears to have missed the fact that his name resembles (and is pronounced) “Bacon.”
There is a rumor of more members being axed in the coming week over sexual harassment as Washington prepares for the final tax vote. Ok, it was just an excuse to show this incredible picture from a Leningrad gas mask drill in 1939.
The GW Hatchet, our award-winning student newspaper, has another interesting article this week on the establishment of a new group on campus, the Internationalist Students’ Front, an anti-fascist, anti-nationalist organization. They are advocates of internationalism, a position similar to the prior world socialist movement. The addition of such groups are a good thing for our university in bringing diverse and passionate views to our campus debates. However, it is worrisome that the first organized effort of the group is reportedly to ban a book on campus.
I recently criticized Gloria Allred for giving Roy Moore a badly needed boost in her belated admission that her client wrote some of the words that she attributed to Moore in the now infamous yearbook press controversy. Now CNN and other media outlets have given critics the most compelling evidence that they are seeking to allege that our media is rife with “fake news.” Trump himself pounced on the false report. CNN went all in on a report from Congressional reporter Manu Raju that Wikileaks gave the Trumps early access to undisclosed hacked emails before they were made public. The story was wrong on the key date and failed to note that the source was just some unknown character encouraging the campaign to look at the publicly available material. Brookings Institution’s Ben Wittes and others joined in the spasm of “bombshell” reporting, as detailed by Glenn Greenwald. This follows the Washington Post reporter David Weigel tweeting a false image of empty seats at a recent rally to contradict Trump’s latest crowd assertions — a picture that was found before Trump spoke. Trump called for Weigel’s firing, which I have said would be excessive (even though Weigel has made past controversial statements against conservatives before the Post hired him). Weigel withdrew the tweet and apologized. I think that that is sufficient and the Trump Administration should be the most sympathetic with wayward tweets. The more serious issue is the CNN coverage of the Wikileaks story and the eagerness to pounce on any story damaging to the Trump Administration. That is a legitimate basis for criticism and review. If this were not Trump, would CNN have run with the “bombshell” without more scrutiny? The alleged lack of circumspection and caution on the story has been raised as characteristic of much of the Trump coverage. (Notably, Fox was also criticized for a headline on the yearbook disclosure, though the objection was to the use of “forgery” in the headline not the content of the reporting).
Continue reading “Boom or Bust: How The Media Fulfilled Trump Narrative On “Fake News””