Yoo, John

Torture memos  UCB

merri ok

CLARENCE CLERK / GINNI

retaliate ~ judges = facism natcon 7 24

claremonster INCUBATOR WITH EASTMAN 2024

eastman coup support

NATCON TRUMP LAWFARE

still has gig?

ACADEMIC SUPPRESSION

bak

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AN 5 25

Top White House adviser Stephen Miller recently suggested President Donald Trump is actively considering suspending the writ of habeas corpus to “take care of the illegal immigration problem.”

"The Constitution is clear … that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said. “So that’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”

But the Dispatch reports John Yoo, a former clerk to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, said Miller’s argument “wouldn’t apply to a case of immigration at all.”

READ MORE: When the sleeping giant awakens, Trump will be toast

The Bush Justice Department lawyer, who drafted several memos in 2002 authorizing the CIA to commit torture at the height of the U.S. war with Iraq, went on to say, “There’s zero chance that that would fly in the courts.”

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Yoo is “not in the least embarrassed by the condemnation of his peers” for his expansionist views on presidential powers, including the right of the White House to commit U.S. adversaries to waterboarding. But he remains confident the courts would not bend on this particular expansionist claim.

However, Miller’s statement may also contain a veiled threat to judges: “A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” Miller said. Later, that statement was followed by the highly publicized arrest of a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge for allegedly interfering with the collection of an immigrant by ICE forces.

In addition, it is a threat potentially wrapped with the insulating layer of a complicit Congress, writes Dispatch Senior Editor John McCormack.

READ MORE:The other shoe drops: Deals with Trump are already backfiring on top law firms

Yoo insists Trump suspending habeas corpus would provide “plausible grounds for impeachment” considering Trump would be arguably arrogating “the powers of another branch at a time when the provision doesn’t even apply.” But the Dispatch reports the reaction from Congressional Republican Party members to Miller’s claim is “muted, at best.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was the only Republican senator to forcefully speak out against Miller’s comments, calling it “a terrible idea.” Other GOP Senators declared, “we’d have to find out more,” like Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), or “I don’t think so,” like Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.).

“A lack of enthusiastic support from congressional Republicans is, of course, far from the kind of threat that might actually deter Trump from an unprecedented assault on civil liberties,” the Dispatch writes. “If Trump doesn’t fear the courts or Congress, might anything else constrain him?”

“It also depends on whether other officers of the government choose to obey the president’s order,” Yoo told The Dispatch. “… [D]oes the president really want to raise doubts about the military’s willingness to follow the commander in chief?”

READ MORE:'Are you really going to answer' like that? Barrett goes to bat for liberal justice — and MAGA is furious

Read the full Dispatch report here.

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One senior-level official from former President Donald Trump's administration just made an ominous threat to the immigrant community during a recent gathering of far-right political activists.

On Tuesday, Semafor reporter Dave Weigel reported that during the National Conservatism conference (also known as "NatCon") in Washington, D.C., several of the speakers eagerly expressed how they would help the former president accomplish his goal of pursuing vengeance against his political opponents if elected to a second term. During one panel, Tom Homan – who was director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Trump's Department of Homeland Security – suggested he was already working behind the scenes to make Trump's promise to deport millions of immigrants as draconian as possible.

"Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan said. “They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025.”

READ MORE:**This Trump campaign platform will cause 'enormous disruption' and economic chaos: analysis**

As the New York Times reported last year, one key plank of Trump's second-term policy agenda is the rounding up and detainment of undocumented immigrants on an unprecedented scale. Trump immigration advisor Stephen Miller — an outed white nationalist — previously suggested Trump would deport approximately 10 million immigrants during a second term. Earlier this year, Ronald Brownstein — a senior editor for the Atlantic — tweeted excerpts from a speech Miller gave to National Rifle Association activists about how Trump would create “standing facilities” to detain immigrants by the thousands “where planes are moving off the runway constantly.”

Deporting millions of immigrants in a short number of years would likely be a major blow to the economy and result in significant price hikes for Americans. New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan reported last month that it's likely "production falls and labor costs go up" in the event of mass deportations.

"For example, if farmers could not find enough workers to pick all their crops, there would be a smaller supply of produce and it would get more expensive," they wrote. "And businesses would be forced to offer higher wages to attract or retain workers — passing on some of their higher costs to consumers."

According to Weigel, the NatCon audience that met at the Capital Hilton in D.C. consisted of "Trump administration veterans mingled with conservative writers and think tankers who had conquered the old 'Bush-Romney' Republican Party." Attendees reportedly viewed Trump as "a conquering hero who’d have a confident, well-trained movement behind him next year," and NatCon speakers often echoed Trump's promises to use the force of the federal government to punish Trump's enemies.

READ MORE:**Trump will 'reignite' inflation with 'fiscally irresponsible' policy: Nobel economists**

In a segment featuring former Trump attorney John Eastman (author of the so-called "Eastman Memo" that outlined the plot to disrupt Congress' certification of the 2020 Electoral College count), the now-disbarred lawyer proposed punishing federal judges who ruled against Trump in his unsuccessful election litigation.

"We’ve got to start impeaching these judges for acting in such an unbelievably partisan way from the bench," Eastman said, just a week after the six conservatives on the Supreme Court ruled that presidents are free to break the law as long as it's deemed an official act.

John Yoo, who was a top DOJ official in former George W. Bush's administration, also encouraged political reprisal under a second Trump administration. He specifically called on Republican prosecutors to be Trump's political foot soldiers should he win in November.

"People who have used this tool against people like John [Eastman] or President Trump have to be prosecuted by Republican or conservative DAs in exactly the same way, for exactly the same kinds of things, until they stop," Yoo said.

READ MORE:[Conservative admits Trump's policies 'would result in price spikes' for most Americans

Click here to read Weigel's full report in Semafor.

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seth a substack july

...

But what about the second question posed at the end of the Introduction, above? Does the fact that a leading counterintelligence adviser to the Trumps (Michael Anton) was publishing coup fan-fiction in a venue associated with one of Trump’s leading lawyers—a lawyer (Eastman) who joined Trump’s legal team just as he came to be associated with the aforementioned leading Trump counterintelligence aide publishing strange coup fantasies—mean the Trumps kept paying attention to what was being published in the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind not just in September 2020 but even in (could it be? is it possible?) October of 2020? This is the key question that launches this Proof investigation.

2. John Yoo

Just two weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election, in October 2020, a former law clerk of Justice Clarence Thomas took to the website of the same institute we have been speaking of, and at which then-Trump lawyer and fellow former Thomas clerk John Eastman was a senior fellow at the time—The American Mind and the Claremont Institute, respectively—to make precisely the anti-democratic argument about the powers of an American vice president that Eastman himself would be making a few weeks later as part of what federal judge David Carter recently ruled was more than likely a criminal conspiracy involving Eastman and—at a minimum—Donald Trump.

According to Business Insider,the former Thomas clerk Yoo had spent much of 2020 working with the Trump White House on one of Trump’s top priorities: immigration. Yoo’s work also would have appealed to Trump personally for a more venal reason: as Business Insider notes, “He also wrote a book about Trump that came out in July 2020 titled Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power.” So not only had Yoo gotten Trump’s attention by writing a book about him, but had done so on yet another top priority for the then-president: asserting his power over the government.

{Note: At least three of John Yoo’s fellow former Clarence Thomas law clerks—besides John Eastman, also William Consovoy and Patrick Strawbridge—are lawyers for Donald Trump.}

Former Clarence Thomas clerks are known to be a close-knit, far-right bunch.As has been widely reported (including at Proof) they congregate online at Thomas Clerk World, a private listserv which roiled with pro-insurrection language following the 2020 election—some of it authored by Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas. Both John Yoo, the former Thomas clerk referenced in the paragraph above, and Eastman, the Trump co-conspirator, would have had access to Thomas Clerk World not only in November and December 2020 but in late October 2020, too, when Yoo published the shocking words below while part of a listserv obsessed with post-election scenarios that included in its rapt audience the aforementioned Thomas (Ginni) and Eastman:

Under the 12th Amendment, “the President of the Senate [i.e., the Vice President] shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates [of the electoral votes of the states] and the votes shall then be counted.” Left unclear is who is to “count” the electors’ votes and how their validity is to be determined.

While the far-right-fringe rhetoric above—which posits a through-the-looking-glass view of the 12th Amendment that is presently only held by seditionists—was written by Yoo for The Claremont Institute, it certainly would have been music to the ears of future seditionist, Claremont Institute senior fellow, Yoo acquaintance, Ginni Thomas friend, and fellow former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman. Notably, Eastman did not only clerk for Thomas, but an almost equally revered far-right conservative jurist, J. Michael Luttig, who has now testified under oath before the United States Congress that there is no possible way for anyone in the United States, whether Yoo or Ginni Thomas or Clarence Thomas or John Eastman or Donald Trump, to read the 12th Amendment as being “unambiguous” on how electors are counted post-election.

ABOVE (top to bottom): J. Michael Luttig, John Eastman, and Clarence Thomas.

But not only did a longtime Ginni Thomas friend who’d clerked for her husband take precisely this radical view, he took it much further—doing so at a time it is hard to imagine he did not know John Eastman was among his audience members whether through the Claremont Institute or Thomas Clerk World. Specifically, Yoo said the following (emphasis supplied)

We suggest that the Vice President’s role is not the merely ministerial one of opening the ballots and then handing them over (to whom?) to be counted. Though the 12th Amendment describes the counting in the passive voice, the language seems to envisage a single, continuous process in which the Vice President both opens and counts the votes.

The check on error or fraud in the count is that the Vice President’s activities are to be done publicly, “in the presence” of Congress. And if “counting” the electors’ votes is the Vice President’s responsibility, then the inextricably intertwined responsibility for judging the validity of those votes must also be his.

It isn’t possible for Proof to sufficiently emphasize here how radical these words are.

They would, if put in practice, end American democracy immediately and permanently.

So Proof will have to settle, for now, for calling the above words “small-s” (i.e., non-statutorily) “seditious”, and say that anyone who adopted them following the 2020 presidential election and took any action to advance their execution via then-Vice President Mike Pence was doing so as a (small-t) “traitor” to the United Statesand American democracy. As even the arch-conservative Judge Luttig confirms, there is no good-faith legal reading of the 12th Amendment that could lead to the reading of it Yoo offers above; such a reading—adopted only when it was feared (as Yoo makes clear in his article) Trump would lose the Electoral College, and never made when a Democratic vice president was in office—could only be intended to provide legal cover for the moral abomination of a seditious plot with Pence as its spearhead.

{Note: This calls to mind the way John Yoo infamously provided legal cover for the moral abomination of torture when he worked for George W. Bush’s Department of Justice. That Yoo is a man without character is generally accepted by mainstream news-watchers, with the exception of cable news channel CNN—which regularly uses him as an on-air legal analyst.}

As Proof has already reported (see here, here [it gests worse ?] , and here $), Ginni Thomas—who is a far-right activist rather than a practicing lawyer—was publicly expressing identical, off-the-grid fringe-right views to those of her friend John Yoo at the same time Yoo was publishing them. With this in mind, Proof went looking for more information about past contacts between Ginni Thomas and John Yoo; as Thomas is a prolific public interviewer of far-right figures she admires and is friends with—not only did she do a lengthy televised interview with Trump co-conspirator Mark Meadows, but even gave him an award thereafter, and spent much of the run-up to the coup texting him—and sure enough I quickly found one of the longest interviews John Yoo has ever given, which saw him speaking with Ginni Thomas on television for over half an hour.

You’d be able to watch that interview if it had not mysteriously been made private.

3. Donald Trump Jr.

Seventeen days after Yoo published his Claremont Institute article—which spread like wildfire among the far-right fringes of the internet—Donald Trump Jr., the son of the sitting president, wrote Ginni Thomas friend Mark Meadows (at a time Ginni Thomas was texting him also) in the shadow of his dad’s quickly-becoming-apparent landslide defeat at the hands of Democrat Joe Biden.

Remarkably, Trump Jr. seemed entirely unconcerned that his father was about to lose the presidency and his immunity from criminal prosecution. Indeed, Trump Jr. had apparently read something online that made him downright giddy about his infamous pater’s chances of remaining in office. Specifically, he said the following to Meadows:

It’s very simple….We have multiple paths [to staying in power]. [And] we control them all.

What was Trump Jr. referring to? Other messages of his to Meadows during the same conversation clarify. Immediately preceding the text above he had sent the following:

This [NB: an unknown embedded link was inserted here] is what we need to do [to stay in power]. Please read it and please get it to everyone that needs to see it because I’m not sure we’re doing it. We have operational control[.] Total leverage. Moral High Ground[.] POTUS [Donald Trump] must start [his] second term now.

Had Trump Jr. himself been the author of the “operational control” and the “total leverage” plan he sent to the White House chief of staff? No—of course not. Trump Jr.’s lawyer Alan Futerfas says this of the Trump Jr. texts to Meadows:

After the election, Don received numerous messages from supporters and others. Given the date [November 5, 2020], this message [NB: the embedded link referenced above] likely originated from someone else and was forwarded.

So what did the link in question entail? CNN reports as follows (emphasis supplied):

The November 5 text message [from Donald Trump Jr. to Meadows] outlines a strategy that is nearly identical to what allies of the former President [Trump] attempted to carry out in the months that followed. Trump Jr. makes specific reference to filing lawsuits and advocating recounts to prevent certain swing states from certifying their results, as well as having a handful of Republican state houses put forward slates of fake “Trump electors.”

While we do not yet know if the specific link Donald Trump Jr. referred to was Yoo’s article, whatever the link was, it echoed perfectly Yoo’s argument from 17 days earlier:

State legislators and governors might come under mounting pressure to designate electors on their own if the popular vote remains incomplete [after Election Day in 2020], especially if there are allegations of fraud or abuse. Article II of the Constitution provides that “each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” The time when state legislatures directly appointed electors themselves are long gone: since the 19th century, states have delegated that power to their voters. But as the Supreme Court noted in Bush v. Gore, a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.”

The constitutional question is not whether but how a state legislature could reclaim the appointment of electors. States have provided by statute for the selection of their electors by their voters; therefore one might argue they may only resume that power with a second, superseding statute. On the other hand, the Constitution specifically designates state legislatures, rather than the executives or a combination of the two, to choose the electors.  A state legislature might argue that a past legislature-and-governor cannot constrain its discretion to choose electors today.

Yoo’s vision, above, could only have been effectuated via the sort of “lawsuits” and “fake elector” schemes the link in the Trump Jr.-Meadows text message apparently detailed.

Were Yoo’s argument a mainstream argument being widely made by conservatives in the days before Trump’s text, we might think that there would be little chance that Yoo (again, friends with Trump adviser Ginni Thomas and publishing in the media outlet run by Trump lawyer John Eastman’s institute) was one of the originators of Trump Jr.’s third-party plan for “operational control” of, and “total leverage” over, American democracy—which plan evolved into, per the ruling of Judge Carter, the more-likely-than not federal criminal “conspiracy” of which Trump is now accused.

And yet.

4. Ginni Thomas

On February 23, 2022, Proof published a comparison between Ginni Thomas’s public statements and writings on the 2020 election and what would become known as the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot attributed to Ginni Thomas friend John Eastman and a top adviser to Ginni Thomas advisee Donald Trump, the now-indicted Peter Navarro.....

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The Boston Globe

no lnx

Tight bond between Clarence Thomas and his activist wife Ginni raises conflict of interest concerns

By Jim Puzzanghera Globe Staff, UpdatedJune 25, 2022,

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/06/25/nation/too-close-comfort-tight-bond-between-clarence-thomas-his-activist-wife-raises-conflict-interest-concerns/

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas and Justice Clarence Thomas, married for 35 years, refer to each other as “best friends."PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife of 35 years, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, refer to each other as “best friends,” their bond built on deep conservative beliefs and forged tighter by decades of fighting attacks they perceive as unfair that began with his turbulent 1991 confirmation

“She was a gift from God that I had prayed for,” the justice said in a new book about him, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words.” “She’s been as dear and close a human being as I could have ever imagined having in my life.”

A longtime conservative activist, Ginni Thomas has seen her profile rise in Washington with her husband’s increasing clout on the Supreme Court in its steady shift further to the right. For years, Thomas was known as the silent justice, at one point going a decade without asking a question during oral arguments and joining fewer opinions than his fellow conservatives.

But he’s an outlier no more. Clarence Thomas’s newfound influence among the court’s conservative supermajority was evident this past week in the major decisions expanding gun rights and overturning the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. He wrote the gun decision, which for the first time granted a broad right to bear arms in public. Then a day later, he urged his fellow justices who gutted Roe to go even further and take aim at precedents protecting contraception, same-sex intimacy, and gay marriage next — a radical agenda that no longer seems so far fetched.

Now, even as Thomas has found his voice in this emboldened right-wing court, revelations about his wife’s involvement in attempts to overturn the 2020 election could mar his moment and fuel the public’s increasing distrust of the institution.

Ginni Thomas’s advocacy on controversial matters that have reached the Supreme Court is unprecedented for the spouse of a sitting justice. Their close relationship — and Clarence Thomas’s refusal to recuse from cases touching on the election and its aftermath — has the court in uncharted ethical territory at a perilous time for its credibility.

Ginni Thomas has agreed to appear before the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection to face questions about her communications with the team trying to help former president Donald Trump overturn the election results. Some legal ethics experts said Clarence Thomas might have broken a federal law covering judicial conduct when he did not recuse himself from a case related to the attack on the Capitol. He was the only dissenter when the high court rejected Trump’s assertion that executive privilege shielded White House communications about the incident.

Those ethicists warn Clarence Thomas definitely would be in violation of the federal law if he participated in any new cases involving the election or its aftermath, now that there’s no doubt he knows about his wife’s involvement. Ginni Thomas reportedly sent texts to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and e-mails to 29 lawmakers in Arizona urging them to improperly replace the state’s electors for Joe Biden. (The Justice Department is conducting a separate inquiry into the fake electors scheme.)

“The more we learn about her activities, the even clearer it becomes that Thomas cannot sit in any case concerning the election or the ‘Stop the Steal’ effort or the insurrection,” said Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and author of a widely used casebook on judicial ethics.

But with no binding code of conduct, the only check on a Supreme Court justice who refuses to recuse from case that poses a conflict of interest is impeachment by Congress. That step has been taken just once in the nation’s history, in 1804, and is highly unlikely in today’s polarized political climate.

The controversy surrounding the Thomases, one of Washington’s premier power couples, comes as the court’s approval rating has fallen to a five-decade low at just 25 percent, according to a new Gallup Poll, after pitched battles over nominations and in anticipation of Roe’s reversal following an unprecedented leak of a draft opinion. The Roe decision Friday sparked protests nationwide and intensified the spotlight on Clarence Thomas.

President Biden specifically called out Thomas Friday in warning the court was taking the nation on “an extreme and dangerous path,” citing his concurrence urging the reconsideration of other landmark rulings such as one protecting the right to access and use contraception.

“Courts don’t have armies. They don’t have the power of the purse. What they have is a public that’s willing to abide by their rulings even when they don’t agree with them,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. “When that trust is faltering, that really goes to the very core of the court’s role in our democracy and the justices ability to do their job.”

But legal experts predicted there’s little chance Thomas would recuse himself from any case revolving around the 2020 election, even though the court is under increasing pressure to adopt a code of conduct amid a push for one from lawmakers.

“If you look at anybody on the court who’d probably be most immune to public criticism by now, it would be him. He’s been going through this for 31 years now,” said John Yoo, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor and a former Thomas clerk who has known him for years and believes the conflict of interest allegations are unfair.

“I don’t think it would cause him to change his mind in how he votes on any case,” Yoo said. “And I don’t think it would cause him to change his mind on how he applies the conflict of interest principles to himself.”

Ginni Thomas acknowledges in the new book that, “I’ve been a pretty political person” and asserted that “the left” has been trying to take her and her husband down for years.

“They really don’t like Black conservatives,” she said. Thomas was just the second Black justice to join the court, replacing the first one, civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall.

Ginni Thomas dismissed criticism of her activism by noting “there have been other judges who have had spouses in the public sphere.” She cited Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who was married to Marjorie Rendell, a federal appeals court judge. They divorced in 2016.

But there are binding conflict of interest rules for all federal judges below the Supreme Court. And Ginni Thomas’s activism as the spouse of a justice stands alone. Over the years, she has worked as an aide for a top Republican congressman, then at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, before running her own advocacy group. She now operates a Washington firm called Liberty Consulting. Supreme Court rules do not require Clarence Thomas to disclose who his wife’s firm works for or funds it.

While at Heritage in 2000, Ginni Thomas gathered resumes for a possible George W. Bush administration. But Clarence Thomas rebuffed calls for him to recuse from the Bush v. Gore case that decided the election. Thomas cast the deciding vote in the 5-4 ruling that made Bush president.

In 2011, 74 House Democrats wrote to Clarence Thomas asking him to recuse from any cases involving the Affordable Care Act because of his wife’s work for Heritage, which opposed the law. He declined and voted against upholding the law in 2012.

“She’s working on the nascent Bush administration before Bush v. Gore is decided. She’s trying to overturn Obamacare. She’s trying to overturn the [2020] election,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, which advocates for a more open and accountable federal judiciary. “It’s a real Forrest Gump-type existence that none of the other previous hundred-odd Supreme Court spouses have lived.”

Ginni Thomas’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election take the conflict of interest concerns to a new level. She sent 21 text messages to Meadows in the weeks after the election urging a push to overturn the results, The Washington Post reported in March.

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she wrote in one of them. In response to a Nov. 24 text from Meadows that he was intent on fighting for Trump’s victory, Ginni Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now … I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”

The e-mails did not make clear who the “best friend” Ginni Thomas was referring to, although she has frequently referred to her husband that way. But amid questions about her Jan. 6 involvement before the texts were revealed, she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site, that “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

Meadows provided the text messages to the House committee after the Supreme Court turned down a request by Trump in January to block the release of White House records. Clarence Thomas filed the lone dissent.

“He never should have participated in that case,” said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “He absolutely needs to stay away from these Jan. 6 cases. This is going to lead to the furthering of the impression that the Supreme Court is just a political body where justices are put on there to carry out the will of the political party of the president who put them there.”

The pressure on Clarence Thomas to recuse from new cases increased in recent days after The Washington Post reported that the committee had obtained e-mails between Ginni Thomas and John Eastman, a lawyer at the center of the discredited legal theory that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the 2020 election results.

At the same time, The New York Times reported that Eastman said in a December 2020 e-mail to another lawyer there was a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices about whether to hear arguments about overturning the election. Eastman has denied the information came from Ginni Thomas. Still, the Jan. 6 committee wants to speak to her and she told The Daily Caller she looked forward to the opportunity to “clear up any misconceptions.”

Committee chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said Friday that he had concerns about Clarence Thomas ruling on any cases involving the election or the insurrection, although he stopped short of calling for his recusal.

“It raises significant flags obviously just because the wife of a Supreme Court justice is so prominently positioned in this situation,” Thompson said.

Others lawmakers have been clear that Thomas should recuse. Two dozen congressional Democrats, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, sent a letter to Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts in Marchcalling upon Thomas to explain his failure to recuse from earlier cases involving the election or the insurrection and to recuse himself from any future ones.

They cited the judicial conduct law that applies to all federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, requiring recusal from any proceeding in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

But Thomas has given no indication he intends to do so. A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to an e-mail request for comment. Warren and others are pushing for a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court that would cover recusals. But the court has resisted putting one in place and there are constitutional questions about whether Congress could impose one.

So, if Thomas stays the course, he and his wife are risking further harm to the court’s standing, said Gillers, the NYU law professor.

“Nothing she did that we are aware of yet is illegal,” he said of Ginni Thomas’s involvement in efforts to overturn the election. “She has a right to do it, but it’s not the norm. And by behaving this way, she has endangered the credibility, the reputation of the court.”

Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter: @JimPuzzanghera.

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https://www.thebulwark.com/the-decay-at-the-claremont-institute-continues/

:{

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when the Claremont Institute, America’s Trumpiest think tank, is in the news nowadays, it is mostly because of John Eastman, the institute senior fellow who wrote the notorious “coup memos” for Donald Trump. Last month, a federal judge ruled that Eastman and Trump were likely involved in a criminal conspiracy together. The ruling arose from a civil suit concerning Eastman’s claim that some of his documents should not be disclosed to the House Jan. 6th Committee, and the judge only opined on possible criminal behavior because it factored into the narrow decision regarding Eastman’s claims. Still, the ruling is an important reminder of what was at stake with Eastman’s work for Trump: nothing less than a concerted effort to overturn a democratic election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power, which, had it succeeded, would have brought on a major constitutional crisis. The judge ordered Eastman to hand over to the committee 101 documents he had been withholding, and Eastman has grumblingly said he will comply—although he now wants to withhold another big batch.

The Eastman saga has been the most prominent Claremont Institute-related drama in recent weeks, but it hasn’t been the only one. The institute’s descent into Trumpian trolling, conspiracism, and fringe extremism has continued to have bizarre ripple effects. It is worth taking a look at some episodes of the last few weeks and what they reveal about the institute’s character—and how Claremont’s leaders seem to understand that character themselves.

Last month, the American Mind, the Claremont Institute’s web magazine, published an article called “The Decline is Real.” Brimming with male sexual anxiety, the piece discusses some research suggesting that testosterone levels and sperm levels are falling in Western populations. It edges up close to replacement theory. And it gripes about “clownworld”—“Soy boys. Simps. Plant-based lifestyles. Polyamory. Incels. Furries. Et cetera… honk honk!”—and suggests that the “dissident right” is “unique[ly]” well suited to making men manly.

But the problem with the piece is less its content than the author’s background. The American Mind has made something of a habit of publishing pseudonymous writers: “Peachy Keenan,” “The Huntsman,” “Horatius,” “Rebecca,” “Privata,” and others. So it is, too, with the article worried about Western man’s sperm count—but its pseudonymous author, “Raw Egg Nationalist,” stands apart for having recently published a book with a Nazi publishing house. As in: a publishing house that is infatuated with Adolf Hitler.

I wish I were joking or exaggerating. What Raw Egg Nationalist’s American Mind byline doesn’t tell you is that his Raw Egg Nationalism Cookbookis published by Antelope Hill Publishing. Antelope Hill is a small publishing house that translates and publishes books like A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, by Richard Walther Darré, described in this way on the Antelope Hill site:

Richard Walther Darré, an Obergruppenführer in the SS, was the leading “Blood and Soil” ideologist of Germany and served his people as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. This book,A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, was massively popular in the Third Reich and led to a strengthening of the agrarian and agriculturalist movements. Highly influential on Hitler, the principles in this book are foundational to the National Socialist worldview.

Antelope Hill, we learn, is proud to present this new translation of Darré’s book, which is the first English-language edition. A *Daily Beast* article from January referred to Antelope Hill as “openly fascist”; a blog that tracks reactionary racism labeled it “a white supremacist publishing company”; and Amazon has faced calls to stop selling its products. The Antelope Hill Twitter and Instagram feeds contain promotional material that playfully celebrates “uncle Hitler.” To celebrate Hitler’s birthday yesterday, Antelope Hill offered a discount on all its books, and an even bigger discount on a collection of Hitler’s speeches, with the cutesy discount code “birthday_boy”:

The Claremont Institute seems to have no qualms publishing one of Antelope Hill’s main authors.

And it is impossible to believe that the publishers of the American Mind do not understand who Raw Egg Nationalist is and what he stands for.

For one thing, he appeared as recently as November 11 of last year on Jack Murphy’s podcast. Murphy was a Lincoln Fellow at the institute last summer, and numerous prominent Claremont folks have come on his podcast since its inception in 2018. For example, Matthew Peterson, the founder and original editor of the American Mind, was Murphy’s guest a couple of weeks before Raw Egg Nationalist, and Glenn Ellmers, a Claremont senior fellow, was on the show a few days before that.

Other Claremonters Murphy has hosted include Ryan Williams (president of the Claremont Institute); Thomas G. West (senior fellow and a member of Claremont’s board of directors); Spencer Klavan (an editor at the Claremont Review of Books and features editor at the American Mind); Jack Posobiec (2019 Lincoln Fellow); Michael Anton (Claremont senior fellow); Christopher Caldwell (Claremont senior fellow); Dave Reaboi (Claremont fellow and 2012 Lincoln Fellow); and Arthur Milikh (executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life). Several of Murphy’s other guests have been alumni of Claremont’s fellowship programs, including Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari, anti-critical-race-theory activist Christopher Rufo, and Trumpist conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie.

In short: Jack Murphy is a Claremont intimate, and his hosting Raw Egg Nationalist is another indication that the latter is a known quantity to the Claremont crowd.

Murphy’s interview with Raw Egg Nationalist is, unsurprisingly, offensive. The two men share an interest in bodybuilding as a way of life; during a discussion of the relationship between mind, body, and aesthetics, Murphy asks Raw Egg Nationalist to explain how he understands the relationship between physiognomy and politics. Raw Egg Nationalist says:

I think that it’s difficult . . . today not to see just how closely linked together nutrition and lifestyle and political orientation are. . . . Bring up all of the mug shots from the “mostly peaceful protests” of last summer and you’ll see that all of these people look the same. I mean, they are hideously ugly, malformed people.

Raw Egg Nationalist concludes that the left has abandoned all concerns with health and “is for a kind of dysgenic existence.” It follows, then, that, “the right, or some people on the right and some traditionalists, just have to be for a healthy physical lifestyle. I think it’s that simple.”

Murphy agrees: “It really is. And I was out on the streets during all the riots in Washington, D.C., and I’ve seen the protesters right up front.”

The exchange, which takes place ten minutes into their conversation, offers a crystal-clear glimpse of this Claremont writer’s character, in case his choice of publishing house isn’t already enough of a tell.

it’s worth saying more about Jack Murphy.

Murphy is a prominent influencer in the “Manosphere” and the founder of a secretive manliness club called the Liminal Order. “Jack Murphy” is also a pseudonym. His real name is reportedly John Goldman, a fact that became common knowledge in December of last year following salacious revelations about his past.

In 2018, Murphy wrote a blog post about sending his girlfriend to have sex with a stranger from Tinder. This became known as Murphy’s ,” and it caused a stir on the right—both the family-values right and the cult-of-masculinity right. It further turned out that Murphy had participated in amateur pornography, and that he had been placed on administrative leave from a job with Washington, D.C.’s public charter schools for wildly misogynist and racist screeds he had posted online.

The revelations about Murphy/Goldman received coverage last December from conservative journalists like Rod Dreher at the :{American Conservative:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Mary Harrington at :{UnHerd}:, and Megan Fox at :{PJ Media}:. (This scrutiny came after an earlier period of wagon-circling: Two months earlier, one Twitter user was blocked by several prominent Catholic integralists after he criticized their acceptance of Murphy.)

But a far more tragic story was unfolding right around the time of Murphy’s scandals: On December 27, a deadly shooting spree in Denver left six people dead, including the alleged shooter, Lyndon McLeod.

Before the tragedy, McLeod was a far-right novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Roman McClay. The Denver shootings followed the plot of his novels, and two of his victims were mentioned by name in the books.

McLeod was also a fan of Jack Murphy’s, and he even appears to have been a member of Murphy’s club, the Liminal Order.

What’s more, Murphy returned the future mass shooter’s admiration. In an online post from February 2020, he deemed Roman McClay’s work “an epic three volume masterpiece.” (He praised the work of reactionary writers Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin in the same context.) After the Denver shootings, even Anthony Dream Johnson, the self-professed “President of the Manosphere,” was willing to denounce Jack Murphy. But Claremont stayed mum.

To summarize: One of Claremont’s future Lincoln fellows had an unconventional sexual relationship with his girlfriend that he wrote about publicly, created pornography, broadcast truly vile racist and misogynist views, and celebrated the violent fictions of a person who would later use them as a roadmap for conducting his own mass shooting.

you will recall Murphy’s Claremont-heavy roster of podcast guests before his scandals in December. The description for one of those episodes contains this intriguing line: “Ryan Williams, The President of the Claremont Institute, explains to Jack Murphy why they engaged with Bronze Age Pervert, Curtis Yarvin, and Jack Posobiec.”

The interview took place in March 2020, the month after Murphy praised McLeod’s violent novels. Much of it is dedicated to standard-fare Claremont grievance-mongering against identity politics, multiculturalism, and the left. But almost an hour into the conversation, Murphy does ask Williams directly why Claremont decided to engage with “underground new media figures” like Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), Yarvin, Posobiec, and himself.

First, he praises Williams for Claremont’s engagements with “your grassroots population,” mentioning Michael Anton’s review of Bronze Age Pervert’s book in the Claremont Review of Books and a BAP symposium at the American Mind. “This was, like, a big signal to me that you guys understood the landscape,” Murphy says. “So can you tell me how the Bronze Age Pervert connection came to be?… How did it all work out? Would you do it again?”

Williams is prepared for this. Beginning cautiously, he says that he and others had noticed BAP’s “weird little book” floating around among young folks on the right and wanted to talk to Claremont’s “very boomer” audience about it as a youth phenomenon. He also wanted to communicate the way “some of his older peers and fellow travelers at Claremont talked about politics and took seriously this energy amongst the young on the right that was sort of up for grabs.”

Williams acknowledges the dangers involved in making these overtures, and says that Claremont traditionally stands for equal rights and believes reactionary politics is a “dead end.” He appears to suggest that his goal in engaging BAP’s audience was to show them an alternative approach and outlook.

But soon Williams starts to hedge. Sounding increasingly sympathetic to what Murphy calls the “grassroots,” he praises BAP’s book as a piece of philosophical art, and admits that they published Anton’s piece in part “to stir things up.” He concedes that Claremont had something to prove: that “we weren’t just fusionist Reagan Republicans,” but are instead “open to new ideas” and “not . . . afraid of the arguments that are gaining some traction on the right.”

Then Williams takes a more evangelical turn. He talks about how important it is to bring eclectic and heterodox thinkers like Yarvin to new readers in order to “continue the conversation.” He and Murphy gloat about how these thinkers have influence in Trump’s White House. Williams argues that the very online landscape of the New Right is an “increasingly huge thing” that is quickly replacing and delegitimizing the old media. After windily defending the right-wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec as “nothing but a gentleman and respectful, an engaged discussant in our seminar and a family man,” Williams insists on the importance of engaging seriously with “this new media landscape” and “this growing cohort of people with huge influence.”

He resumes a cautious stance at the end of the episode. In case the audience has forgotten, Williams reminds listeners that Claremont hopes to be the teacher and fearless influencer in its relationship with Murphy’s “grassroots,” not the one being taught and influenced.

Murphy, though, heard things differently: “I really commend you guys for . . . the direction you’re taking the organization. I respect it. It got my attention. If the Bronze Age Pervert thing was meant to be a bat-signal to the young and new right and the internet right—well, we heard it, we saw it, here we are.”

Williams chuckles at the mention of the bat-signal and doesn’t object to the characterization of Claremont as inviting Murphy and his ilk into its domain. He thanks Murphy for his public-spiritedness, saying that “America is a better place because of what you do, so keep doing what you do.” The Claremont Institute would accept Murphy as a Lincoln Fellow the following year.

Maybe Raw Egg Nationalist will make the cut for 2022.

this trip through the Claremont underworld ends with a return to a more familiar and respectable side of the institute: a March 17, 2022 episode of the Power Line podcast hosted by Steven Hayward and featuring guests Charles Kesler and John Yoo. Titled “The Claremont Question,” the episode raises explicit questions about the coherence of the organization and the relationships among its various constituents.

Hayward is a resident senior scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley and a graduate of Claremont Graduate School. Kesler is a professor at Claremont McKenna College and the founding editor of Claremont’s premier publication, the Claremont Review of Books. Yoo, a professor at Berkeley Law School, is best known for authoring the Bush administration’s notorious “torture memos,” which made him a figure of perennial controversy. It is a sign of strange times that he is among the least polarizing figures in Claremont’s orbit today.

The title of the episode suggests that the three longtime Claremont associates might address the institute’s efforts to accommodate Murphy’s “grassroots.” But while Ryan Williams showed a measure of confidence and security in responding to Murphy’s questions, this conversation went differently. The 44-minute Power Line talk alternates between chummy banter, outrage at the left, and the occasional nod to non-MAGA realities. It is also full of awkward yuks and guffaws. Hayward, Kesler, and Yoo may represent the Claremont Institute’s old guard—the conservative intellectuals who like to have deep conversations about statesmanship and the Founders and the dangers of progressivism—but they don’t have any of the confidence one might expect from them. A mood of uneasiness prevails. The three men often fall into anxious laughter at one another’s bad jokes.

“My goodness!” Hayward begins. “The Claremont Institute has everybody’s attention these days, and lots of enemies on the left and on the right. . . . I’m not quite sure where to begin!”

After reviewing the facts, he asks Kesler to explain the sources of controversy at Claremont.

From the perspective of, say, Bronze Age Pervert and company, Kesler makes a handful of “normie” admissions: His colleague John Eastman’s plan for Vice President Mike Pence was “impossible” and “not credible”; Jan. 6th was “a terrible stain” on the Trump presidency; Trump should probably cede the stage to a younger Republican to draw a better contrast with Biden. But before Kesler gets to all that, he acknowledges a simpler truth: Trump was a boon for Claremont. Everything is going great at the institute, and some of their good fortune has resulted directly from their public pro-Trump stance. Subscriptions to the CRB are at an all time high and growing, he says. They have real momentum.

But given everything that has been going on at Claremont, the discussion is awfully evasive. For example, while the three men agree on the most salient part of the Eastman debacle—that there was no real dispute over any state electors—they do not grapple with the implications of that admission. Instead, they act as though Eastman’s various legal notions about Pence’s decision-making authority on Jan. 6th are still worth taking seriously. The truth is closer to this: Eastman can interpret the law however he pleases, but because there was no serious dispute about the electors, his ideas are, at best, perfectly irrelevant to the reality of the situation.

Yoo says that Eastman “got the facts wrong but the law right.” Imagine if someone understood the laws governing murder but merely “got the facts wrong” in a given case: it would be the definition of a miscarriage of justice. And when Hayward, Kesler, and Yoo concede that there were no disputed electors, they unwittingly imply that Eastman’s perspective runs closer to delusional fabrication than to serious legal commentary, let alone reasonable advice to a sitting VP with a crucial role to play in the peaceful transfer of power.

Rather than grapple with that truth, the group praises Kesler for expounding the Eastman controversy in the pages of theClaremont Review of Books. They revel in the seriousness of a followup exchange between Eastman and critic Joseph Bessette in the CRB. They take credit for presenting “both sides” of the issue “utterly without snark or invective on either side.” And Kesler prides himself on allowing the magazine not to take a stance on such “very complicated” issues.

To be clear, Bessette’s critique of Eastman’s position is excellent. The problem is that the CRB’s “both-sides” approach launders Eastman’s arguments and gives them false legitimacy.

And what the CRB did for Eastman, Hayward’s Power Line conversation does for Claremont as a whole. The three members of the old guard are reticent about Eastman, their “friend and colleague,” throughout the episode. This reflects a larger unwillingness to attempt a substantive reckoning with Claremont’s recent past.

That past includes plenty of cynical publication decisions—among them, Anton’s solicitous review of Bronze Age Pervert’s book; institutional decisions to grant fellowships to conspiracy theorists and extremist influencers; an eagerness to publish authors too timid to put their real names on their articles, including an author who sends his writing to a Nazi publishing house. Does Charles Kesler think these decisions represent a brave stance on the part of the institute?

Conservatives are very good at calling out instances of excess zeal and censoriousness on the left. But the decline at the Claremont Institute demonstrates inverse dangers: namely, the cratering of accountability and good judgment. The Claremont old guard acts as though the rest of what’s happening at the institute isn’t their concern, and with a few exceptions the intellectuals of the New Right operate the same way with respect to the Claremont Institute: as though there are no right-wing viewpoints or associations that can be unequivocally condemned, no liberal norms that don’t deserve challenging, no fringe that’s too fringey for them.

In its outreach to the Manosphere, in its welcoming of fascist-curious and bigoted Trumpy writers, not to mention its months of support for lies about the last presidential election, the institute is allying itself with some of the most dangerous tendencies in politics.

The Power Line episode ends on a surreal but fitting note:

Steven Hayward (abruptly): Well, we never really did get to the contents of the issue, but that would take us four or five hours. Thank you, Charles; thank you, John.

John Yoo (genuinely surprised): That’s it? It’s over?

Hayward (cheerfully): I think we’ve taxed our listeners long enough with our quips and jests.

Charles Kesler (deadpan): Do you mean to ask . . . is that all there is?

(guffaws all around)

That’s it: no reckoning, no grappling, no calling to account. Instead, we are left with a throwaway reference to a wry little song by. But “Is That All There Is?” also happens to capture the essence of intellectual life at Claremont today: the carnival atmosphere, the old boys’ club, and the decay.

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an 11 21

no lnx

Revealed: Fox's Judge Jeanine orchestrated payments for ‘command centers’ that could blow up Trump’s defense

Travis Gettys and Raw Story November 03, 2021

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro orchestrated campaign payments for 'command centers' at DC hotels that could blow up Donald Trump's executive privilege claims.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and the city's former police chief Bernie Kerik had been paying for hotel rooms and travel related to their efforts to overturn Trump's election loss, but the pair grew concerned by early December as the bills piled up, reported the Washington Post.

"How do I know I'm gonna get my money back?" Kerik thought at the time, as he recently told the newspaper.

Kerik knew that Giuliani hadn't been reimbursed for his expenses or paid for his services, but their friend Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host beloved by the twice-impeached one-term president, called Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and asked her to help them out.

McDaniel spoke to Kerik by phone but refused to give him money, and instead recommended that he ask the Trump campaign to reimburse his expenses, according to the former police chief and a GOP official.

The campaign cut its first check to Kerik in mid-December with Trump's approval, according to a former senior campaign official, and eventually paid more than $225,000 for hotel rooms and suites at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., that served as a "command center" for efforts to overturn the election results ahead of Jan. 6 riots.

Those payments, according to legal experts, could undermine Trump's claims of executive privilege over documents and testimony related to the U.S. Capitol riots sought by the House select committee investigating the insurrection.

"[This] further undermines a wildly broad assertion of executive privilege," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor. "Executive privilege is typically limited to the protection of communications involving a president's official duties — not to those relating to personal or political campaign matters."

Former Justice Department officialJohn Yoo, who advised former vice president Mike Pence's staff that there was no legal basis to deny the certification of Joe Biden's election win, agreed that the payments could upend Trump's defense.

:{

}:

"If he acts as a president, he gets these things we talk about — executive privilege and immunity," Yoo said. "But if he's acting as a candidate, he's deprived of all of those protections."

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7/20 recently in news?

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Eastman and Yoo: Dems' unrelenting drive against Trump...https://www.foxnews.com › opinion › democrats-trump-p...

Aug 6, 2021 — Eastman and Yoo: Dems' unrelenting drive against Trump continues to do real harm to presidency, Constitution. Congress's demands for documents ...

Trump lawyer who planned election overthrow to speak at ...https://www.news10.com › news › politics › trump-law...

36 minutes ago — (WIAT) — When John Eastman speaks during the American Political ... Like Yoo, Eastman is set to participate in a panel organized by an ...

Yes: His views spark important debate - Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com › la-oe-eastman9-2009apr09-s...

Apr 9, 2009 — For 2008-09, I asked Richard Falk and John Yoo to accept one-semester ... John C. Eastman is dean at Chapman University School of Law and a ...

Terror-War Fallout Lingers Over Bush Lawyers - The New ...https://www.nytimes.com › 2009/03/09 › washington

Mar 8, 2009 — WASHINGTON — When John C. Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer, ... But John C. Eastman, the dean of the Chapman University law school ...

Dems' unrelenting drive against Trump continues to do real ...https://www.foxbangor.com › National News

Aug 6, 2021 — Eastman and Yoo: Dems' unrelenting drive against Trump continues to do real harm to presidency, Constitution. While Congress has a right to ...

Podcast: Debating Birthright Citizenship - Two Perspectives https://fedsoc.org › commentary › fedsoc-blog › podca...

Oct 30, 2018 — In a 2015 teleforum podcast, Professors John Eastman and Yoo ... Professor Yoo's stance is that the issue was rendered moot in U.S. v.

Does the Fourteenth Amendment Guarantee Birthright ...https://fedsoc.org › commentary › videos › does-the-fo...

Nov 22, 2019 — Arguing both sides of the birthright citizenship issue are Professor John Yoo of UC Berkeley School of Law and Professor John Eastman of ...

John Eastman on Twitter: "John Yoo and I have an article just ...https://twitter.com › drjohneastman › status

Aug 6, 2021 — John Eastman · @DrJohnEastman. Former Constitutional Law Professor and Dean, Chapman University Fowler School of Law; Senior Fellow, ...

Yoo and I have an article just published, describing the terrible and in our view unconstitutional decision by the Biden Justice Department to waive Trump's claims of executive privilege over confidential discussions had with his top advisors.

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same covid weekend so reruns but shillenberger repeated plus

https://www.c-span.org/video/?474100-1/defender-chief

also newt who has written 5 trump books?!

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bktv hoover inst greatest hits, spouts Heartland BS that energy regulation by gov't will lead to control

globalism in bk title

5/30/20

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Yoo olin fellow dark $ bk

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trumps-right-wing-defenders-earn-the-deplorable-label-with-their-vicious-attack-on-the-latest-impeachment-witness/

no lnx

Trump’s right-wing defenders earn the ‘deplorable’ label with their vicious attack on the latest impeachment witness

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 29, 2019

It was only a week ago that a chorus of people on both the left and right rose up to defend Tulsi Gabbard from Hillary Clinton’s statement that “she’s the favorite of the Russians” by pointing to Gabbard’s military service. The point was that someone who has served honorably should never have their loyalty to America questioned.

Trump’s enablers, however, are in a very difficult position right now. With every witness being deposed in the House impeachment inquiry, the picture of an American president pressuring a foreign government to smear his political opponents grows more clear. They are now the ones who are attacking the loyalty of someone who served honorably in the military.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, is set to become the first current White House staffer to testify. Danny Hakim reports on what he will say in his prepared opening statement.

He will be the first White House official to testify who listened in on the July 25 telephone call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that is at the center of the impeachment inquiry, in which Mr. Trump asked Mr. Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine,” Colonel Vindman said in his statement. “I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained.”…

“This would all undermine U.S. national security,” Colonel Vindman added, referring to Mr. Trump’s comments in the call.

Vindman didn’t think what Trump did was “proper” because it wasn’t. For those of us who deal in facts, that is the bottom line. But if your task is to defend the president, no matter what he does, your job is a little more difficult. That is why congressional Republicans have relied almost exclusively on criticizing the process of the impeachment inquiry rather than the substance of the testimony being provided.

With Vindman’s testimony looming, Trump’s enablers have decided that their only defense is to attack the messenger. But how do you do that for someone with this resume?

Alexander S. Vindman and his twin brother, Yevgeny, were 3 years old when they fled Ukraine with their father and grandmother, Jewish refugees with only their suitcases and $750, hoping for a better life in the United States.

In the 40 years since, he has become a scholar, diplomat, decorated lieutenant colonel in the United States Army and Harvard-educated Ukraine expert on the White House National Security Council.

If you are Sean Duffy, CNN’s latest Trump-enabling commentator, you question his loyalty to the United States.

Aaron Rupar

?

@atrupar

Sean Duffy on CNN on Army Lt. Col. Vindman: "It seems very clear that he is incredibly concerned about Ukrainian defense. I don't know that he's concerned about American policy ... we all have an affinity to our homeland where we came from ... he has an affinity for the Ukraine."

Embedded video

It seems very clear that [Vindman] is incredibly concerned about Ukrainian defense. I don’t know about his concern [for] American policy, but his main mission was to make sure the Ukraine got those weapons. I understand it: We all have an affinity to our homeland where we came from. Like me, I’m sure that Vindman has the same affinity…He’s entitled to his opinion, he has an affinity, I think, for the Ukraine, he speaks Ukrainian, he came from the country, and he wants to make sure they’re safe and free.

It was actually Laura Ingraham who first leveled this kind of attack on Vindman Monday night. She zeroed in on this part of the report from Danny Hakim.

While Colonel Vindman’s concerns were shared by a number of other officials, some of whom have already testified, he was in a unique position. Because he emigrated from Ukraine along with his family when he was a child and is fluent in Ukrainian and Russian, Ukrainian officials sought advice from him about how to deal with Mr. Giuliani, though they typically communicated in English.

Ingraham twisted that into an accusation that Vindman was working as a double agent, saying “Here we have a U.S. national-security official who is advising Ukraine, while working inside the White House, apparently against the president’s interest.” Her guest, John Yoo, responded by saying “You know, some people might call that espionage.” Note the rather Freudian slip from Ingraham in accusing Vindman of working against “the president’s interest.” Even she can’t suggest that what Giuliani was doing in Ukraine was in the country’s national interest.

So is this a case of “both sides do it,” with both Clinton and Trump enablers questioning the loyalty of people who have served in the military? Not even close.

First of all, Clinton never questioned Gabbard’s loyalty. She merely pointed to something that was already in the public record: “she’s the favorite of the Russians.” In other words, there is evidence to support Clinton’s claims.

On the other hand, Trump’s enablers have zero evidence when it comes to their attacks on Vindman. Coming to this country as a 3 year-old refugee is the quintessential American story. Duffy’s charge is reminiscent of that time when Trump questioned the impartiality of a federal judge because of his Mexican heritage. Using someone’s ethnicity or country of origin as a way to question their loyalty to this country is the definition of what we mean when we use the word “deplorable.”

At the time that Vindman was attempting to advise Ukrainians about the pressure they were getting from Giuliani, the official public position of the United States was to assist that country in their defense against Russian incursion. Giuliani has made it abundantly clear that his efforts were to assist his client, Donald Trump, not to promote our national interests. So you can understand why the Ukrainians were confused and went to a trusted source for guidance.

In the end, military service is no defense against charges of criminality or corruption. Anyone who doubts that should simply look at what transpired with Michael Flynn. Just as with any other American, it is the facts that matter. The smears against Lt. Col. Vindman aren’t deplorable because he served in the military. They deserve that characterization because they are devoid of evidence and are therefore nothing more than an attempt to attack the messenger.

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:{:(style="font-weight:normal"):}:‘A crime called libel’: Experts outraged after torture advocate John Yoo accuses White House Ukraine expert Vindman of espionage on Fox News

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

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• FinamdLaw
• Caselaw
• California
• CA Ct. App.
• CALIFORNIANS FOR SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY v. REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Court of Appeal, Third District, California.

CALIFORNIANS FOR SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY v. REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

CALIFORNIANS FOR SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY, Plaintiff and Appellant, v. The REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Defendant and Respondent.

No. C028522.

-- July 06, 2000

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Theodore B. Olson, Los Angeles, Mark A. Perry, Thomas G. Hungar, Washington, DC, John C. Yoo, and Zumbrun & Findley, Ronald A. Zumbrun, Sacramento, John H. Findley, and Jeffrey H. Speich for Plaintiff and Appellant.Law Office of Eric G. Scheie, for The Claremont Institute, Amicus Curiae on behalf of Plaintiff and Appellant.

Christopher M. Patti, James E. Holst, John F. Lundberg and Eric K. Behrens, Oakland, for Defendant and Respondent.

Plaintiff Californians for Scientific Integrity filed suit against defendant Regents of the University of California (the University), alleging the University had improperly permitted a professor to use public funds and resources to advance anti-smoking efforts.   The trial court granted the University's demurrer and entered judgment in its favor.

Plaintiff appeals, reiterating that the use of public funds and resources for these purposes is impermissible and a violation of the First Amendment.   We disagree and shall affirm.

standard of Review

“In reviewing the sufficiency of a complaint against a general demurrer, we are guided by long-settled rules.  ‘We treat the demurrer as admitting all material facts properly pleaded, but not contentions, deductions or conclusions of fact or law․  We also consider matters which may be judicially noticed.’  [Citation.]  Further, we give the complaint a reasonable interpretation, reading it as a whole and its parts in their context.  [Citation.]  When a demurrer is sustained, we determine whether the complaint states facts sufficient to constitute a cause of action.   [Citation.]  And when it is sustained without leave to amend, we decide whether there is a reasonable possibility that the defect can be cured by amendment:  if it can be, the trial court has abused its discretion and we reverse;  if not, there has been no abuse of discretion and we affirm.  [Citations.]  The burden of proving such reasonable possibility is squarely on the plaintiff.”   (Blank v. Kirwan (1985) 39 Cal.3d 311, 318, 216 Cal.Rptr. 718, 703 P.2d 58;  see also CAMSI IV v. Hunter Technology Corp. (1991) 230 Cal.App.3d 1525, 1538-1539, 282 Cal.Rptr. 80.)

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no lnx

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/coal-proponent-attacked-federal-regulator-being-run-radical-environmentalists-now-hes

In a familiar “fox guarding the henhouse” move, the Trump administration has dispatched former coal association president and conservative commentator Christian Palich to a federal coal mine regulator he previously claimed was “unaccountable” and filled with “unelected” and “radical environmentalist bureaucrats.”

Palich, the former president of the Ohio Coal Association, has described himself as a “leading, national voice” on energy issues. He has appeared in the media to praise President Donald Trump for rolling back environmental regulations and has also tweeted anti-environmental propaganda, including that climate change is “junk science” and the Sierra Club wants to “kill jobs & destroy families for a phony cause.” From 2017 to early 2019, he worked as an official at the Environmental Protection Agency.

On July 30, Media Matters first reported that Palich had recently begun working as a senior adviser for the Department of the Interior. E&E News subsequently reported that Palich is specifically working at the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE or OSM), which is under Interior’s jurisdiction.

OSMRE’s stated mission is to clean up “millions of acres of pre- Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) abandoned mine lands and the return of post-SMCRA mined lands to productive and beneficial use.” Palich has participated in weekly meetings with Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and other senior Interior Department officials since June, according to publicly released secretarial calendars.

In addition to his record of climate denialism, Palich has previously fought directly against the agency where he’s now working.

Palich frequently attacked OSMRE during the debate and drafting of the Stream Protection Rule, which the agency worked on for much of the Obama administration. The administration finalized the rule in late 2016, which was intended “to prevent or minimize impacts to surface water and groundwater from coal mining.” Congress and the Trump administration then reversed the regulation, giving coal companies “a freer hand in dumping mining debris in streams.”

In 2015, Palich complained that it’s “unfortunate the unelected bureaucrats at OSM have ignored the concerns of state regulators and Congress in order to promote a continued radical anti-coal agenda."

In a January 2016 interview, he said that all Ohio miners “are at risk because of what the Office of Surface Mining is doing” and claimed that the rule was being pushed “against the will of the people.”

In a February 2016 tweet, he shared a FoxNews.com op-ed by right-wing commentators John Yoo and Dean Reuter and commented: “All great points & being in the #coal industry we see everyday just how unaccountable @EPA, @OSMRE, & @Interior are.”

Palich wrote a July 21, 2016, Columbus Dispatch op-ed claiming that the Stream Protection Rule “is a rule in search of a purpose - one that is more about politics than environmental protection - and from a federal agency that has clearly lost its way.”

He also claimed that OSMRE wrote the stream rule to create more jobs for itself. In the Dispatch op-ed, he wrote that it “will do more to pad a bureaucratic agency’s budget than protect streams.” And after the rule was revoked in February 2017, Palich tweeted that it “would have made 64% of coal reserves uneconomic & destroyed 280,000 jobs in mining sector. Only creating more bureaucrat oversight jobs.”

He added in February 2017 that the rule was “devised by radical environmentalist bureaucrats” and “was never about the environment and was always about carrying out the Obama Administration's nonsensical war on coal."

In 2017, the administration nominated coal consultant and climate denier Steven Gardner to head OSMRE, prompting criticism from environmental groups. Like Palich, Gardner has also been a vocal critic of OSMRE. He withdrew his nomination in September 2018, citing a long “back and forth with the Office of Government Ethics over the conditions for an ethics agreement.”

The Interior Department also recently appointed William Perry Pendley as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management. As a right-wing commentator, Pendley attacked his current agency and has argued that the federal government should sell its public lands.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/07/30/new-interior-department-senior-adviser-christian-palich-climate-denier-and-former-coal-group/224357

The Department of the Interior has hired former coal association president and right-wing energy commentator Christian Palich as a senior adviser. Palich previously appeared in the media to praise President Donald Trump for rolling back environmental protections and has tweeted that climate change is “junk science” and the Sierra Club wants to “kill jobs & destroy families for a phony cause.”

Under the Trump administration, the Department of the Interior has been rolling back environmental protections and pursuing actions to benefit the oil and gas industry. A recent analysisby the Center for Western Priorities found that the department “has completed or taken action on at least 53 policy changes requested or supported by energy companies and associations as of June 2019.”

In 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report documenting that senior political officials at Interior “have unleashed constant—and ongoing—attacks on science, from sidelining the work of the agency's own scientists to systematically refusing to acknowledge or act on climate change.” The House recently held a hearing in which former Interior employees said that the department had suppressed its work on climate change.

Palich’s hiring continues the department’s anti-environmental trend. Palich, who states on his LinkedIn page that he started working at Interior last month, was previously the president of the pro-Trump Ohio Coal Association from 2013 to 2017. From April 2017 to February 2019, he worked as the deputy associate administrator for congressional and intergovernmental affairs at the Environmental Protection Agency -- an appointment that drew criticism from environmentalists because of his coal industry connections.

In the first half of 2019, he briefly worked as the vice president of government and public affairs at the lobbying firm Siekman, Siekman & Associates. In his now-removed biography for the firm, Palich touted his role as a commentator in the media, describing himself as a “leading, national voice” on energy issues and noting that he has “appeared multiple times on Fox & Friends, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, Fox Business, and NBC” and been “published in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and across Ohio media.”

Palich praised Trump in the media for undoing environmental protections. He appeared on the March 29, 2017, edition of one of the president’s favorite programs, Fox & Friends, and hailed Trump for signing an order rolling back President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, calling it a “great day” and saying that “we have a president of the United States that stands with” the coal industry. He also praised Trump in a November 25, 2016, op-edin The Columbus Dispatch, writing: “Just as he recognized an untapped potential in the American electorate, Trump recognizes similar potential in American coal. Making America Great Again will create a huge demand for energy -- and coal, with all of its technological advancements, will be there to meet it.”

Palich has frequently attacked climate science and environmentalists on his Twitter account. Here are some examples:

• In response to President Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union speech, he wrote: “I walked to work in -7 temps this morning same day #POTUS says the debate on global warming is settled. Seems legit... #SOTU.”
• He wrote of the Clean Power Plan in August 2015: “Even if you buy #EPA's bad science (which I don't), #CPP is still bad policy for America.”
• In November 2015, he wrote that the Sierra Club wants to “kill jobs & destroy families for a phony cause.”
• In February 2016, he tweeted in response to Obama’s criticism of Republicans for not wanting to act on climate change: “Not destroying our economy over junk science & a radical enviro agenda. Sign me up. #GOP #CoalCountry.”
• After Trump’s election, he tweeted: “Time to push fight back on all the radical enviro regs that have been illegally been brought on America over last 8 yrs.@realDonaldTrump.” He also tweeted: “Really enjoying the radical enviro panic right now. Americans flat out rejected this agenda yesterday by a large margin. #CoalCountry.” 
• In January 2017, he celebrated the news that the new Trump White House had deleted references to climate change from its website, tweeting: “Looks like there is a new sheriff in town. #MAGA.”

He also attacked his future employers and colleagues while working for the Ohio Coal Association. In a February 2016 tweet, he promoted a FoxNews.com op-ed by right-wing lawyers John Yoo and Dean Reuter, who claimed that the federal government bureaucracy is unaccountable. Palich wrote: “All great points & being in the #coal industry we see everyday just how unaccountable @EPA, @OSMRE, & @Interior are.” 

Media Matters previously documented that William Perry Pendley, who has just been made acting chief of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, is also a climate denier. Pendley has additionally argued that the federal government should sell its public lands, that environmentalists want to “destroy” civilization, and that diversity is killing people. Pendley’s appointment comes as two former directors of the bureau “say plans to move the agency’s headquarters to Colorado are an early step toward abolishing the entire agency and transferring millions of acres of federal land to the states,” as Bloomberg reported. 

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ref seems to be more about big gubmint that XO fed overreach?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/our-next-presidents-challenge-the-unaccountable-bureaucracy

As frontrunners in the Republican presidential primary campaign,  Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio will have the opportunity to explain how they will reignite the economy and protect our security while remaining true to constitutional principles. One area where they should agree is on blocking the growth of the federal government, designed by the Founders to exercise only limited, enumerated powers.

It will not be simple to reverse the century-long evolution toward the large and unaccountable form of government that we call the administrative state. President Woodrow Wilson established its broad outlines to introduce more expertise and expel politics from lawmaking.

To Wilson, the lack of political accountability in agencies was a positive feature of the administrative state, not a fault. Today we are left with an ever-growing sprawl of federal agencies, often with unclear and overlapping purposes, and increasingly a law unto themselves.

According to the federal government itself, Washington, D.C. does not even have an authoritative list of all of its agencies.  Nevertheless, they continue to put out thousands of new regulations a year, culminating in an administrative code that is 80,000 pages long with even more informal guidelines – far longer than the laws passed by Congress.

As it impoverished our liberties, presidents needed the help of the other branches of government to extend bureaucracy’s reach.  The administrative state operates today with the assent of Congress and the passive acquiescence of the judiciary.

The administrative state violates the Constitution by transferring the power to legislate from Congress to agencies, which enact rules, enforce them, and then even adjudicate the cases that arise under them.  The Constitution actually requires a separation of powers between the three branches, because our Founders rightly feared the consolidation of too much power in one person or entity.

As James Madison warned: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

[painting, gravitas? Scene at the Signing of the United States Constitution,' a 1940 painting by Howard Chandler Christy (AP)

The Constitution grants no permission for the transfer of legislative power from Congress to another branch of government.  While government agencies must have some discretion when carrying out Congress’s laws, the Framers never intended the president to override Congress’s choices with selective enforcement and unreasonable readings of statutes.

Sadly, the courts have stood by while the administrative state has grabbed more and more power. They read out of existence the non-delegation doctrine, which prohibits precisely the transfer of power from Congress to the agencies that has now become so routine. The courts compound their error by deferring to agency decisions, giving unaccountable bureaucrats wide latitude in their decision making.

Proof that agencies wield great and unaccountable power can be found in the Internal Revenue Service scandal, which targeted and then delayed applications for tax exempt status from hundreds of right-of-center groups hoping to become involved in the last election cycle.[bogus patriot BS]

Redefining and repeatedly delaying the employer mandate under ObamaCare, the Treasury Department exercised authority it did not possess.  In settling non-adversarial lawsuits with friendly environmental groups, the Environmental Protection Agency expands its authority, with the imprimatur of the judiciary.

Our new book, "Liberty’s Nemesis," documents the wild growth of this welfare state and offers solutions.  With 35 contributors who have worked at the highest levels of all branches of government, it covers an enormous amount of territory.

A determined president acting alone can only temporarily rein in the bureaucracy. He  would have to surrender enormous policy-making power back to Congress, exercise great vigilance in policing subordinates, and resist the temptation to solve all of society’s ills. And the gains might last only as long as his presidency.

A lasting solution requires the cooperation of all three government branches. Congress must stop giving up its lawmaking authority to the agencies, and must use its power of the purse to exercise effective oversight. The courts must be serious about blocking the delegation of legislative authority, and must be willing to scrutinize the legality and constitutionality of challenged agency actions. Presidents must faithfully execute the laws, rather than selectively enforce them to help political allies and punish opponents.

It has taken more than 200 years for the government to grow to its current size, and it will not be reined in without concerted effort.

The alternative is the further consolidation of power in the administrative state and the continued slide toward Madison’s feared “definition of tyranny.”

John C. Yoo is Heller professor law at UC Berkeley School of Law, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at The Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of the new book “Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots and Space Weapons Change the Rules of War.”

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