Book Discussion: Hatchet Man

 

The C-Span program Book TV broadcast a discussion by author Eli Honig about his 2021 book, Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department. Honig is a former federal and state prosecutor, and now an expert commentator for CNN.

This discussion is useful to (1) help people recall what Barr did as US Attorney General (AG), and (2) why and how he was, as Honig describes it, so deceptive. Yes, Barr was deceptive, but a special kind of deceit describes it more precisely, he was a liar. Lies were often a key part of his deceit tactics. 

What Barr was hiding not just political corruption of the DoJ to serve the interests of the ex-president. We was also hiding the fact that he was and still is a hard core anti-democratic authoritarian Christian nationalist. He was also hiding his own personal agenda. Barr’s Christian fundamentalism and its hostility to secularism and non-heterosexuality came out in Honig’s research on speeches Barr gave in the 1990s. In my opinion, Barr was and still is an elite Republican Party Christian nationalist fascist.

Garland’s and Biden’s fatal flaw

Honig argues that Barr’s legacy was infliction of serious, long-lasting structural damage to the DoJ. Specifically, Barr attacked and undermined both the credibility and the independence of the DoJ. He argues that Barr damaged the DoJ in that way to serve his own deeply-rooted, extremist legal and personal (Christian fundamentalist) beliefs.

Honig also argues that Merrick Garland’s approach to fixing the DoJ is too weak. Garland is crippled by a desire to avoid political conflict or controversy whenever possible. That is presumably driven by Garland’s, and in my opinion Biden’s, tragically mistaken belief that conflict avoidance will somehow lead Republicans to be more trusting and more democratic. In other words, Garland is deeply flawed by the same false belief that his boss, Joe Biden probably has. Neither of them understands that the Republican Party is irreparably anti-democratic and irreparably morally corrupt. That leaves Garland’s and Biden’s efforts to fix the damage the GOP and the ex-president caused to the federal government to be too little and maybe too late.

Honig argues that people “better” than ones like Barr and his ilk are necessary in the DoJ to fix the damage and repair its broken pro-democratic institution status. Unfortunately, Honig doesn't use the word moral. Instead he just leaves it at better. IMO, that is a mistake.

Barr & the Mueller Report

Two matters related to the Mueller report that Honig discusses at length about obstruction of justice by the the ex-president are worth remembering.

• Barr was corrupt and mendacious from the start. His first significant act as AG was to distort the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller on (1) obstruction of justice by the ex-president, and (2) the role of Russian significant efforts to throw the election to T**** (which really did happen, but the GOP and T**** still deny to this day). Mueller himself had written an accurate summary of his own report for the public, but Barr refused to release it. Instead, Barr wrote and released his own summary of Mueller’s findings. Barr’s summary falsely asserted that the Mueller investigation had exonerated the ex-president. Lies of omission underpinned that propaganda. Barr received a public rebuke for his lies to the public from both Mueller himself and a federal judge. Barr also directly lied to congress when asked if anyone “from the Mueller team” disapproved of how Barr distorted (lied about) the Mueller report. He said nope. A couple of days after that lie to congress, Mueller’s letter of disapproval became public. Barr was hauled back into congress to explain his lie. Mueller’s defense was insulting nonsense: He said to congress that Mueller himself was not part of “the Mueller team.” Because of that, he did not lie to congress when he said that no one “from the Mueller team” disapproved of how Barr distorted and lied to the public about the Mueller report.

• When Barr released to the public his own summary of the Mueller report with his lies in it, that was just the first half of his propaganda and lies plan. The second half was brilliant. It was about as effective as mendacious, immoral mind manipulation can be. What Barr did after publicly lying about what the Mueller report contained and concluded, he withheld the report from the public for 28 days. Why did he delay releasing the truth? Those 28 days gave the public time to come to believe that the Mueller report exonerated the ex-president. Barr defended the 28 day delay as time needed to redact the report, but Honig argues that should have taken no more than a week at the very most. Worse, public release of the Mueller report should have been timed with the release of a summary. That unjustifiable time gap left plenty of time for the ex-president, Republican elites and their propaganda Leviathan to keep saying over and over and over that the Mueller report exonerated the ex-president. By the time the redacted Mueller report was released with an explicit statement that the ex-president was not exonerated, tens of millions of minds rejected that factual truth as a Democratic lie.

Barr really was a hatchet man. Honig argues that Barr was the worst AG in US history. He managed to convince tens of millions of Americans that the Mueller investigation exonerated a sitting president of obstruction of justice, despite an investigation that did not say any such thing. 

Barr also corrupted the DoJ’s independence and credibility. The loss of credibility seems to apply to some extent to both sides in American politics-culture wars. Many liberals, and independents like me, are now less trusting of DoJ motives and its professionalism. Many conservatives distrust the DoJ partly because they falsely believe that the ex-president committed no crimes, when in fact he did. 

Whatever it is that Garland thinks he is doing, it is not reassuring to to least some Americans. Honig’s argument that Garland is ineffective in repairing the damage to DoJ credibility is convincing. However, Honig does argue that Garland’s effort to rebuild DoJ independence is significant and deserves credit. 

But the question all of this raises is obvious: If one authoritarian president appoints one authoritarian AG, what is to stop them from doing the same to DoJ independence and credibility that T**** and Barr did? The precedent for Christian fascism to neuter the DoJ has been set. T**** and Barr set that precedent. It will never go away.

The United States is not on the verge of civil war

 Repeat - not!

I have been a harsh critic of the Right for quite some time (no kidding!) but have to admit the hyperbole on the Left about another Civil War coming is kind of over the top. In my humble opinion of course.

So the following article tackled this question and I highlighted a few snippets that I believe to be true. Though I believe the statements made to be true, YOU can disagree with the premise if you want.

https://www.wamc.org/commentary-opinion/2022-08-26/the-united-states-is-not-on-the-verge-of-civil-war

Snippets:

The right wing lie machine has recently expanded its scope. With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act by Congress, they have seized on increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service that will lead to the hiring of 87,000 agents --- (half of which will go to replace immanent retirements). To hear the liars at Fox News and too many Republican members of Congress, these agents, armed with machine guns, will be invading the homes of small business owners in search of unpaid taxes. In fact, very few of them will be in the armed enforcement units. Most IRS auditors work in offices at computers and most audits are conducted by mail or on line.

However, despite the outrageous and dangerous misbehavior of the right-wing echo chamber, right-wing pundits and too many members of Congress, a note of caution is in order. Talk is cheap and rhetoric is not the same as action. So far, there has been ONE --- repeat --- ONE attempt to physically harm FBI agents in the wake of the widespread anger stoked by Trump and his minions.

Polling data shows that about 20 percent of Americans believe that violence is justified to protect “our freedom.” Twelve percent said they themselves were willing to be violent.
Of that group, do you think every one of them is really ready to start shooting? I would venture to guess that a large percentage of that group are what the Texans call, “All hat and no cattle,” In other words – big talkers.

Agree or Disagree? Example: no mention of Jan. 6. BUT over 800 arrests. Nothing changed, and now the Capitol has more security. So the wannabees didn't accomplish much. My opinion. BUT could something worse be in the making? OR, as I prefaced, is the rhetoric just "over the top?"

PS; I am NOT talking about other threads to America's democracy, but strictly about the notion that there will be another civil war.

Climate change and the Republican Party’s open support of it

By now it is clear that the US has limited options to deal with climate change. That is despite recently passed legislation that has some anti-climate change measures in it. That legislation was opposed by 100% of Republicans in congress. The Repub Party (RP) has made it explicit and clear that it opposes all meaningful attempts to use government to deal with the problem. The RP says it like this in a recently released political document (quote shown above):

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.

That is reasonably interpreted to be explicit statement that the RP intends to fight all government measures intended to deal with climate change. It is only in that sense that the RP takes climate change seriously. 

It is now also clear that the RP also opposes companies who want to try to deal with climate change. The reason for that is unclear. One possibility is that the RP sees climate change as ordained by God and not something that humans have any business trying to do anything about. 

One article comments on RP attacks on companies making efforts to deal with climate change:

How an Organized Republican Effort Punishes Companies for Climate Action

Legislators and their allies are running an aggressive campaign that uses public money and the law to pressure businesses they say are pushing “woke” causes.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.

“We’re an energy state, and energy accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue for us,” said Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer. “All of our jobs come from coal and gas. I mean, this is who we are. This is part of our way of life here in the state. And they’re telling us that these industries are bad.”

“We have an existential threat here,” Mr. Moore said. “We have to fight back.”

In doing so, Mr. Moore and others have pushed climate change from the scientific realm into the political battles already raging over topics like voting rights, abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. In recent months, conservatives have moved beyond tough words and used legislative and financial leverage to pressure the private sector to drop climate action and any other causes they label as “woke.”

“There is a coordinated effort to chill corporate engagement on these issues,” said Daniella Ballou-Aares, chief executive of the Leadership Now Project, a nonprofit organization that wants corporations to address threats to democracy. “And it is an effective campaign. Companies are starting to go into hiding.”

Wokeness causes is something that the RP document quoted above mentions:

The Democratic Party and their Big Tech allies are not merely secular; they have virtually created a new religion of wokeness that is increasingly hostile toward people of faith, particularly Christians and Jews. They are determined to drive all mention of God out of public view.

Their bizarre policies are intentionally destroying our values, our culture, and the beliefs that hold us together as a nation. They want to replace our culture with government and rewrite history. They are also busy destroying the greatest economy in the world – perverting it into an old, socialist-style system. Our nation can’t survive this combination of wokeness, socialism, and globalism.

Based on wokeness being associated with Christianity in the political document and climate change in the news article, it may be the case that the RP sees climate change as good because it is ordained by God. In that case, the RP could believe that climate change is not something humans should try to deal with or even worry about. 

Or, religion might underpin little or only some of with the hostility. RP lust for the power and wealth that continues to flow from continuing to support pollution as usual could also be a significant factor.

With the modern RP, either or both fundamentalist Christianity and brute capitalism are possible explanations. Other reasons, e.g., protecting jobs, seem unlikely. Those feel like a deflection from the real but unspoken reason(s) for RP’s all-out opposition to dealing with climate change.

THEY NEVER GIVE UP, DO THEY?

 

Arizona GOP candidates lose bid to ban ‘exploitable’ voting machines

The judge called the supposed evidence speculative and noted no actual harm has occurred.

PHOENIX (CN) — A federal judge in Arizona dismissed a suit Friday seeking to ban electronic voting machines ahead of the November midterm election, brought by Republican candidates who claim the machines may have security flaws.

In the suit, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem claimed an injunction to stop the use of voting machines was necessary since the "voting system does not reliably provide trustworthy and verifiable election results." Former President Donald Trump — a frequent purveyor of baseless election fraud claims — has endorsed Lake and Finchem in their respective races.

Lake and Finchem claimed that voting on paper ballots and hand-counting those votes was the only efficient and secure method for proceeding in November.

In arguments, the pair contended that contractors found some concerns after completing a partisan audit of the 2016 presidential election. Chiefly, the contractors allegedly found cybersecurity best practices weren’t used, antivirus software patches were neglected, computer logs were cleared, and some files were missing from the election management system.

U.S. District Judge John Tuchi on Friday found the supposed evidence conjectural and not concrete.

“Ultimately, even upon drawing all reasonable inferences in plaintiffs’ favor, the court finds that their claimed injuries are indeed too speculative to establish an injury in fact, and therefore standing,” wrote Tuchi.

Tuchi wrote that in previous election fraud cases, courts have ruled in favor of the plaintiffs when actual fraud had occurred. In Curling v. Kemp, Georgia voting machines had been hacked and the secretary of state refused to act. Tuchi said the plaintiff’s case is nothing like that case.

“Here, as the secretary points out, a long chain of hypothetical contingencies must take place for any harm to occur— (1) the specific voting equipment used in Arizona must have “security failures” that allow a malicious actor to manipulate vote totals; (2) such an actor must actually manipulate an election; (3) Arizona’s specific procedural safeguards must fail to detect the manipulation; and (4) the manipulation must change the outcome of the election,” Tuchi wrote.

None of that has occurred, Tuchi found.

Additionally, Tuchi said if he had entertained the abstract claims for injunctive relief, he would violate the Purcell principle, barring courts from ordering changes to election rules in the period just before an election. The U.S. Supreme Court's 2006 ruling in Purcell v. Gonzalez established the principle.

“In applying Purcell, courts have made clear that it stands for more than just the proposition that federal courts should avoid changes in law that may cause voter confusion,” wrote Tuchi. “The county defendants are correct to assert that courts applying Purcell also ‘caution federal courts to refrain from enjoining election law too close in time to an election if the changes will create administrative burdens for election officials.’ The injunctive relief plaintiffs seek would not just be challenging for Arizona’s election officials to implement; it likely would be impossible under the extant time constraints.”

According to Scott Jarrett, an expert witness during oral arguments and the director of elections for Maricopa County, switching to a hand-only count would devastate the county’s ability to conduct business. The county would require thousands more workers even as they already struggle to maintain enough at a paltry wage. Jarrett also said they’d need much more real estate to conduct a hand count.

Tuchi additionally dismissed motions by the plaintiffs to supplement the record, post-arguments, with video allegedly showing unauthorized individuals accessing the electronic management server (EMS) room without authorization. According to the plaintiffs, the video would discredit expert testimony from Jarrett that the room was secure.

“The request is extraordinarily and inexcusably untimely, and in any event does not remedy the speculative nature of plaintiffs’ claims,” Tuchi wrote. “Plaintiffs initiated this action according to their preference. The court set the hearing by an order issued well in advance, and plaintiffs had ample time to prepare their evidence.”

https://www.courthousenews.com/arizona-gop-candidates-lose-bid-to-ban-exploitable-voting-machines/

Damn those liberal judges!! 😎 Appointed by Barack Obama no less!

Very bad economist forecasting about climate change

Forecasts by economists of the economic damage from climate change have been notably sanguine, compared to warnings by scientists about damage to the biosphere. This is because economists made their own predictions of damages, using three spurious methods: assuming that about 90% of GDP will be unaffected by climate change, because it happens indoors; using the relationship between temperature and GDP today as a proxy for the impact of global warming over time; and using surveys that diluted extreme warnings from scientists with optimistic expectations from economists. Nordhaus has misrepresented the scientific literature to justify the using a smooth function to describe the damage to GDP from climate change. Correcting for these errors makes it feasible that the economic damages from climate change are at least an order of magnitude worse than forecast by economists, and may be so great as to threaten the survival of human civilization. -- Steve Keen, The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856, 2020

If there is uncertainty in climate science, as most climate change deniers like yourself claim, then it is possible that the climate situation could be better than, about the same as, or worse than what expert consensus argues it is. If each is equally possible, then there is a 66.67% chance the situation is what experts claim or worse. If one thinks that the experts are better than random guessing about climate and chances are that they are about right is 75%, then there is a 87.5% chance the situation is what experts claim or worse. -- paraphrasing Germaine, locking horns in a futile attempt to communicate rationally with climate science deniers, ~2015 

Germaine communicating rationally with Republicans

and other climate science deniers

Epiphany: Since we're going to burn carbon fuels, why not

push harder to incentivize alternatives and just hope it's not too late?

But what to do? → Put up solar panels, buy an electric car

and install a little nuclear reactor in the back yard ☢️

Recent articles are coming out arguing that due to fear of backlash by the radical right, climate science experts have soft-pedaled their estimates of damage from climate change. Our climate situation is worse than previous estimates. Now, some economists are starting to wake up to what the climate really is in real reality, instead of what it is in the faux reality dreams of rigid laissez-fair capitalists. That is forcing some to do a rethink about climate and economic damage. The New York Times writes:

Pace of Climate Change Sends Economists Back to Drawing Board

They underestimated the impact of global warming, and their preferred policy solution [a carbon tax] floundered in the United States.

Economists have been examining the impact of climate change for almost as long as it’s been known to science.

In the 1970s, the Yale economist William Nordhaus began constructing a model meant to gauge the effect of warming on economic growth. The work, first published in 1992, gave rise to a field of scholarship assessing the cost to society of each ton of emitted carbon offset by the benefits of cheap power — and thus how much it was worth paying to avert it.

Dr. Nordhaus became a leading voice for a nationwide carbon tax that would discourage the use of fossil fuels and propel a transition toward more sustainable forms of energy. It remained the preferred choice of economists and business interests for decades. And in 2018, Dr. Nordhaus was honored with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

But as President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act with its $392 billion in climate-related subsidies, one thing became very clear: The nation’s biggest initiative to address climate change is built on a different foundation from the one Dr. Nordhaus proposed.

Rather than imposing a tax, the legislation offers tax credits, loans and grants — technology-specific carrots that have historically been seen as less efficient than the stick of penalizing carbon emissions more broadly.

Carbon taxes and emissions trading systems have been instituted in many places, such as Denmark and California. But a federal measure in the United States, setting a cap on carbon emissions and letting companies trade their allotments, failed in 2010.

At the same time, Dr. Nordhaus’s model was drawing criticism for underestimating the havoc that climate change would wreak. Like other models, it has been revised several times, but it still relies on broad assumptions and places less value on harm to future generations than it places on harm to those today. It also doesn’t fully incorporate the risk of less likely but substantially worse trajectories of warming.

Dr. Nordhaus dismissed the criticisms. “They are all subjective and based on selective interpretation of science and economics,” he wrote in an email. “Some people hold these views, as would be expected in any controversial subject, but many others do not.”The outcome reflects a larger trend in public policy, one that is prompting economists to ponder why the profession was so focused on a solution that ultimately went nowhere in Congress — and how economists could be more useful as the damage from extreme weather mounts.

“You’re saying, ‘Things are going to cost more, but we aren’t going to give you help to live with that transition,’” said Rhiana Gunn-Wright, director of climate policy at the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute and an architect of the Green New Deal. “Gas prices can go up, but the fact is, most people are locked into how much they have to travel each day.”

At the same time, the cost of technologies like solar panels and batteries for electric vehicles — in part because of huge investments by the Chinese government — was dropping within the range that would allow them to be deployed at scale.

For Ryan Kellogg, an energy economist who worked as an analyst for the oil giant BP before getting his Ph.D., that was a key realization. Leaving an economics department for the public policy school at the University of Chicago, and working with an interdisciplinary consortium including climate scientists, impressed on him two things: that fossil fuels needed to be phased out much faster than previously thought, and that it could be done at lower cost.  

“We all cringe [because we're all laissez-faire capitalists],” said James H. Stock, an economist who serves as vice provost for climate and sustainability at Harvard University. But all things considered, he said, a $7,500 tax credit and reliable charging network might be as powerful as high gas prices in getting someone to buy an electric vehicle.

In that sense, subsidies are a variant of pricing policy: They effectively raise the cost of fossil fuels relative to renewable alternatives. Only recently did the supply of those alternatives reach the point where a tax credit would make the difference, on a large scale, between buying an electric vehicle or not.

“Economists could be faulted for not shifting quickly enough as these prices have fallen so surprisingly,” Dr. Stock said. “My criticism wouldn’t be ‘Why did you start with a carbon tax?’ but ‘Why didn’t we embrace the investment strategy five years ago?’”

Some economists are rethinking cost-benefit. They are reluctantly concluding something actually politically doable actually needs to be done, even if it does mean, gasp!!, some government intervention and policy action. The Republican Party and carbon energy sector (Exxon-Mobile, Shell, etc.) have successfully denied climate change and blocked a carbon tax for decades because they both hate government and taxes. The GOP is clear that the climate change threat is that it suggests a need for government intervention, not that we need to cut back on burning carbon fuels. According to GOP sacred gospel, all government intervention must be blocked at all costs, because all government is all bad all the time (except of course when it protects the elites and their power and wealth). 

Government, just like Democrats and liberalism, are evil atheistic socialists and pro-pedophilia. The only people who do not know this are Democrats, liberals, atheists and pedophiles.

Q: Will the awakening of some economists make any difference in the Republic Party's all out opposition to trying to do anything serious about trying to combat climate change, while being dead serious about defending carbon fuel pollution business as usual?

Once again, plausible deniability shields a vicious white collar criminal from the law

In multiple posts here, e.g., here, I have pointed to plausible deniability as probably the most important defense that a white collar criminal has in keeping his/her free from prosecution and their corrupt asses out of jail. My guess is that plausible deniability shields about $2.5 trillion/year in economic crime from ever being prosecuted, much less imposing criminal or civil liability on the lawbreakers and criminals. About $1.2 trillion of that comes from tax cheating alone.

The New York Times writes on how the morally rotted, corrupt, fascist Attorney General, Bill Barr, used his “Department of Justice” and plausible deniability to shield his morally rotted boss, the corrupt, fascist ex-president. Barr shielded the rotter from liability for multiple obstruction of justice felonies. Those felonies were described in great detail in the Mueller Report that was made public on April 18, 2019. To any sane neutral observer, there was no question that the ex-president committed multiple felonies. But as we all know, Barr and his corrupted “Department of Justice” were neither sane nor neutral.

The NYT writes:

The Biden administration released a Trump-era memorandum on Wednesday that provided the most detailed look yet at the Justice Department’s legal reasoning for proclaiming that President Donald J. Trump could not be charged with obstruction of justice over his efforts to impede the Russia investigation.

The March 2019 memo, delivered to the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, concluded that none of Mr. Trump’s actions chronicled in the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III — from firing his F.B.I. director to pressuring the White House counsel to recant his testimony to prosecutors — could be shown beyond a reasonable doubt to be criminal acts.

Many of these actions, two senior Justice Department officials wrote, should be interpreted by an inference that Mr. Trump “reasonably believed” the investigations were impeding his government agenda, meaning he lacked the corrupt intent necessary to prosecute him for obstruction.  

The Justice Department under both the Trump and the Biden administrations fought unsuccessfully in court to avoid releasing the full text of the memo, which was the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

There it is. The highlighted part gets right to the point. Prosecutors cite a lack of intent. That is plausible deniability in action shielding yet another felon from prosecution.

What is deeply disappointing here, to say the least, is that Biden doesn’t understand. He actively worked to illegally keep the DoJ memo hidden from the public. The court forced his hand, not his own sense of justice, and not the sense of justice that Merrick Garland is supposed to have. Those two nincompoops are screwing us and betraying democracy.

T**** did not “reasonably believe the investigations were impeding his government agenda.” That lie is pure bullshit. T**** knew exactly what laws he was breaking. He did it knowingly. That betrayal of the the law and the American people was standard operating procedure for T**** and his thug co-conspirators, like the treasonous Bill Barr.

America desperately needs a new political party that is seriously dedicated to enhancing, defending and vindicating what little is left of the rule of law in American politics. American politics includes (i) the rule of law, and (ii) federal tax policy and its enforcement. 

The status quo “rule of law” for rich and powerful elites is far too weak, rotted and corrupt to be taken seriously. But it’s a deadly threat, not a sick joke. 

Truth, hyperbole or a lie?