More On Ivy Admissions

While researching Wednesday's post on foreign students, I ran into this essay from last July at Forbes by Michael Nietzel, President Emeritus of Missouri State University, How The Admission Practices Of Elite Colleges Perpetuate The Advantages Of The Wealthy. Again, received opinion by writers like David Brooks of the New York Times and The Atlantic has been that the elite colleges are meritocratic, admissions are driven by SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. Nietzel's argument is that the numbers simply don't point in that direction.

While only 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college, 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution do so.

. . . The authors [of a recent Brown University study] estimate that this higher admissions rate leads to 103 extra students being admitted from the top 1% in a typical Ivy-Plus class (of 1,650 students) relative to a theoretical benchmark where students are admitted at the same rates across the parental income distribution based on their test scores.

The study quantifies the effect of the admissions "baskets" that Jerome Karabel discusses in The Chosen, especially for legacies, applicants from private "feeder schools", and children of major donors.

Legacy admission policies exerted the largest effect, with legacy applicants admitted at higher rates at all levels of parental income. The biggest boost was given to high-income legacy applicants, who are five times more likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college than peers with comparable credentials who are not legacies. Legacies would account for 47 of the 103 extra students admitted from the highest income levels.

The authors also found that while children of alumni at a given Ivy-Plus college are much more likely to be admitted at that college, they are no more likely than non-legacies to gain admission at other Ivy-Plus colleges, suggesting that they do not have stronger academic credentials.

The weight placed on non-academic factors like extracurricular activities, leadership capacity, and personal traits had the next largest effect, accounting for 31 of the 103 extra top 1% students. Among students with similar SAT/ACT scores, those who attend private high schools tend to obtain much higher non-academic ratings (but similar academic ratings) than students attending public high schools.

Tellingly, the preference for private school applicants extends to athletic admissions as well:

The remainder of the high-income admissions advantage was due to athletic recruitment, yielding another 25 extra students from the top 1% because recruited athletes come disproportionately from high-income families.

Karabel explains this, at least in part, by noting that colleges recruit for upscale sports like rowing, skiing, and lacrosse, for which many public high schools do not have programs, but prep schools do. The study concludes that by eliminating legacy preferences, a more egalitarian review of extracurriculars, and a more egalitarian athletic recruitment policy,

those three changes would increase the share of students from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution attending Ivy- Plus colleges by 8.7 percentage points, equal to about 144 students in a typical Ivy-Plus college class.

This gives at least a hint of the relative sizes of Karabel's "baskets" for legacies, preppies, and recruited athletes: if those were eliminated, 8.7% of the current Ivy-plus student body would be replaced by students not from the top 5% of family incomes. But based on the information I cited in Wednesday's post, this leaves out the nearly 25% of foreign students in typical Ivy-plus student bodies, so, leaving racial preferences and children of celebrities and politicians aside, we're looking at over 30% of Ivy-plus student bodies who've likely been admitted via non-meritocratic applicant categories. And, because these are the ones paying full fees and likely future big donors, they're preferred customers.

I've always had a lurking question in the back of my mind, ever since the president of my Ivy undergraduate instution remarked something to the effect of, "We know that our smartest students always earn grades in the B and C range". He blurted this out, but he never expanded on it, and putting it in perspective, I can see why he wouldn't -- it's a clear effect of admitting something over 30% of the student body on a basis other than grades, test scores, and non-preferential extracurriculars. If your most profitable customers aren't your smartest, you're going to skew the whole program to accommodate them, not just admissions.

This also begins to explain another phenomenon I saw as an Ivy undergraduate: the "hot shot", except in "shot", we substituted the "o"with an "i". The expression would be "Bob Throckmorton is a hot [shot}," which implied basically that he was going to be fast-tracked through whatever program was involved -- it usually had something to do with grandiose social schemes in areas like international relations, energy policy, or urban studies. Somehow, Bob was going to get special treament, though it was also understood that it was less through his own merit than through some sort of patronage; whatever it was, Bob was predestined to be an important guy.

I don't know how you'd conduct a study that gave insight into this, but I'll bet that a lot of hot [shots] wind up in cabinet-level jobs. This is probably one reason we're in the mess we're in.

More On Michael Voris And Church Militant

I've put up a post with more information from a former insider at Church Militant on the Cold Case File blog.

Back To The Foreign Students At MIT

I've already posted on MIT backing down on its threat to suspend the foreign students who violate policy during their pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic demonstrations. This story at the Washington Free Beacon adds only one new tidbit:

At elite institutions like MIT, nearly a quarter of all students hail from another country.

The story goes on to make the already recognized point that administrators want to keep them on campus; suspending them would threaten their visas, and since foreign students pay the published full fees, it would badly hurt the school's revenue. The only new point here is the size of the foreign-student contingent at ostensibly highly selective schools like MIT.

Nobody so far is putting two and two together. As writers like Jerome Karabel have pointed out in The Chosen, universities have separate admissions categories for high-profit markets like the children of alumni and other major donors, as well as the children of politicians, celebrities, and other public figures. These simply bypass the ordinary high requirements for SAT scores, GPA, and extracurriculars to which ordinary middle-class applicants are subject.

To these high-profit markets, we may also add foreign students -- except the Beacon is now telling us this category of exceptions to the ordinary admissions standards alone at highly selective elite schools is nearly one quarter of each entering class. (If I were arguing on behalf of the Ivies, I'd question where the Beacon got this information, as the size of the admissions bypass categories at each institution is highly confidential, but we'll accept this figure for now.)

But if we accept the Beacon's estimate of nearly 25% for just one admissions bypass category, how big are the others, for instance for major donors, alumni, preppies, and the rest? Joe Biden's son Beau, his daughter Ashley, and his granddaughter Naomi all got into Penn; Hunter's laptop carries details of at least one personal meeting between Joe and Penn's president to facilitate Naomi's admission. Presumably similar influence was applied in each of the other Biden cases -- but let's consider that when the elite schools also give this consideration in each entering class to the families of members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and the like, this is not a small number of exceptions.

Is this bypass category, adding the offspring of politicians and celebrities to the children of major donors and alumni, as big as the nearly 25% just of foreign students in each entering class? It's not beyond the realm of possiblity, which is one reason these figures are highly confidential. And let's recognize they stay confidential because the president, vice president, members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and the like whose children benefit from such preferential treatment will quietly assure that issues like the size of elite-school endowments or the preferences in elite-school admission that benefit their families never come under serious legislative threat.

I do think it's reasonable to estimate that as a rule of thumb, as much as half of each entering elite-school class is admitted under relaxed standards that are below the SAT and GPA ranges that are published for the high school guidance counselors for the US middle-class students who are making their good-faith applications each year. Yet the prestige of Harvard, MIT, Chicago, and Stanford is based entirely on their selectivity from the ranks of the ordinary middle-class applicants. (It's worth noting that the foreign students who pay full freight are also from wealthy and influential families in their home countries, who use their US elite-school degrees to reinforce their prestige.)

This is certainly one reasonable explanation for how someone like Sam Bankman-Fried could be admitted to MIT. I suspect there's a "professional courtesy" category for bypassing admissions standards as well. Isn't it odd that the unpromising Caroline Ellison, daughter of MIT faculty, should get into Stanford just as the unpromising Sam, son of Stanford faculty, should get into MIT?

There's another conclusion we might draw from the MIT vignette and its reluctance to enforce policy on high-profit-margin students: the graduation rate from elite schools, already remarkably high, is bolstered by a general willingness to coddle those students. I recall an instance in my own time as an elite-school undergraduate in which the Dean of the College was called away from his normal schedule to address a family rift among the highly prominent ___________s, because a scion of that family, currently enrolled at my alma mater, had decided he no longer wished to attend. (Come to think of it, this was the man who served as the model for Dean Wormer.)

I don't recall the upshot, but poor Dean Wormer spent the better part of a week putting out that fire. If it had been me, it would have been half an hour in the dean's office to tender my withdrawal, if that. Sorry to see you go, John, good luck! The same influence that creates widespread exceptions to elite-school admissions standards seems to ensure that the students who get in on privilege stay in.

For the middle-class families who are caught in the college admissions rat race, if only half the applicants are admitted via the published criteria, no matter, that just means those who get in that way have acquired even more merit. The families of those who win that lottery aren't going to complain, any controversy will simply diminish the value of what they've worked so hard to get. The families of those who can bypass the middle class standards are just going to keep quiet, and when they can, they'll also work to keep things quiet.

It's Not A Stalemate, It's Worse

Looking for the current outlook on the Russia-Ukraine War, I found this article at Responsible Statecraft:

George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy at [Quincy Institute], highlighted the perils of extrapolating a “stalemate” from the current lack of significant battlefield movements in Ukraine. “Those who believe this war has settled into a long-term stalemate make the mistake of measuring the relative progress of each side with maps. They see that the frontlines have not moved significantly over the last year and conclude that the sides are stalemated,” Beebe told me.

“But other metrics, though, paint a different picture. Ukraine is using up its quite limited supplies of men, weapons, and ammunition, and the West cannot provide what Ukraine needs. That is not a formula for stalemate; it's a formula for Ukraine's eventual collapse or capitulation,” he continued.

. . . “Despite everything that’s happened, despite all the stuff we have given, the Bradley’s, the M1 [Abrams] tanks, Patriot air defense systems, the Challenger tanks, the Leopard [tanks], all those things, nothing changed at all except the casualty count,” said former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow and Military Expert at Defense Priorities and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.

“While the lines haven’t changed, I don’t call it a stalemate because I think time is continuing to work against Ukraine,” he said in an interview, noting the stark year-on-year decline in U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

. . . Recent suggestions in the West of a stalemate and looming “frozen conflict,” though a stark change in tone from the kind of rhetoric that characterized the war as late as the summer of 2023, still does [sic] not reflect what experts describe as the severity of challenges facing the Ukrainian war effort.

However, the public US position, supporting Ukraine "as long as it takes", hasn't changed. As of today,

The United States is joining member states from NATO this week in renewing the alliance's "steadfast commitment" to Ukraine in its fight against Russia's aggression, according to a senior State Department official.

Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads to Brussels, where foreign ministers from NATO will gather from November 27 to 29.

But this morning, Larry Johnson reported at Gateway Pundit:

In Kiev, the rift between President Zelensky and General Zaluzhny is widening, with rumors swirling that Zelensky will order a full mobilization of Ukraine that will draft 17 to 70 year old civilians, including women.

. . . Ukraine’s reported plan to draft as many as 20,000 prospective candidates for cannon fodder is being condemned by members of Zelensky’s party, who believe this is a meaningless gesture that will not advance Ukraine’s military fortunes.

. . . Zelensky’s efforts to hide the staggering losses of Ukrainian troops took a major hit when Ukrainian TV Channel 1+1 reported that the AFU’s casualties so far were 1,126,652 KIAs and MIAs. Andrei Martyanov noted that Zelensky’s office moved quickly to force Channel 1+1 to retract the story, but the damage was done. The horse left the barn. Closing the barn door does not put the horse back in its stall.

. . . Even if basic training is completed, the new soldiers are not qualified to operate the armored vehicles, mortars, artillery and tanks they would need on the frontlines. And there is one big assumption here — the United States and NATO will continue to flood Ukraine with a billion dollars worth of gear. That ain’t going to happen. Public support in the United States and Europe to continue pouring good money after bad in Ukraine is flagging and the trend line points to growing opposition.

At this point, Joe Biden appears to be preoccupied with the Israel-Hamas war; issues like Ukraine and climate change appear not to be among his top priorities:

President Biden will skip the United Nations climate summit that kicks off Thursday in Dubai amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, a report said Sunday.

Biden, who just weeks ago called climate change “the ultimate threat to humanity,” will not be among the leaders of nearly 200 countries who will attend the two-week event, known as COP28, a White House official told the New York Times.

The official who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the president’s plans did not provide a reason for his absence, but senior aides told the publication that Biden has been preoccupied with the deadly conflict across Gaza and Israel.

Up to this fall, Ukraine and "as long as it takes" had been one of his signature issues. Zelensky visited Washington as recently as this past September, just two weeks before October 7, but his prospects were fading even then.

The blue-and-gold flag draped hero worship of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s last Washington trip, which stirred comparisons to Winston Churchill’s wartime stand against Nazism, was a distant memory on Thursday.

Nine months later, Zelensky was back in town and he and his hosts learned some jarring lessons about one another at a moment when a path to ultimate victory in the war against Russia seems increasingly distant.

Zelensky got an abrupt preview of how Donald Trump’s possible return to power after the 2024 election and how the ex-president’s current sway over the ungovernable Republican-led House of Representatives could rupture the multi-billion dollar lifeline on which Ukraine’s survival depends.

I think the signs are becoming clear that Biden, and in fact NATO, need to come up with an exit strategy. However, the cost will be that it gives Trump an opportunity to say, "I told you so", although so far, he's pressing other issues like the border and the economy. An outright collapse in Ukraine over the winter, which observers are beginning to consider possible, or even a coup there, since Zelensky has canceled elections, would change that quickly.

Ukraine and Just War Doctrine

Somebody Agrees With Me

Is Biden drunk? pic.twitter.com/ex6IjBoZ0J

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 24, 2023

Nick Arama responded to the post at Red State:

After the press conference, some on the X platform began asking questions about Biden's condition and how he came into the press conference.

Some of those questions didn't hold back and were blunt.

Unfortunately, farther down, he unintentionally reveals something about the condition of journalism at Conservative Inc:

He has gait problems, in addition to his incoherence and deterioration. I'm not sure that it matters what name you put on it at this point--except to say that he has continuing problems. If it were just that he was drunk, that might be beer, because at least that would goes [sic] away.

"That might be beer"? Wha? What on earth is he trying to say? Maybe he meant to type, "that might be bad enough, but at least that would go away". But then he followed it up "that would goes away". Here's my problem. The people who write at Red State are being paid; they're at least semi-pro. But not only are they not proofreading their own copy, there doesn't seem to be a copy editing function at Red State or nearly any other conservative alternate media. And Red State is owned by Salem Media, which calls itself "the largest community of opinion leaders and Main Street conservatives today". Where have you gone, Bill Buckley?

But back to my point. The video at the link isn't clear; all I can see is a certain hitch in Joe's gait that could stem from several causes -- I'm five years younger than Joe, and it's been a while since I've been really steady on my feet. But what's convinced me that Joe is drunk is that his speech patterns, slurring, hypercorrection, and random pauses, are the sort of thing police officers are trained to recognize are signs of intoxication.

Occam's razor is "the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements". The received explanation for Joe's stumbling speech is that it's an artifact of a childhood stutter, or something like that, but it seems to me that it reaches too far back and adds too many hypothetical factors. A much simpler explanation is that he talks like he's drunk because he's drunk.

But Mr Arama at Red State gets something else wrong -- if Joe is drunk, at least it goes away. The problem I see is that Joe displays intoxicated speech patterns almost all the time, and the "almost" is what gives it away. He was able to avoid the problem during his 2020 debates with Trump, which was a major factor in his November victory -- had his performance been the usual stumbles and gaffes, he woud have taken himself out of the running. He's also able to speak clearly at least for brief public statements after meetings with major world leaders, but only the G8, not the G20.

That suggests his handlers are able to keep him away from alcohol at the most critical times -- but otherwise, he's pickled. All the time, or maybe, as one Kennedy remarked about another, he's sober 20 minutes a day. This may be functionally equivalent to dementia, and it may make little difference in Joe's overall performance, but it's a simpler expanation that doesn't require a medical diagnosis.

How do we reconcile this with his frequent claims, which he's made even to Pope Francis, "I'm the only Irishman you've ever met who's never had a drink." Nevertheless,

Alcoholism, like any other addiction, changes behavior. People who struggle with addiction have undergone changes in their brains that make rational decision-making more difficult. Common behavior changes that many people notice are lying, deception, and avoidance.

Joe tells lies. He tells them all the time. He was arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa. He was arrested marching for civil rights in the US. He was raised by Puerto Ricans. He got Strom Thurmond to vote for the Civil Rights Act. He was appointed to the Naval Academy. He used to drive an 18-wheeler. He played varsity football at the University of Delaware. Golda Meir wanted him to be her liaison with the Egyptians. That he's never had a drink has got to be the least of it.

Michael Voris

I've put up a post with my thoughts on the recent developments over Michael Voris over on the Cold Case File blog.

Revisiting Sam Bankman-Fried

I ran into a recent article that points to the same questions I had about Sam Bankman-Fried when I posted on the scandal a year ago:

[T]he received narrative goes on to say that FTX was run by a dozen or so polyamorous hippie-style geniuses who suffered from ADHD, lived communally in a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas, and had their own doctor-therapist who prescribed amphetamines for their ADHD. The only female in the group I'm aware of was Caroline Ellison, so according to that doctor, there wasn't really that much action. Nevertheless, it was the synergy between Beanbag Boy Bankman-Fried and Queen Caroline that drove the whole enterprise, or something like that. But they let Caroline lose $10 billion in unsupervised trading, and John Ray III says he's nver seen anything like it.

Never underestimate what a beautiful woman can do.

At the time, I was scratching my head: I kept doing web searches on ADHD and came up with discussions like this:

In order for people age 17 and older to be diagnosed with ADHD, 5 or more symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity/impulsivity must be present and negatively impacting directly on social and academic/occupational activities.

Among those symptoms listed are:

• Makes careless mistakes/lacks attention to detail
• Difficulty with organization, time management, and deadlines
• Avoids tasks requiring sustained mental effort
• Loses things necessary for tasks or activities
• Easily distracted (including unrelated thoughts)
• Forgetful in daily activities
• Procrastinates and puts off tasks until the last moment possible.

Sam had a degree in math and physics from MIT, while Caroline had a degree from Stanford in math. My degrees are in Eng Lit, but I can still compute that somneone who can't sit still, makes careless mistakes, and has difficulty with time management and deadlines isn't even going to be capable of taking the SATs or any other standardized test at all, much less get through course work in an undergraduate math or physics major.

How did they even get near a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange? This raises questions that go far beyond Sam and Caroline, but up to now, nobody has been asking them. The piece I discovered at the link at the top, originally in Fortune but behind a paywall there, at least begins to give some insight:

When a jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried on seven fraud-related charges, it marked a symbolic end to the biggest scandal in crypto history. But for Bankman-Fried's law professor parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, the legal ordeal is far from over.

Bankman-Fried's bankrupt FTX exchange, now led by a caretaker CEO, is suing Bankman and Fried to recover a $10 million gift from their son that was paid with corporate funds. More seriously, the parents—Bankman in particular—might face the risk that federal prosecutors charge them for abetting their son's criminal enterprise.

What do you mean, "abet"? Sam himself apparently couldn't even sit still behind a computer screen. Somebody else had to be calling the shots -- in fact, somebody had to create Sam from the start. I can't imagine that he could have been admitted to a highly selective university like MIT based on the admissions standards for applicants from the general public. The story continues,

Long before Bankman-Fried launched his ill-fated crypto empire, his parents enjoyed substantial financial security and cultural status. They live in a house on the immaculate campus of Stanford University at which they hosted gatherings of the Bay Area's academic and political elite, and enjoyed access to the very top ranks of the Democratic party thanks, in part, to Fried’s fundraising prowess.

Given that capability, it sounds as though Prof Bankman was already running a scam not much different from Jeffrey Epstein's philanthropic hustle, in which he bundled so-so donations from his marks to Harvard and MIT and parlayed them via smoke and mirrors into favors and prestige for himself. Sam's Wikipedia entry gives some insight into this environment:

Bankman-Fried was born on March 5, 1992, in Stanford, California. He is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School. His aunt Linda P. Fried is the dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. His younger brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried (b. c. 1995), is a former legislative assistant, Wall Street trader, and the former director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics and its associated political action committee, which came under scrutiny by Federal investigators after it was discovered that much of the $35 million on its books had been stolen by his older brother, Sam, from Alameda Research accounts.

What we're seeing is a preexisting network of connections, nepotism, and money that could not only place Sam in the highly prestigious and upscale Crystal Springs Uplands School, get him into MIT almost certainly via an admissions category that bypassed the ordinary competitive process, and even assure his graduation with a degree in physics and math. (My surmise has always been that if powerful families can ensure the admission of unpromising offspring to prestige schools, they can just as effectively ensure their graduation.) My view continues to be that Sam, essentially a special-needs child, was entirely the creation of his parents, powerful and prosperous people at the top of the academic food chain, and for the whole of his life, he was groomed for his role as their puppet. The Fortune story continues,

Whether or not Bankman’s role at FTX amounted to abetting in the criminal sense, there is evidence he was directly involved in major decisions at the firm. That evidence includes numerous group chats on the messaging app Signal, produced as evidence at Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial, in which Bankman participated during a time frame up to and including the exchange’s collapse.

. . . There is also the balance sheet itself, which listed obscure tokens that had little real-world value and included surreal entries like “Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account.” If Bankman had seen it—which seems plausible, given his role as lawyer and close advisor to the firm—it’s hard to fathom how he could accept the validity of such a document, which would have received a failing grade from a high school accounting teacher.

As for Bankman’s precise role at FTX, it was amorphous like everything else at the company his son ran as a personal fiefdom. The only formal documentation about its corporate structure, drawn up by an executive and published on the dust jacket of Michael Lewis’s book about Bankman-Fried, lists Bankman as a direct report to his son.

Well, that's the org chart, which says nothing about who's really calling the shots. Should Profs Bankman and Fried ever stand trial, we may possibly learn more about how that layer of the power elite actually works.

More On The 2024 Dilemma

I ran into a piece by Walter Shapiro at The New Republic, The Real Reason Why Biden Shouldn’t Drop Out:

Panicked Democrats, vibrating with anxiety over the polls, continue to nurture an unlikely fantasy: Joe Biden looks at his family across the Thanksgiving table on Nantucket and says with a weary sigh, “I can’t do this for another five years. I’ve tried my best. But I just don’t have the stamina to keep going through 2028.”

Nothing in the president’s makeup suggests that he would abruptly jettison his reelection campaign. . . . Every sign emanating from his inner circle and reelection campaign suggests a stubborn refusal to even acknowledge his growing legion of Democratic doubters. But even if Biden were to accept the truth embedded in the polls, as Harry Truman did when he bowed out in 1952, the subsequent multicandidate scramble for the Democratic nomination would create as many (if not more) political problems as it would solve.

This echoes David Axelrod, who says, "It's very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden's team says his resolve to run is firm." But Shapiro goes into detail on the downside for anyone who thinks about stepping in if, as seems unlikely, Biden will withdraw even this early in the cycle:

If Biden announced on the Monday after Thanksgiving that he would be retiring, it would give 2024 presidential contenders fewer than 100 days to declare their candidacies and define their image before 14 states pick delegates on Super Tuesday, March 5. And 11 other states will be holding Democratic primaries later in March.

Organizing a campaign and raising the money at that pace would be gruelling enough. But candidates would also face high-intensity scrutiny from the media and the voters without any benefit from a learning curve. It would be the equivalent of opening a musical on Broadway without a single tryout and just three days of rehearsals.

. . . Those who have been watching the Republican debates (not necessarily a recommended activity) probably will have noticed that, in a technical sense, both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have grown more adept over the last three months. That is the learning curve at work.

. . . Even a globe-trotting governor like Newsom, who visited China last month, would be ill prepared for the full range of queries that would be immediately hurled at him as a presidential candidate—hourly questions about a cease-fire based on the latest glimmers of news from Gaza, repeated inquiries about the best Democratic strategy on Capitol Hill to keep the government open, and never-ending queries about how to finance proposed new government programs.

But he also raises an issue that I haven't seen from anyone else, the extent to which the McGovern wing of the Democrats has gained effective veto power over the past 50 years:

As president, Biden has papered over many of the ideological fissures in the party by being far more ambitious in his legislative agenda than his prior moderate reputation might have suggested.

This is a polite way of saying that the Democrat center, in the persons of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, has been forced to cave to the far left, in the form of the Squad and similar constituencies. They aren't papering over fissures so much as they're adopting the agenda, and the problem is that the putatively centrist leadership, Biden and Pelosi, have aged out, leaving no centrist equivalent to Bill Clinton to take over in their place. But there's no credible leftist to replace them, either:

But if the 81 year-old (as of today) Biden opted out of a second term based on age, presumably that would also leave Bernie Sanders (82) and maybe Elizabeth Warren (74) on the sidelines. An unanswered question under such a scenario: Who, if anyone, would emerge as the left-wing favorite in the primaries? There is no natural successor to Sanders or Warren being bandied about as a break-in-case-of-emergency option should Biden withdraw.

He thinks the major problem now confronting the Democrats is that among the current possibilities, none will have had the time to build a credible public profile as a candidate as the prinmary season gets under way. But I think this evades the reality of 2024: the primaries are going to be irrelevant to both parties. Trump's overwhelming polling lead will make Repulblican primary victories a formality. If Joe Biden withdraws, it won't be during the primary season; it will be either just before or just after the Democrat convention, avoiding any primary battle, which would simply expose the rift between the Democrat far left and shrinking center.

My scenario continues to be that Joe withdraws sometime next summer, and the party insiders under something like Rule F designate Newsom as Joe's successor but keep Kamala as vice presidential nominee. I'm not sure this will work at all, but it's probably the only possible strategy -- put someone new and young and arguably not quite such a rabid leftist at the top of the ticket and hope keeping Kamala will satisfy the rabid left, but this is a charade, and it leaves open the possibility for a third party challenge from the far left as well.

I Haven't Seen Anything Like This So Early In A Campaign

Even in 1980, the incipient Reagan landslide seems to have taken Democrats, or at least those speaking for public consumption, by surpise. In 1972, especially after the Eagleton fiasco, there was never any serious expectation that McGovern could beat Nixon, so that election is an outlier -- but even then, the real pessimism didn't even take hold until McGovern was nominated. In the 2024 cycle, we're seeing gnashing of teeth and rending of garments a full year before the election.

The closest equivalents to the current environment that I can remember were in 1988 over Dukakis and 2004 with John Kerry, when, after the Democrat conventions, "sources" spoke to reporters without attribution about how badly those campaigns were going. But again, this was during the summer and early fall before those elections, not during the fall a full year ahead, and few people are now publicly trying to maintain a happy face. And the Democrat insiders aren't just talking on background, certainly not David Axelrod:

“I think he has a 50-50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod said.

“He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”

This was in Politico a week ago:

Just under one year before the presidential election, Democrats should be concerned but not panicked about President Biden’s standing.

. . . For Biden to win reelection, however, he must make changes. I spoke with dozens of Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans about what the president can do on personnel, presentation and strategy to improve his prospects. Their suggestions (pleadings?) are below.

The level of despair was striking. Since beginning this column a year ago, I’ve written repeatedly about the chasm between what Democrats say in private versus public about Biden. Yet perhaps not since Trump’s 2016 election have the party’s leaders and lawmakers been so alarmed.

What’s notable is both the uniformity of these anxieties — there’s no faction in denial — and how they mirror the discontent of the broader public.

Also in Politico a day later:

Earlier this fall, President Joe Biden’s top aides met a pair of progressives who had arrived in the West Wing with reams of data and a private warning: “Bidenomics” wasn’t breaking through.

. . . The meetings — the extent of which have not been previously reported — included sitdowns with members of Biden’s inner circle, as well as top aides charged with shaping Biden’s political and policy strategy ahead of 2024. They offer a window into a White House well aware that its economic message wasn’t resonating, even as it’s repeatedly dismissed such fears as overblown.

This reminds me of the public soul-searching in 2004 as John Kerry's campaign went awry, but keep in mind that this was only in September of that year, just two months before the election:

Following the Democratic convention in late July, Kerry was ahead (or tied) in most polls, a majority of Americans viewed Iraq as a mismanaged war and more had an unfavorable view of President Bush than of Kerry.

The mirror image is now true. What went wrong?

According to veteran strategists, three things: attacks on Kerry's Vietnam War record went unanswered, a Democratic convention went positive instead of driving a wedge between Kerry and Mr. Bush, and the Kerry campaign lacked a cohesive overall message.

"They only have two gears on their campaign: coast or fight. Like they did in 2003 when they almost lost it to us," [Howard Dean adviser Joe] Trippi says, speaking of Howard Dean's near victory. "[Democrats] stayed really positive and the mistake was not taking Bush on in the convention."

As of today via the UK Daily Mail, we're hearing similar tones, except that it's ten months earlier in the cycle:

The President has seen repeated questions over his fitness for office, with polls and pundits suggesting it is a huge problem with less than a year to the 2024 election.

When asked to respond to concerns about his age by the New York Times, the White House swerved and tried to rattle off a list of his achievements.

. . . But some of his staffers still believe he needs protecting, with a new strategy being set out to stop him falling or getting lost on stage like he has on multiple occasions.

. . . But John B. Judis, a longtime political strategist and author, suggested Biden's age has made him look less presidential.

'He doesn't look and speak the part,' Judis said. 'He's not a commanding or charming presence on a presidential or presidential election stage.'

Mr Judis's point is the most telling. Joe can't hold traditional press conferences or one-on-one interviews with any reporter who asks serious questions about his family business deals, the state of the Ukraine war and his plans for it, the border immigration crisis, crime, or homelessness. The same goes for debates -- it wasn't clear during the 2020 campaign that Joe can perform coherently for only brief periods (in my view, when he's kept from alcohol, despite his protestations of never having had a drink).

And it isn't just the most recent polls showing even Nikki Haley leading Biden in swing states. James Carville was saying the same thing in September:

Democratic Party leaders are not listening to their voters' concerns about President Biden's age, as they push Biden forward as the party's primary candidate for the 2024 election, a prominent Democratic strategist warned.

"The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll," James Carville told the New York Times. Worrying these fears could lower voter turnout, he conceded, "You can’t look at what you look at and not feel some apprehension here."

. . . According to a CNN report, Biden's aides are terrified of losing to Donald Trump in a potential rematch as several polls show the two in an essential tie.

CNN reported last week that polls showing no clear lead between the two candidates in a hypothetical rematch were leaving aides with "existential stress" as members of the media continue to question whether Biden should run for re-election at all.

Again, we're looking at a level of pessimism among Democrats about an incumbent Democrat so early in the cycle that it's unprecedented. The pessimism about McGovern, Dukakis, and Gore was about candidates running against an incumbent, but Biden is an incumbent. There was much less pessimism about Carter's chances in 1980, and it was nowhere near as great a year ahead of that election -- in part because Reagan was an unknown quantity at that time, and it was by no means certain that he'd be the nominee. Trump is a known quantity, he's the likely nominee, and voters are making up their minds very early in the cycle.

I don't think Joe can turn things around; he's too much of a known quantity. For the odds to change, one or both sides will need to find another nominee, but as of right now, even if the Republicans have to fall back on Nikki Haley, the polls suggest even she would beat Joe.

Kevin Morris Reemerges

I'm a contrarian on many things, but I'm especially contrarian on the subject of Kevin Morris, the Hollywood lawyer who's been funding Hunter Biden's lifestyle since the wheels came off in 2019-20 and more recently, as best anyone can surmise, paying Hunter's lawyers and guiding his overall legal strategy. How's that going? Well, this past summer, the tentative plea deal and diversion agreement negotiated by Chris Clark, Hunter's attorney who was apparently paid and supervised by Morris, collapsed in a Delaware courtroom, and apparently at Morris's order, Clark withdrew from the case, replaced by Abbe Lowell.

This controversy forced Attorney General Garland to take the leash off the Delaware prosecutor, David Weiss, and make him a full special counsel with the ability to pursue the case in other districts. Now, as a result,

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig suggested it doesn’t bode well for Hunter Biden that a California grand jury is being used in a special counsel’s investigation into the president’s son.

“It’s bad news for Hunter Biden any way you slice this,” Honig said during an interview on “Anderson Cooper 360″ on Thursday evening. “Let’s remember, he already has a pending indictment in the federal district court in Delaware for the firearms-related charges.”

. . . CNN said the move by Weiss indicates he may be seeking new charges against Biden after previously bringing gun charges against him in Delaware. Honig said Biden may be looking at a second indictment out of California.

Morris has got to be some lawyer, huh? As I've been saying, he's an entertainment lawyer whose career seems to have prospered, at least for a time, because his wife, William Morris partner Gaby Morgerman, is one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood. But the projects he's been asssociated with, South Park (1997) and the musical The Book of Mormon (2011), are old news. He left his former law firm Morris Yorn Barnes & Levine in 2020, oddly at the same time that he became heavily involved in Hunter's business and personal affairs.

But as I posted here, Morris appears to have lost interest in his law practice years earlier. In 2009, he "decided to become a writer" and seems to have worked full time at writing and publishing a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems (2014), and two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). By most accounts, he met Hunter in 2019 at a Joe Biden fundraiser, Hunter impressed him, and the rest is history. He seems to have dropped his aspiration to become the John Updike of his generation, as well as his entertainment law career, and undertaken Hunter as his full time project.

The conventional wisdom is more or less as follows:

Kevin Morris, an entertainment attorney and novelist who earned a fortune representing the co-creators of “South Park” and won a Tony Award as the co-producer of “The Book of Mormon,” footed Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes totaling over $2 million — more than twice what was previously reported, a source familiar with conversations between the two told The Post.

Morris, whom Hunter Biden’s friends call his latest “sugar brother,” has also been funding the 52-year-old’s lifestyle in Los Angeles — including his rent and living expenses, the source said.

Plus, now, Hunter's astronomical attorney fees as well. These payments, which by now must certainly be well into eight figures, have been loosely characteried as "loans". As House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer puts it,

It sure seems that the Bidens get a lot of ‘loans’ that raise many questions. Kevin Morris is reportedly helping Hunter Biden pay off his legal bills and China debt, which the Biden team claim are ‘loans.’ These ‘loans’ have occurred both during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and presidency, which raise serious ethical concerns.

The House committees have begun the process of obtaining more information from Morris on what I assume must be the total of his financial support for Hunter and how this is characterized -- adding multimillions in legal fees from nationally prominent lawyers, Hunter's tax debts, which appear to be considerably more than $2 million, other legal fees for his child custody case, lease expenses for a Malibu residence and likely an additional residence for his wife, Melissa Cohen, and payments to his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, it's hard to avoid wondering how anyone at Hunter's age and prospects, and taking into consideration his overall lack of talent, could conceivably pay this off as a "loan".

But now we come to the next question: Kevin Morris, as far as anyone can tell, is no longer working as an attorney, and in any case, the time he's spending running Hunter's life and businesses isn't billable. He failed in his attempt at a literary career and no longer seems to be writing. One recent vignette showed him smoking weed from a bong on an upstairs porch, which suggests he's no longer much more than your average stoner. Leaving aside possibly $10-20 million or more he's spent on Hunter since 2020, his lifestyle, which seems to include major residences in Malibu and Manhattan as well as a pied-a-terre in Santa Monica and a private jet, must be financed entirely by his wife.

$10-20 million isn't mad money. Even a powerful Hollywood agent isn't rich enough to cover that family lifestyle plus Hunter. This money has got to be coming from some other source.

Somebody Agrees With Me On Gavin Newsom

Joe Biden recently reignited speculation on what's up with Gavin Newsom's not-a-campaign for president next year:

President Biden late Wednesday quipped that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) could have any job he wants, including potentially being president, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the governor’s much-discussed White House ambitions.

. . . “Matter of fact, he could be anything he wants. He could have the job I’m looking for,” Biden added, eliciting laughter in the room.

The California governor has widely been considered as a possible presidential contender, and some see him as a potential candidate come 2028. Newsom has repeatedly fended off speculation he could challenge Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024.

Biden, who will turn 81 this month, has faced persistent questions about whether he is too old to run for a second term. Polls have consistently shown large percentages of Democrats would prefer a different nominee in 2024.

Last month I went out on a limb and predicted this:

I suspect Pelosi and other insiders are fuily aware that Joe has multiple skeletons in multiple closets, and they're in the process of hedging against a set of scandals that will force Joe's withdrawal from the race late in next year's primary season, leaving a limited field with no potential Democrat replacement having a clear primary campaign record. This will open the opportunity for Newsom to become the consensus last-minute white guy who isn't either Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg.

He would keep Kamala as vice president.

This theory refines the scenario slightly:

The attacks on Biden from the Democrat Establishment coincide with the ascent of Gavin Newsom.

How could the DNC avoid a messy primary and nominate their preferred candidate (Newsom)?

It’s in the fine print.

Biden is increasingly frail and confused, his dementia is worsening and his economic plan is faltering.

His popularity continues to crumble even among Democrats.

Consider the possibility that he resigns after receiving the Presidential nomination at the DNC 2024 convention.

Why that specific timing?

Because –

Rules adopted by the Democratic National Committee in 2022 leave the DNC as the sole authority to appoint a Presidential nominee where that nominee resigns after the August 2024 convention.

No vote or primary needed.

Although the piece refers to "Rules adopted by the Democratic National Committee in 2022" and quotes them, it's without a link. Here's the text the piece claims to quote:

In the event of death, resignation or disability of a nominee of the Party for President or Vice President after the adjournment of the National Convention, the National Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee shall confer with the Democratic leadership of the United States Congress and the Democratic Governors Association and shall report to the Democratic National Committee, which is authorized to fill the vacancy or vacancies.

The only other place I can find this text is at this site from 2020, which refers to it as the Democratic Party’s Rule F, but the link is broken. On one hand, the rule may or may not be current, but on the other, I'm not sure if we can rely on the Democrats to follow whatever rule is in place in any case.

I do agree with the subtext of the piece, which is that the Democrats don't trust the primary process -- just look at the so-far unsuccessful effort by the Biden handlers to replace the New Hampshire primary with South Carolina as the first in the 2024 cycle. At the same time, Newsom so far is pushing the same buttons as Biden, a continuation of preferential treatment for favored minorities (he established a California commission on reparations), same old-same-old on homelessness, crime, and immigration, preferential treatment for LGBTQ+, full abortion rights, and so forth).

An unfettered primary process might or might not nominate Newsom, but it wouldn't work at all as long as Joe is still in office. Thus there would need to be a swap imposed by the party insiders either very late in the primary season or after the convention.

Right now, the polls showing Trump, or even Nikki Haley, beating Biden are starting not to look like outliers, and other factors may figure in, including the collapse of Joe's Ukraine policy, further revelations of paymnents to the Biden family, a collapse of the Get Trump lawfare strategy via the appeals process, or a collapse of the January 6 narrative with the release of the Capitol security tapes. This leaves aside some utterly game-changing gaffe or a serious health event by Joe himself.

Democrat insiders have got to be gaming the contingencies, and Newsom looks like the most predictable replacement, especially with the supprt of Nancy Pelosi and maybe now Joe himself.

Appeals Judge Stays Engoron's Gag Order

Alan Dershowitz recently remarked that of all the Get Trump cases, the prosecutions have been putting on the weakest ones first. The New York civil case under Judge Engoron is hurning out to be not just weak but farcical. A recent commenter on Xwitter posted on the judge:

Dude! He looks like Mr. Burns off of the Simpsons. And he looks like he drives a van with no windows.

For comparison, here's Mr Burns. Judge Engoron is simply playing into Trump's hands -- in their motion for a mistrial and appeal of the judge's gag orders against Trump himself and his attorneys, they cite in particular evidence from the the judge's comments in his high school newsletter, of all things. He's 74 years old and hasn't left high school, despite his degrees from Columbia and NYU.

The Hill says of the appellate stay of his gag order:

The former president’s legal team requested an interim stay of Engoron’s gag orders — and the sanctions that resulted from his violation of them, which the New York appellate division granted after oral arguments Thursday.

The gag orders stemmed from an online attack Trump made on Engoron’s principal law clerk, who has become an unwitting main character in the fraud trial.

There's the nexus: Trump and his lawyers had been making fun of Engoron's apparent need to consult his principal clerk, Allison Greenfield, almost constantly, whispering and passing notes throughout the proceedings, which makes Engoron look weak and incompetent, and the fact that he frequently pontificates about Trump and his family in his high school newsletter only compounds the risibility. The judge has brought this on himself and doesn't seem able to back out of it. The Hill continues,

The appeals judge raised concerns over restricting Trump’s free speech in his decision to stay the gag order, meaning Trump can now comment freely about Engoron’s staff while the appeals process plays out.

Trump promptly seized this very opportunity:

Judge Arthur Engoron has just been overturned (stayed!) by the New York State Appellate Division (Appeals Court), for the 4th TIME (on the same case!). His Ridiculous and Unconstitutional Gag Order, not allowing me to defend myself against him and his politically biased and out of control, Trump Hating Clerk, who is sinking him and his Court to new levels of LOW, is a disgrace.

This again is, as Alan Dershowitz has also pointed out, the Chicago Seven defense. Engoron has telegraphed his insecurity on the point that he needs Ms Greenfield to sit with him on the bench, so his attorneys have been stressing this in their filings, and now with the gag order stayed, Trump is again hurling bombast at the two of them, which will only enrage Engoron further and elicit further bizarre reactions that soon enough will need to be overturned, and inevitably will make him a greater figure of ridicule.

None of the Get Trump cases has the A team either among the prosecutors or the judges, but the overall problem is that this case is the first one to come to trial, and it's inevitably going to set the tone for the ones that follow. The Trump Chicago Seven strategy seems to have been overall to bait the judges and prosecutors into imposing gag orders that inevitably will be overturned on appeal, and this process is now under way. This will only make the prosecutions seem weak and ineffective.

If the prosecution doesn't have the A team, Trump seems so far to have a much more capable group.

And Back To The White House Baggie

According to the New York Post,

Photos have emerged of cocaine that was found last summer at the White House — before the Secret Service executed a quick investigation into the matter without arresting a suspect. A small baggy containing roughly one gram of the white, powdery substance is visible in locker No. 50 near the White House’s West Executive entrance, according to photos the Daily Mail received after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the protective agency.

The Secret Service concluded its probe just 11 days after the cocaine was discovered by an agent sweeping the West Wing on the night of Sunday, July 2, forcing a brief evacuation and a response by a hazmat team before the substance could be identified.

This at least clarifies one part of the confusion surrounding the story:

1. July 4: The New York Times reported the substance was found in the White House “library.”
2. July 5: Reuters reported the substance was found in a “cubby hole” near the Situation Room.
3. July 13: The Associated Press reported the baggie was found in the “lobby.”

The photos at least depict it in trhe cubby, but Jesse Watters isn't buying the story:

Primetime thinks the coke may have been planted in the cubby after it was found in the library.

In other words, it took the Secret Service several days to get its story straight to take suspicion off the Biden family. Further,

Watters reported that the original narrative stated that no DNA was recovered from a bag of cocaine found at the White House, leading to the destruction of the bag.

However, the FOIA documents suggest the presence of three tubes of DNA, conflicting with the Secret Service’s initial reports. It appears the DNA samples were not only found but also preserved in an evidence vault.

“There’s more evidence that they didn’t destroy: an envelope with three tubes of DNA,” said Watters.

“Where did they get the DNA from? They got the DNA off the baggie. So the Secret Service lied, and so did the White House. They did find DNA on the baggie, and the DNA was processed and has been moved to an evidence vault for preservation.

The current Director of the Secret Service is Kimberly Cheatle, which is an unfortunate surname. She served as head of the the Vice Presidential Protective Division in the Obama administration when Joe Biden was vice president, but she left the Secret Service in 2018 to become senior director of global security at PepsiCo. Joe seemed to think well enough of her to give her a Presidential Rank Award for exceptional performance in 2021, and in September of last year, he brought her back to the Secret Service as Director.

As of September 2022, stories began to emerge of Hunter's art sales, while his legal problems over his tax issues and the gun permit application grew more critical. At roughly that time, although nobody can say exactly when, Hunter moved into the White House, as I discussed in this post. It appears that Ms Cheatle's handling of sensitive issues with Secret Service agents while Joe was vice president, such as his tendency to go skinny dipping in front of female agents, as well as the agent who almost punched Joe out for groping his girlfriend convinced Joe that she was right for the job:

In 2017, the Gateway Pundit exclusively reported that a Secret Service agent was suspended for a week in 2009 for shoving then-Vice President Joe Biden after he cupped his girlfriend’s breast while the couple was taking a photo with him.

The situation got so heated, a source who was a Secret Service agent at the time told TGP, that others had to step in to prevent the agent from hitting the then-Vice President.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the agent asserted that, “we had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.” The annual party was for agents and Navy personnel who were tasked with protecting the Biden family.

The Secret Service has now inadvertently confirmed our report to Judicial Watch, who has filed a lawsuit after the Secret Service failed to respond to a July 14, 2020 administrative appeal challenging its claim that all files related to the 2009 altercation, “ha[d] been destroyed,” due to “retention standards.”

It appears that the Biden family has consistently created situations with the Secret Service that require extreme sensitivity, including most recently the Biden family dogs that repeatedly attack agents. Somehow Ms Cheatle impressed Joe with her ability to finesse such issues while he was vice president, and he brought her back, possibly in the context of Hunter's move into the White House last year.

My sense of things has always been that the Biden family detail puts agents in difficult situations, especially when they have to accompany Hunter and look the other way when he does drugs. My surmise is that l'affaire baggie prompted even Ms Cheatle to lay down the law: if Hunter stayed in the White House, there would be limits to what the Secret Service could continue to do to cover for Hunter and Joe, and Hunter quietly moved out later this past summer.

If nothng else, the shooting by the Secret Service detail protecting Naomi Biden Sunday night, which as far as I can tell would have resulted in the dismissal of a civilian police officer, gives an indication of the general quality of the agents assigned to the Biden family detail. Those currently assigned have to put up with dog bites and pretending they don't see Hunter snorting coke. Better agents seem to be able to wangle other assignments.

Secret Service Opens Fire

Something's missing from the media coverage of the incident Sunday night when Secret Service agents protecting Naomi Biden "opened fire" on three people trying to break into an unoccupied fedmobile they were using to ferry her around Georgetown. The UK Daily Mail's account seems to be the mopst complete:

Secret Service agents protecting President Joe Biden's granddaughter Naomi opened fire after three suspects tried to break into an unmarked Secret Service vehicle.

The agents, assigned to protect Naomi Biden, 29 and the daughter of Hunter Biden, were out with her in the Georgetown neighborhood late Sunday night when they saw the three people breaking a window of the parked and unoccupied SUV, the Secret Service said in a statement.

Around 11:58 pm ET, one of the agents opened fire, but no one was struck by the gunfire. The incident took place near Naomi Biden's Georgetown home, NBC News reported.

. . . 'During this encounter, a federal agent discharged a service weapon and it is believed no one was struck,' the Secret Service said.

. . . It is unclear if Naomi Biden heard the shooting but she was made aware of the incident afterward, sources told ABC News.

At one point in my career, I was a technical writer for a Los Angeles City agency, in which position I had frequent reference to LAPD policies. As part of becoming familiar with police work, I discovered that law enforcement agencies take any discharge of an officer's weapon under any circumstance very seriously. This can include an accidental discharge while off duty that causes no injury, but it can range all the way to a shooting by an officer in self-defense that leads to a fatality. The circumstances under which a firearm discharge is "in policy" are carefully circumscribed, and every shooting is thoroughly investigated.

Current LAPD policy on use of force is typical of civilian police agencies:

Officers may use deadly force [i.e., shooting] only when they reasonably believe, based on the totality of circumstances, that such force is necessary in defense of human life. Officers who use unreasonable force degrade the confidence of the community we serve, expose fellow officers to physical hazards, violate the law and rights of individuals upon whom unreasonable force or unnecessary deadly force is used, and subject the Department and themselves to potential civil and criminal liability.

The best I can conclude from the media accounts of the Georgetown incident is that the Secret Service protectee, Naomi Biden, was not with the agents at the time the attempted burglary on the fedmobile occurred. She was apparently in no danger and apparently inside a residence while the agents were waiting outside, or something like that. Under typical civilian police policy, just for starters, the use of deadly force wouldn't have been jusified to protect anyone's life in that circumstance, certainly not the Secret Service protectee. Beyond that, the LAPD policy says that "objectively reasonable" grounds for use of deadly force, i.e., discharging a firearm, include, among others,

• The seriousness of the crime or suspected offense;
• The level of threat or resistance presented by the subject;
• Whether the subject was posing an immediate threat to officers or a danger to the community;
• The potential for injury to citizens, officers or subjects[.]

The offense described in media accounts was breaking a window to burglarize an unoccupied vehicle. In California,

PC 459 auto burglary is a second-degree burglary – known as a “wobbler” – which means the prosecutor can charge the case as either a misdemeanor or felony. If convicted of misdemeanor auto burglary, you will be facing up to one year in county jail.

On one hand, District law may differ, but in any case, the Secret Service doesn't enforce the burglary law there; that's up to the Metropolitan Police. It may be a federal crime to vandalize a fedmobile, but again, that would be up to the FBI to investigate. The agent who discharged his firearm had no jurisdiction over the burglars, who objectively were not committing a crime serious enough to warrant use of a firearm in any case. So what happens to a civilian police officer who pops off a round at a guy burglarizing a vehicle? In response to a "shots fired" call:

The supervisor responds to the scene. Other officers take over any involvement the officer who did the shooting may have had with the incident at hand.

The supervisor takes the officer’s firearm from him.

. . . The officer is taken to a hospital or some other facility where blood is drawn for toxicology testing.

. . . The officer may or may not be interviewed or asked to make or write a statement about what happened for purposes of an internal policy investigation. If a statement is not made immediately, an interview may be scheduled in 48-72 hours. The officer cannot refuse to be interviewed. If he does, he can be charged with insubordination and his employment terminated. When the officer is interviewed, he is usually accompanied by legal counsel or a representative from the police officers’ association or union.

The officer is put on administrative leave.

. . . When the internal investigation is complete (this can take anywhere from a few days to months), the officer is required to appear before a “shooting board” to discuss the investigation, clarify any details, and identify any relevant police or training issues for future use. The officer is usually notified whether the shooting has been determined to be within policy or out of policy. If it is out of policy, the officer may be disciplined or his employment terminated. If the shooting is within policy, he may then have his firearm returned to him and any expended ammunition replaced.

From the accounts in the media, this firearm discharge would pretty clearly have been out of policy, and a civilian police officer who popped off a round at some car burglars would almost certainly have been off the force following a due process investigation. In fact, a civilian police officer who did this outside his jurisdiction would probably also have been deemed unstable and, even if he somehow kept his job, no longer eligible to carry a firearm.

So every media account of this episode has completely missed the point: a civilian police officer under those circumstances would have been deemed unfit to carry a weapon and likely off the force. What's happening to the Secret Service agent who shot his weapon out of policy? How was he hired? How was he kept on the force? Is he currently on administrative leave pending investigation and likely to be off the force? While the specifics of the investigation are confidential, the Secret Service should at minimum have announced the circumstances were under investigation, and media should have followed up.

There were two other agents there as well. What was their involvement? Did the supervisor turn up and relieve the one agent of his weapon? What "shots fired" procedures were followed? This whole thing should raise questions about the Secret Service equivalent to the 2012 "Wheels up" scandal.