Not That Difficult

Here's Biden's problem, and I think it's clear enough that even he recognizes it. The slimmest of Democrat majorities in Congress have shielded him from investigations over the past two years. If he loses either house in the November elections, Republicans will control key oversight committees with subpoena power, which will at best threaten his prospects in 2024 -- but there are potential avenues of investigation that could reach a "Nixon standard". This phrase has come up in connection with potential Trump offenses that could have been uncovered in the Mar-a-Lago raid (but so far have not) -- but I'm not the only one who's seen parallels between Nixon and Biden as well.

A quick web search suggests that there's never been a clear definition of a "Nixon standard" for impeachment, but of course, Nixon was never impeached, so his case can't be a precedent anyhow. Nevertheless, legal scholars in the Clinton impeachment came up with this definition as it was developed by congressional staff in the Nixon investigation:

Impeachment is a constitutional remedy addressed to serious offenses against the system of government. . . . It is not controlling whether treason and bribery are criminal. More important, they are constitutional wrongs that subvert the structure of government, or undermine the integrity of office and even the Constitution itself, and thus are `high' offenses in the sense that word was used in English impeachments.

The "smoking gun" allegation against Nixon involved his attempt to use the CIA to convince the FBI not to investigate the Watergate burglary:

A secretly recorded conversation between President Richard Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman on June 23, 1972, reveals the president's involvement in the Watergate break-ins and cover-up. During the conversation, which became known as the "Smoking Gun," Nixon and Haldeman discuss telling Deputy CIA Director Vernon Walters to interfere with FBI Acting Director Pat Gray's investigation.

There was never a House vote to impeach Nixon on this allegation, and never a Senate trial, but the evidence was felt at the time by senior Republicans to be sufficient that they should urge him to resign in the face of likely impeachment and conviction, which he did.

Right now, there are two potential avenues of investigation that could reach this "Nixon standard". The first would be if it were provable that Biden ordered an investigation, including a raid on Mar-a-Lago, that would lead to an indictment of Trump on nearly any grounds short of deliberately passing secret information to Putin for the purpose of undermining the US. This is highly unlikely, and an indictment short of that would be an extreme gamble for Biden that would likely fail.

The second, which has developed more recently, is any Biden involvement in using the government to pressure private media to censor COVID information:

[N]ew evidence suggests a much wider campaign by his administration to sic Big Tech on critics than previously thought, going so far as removing a parody of Biden's chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci.

The First Amendment lawsuit by Republican attorneys general and a civil liberties group against Biden, Fauci and several other high-level officials has revealed a "massive, sprawling federal 'Censorship Enterprise'" related to COVID-19 and elections, the plaintiffs said in a 711-page "joint statement on discovery disputes."

"If there was ever any doubt the federal government was behind censorship of Americans who dared to dissent from official Covid messaging, that doubt has been erased" by what the defendants have already turned over, New Civil Liberties Alliance lawyer Jenin Younes said.

A third potential issue might be an "Agnew standard":

Agnew’s downfall began in the summer of 1973, when he was investigated in connection with accusations of extortion, bribery, and income-tax violations relating chiefly to his tenure as governor of Maryland. Faced with federal indictments, Agnew fought the charges, arguing that the allegations were false, that a sitting vice president could not be indicted, and that the only way he could be removed from office was by impeachment. . . . secret plea bargaining took place between Agnew’s lawyers and a federal judge. Agnew resigned the vice presidency on October 10, 1973, and appeared in United States District Court in Baltimore on the same day to plead nolo contendere to a single federal count of failing to report on his income-tax return $29,500 in income that he had received in 1967, while governor of Maryland. Acknowledging that the plea amounted to a felony conviction, Agnew declared that he had resigned in the national interest. He was fined $10,000 and sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation.

In Biden's case, there's the potential for equivalent tax violations in the numerous questionable business deals engineered by his son Hunter. A forced resignation on this basis would be pretextual, but if Republicans are able to get a special prosecutor appointed for Hunter's transactions, this would be another potential outcome for Biden.

I'm occasionally beginning to see remarks that Biden is already running against Trump for 2024, but what I think is really happening is Biden sees threats to his tenure before then if Republicans gain control of either house in 2022.

But the national mood is changing as well. Media across the spectrum is less of a monolith, with CNN moving to the center, the intramural dispute over Live PD, and of all things the departure of extreme never-Trumper Allahpundit from the never Trump Hot Air blog as of today, which I suspect is further fallout from Liz Cheney's electoral defeat.

And Trump is still a contender, with Biden's current effort against him having the counterproductive effect of putting him in the national spotlight. He's already testing a 2024 platform of pardoning the January 6 defendants with an apology.

The Dumpster Fire That Won't Go Out

Just the other day I had a post on the revival of the former A&E Live PD show, now on a new channel, Reelz, as On Patrol: Live. Just a day later, it was an item on regular news:

A&E filed a lawsuit seeking to block rival network Reelz from airing “On Patrol: Live,” which it claims is a blatant ripoff of its own show, “Live PD.”

Both shows feature live footage from police ride-alongs, both are hosted by Dan Abrams, and both are produced by the same company.

A&E canceled “Live PD” — one of its top-rated shows — in June 2020, at the height of protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Reelz debuted its version of the show last month. In the lawsuit, A&E argues that “On Patrol: Live” copies nearly every aspect of its own show’s format, down to specific catchphrases. The Reelz show even occupies “Live PD’s” old time slot.

My wife and I resumed watching whatever you want to call the show as soon as we heard about it. The accounts are completely correct, the show is a full revival of Live PD down to the look and feel of the studio, just under a different name. There's no question that the show's audience, which was the biggest on weekend cable and among the biggest at any time, felt its cancellation at the peak of the cancel culture during the BLM riots of 2020 had been a grave error and was grateful for its return.

REELZ reeled in 3.5 million unique viewers for “On Patrol: Live,” with an average viewing time of 146 minutes across the seven telecasts over the premiere weekend starting July 22. The show made REELZ the second most watched network among all ad-supported broadcast and cable networks during its live showings on Friday and Saturday night, propelling REELZ into a top 25 cable network position for the first time ever. In Live+3 data, Friday’s episode grew 27% in HHs, from 623,000 to 792,000, and Saturday’s rose 22%, from 684,000 to 835,000.

In contrast,

A&E lost a ton of its “live” (plus same day) viewership after cancelling “Live P.D.” last year amid a firestorm over onscreen depictions of policing following the killing of George Floyd. Immediately after the network canceled “Live P.D.,” the cable channel’s primetime viewership declined 49% — or pretty much by half. That’s no surprise since at the time of its cancellation, “Live P.D.” was A&E’s highest-rated program and occupied multiple evenings on the schedule. Since then, things have been a bit better — but barely. For the recently ended second quarter of 2021, A&E was down 42% in total viewers from the same time in 2020, averaging 495,000 overall primetime audience members compared to 852,000 the year before. Those numbers, like all in this story, are according to Nielsen’s Live + Same Day data, which we chose due to the dominant live viewership delivered by live show “Live P.D.” But the loss of that block of reality programming has delivered a big hit. The month before “Live PD” was canceled, May 2020, A&E ranked as the No. 8 ad-supported cable channel in total viewers. The month after cancellation, A&E sunk all the way to 20th.

The show's host and de facto spokesman, Dan Abrams, had telegraphed throughout the summer of 2020 that efforts of some sort were under way to bring the show back at A&E, but they never came to fruition. At the time, A&E said in a blandly corporatese announcement,

"This is a critical time in our nation's history and we have made the decision to cease production on Live PD," A&E said in a statement. "Going forward, we will determine if there is a clear pathway to tell the stories of both the community and the police officers whose role it is to serve them. And with that, we will be meeting with community and civil rights leaders as well as police departments."

Wikipedia describes Dan Abrams as

an American media entrepreneur, television host, legal commentator, and author. He is currently the host of the prime-time show Dan Abrams Live on NewsNation, On Patrol: Live on Reelz and The Dan Abrams Show: Where Politics Meets The Law on SiriusXM's P.O.T.U.S. channel. He is also the Chief Legal Analyst of ABC News.

In other words, the man is a media heavyweight. I've had a mild interest in his career over the years, and as far as I've been able to tell, his opinions on social and political issues are fully consistent with every other media heavyweight at his level. In other words, he really isn't that much of a pro-cop sort of guy. On the other hand, Live PD or OP: Live, whichever you want to call it, is a gold mine, and Abrams is not opposed in principle to making a buck.

This brings up the actual conflict at the lizard-people level. With the 2020 COVID-and-BLM dumpster fire gradually receding in the rear view mirror, people who actually want to make money out of quality entertainment saw a chance to bring back Live PD, which had been canceled, apparently with no serious intention of ever reviving it, by A&E. Even in 2020, media analysts were questioning A&E's judgment, and two years later, A&E hasn't won back the nearly 50% of its audience it lost.

On one hand, the immediate popularity of the revival -- and its ability to return without renewed demands for its cancellation -- seem to have caught A&E flat-footed, with Reelz's sudden rise to prominence an additional embarrassment. At some point, someone is going to have to hold the suits at A&E responsible for, first, the original call of canceling the show, and then for doubling down on the original bad call.

However, the financial penalty to A&E is still probably just secondary to the main issue, that A&E seems to see itself as a cultural leader and thus with the authority to decide who gets to see what, on its own network or for that matter anywhere else. On one hand, they made a lot of money from a show the deplorables loved. On the other hand, once it became clear that the right people didn't want the deplorables watching it, A&E got with the program, and as far as they're concerned, the program is still the program. Money has nothing to do with it.

I think this is the actual conflict. Dan Abrams is on the side of the money. My guess is he's going to win. Dumpster fires are fun, but they eventually get old, especially when they cost money.

What Is There To Say About Gorbachev?

I didn't intend to spend any time on Mikhail Gorbachev's passing, but the dog days of summer being what they are, and the whole range of opinion on any subject being as obtuse as it's been, Gorbachev is one of the most interesting subjects around -- which I guess says something. The first observation to make is that the Ukraine invasion has proven to be a last, desperate, feckless gesture of Soviet revanchism. The tanks that rolled into Ukraine in February carried Soviet flags in addition to their Zs for victory, neither of which has worn well. This was the system Gorbachev intended to preserve and reinvigorate.

The conventional obituaries have missed the point. Here's The Guardian:

Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration.

Somebody quoted a tweet that said Gorbachev ended the Cold War like Robert E Lee ended the American Civil War. I suppose this goes to one part of the story, but let's recognize that if the Cold War began with the Berlin Airlift in 1948, Stalin died in 1953, so the Cold War took place at the very end of his regime. There had to be explanations for it beyond nukes or Stalin himself.

Important discussions of Soviet Marxism-Leninism had already been written in To the Finland Station (1940) and Witness (1952). They predate Solzhenitsyn, are intellectually more robust, and cover a great deal more ground. Indeed, one effect of the botched Ukraine invasion has been a vigorous revision of both Dostoevsky's and Solzhenitsyn's reputations from the Ukrainian perspective -- Ukraine, with some justice, has seen itself as something of a literary victim of their mindset.

Marxism, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in detail, was a crisis for the West that predated Lenin, although Lenin was the critical figure who understood and could mobilize the level of ruthlessness needed to implement it. Nevertheless, the threat of revolution was a project for the elites throughout much of the 19th century. Fabian socialism and the programs it advocated, like social insurance, the minimum wage, and universal health care, were as a practical matter intended to avert proletarian revolution decades before 1917.

On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an important event in that no equivalent ideologically-based regime succeeded it, and most of the regimes in Europe and elsewhere that had been nominally similar repudiated Marxism-Leninism. It brings me back to a passage from William James:

A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.

At some point, and in fact that point was probably prior to Gorbachev's accession to power in 1985, Marxism-Leninism ceased to become a live hypothesis in the West, when in fact it had been one since the 19th century. To Whittaker Chambers, for instance, when he saw the devastation of Europe after the Great War, Marxism clearly made an electric connection. But by the 1980s, it had become an intellectual plaything of the privileged gentry in the faculty lounge, to the point that few of them recognized that they themselves would be among the first to be exterminated in an actual Marxist revolution.

In effect, Marxism reverted to the sort of vain parlor exercise it had been before Lenin, and those tasked with actually building a functional society didn't bother with it. This happened without Gorbachev's assistance. I'm not sure if he even noticed.

The intriguing question is what replaced it, and that question continues. My sense of things after the Soviet collapse was initially that former Soviet client states like Iraq were no longer subject to policy restraint from Moscow, but even before the collapse, tension had arisen between Soviet Marxism and Islamism. The end of the Soviet Union gave Islamists the idea that they could attempt to fill the political vacuum this left, at least in the Islamic world.

After 9/11, I think it was a worthwhile and necessary task to prevent Islamism from gaining that sort of foothold, and the expenditure in Iraq was probably worth it. Islamist terror, at least as of now, is not a high-priority issue in the US, and even in places like France, the UK, and Germany, the "truck of peace" is much less common. This may well be due to the US-originated strategy of disabling international funding of this movement.

But if not Marxism, and if not Islamism, then what? The current fashion is the Great Reset, which is a loose combination of neo-Malthusianism expressed in the global warming hypothesis, extreme sexual egalitarianism beyond anything envisioned among 19th-century Fabian progressives, and an alliance between the gentry class and the Lumpenproletariat expressed in the Black Lives Matter movement. The one thing that can be said about this combination is that none of it is remotely Marxist; in fact, it's bourgeois fantasy, self-contradictory and self-defeating. My prognosis for it is grave.

I currently think that loose combination of separate and somewhat nutty individual ideologies doesn't have the potential for attracting a Lenin ruthless enough to implement them in any serious way. The one guy who's actually trying to do this is Joe Biden. There's more thinking for me to do along that path.

Thibault Is A Little Guy

FBI agent Timothy Thibault was reported late Monday to have been escorted out of his FBI office in Washington Friday afternoon and to have "abruptly resigned". Thibault had been a public target of allegations by Iowa Sen Charles Grassley that FBI agents have shown political bias in their investigations.

"The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI's receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI's false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation," GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley wrote FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland on July 25. "The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter."

. . . In October 2020, one month before the election, "an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed" by a senior FBI agent at the bureau's Washington Field office. An earlier letter from Grassley identified the agent as Timothy Thibault.

. . . In that May 31 letter, Grassley also accused Thibault of likely violations of "[f]ederal laws, regulations and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) guidelines."

"Whistleblowers have reported to me, that although the FBI and Justice Department maintain policies dictating specific standards requiring substantial factual predication to initiate an investigation, Thibault and other Justice Department and FBI employees failed to comply with these requirements."

However,

Thibault, a 25-year-veteran, had already been on leave for a month after the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), started raising concerns about whistleblower claims that the FBI had obstructed its own investigations into the first son.

Beyond that, on August 4,

FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday that allegations of an FBI agent’s partisan social media posts and efforts to suppress information in the investigation into Hunter Biden’s business activities were “deeply troubling.”

Speaking at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Wray appeared to condemn the alleged actions of Timothy Thibault, who he said was an FBI assistant special agent in charge at the Washington field office until “relatively recently.”

Well, Director Wray was clearly shocked, shocked to hear of this on August 4. It sounds like he got right on it (cough, cough), notwithstanding Grassley had written him about Thibault and others at least as early as May 31. In fact, it sounds as if the FBI is belatedly covering itself. Here's what sounds like background from them in this Fox report:

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, FBI Director Christopher Wray called the whistleblowers' allegations "deeply troubling." He promised that the whistleblowers would be protected and removed Thibault from his supervisory role.

Thibault was one of 13 assistant special agents in charge at the Washington field office. He was not involved in the FBI raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month at any level.

This raises more questions than it answers. The specific allegations against Thibault go back to October 2020 and the FBI's work to characterize the Hunter Biden laptop story as "Russian disinformation", so Thibault had been up to no good for nearly two years, based only on what's been made public so far. But Wray learned about this only this summer? And Grassley's letters clearly allege that Thibault isn't the only case -- and by the FBI's own account, Thibault was one of 13 assistant special agents in charge at the Washington field office.

Which, by the way, ran the Mar-a-Lago raid. Doesn't this affect the credibility of that raid as well?

The FBI's nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president's Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington – not Miami, as has been widely reported – according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau's counterintelligence division led the 2016-2017 Russia "collusion" investigation of Trump, codenamed "Crossfire Hurricane."

Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau's disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team – Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten – has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden's son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian "disinformation," an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

. . . Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asked Wray for copies of recent case files and reports generated by Auten and whether he is included among the team the FBI has assembled to determine which of the seized Trump records fall within the scope of its counterespionage investigation and which fall outside of it.

. . . "It is a disgrace that Auten is still even employed by the bureau," said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello. "I would substitute other analysts and agents."

So Thibault is only one of several problem agents identified by Sen Grassley and enumerated at the link, including Alan Kohler, the head of the FBI's counterintelligence division, who was also key to the Crossfire Hurricane operation and now supervises the Mar-a-Lago investigation. In addition,

In congressional testimony this month, Wray confirmed that “a number of” former Crossfire Hurricane team members are still employed at the bureau while undergoing disciplinary review. In the meantime, Wray has walled off the former Russiagate investigators only from participating in FISA wiretap applications, according to the sources.

So it sounds as though other FBI agents besides Thibault had stayed with the bureau while undergoing disciplinary review -- and the action taken against Thibault, while belated, should not be the end of the story. We'll have to see what develops. . . .

Victor Davis Hanson, The Poor, And Live PD

Victor Davis Hanson published an essay Friday in the New York Post, Elites’ divide & conquer failure: How middle class now view their rulers with rightly earned disdain. Hanson emerged with a new set of commentators like the late Angelo Codevilla around the time of 9/11. From the start, I always thought there was more he could have done with any of his themes than he ever actually delivered, but in recent times, I think the problem has grown.

In this piece, he's specifically addressing class, which means he really needs at least to nod his head to Marx, but he doesn't. He writes either as if Marx didn't exist, or Marx is completely irrelevant to the subject, or (possibly more likely), he thinks he underatands Marx and expects the reader to assume he does, so he won't mention him. However, he doesn't understand Marx. We have to back up and see how this matters.

It's important to recognize that Marx had a point, and his basic taxonomy of class and class interests is accurate, something the American populist writer Ferdinand Lundberg instinctively understood. Where Marx and his ideological successors erred was in the question of what is to be done. Marxism suffered an irrecoverable defeat in the late 20th century when its methods collapsed, while capitalism managed to expand world prosperity to the point that India and China generated what might be called large middle classes, but which a populist like Lundberg would call a prosperous working class, which I think is more faithful to Marx's original idea.

This is the point Hanson misses. He divides US society into the "elites", the "masses", and the "truly poor":

Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence.

. . . The elite found in the truly poor — neglecting their old union-member, blue-collar Democratic base — an outlet for their guilt, noblesse oblige, condescension at a safe distance, call it what you will. The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes and romance of the far distant underclass.

This ignores Marx, and while historical and economic circumstances have changed, Marx has a clearer view of the classes.

Marxist Theory maintains that poverty, like wealth, is an inevitable consequence of a capitalist society. Marxists argue that poverty benefits the ruling class, as it ensures that there is always a workforce willing to accept low wages. Similarly, the existence of unemployment and job insecurity means that there is always a ‘reserve army of labour’ able and willing (or, unable to be unwilling!) to take their place if they are not happy. Capitalism and the bourgeoisie therefore benefit from the existence of poverty. It is not simply that there are rich and poor. It is rather that some are rich because some are poor.

In other words, poverty is an alternate state of the working class. In good times, workers will be slightly better off; in bad times, they'll be unemployed, poor, and anxious to find any work at all, which benefits capital. For the past 75 years or so, there's been a phase of capitalist prosperity that's discredited the Leninist strategy of revolution, but that doesn't change Marx's insight that the poor are an alternate state of the workers; the interests of the poor and the workers are aligned, and they are in fact the same class.

Hanson also conflates the poor with a group Marx recognized was a separate class, the Lumpenproletariat:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.

The poor are part of the proletariat, the working class. The Lumpenproletariat are a different group, opposed to the interests of the working class, which of course includes the poor. We've seen this vividly illustrated daily in two fairly recont TV series, A&E's The First 48, and Live PD, which was also on A&E until it was canceled there during the BLM panic (it's now been cloned in its original form as On Patrol: Live on the Reelz channel.) Both are the best sort of reality programming, unscripted, with camera crews simply following homicide detectives (The First 48) or uniformed patrol officers (Live PD/On Patrol: Live) in their daily routines.

The homicide detectives are the best illustration of Marx's insight into the Lumpenproletariat. It's well known that most homicides occur in poor inner-city areas, but what's not understood (including by Hanson) is that they're most frequently fratricidal killings among the Lumpenproletariat, drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and other petty criminals. And many of these are by no means poor in the conventional sense; they dress extravagantly with flashy jewelry and drive fancy cars, for which they may well kill each other. Their money comes in large measure from exploiting their poor working-class neighbors, something Marx understood.

Hanson accuses the eltes of fetishizing "the poor", but they're actually fetishizing the Lumpenproletariat, the inner-city street criminals who exploit the poor working class. George Floyd was a member of this group, and the BLM riots and the "defund the police" movement were utterly misleading in conflating the interests of the poor working class and the street criminals. Rap artists who get rich and famous adopting the personas of successful street criminals are another part of this phenomenon.

Thus one of the first victims of the BLM panic was the Live PD show, which was accused of glorifying the police. It was certainly the most-watched show on weekend cable, as its revival On Patrol: Live has instantly become as well. Those who watch it see an unmediated portrayal of routine social disorder, DUIs, domestic violence, addiction, homelessness, and petty crime. The police, aware that their conduct is on film, are models of courtesy and restraint, although there are also unavoidable situations where they must use appropriate force. The result is an increased understanding among viewers of the actual nature of law enforcement. Why anyone thought this should be canceled, especially at a time when this understanding should be promoted, is a mystery.

Hanson also disinguishes the "masses" from the "poor", and while the "masses" are opposed to the "elites", the "elites" fetishize the "poor". This is about as un-Marxist as you can get. Marx thought the Lumpenproletariat were an unreliable ally for anyone, much less the workers, but they'll steal from the elites as well if they get the chance. I'm inclined, on the other hand, to extend the definition of "middle class" to include the former working class; the interests of both are in opposition to the "elites", which I think are actually made up of two groups, the truly rich, the rentiers, who amount to much less than 1%, and the "gentry", academics, artists, politicians, high-level bureaucrats, corporate decisionmakers, and media figures who align themselves with the rentiers and associate with them in Ivy schools and similar institutions.

Two recent media figures illustrate the differences. Scott Adams got rich with the Dilbert comic strip that portrays the struggles of the white-collar tech working class -- but once he got rich, he aligned himself with the gentry. Mike Rowe, oddly enough, began as an artist, an opera singer, and gradually identified with the working class. He now spends much of his free time promoting the idea that it's possible to have a rewarding career without a college degree. He continues to be unabashedly pro-Trump, unlike Adams.

I think the contribution Trump has made to the political scene, aided to some extent by thinkers like Codevilla, has been to recognize this expanded definition of the "middle class" to include everything from those in upper-middle white collar jobs down actually to the urban poor, and this is reflected especially in increasing numbers of Latins who now identify as Republican. By the same token, the increasing bitterness of the elites toward such signs shows they're aware of it and will do anything they can to stop it.

Hanson's problem is that he comes to a conclusion -- the "masses" now hold the "elites" in disdain -- that isn't specific enough to be very useful, and the route he takes to get there doesn't add much insight. Bloviation gets us noplace.

Looking At The Other Side

On Friday, I looked at what seems to be the best case for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, that there was ample evidence of highly classified material stored there willy-nilly in rooms that, while they were under locks with video surveillance and controlled by the US Secret Service, had not been formally designated facilities eligible to receive classified material. This is a violation of bop-de-bop. Both Andrew McCarthy and Alan Dershowitz argue that this meets the probable cause standard for both an indictment and a search warrant.

On Saturday, I pointed out that in well-publicized prior cases, Hillary Clinton received no penalty for an equivalent violation under the "no reasonable prosecutor" standard, while John Deutch. having run afoul of the Clintons as CIA Director and being eased out of that job, went though several years of investigation in which neither the Justice Department nor the CIA would prosecute for similar violations. His case, clearly a political grudge by the Clintons, was ultimately resolved with a misdemeanor guilty plea the day before Bill Clinton left office, followed by a presidential pardon for that misdemeanor the following day.

I would say that Andrew McCarthy's conclusion is based on confirmation bias; as a former federal prosecutor, he would tend to view the existing system and his former colleagues favorably, while as a never Trumper, he's inclined to believe the worst of Trump. Dershowitz has been in the penalty box with legacy media ever since his defense of Trump in the first impeachment, and his interview with Newsweek was a chance to return to the game. Both McCarthy and Dershowitz make the bizarre assertion that the Justice Department, even though it had probable cause for the search warrant, won't indict based on the exact same probable cause. This if nothing else should be reason to question their view.

There's another problem with their assessment. It assumes that the boxes of White House documents in one or possibly other storage rooms at Mar-a-Lago were the sole object of the search, and the violation of bop-de-bop that this implies was the only crime, or element of the crime, being investigated. But much more of the affadavit was redacted than not, and we have no assurance that this is the case. We know at minimum that the FBI also searched the home office and had a safecracker open the safe in it, which suggests old secret documents mixed in with family miscellany cleaned out of the White House residence weren't the only objects of the search.

A federal judge's decision yesterday reinforces this view.

Trump and his legal team filed a motion Monday evening seeking an independent review of the records seized by the FBI during its raid of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, saying the decision to search his private residence just months before the 2022 midterm elections "involved political calculations aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump."

U.S. District Judge from the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen M. Cannon on Saturday afternoon said that the decision was made upon the review of Trump’s submissions and "the exceptional circumstances presented."

"Pursuant to Rule 53(b) (1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Court’s inherent authority, and without prejudice to the parties’ objections, the Court hereby provides notice of its preliminary intent to appoint a special master in this case," Cannon wrote in a filing Saturday.

A hearing is set for Sept. 1 at 1:00 p.m. in West Palm Beach, Fla. Cannon also ordered the Justice Department to file a response by Aug. 30 and provide, "under seal," a "more detailed Receipt for Property specifying all property seized pursuant to the search warrant executed on August 8, 2022."

This, if nothing else, strongly implies that the FBI was looking for much more than presumably declassified documents left over in the residence and packed into boxes, and given the redactions in the affadavit, we (along with Trump and his legal team) have no idea what it was. He and his attorneys have been able to convince a judge that this is a problem, which in itself should suggest McCarthy's and Dershowitz's view that the Justice Department probably won't indict is remarkably naive. (I don't think Trump should hire Dershowitz to defend him this time, by the way.)

While the McCarthy-Dershowitz line has dominated what news we've had about the case over the weekend, there's been at least one informed dissenting voice:

The FBI's former intelligence chief declared Friday the agency should not have criminalized the records dispute between Donald Trump and the National Archives and that the bureau appears to have failed to meet the probable cause standard for the invasive search of the former president's Florida estate.

"I think they're going to regret this," retired Assistant Director Kevin Brock told the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show after reviewing a heavily redacted affidavit the FBI used to persuade a judge to allow the Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago.

Brock, ordinarily an ardent defender of his former agency, has raised concerns for several days that the bureau did not exhaust other means to resolve the dispute over presidential and alleged classified records Trump kept. He said he did not believe the FBI adequately considered the possibility that Trump had wide latitude to declassify records and declare them personal.

He said Friday his concerns were only heightened by the court-ordered release of the search warrant affidavit, which he noted was still heavily redacted.

. . . Brock said if the redacted sections of the affidavit don't lay out evidence that Trump's possession of the documents was clearly illegal, then "basically we have a search of the man's residence without cause being stated as to why something illegal happened."

As a true crime fan, I often watch A&E's The First 48, which documents homicide investigations that can include arrests and search warrants based on the probable cause standard that McCarthy and Dershowitz discuss. In a typical case, detectives find surveillance video that confirms witness accounts of the perp's appearance and clothing. Using tools like phone records, they narrow down where the perp was, whom he was with, and where he went after the crime. That all establishes probable cause for a judge to sign both an arrest and a search warrant using the same standard. Often they raid the perp's home and conduct the search at the same time as they put him in cuffs -- and in the search, they find the murder weapon and bloody clothing they specified in the search warrant.

We have no indication that any such specific evidence was gathered at Mar-a-Lago, nor any indication of what they may have been looking for. Even though McCarthy and Dershowitz think it's a silver lining that Justice maybe won't indict, I actually think it's troubling. If what they were looking for was so deadly serious, criminal espionage activity by a former president, why on earth didn't they indict? If they don't indict, then this whole thing is trivial, no?

The retired FBI counterintelligence head puts it pretty clearly,

"This is not anything that rises, or passes the no smile test, that rises to the level where you would actually do a search with armed agents of almost any other federal employee, let alone the former president of the United States," he said.

In other words, the FBI is being dragged in to give credibility to a political dispute, which is effectively Trump's argument that the raid "involved political calculations aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump." I think at best, the government's case is going to die the death of a thousand cuts -- at best. More likely, there'll have to be resignations.

James Comey And The "No Reasonable Prosecutor" Standard

I'm astonished at how little analysis, smart or dumb, there's been in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago affadavit's limited unsealing -- but the situation is comparable to how poor the analysis has been of the Russo-Ukraine War. Journalists just aren't smart people, but when the news actually takes some work to report, they don't even show up.

Here's how I see it. Alan Dershowitz told Newsweek the same thing Andrew McCarthy said at National Review Online yesterday,

Donald Trump's former attorney Alan Dershowitz said that the unsealed affidavit supporting the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago gives the Justice Department enough evidence to indict the former president.

In an interview with Newsweek, Dershowitz said, "It sounds like there would be enough for an indictment, but like probable cause, an indictment is easy to get," explaining that prosecutors could simply point to the materials found at Trump's residence that he had unlawful access to.

This is no diferent from what Andrew McCarthy said in yesterday's link:

The Justice Department cannot properly get a search warrant unless it has probable cause that crimes were committed. If it has such probable cause, that almost always means it has a basis to make arrests[.]

As McCarthy put it, the standard for a search warrant and the standard for an indictment are the same, and in fact, a search warrant normally takes place simultaneously with an indictment or an arrest. The fact that they didn't coincide in this case may or may not mean something, but I don't agree with either Dershowitz or McCarthy that it might mean the Department of Justice won't indict Trump.

The redacted version contains on page 8 what I think is the main public evidence against Trump:

The NARA Referral stated that according to NARA's White House Liaison Division Director, a preliminary review of the FIFTEEN BOXES indicated that they contained "newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and postpresidential records, and 'a lot of classified records.' Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified."

This supports the view I've had all along that the materials in the boxes were random items that remained in the White House residence in the early morning of January 20, 2021 and were hurriedly picked up and placed in boxes by White House housekeeping staff. (Accounts suggest that the boxes weren't full, reflecting the haste of the procedure, so there is likely far less material in them than would be suggested by numbers like "15 boxes".) Again, Trump was authorized to take classified materials into the residence from the office areas, and as best I understand the legalities of the matter, he automatically declassified them in the act of doing this. As outlined in this analysis from John Solomon,

Trump's office issued a statement saying the records found in Mar-a-Lago were originally taken by the president from the Oval Office to his White House residence under a "standing" declassification order. . . . [All observers] agree every president has wide latitude to declassify what they want, when they want while they are in office. Some legal observers also noted a careful choice of language in the National Archives May 8, 2022 letter sent to Trump's legal team. Rather than call the documents found at Mar-a-Lago "classified" they described the recovered papers as "documents with classification markings," language that leaves open the possibility that declassification may be disputed in the future.

The problem that jumps out at me, which as far as I can tell nobody has yet mentioned in the context of the partly unsealed affadavit, is that former FBI Director James Comey recommended regarding Hillary Clinton's transmission of classified materials on an unsecured e-mail server, a very similar case, that

Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.

In other words, there have been cases like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, respectively FBI and CIA agents, who deliberately obtained classiified information and sold it to hostile countries. On the other hand, there have been government officials who did not observe the full set of protocols in handling classified materials -- indeed, they may even have been reckless or careless -- but did not do it with criminal intent. Comey went on to say,

All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

And of course, Hillary Clinton's case is now a clear example of, as Comey puts it, "how similar situations have been handled in the past". Another "similar situation" is CIA Director John Deutch:

Deutch left the CIA on December 15, 1996, and soon after it was revealed that several of his laptop computers contained classified information wrongfully labeled as unclassified. In January 1997, the CIA began a formal security investigation of the matter. Senior management at CIA declined to pursue fully the security breach. Over two years after his departure, the matter was referred to the Department of Justice, where Attorney General Janet Reno declined prosecution. She did, however, recommend an investigation to determine whether Deutch should retain his security clearance. Deutch had agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for mishandling government secrets on January 19, 2001, but President Clinton pardoned him in his last day in office, two days before the Justice Department could file the case against him.

Neither Clinton nor Deutch, however, was president, and neither had the president's authority to declassify. Both mishandled classified information, but Clinton received no penalty, while Deutch's penalty was quite mild. Neither Clinton nor Deutch was raided by the FBI. Note once again that the criterion for a raid is precisely the same as that for an arrest or indictment -- it's no good to suggest, like both Dershowitz and McCarthy do, that maybe Justice won't indict; they've already made Trump's case much more serious by opening the door, which they didn't do for Clinton or Deutch.

As far as we can tell from what's been unsealed and other accounts, the materials at Mar-a-Lago were gathered up from the White House residence at the end of Trump's term and placed willy-nilly into boxes which were sealed, loaded into moving trucks, and placed into locked storage rooms at Mar-a-Lago under video surveillance, with the premises under US Secret Service protection, where they either remained until Trump returned them voluntarily in January 2022, or they were seized in the FBI raid on August 8. They do not appear to have been accessed otherwise, as far as we currently know.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the conduct that James Comey excused under the "no reasonable prosecutor" standard as it applied either to Hillary Clinton in 2016 or John Deutch in 1997 was actually more serious than Trump's with the documents found a Mar-a-Lago. I think it will be very difficult for the current administration and the FBI as an institution to avoid the inference that the FBI is routinely used as a partisan political police force.