A Closer Look At QAnon Shaman

Much of the up to now suppressed January 6 Capitol footage that Tucker Carlson ran Monday night features Jacob Chansley, aka QAnon Shaman. There's been remarkably little commentary on Chansley's legal situation, although he's currently in federal prison serving a 41-month sentence on one count of obstructing an official proceeding, for which he pleaded guilty on September 3, 2021. The severity of the sentence was explained by the judge:

Judge Royce Lamberth has had Chansley held in jail since his arrest, despite his multiple attempts to gain sympathy and his release.

Other judges are likely to look to Lamberth’s sentence as a possible benchmark, since Chansley is one of the first felony defendants among more than 660 Capitol riot cases to receive a punishment.

. . . “He made himself the image of the riot, didn’t he?” Lamberth said to Chansley’s defense attorney. “For good or bad, he made himself the very image of this whole event.”

The release of the January 6 footage that depicts his role more clearly during the Carlson broadcast raises questions about whether this was Chansley's actual intent (a record of the whole show is here.) According to the New York Post,

For several minutes, the video shows, Robishaw and another officer follow Chansley as he tried to enter the Senate chamber. At one point, Robishaw tried a locked door with the Senate seal etched on its frosted glass.

At another point, Chansley and the officers pass a group of seven other cops, who seem to pay them no mind.

Chansley and the two officers eventually find an unlocked door and one of the policemen holds it open after Chansley lets himself onto the Senate floor. The DOJ timeline confirmed that Robishaw followed Chansley into the chamber as the “Shaman” took the seat on the dais recently occupied by Vice President Mike Pence.

The most obvious conclusion I can draw from the footage is that Chansley's own behavior appears to be disorganized and unfocused, irrespective of any other judgment that might be applied to it. He was wandering the halls at random, with no apparent objective in mind, and the police simply followed him, making no attempt to stop him or detain him, and in at least one case, trying to open a door for him, although it isn't necessarily clear if that was what Chansley himself wanted done.

In other words, with only a layman's understandiong of mental health, adding this to his bizarre dress and reported ranting, I've got to wonder if Chansley was all there. The incomplete record we have suggests he wasn't:

Chansley's defense lawyer Albert Watkins said that it's possible his client could cut a plea deal after officials at the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) diagnosed him with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety.

. . . Watkins said his client has expressed some delusions including 'believing that he was indeed related directly to Jesus and Buddha.'

. . . Watkins says Chansley's 2006 mental health records from his time in the U.S. Navy show a similar diagnosis to the BOP's.

Watkins said authorities will need to determine how Chansley can get access to the treatment he needs to 'actively participate in his own defense.' Pleading guilty to a charge negates the need for a trial, but defendants still have to be declared mentally competent to do so.

Chansley was discharged from the US Navy after two years in 2007:

A Navy official told Task & Purpose Chansley was booted from the service after he refused to take the anthrax vaccine. Citing privacy regulations, officials declined to provide the characterization of his discharge.

Chansley's attorney Watkins referred to some type of Navy psychological evalutation, but as is routine, this would be confidential. Nevertheless, given his public conduct on January 6 and the evaluation by the US Bureau of Prisons, it's certainly credible that he'd been displaying symptoms of mental problems throuhout at least the prior 14 years. For whatever reason, Watkins seems not to have pursued an effort to have had him declared mentally incompetent to plead guilty.

On November 30, 2021, only three months after his guilty plea, Chansley appealed his 41-month sentence:

Chansley’s appeal came a day after the federal judge who accepted his plea and who sentenced him in U.S. District Court in Washington signed off on his move to replace his defense attorney Albert Watkins with a new lawyer, John Pierce.

. . . It is extremely difficult to get a guilty plea and subsequent sentence in federal court reversed on appeal, particularly because judges are careful to have defendants confirm that they understand that they are waiving their rights to appeal the plea or sentence in most cases.

However, a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel — essentially an argument that a defense lawyer badly botched the case — is one potential way to win a reversal of a guilty plea.

A legal nonprofit group founded by Chansley’s new attorney last week said ineffective assistance of counsel may be a ground for Chansley to appeal his conviction. A legal filing Tuesday by Pierce did not lay out Chansley’s grounds for his appeal, which will be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Another problem that isn't yet clear is whether Chansley's counsel, either Watkins or Pierce, was aware of the January 6 footage that shows Chansley's actual conduct on that day. He entered the Senate chamber and sat in the vice president's seat only after being escorted there by Capitol police, who made no effort to restrain him and appear to have given him the impression that they were there to assist him. According to this report from Julie Kelly,

Capitol Police and the Justice Department designated the recordings as “highly sensitive” material in March 2021; the trove remains under tight protective orders and defendants must agree to strict rules before gaining access to clips entered as evidence against them.

Capitol Police turned over to the FBI roughly 14,000 hours of video covering the hours of noon and 8:00 p.m. on January 6 but the full 24-hour reel has been in the hands of House Democrats for two years—reportedly the footage that Carlson’s team was authorized to view.

If prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence in the January 6 recordings from Chansley's counsel, or if Watkins made ineffective use of them, that would be highly problematic for the government's case, and it would certainly support a claim that Watkins had been ineffective as Chansley's counsel.

The response of the Capitol Police to questions about the new footage also doesn't seem to match the depiction of actual events:

The footage appears to show officers walking with the horn-hatted Chansley through the halls of the U.S. Capitol Building.

Capitol police were asked for their response to the footage and the argument that an effort was not made to stop the Jan. 6 demonstrator from reaching the Senate floor.

"Before this video was recorded, a violent group of people fought through multiple police lines and illegally broke into the U.S. Capitol, which was closed for a Joint Session of Congress," the police force said in a statement to Just the News.

. . . The police force statement also reads: "Moments earlier, our officers and agents had to evacuate the Senate chamber, which was closed to the public, to rush elected officials and staffers to safety. After that, multiple people snuck into the chamber. The officer was vastly outnumbered by rioters. At this point, it is clear the officer is trying to get everyone out of the chamber."

However, this refers to an entirely separate event, quite possibly involving a different officer or officers who were with Chansley in the Carlson footage, and who in one scene were with seven other officers, none of whom made any attempt to detain or restrain Chensley. Chensley throughout many minutes in the Carlson footage was never with more than one or two others, and the officer or officers with him and his companions never seem even to have remonstrated with them.

There are many unanswered questions. This story, ostensibly a "major update" following the Carlson show, isn't entirely credible:

A former federal prosecutor representing J6 clients revealed that Chansley very well may be released from custody soon.

“My client, Jake Chansley, was a big part of Tucker’s first big rollout of video tonight,” said his attorney on Twitter. “There is a story beyond just the fact that the Govt had video Jake’s attorney never looked at. Jake is set to be released from custody soon.”

But the story refers only to a Twitter thread by someone going under the name shipreckedcrew. I've been trying to figure out who "shipreckedcrew" is -- possibly Chansley's new attorney, Pierce -- but I've got to say that he isn't acting like defense attorneys I usually see as a true crime fan. His statements on Twitter still leave it unclear whether the Justice Department or the January 6 Committee withheld evidence from the defense.

As a retired guy with nothing else to take priority, I spent maybe three hours off and on researching this case on the web over the past day or so. So far, I haven't seen a single full-time paid reporter or commentator who's done even that much work in the wake of the Carlson Monday night show.

Judge Lamberth says he "made himself the image" of January 6, but it seems to me that the depiction of him was something much more like the exploitation of a mentally handicapped individual to suit the media's purpose.

Let's Revisit An Old Story

The photo above is of the avuncular Dr Francis Collins, former director of the US National Institutes of Health, who also happens to be a prominent Evangelical who has periodically argued that "rigorous science" poses no conflict with religious belief. But I suppose that depends on what the meanings of "rigorous science" and "religious belief" are -- and they certainly haven't stood in the way of Dr Collins getting the prestigious Templeton Award, notwithstanding his direct subordinate Dr Fauci has constantly insisted that the anti-religious COVID lockdown policies involving church closures are based on "science".

In the context of the recent revelation that Dr Fauci in February 2020 commissioned an academic study that he then cited to refute the lab-leak theory of COVID's origin, it's worth revisiting a story that I first covered here last August, wherein Collins effectively ordered his subordinate Fauci and a colleague to stir up an equivalent academic takedown of another strain of COVID dissent:

The memo first came to light due to a freedom-of-information action by a public interest group in December 2021. At the time, informed medical opinion said,

This week, emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research revealed what I see as worrisome communication between Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and others within the National Institutes of Health in the fall of 2020. At issue was the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter written in October 2020 and eventually signed by thousands of scientists. It argues that Covid-19 policy should focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable, and largely re-open society and school for others.

. . . Collins appeared on television this week to confirm that the email was authentic, and that he stood by the message. At the time, he believed the Great Barrington Declaration idea of focused protection would result in more deaths than the alternative view of one-size-fits all restrictions. Collins also confirmed that he believed the three authors of the declaration were “fringe” scientists.

. . . What concerns me about the NIH director’s email and his interview on television is that he appeared unwilling to have this dialogue. Collins’s day job does not make him arbiter of scientific truth, the Pope for all scientists. On questions of unprecedented pandemic policy, he is surely entitled to his opinion — as we all are — but his is just one opinion of many.

. . . Collins’s response to a memo signed by thousands of scientists should not have been to call for an immediate and devastating take down, but to use his pulpit as NIH director to hold a series of public discussions and dialogues.

I think the memo, and the overall tone of Collins's response to the problem, is a good indication of Collins's actual management style, which seems to have been anything but avuncular. He was saying, in tones that I well recall from my days as an Ivy Leaguer, that there had better be a quick and devastating public takedown of these guys, if Fauci knew what was good for him. In other words, Fauci had better get on it and find a presigious stooge in a lab coat to write it, stat. (I would also suggest that the implication there included the availability of generous NIH money to pay the prestigious stooge.)

I strongly suspect that Fauci's commissioning of the February 2020 study that discounted the lab-leak theory had the precise same origin -- he was following orders from Collins, both to sponsor the study and to use it to support the NIH agenda.

What we're beginning to see as the Morning After phase of the COVID panic continues to unfold is that there was an inner circle that didn't just influence public opinion but micromanaged it.

[I]n the early months of the pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker would not allow his network to chase down the lab-leak story because he believed it was a "Trump talking point," according to a well-placed CNN insider.

"People are slowly waking up from the fog," the insider told Fox News Digital. "It is kind of crazy that we didn't chase it harder."

But what was Collins/Fauci's problem with the lab-leak theory? As House Judiciary Chairman Jordan put it,

"Why was Dr. Fauci so consumed with making sure the narrative wasn't about the lab?" the Ohio Republican told Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures" host Maria Bartiromo. "I think it's because they were doing gain of function research there, he didn't want that out, and that was the narrative that everyone on the left bought into."

I think the path to an answer lies in questions that have been around since at least December 2021:

The National Institutes of Health allowed a U.S. nonprofit it funds to police its own controversial research on bat coronaviruses in China, raising new concerns about insufficient oversight at the agency.

. . . In December 2017, the funding for some gain-of-function research was resumed under carefully constructed guidelines for “Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight,” or P3CO — but the language suggested by Daszak helped the group evade this oversight as well. In July 2018, NIAID program officers decided that the experiments on humanized mice — which had been conducted a few months earlier — would get a pass from these restrictions as long as EcoHealth Alliance immediately notified appropriate agency officials according to the circumstances that the group had laid out.

. . . In a written response to questions submitted in September and October, an NIH spokesperson told The Intercept that the rule that was supposed to trigger a stop to the research was added “out of an abundance of caution.” Similarly, in a letter sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform last month, NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak called the rule “an additional layer of oversight,” implying that the agency had devised the rule itself. But the notes reviewed by The Intercept show that the language was inserted at Daszak’s suggestion and that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance worked together to evade additional oversight.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the circumstances that led to what's looking more and more like the origins of the pandemic were exceptional, a violation of existing NIH policy, and the result of some sort of deal at the policymaking level, which is to say, at the level of Dr Francis Collins. What were the incentives for the deal? Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance got money. What did Dr Collins get? I'll bet it was something, and it wasn't something Dr Collins, prominent Evangelical, wanted to be made public.

Templeton Award indeed.

Looks Like We Just Got A New Overton Window

One intriguing indicator that we've reached the Morning After phase of the COVID moral panic is how the Overton Window, the permissible range of opinion on public issues, has changed almost instantly over roughly the past week. At the peak of the panic, the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak in China wasn't just a minority view, it was a pariah view associated with racists and conspiracy theorists. But as of this past Saturday,

FBI Director Chris Wray told Fox News' Bret Baier this week that COVID-19 "most likely" came from a Chinese lab.

. . . The Energy Department, which had been undecided on the origin of the pandemic, concluded that the coronavirus most likely spread due to a mishap at a Chinese laboratory, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and "key members of Congress."

. . . Beyond the FBI and Energy Department, the National Intelligence Council and four other unnamed agencies assess at "low confidence" that the COVID-19 pandemic originated due to natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the Journal.

The CIA and another unnamed agency are reportedly still undecided.

At the same time, we might also conclude that respectable opinion is beginning to entertain the idea that the panic was manufactured by public health officials who were fully aware of what they were doing. Recent revelations suggest that this was the case in both the US and the UK. In the UK,

Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “squeeze the pants off” the public and ensure they comply with lockdown, leaked news from The Telegraph has revealed.

. . . Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that “the fear/guilt factor” was “vital” to “boost messaging” during the third national lockdown in January 2021.

The previous month, Matt Hancock, then Health Secretary, appeared in a message to suggest that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would help prepare the ground for the looming lockdown by scaring people to comply.

In almost so many words, these officials agreed that the way to influence the public was to incite panic. In the US, Dr Fauci commissioned an academic paper using his power to approve research funding and then used the paper he'd commissioned to support his official line on the lab leak theory:

New emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the deceptive nature of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

They show he “prompted” or commissioned — and had final approval on — a scientific paper written specifically in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors.

What's changed? Matt Hancock was UK health minister, apparently equivalent to Dr Fauci in his influence, from 2018 to 2021. He had a role in starting the panic, but he left office well before the panic began to subside in mid-2022. On the other hand, Dr Fauci didn't retire from all his public roles until the end of 2022, while his boss, Francis Collins, retired as director of the US National Institutes of Health at the end of 2021. Both Fauci and Collins appear to have been in full agreement on how to handle issues like the lab leak theory, and records have already shown that together, they closely coordinated the COVID strategies of the public health estabilshment.

It's likely that the Overton Window shifted so quickly in the US, if not in the UK, due to the narrow Republican win in the 2022 midterms, though the retirements of both Fauci and Collins, as well as the difficulty Dr Rochelle Walensky had in establishing a credible public profile, also enabled the shift. Thus we have a Republican House leader stating flat out opinions that only weeks before would have been unacceptable:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said Sunday he wants to get to the bottom of one "fundamental question" concerning the ongoing investigation into the origins of the COVID-19: pandemic: Why was Dr. Anthony Fauci trying to hide the narrative that the coronavirus was leaked from China's Wuhan Institution of Virology?

. . . "With this virus, they have told us all kinds of things that turned out to be false," said Jordan. "They told us it didn't come from a lab, now it looks like it sure did because the Department of Energy, FBI, everyone says it came from a lab. They said it wasn't gain-of-function research, but it sure looks like it was. They said it wasn't our tax dollars used at that Wuhan Institute of Virology, yes, they were. Then they told us the vaccinated couldn't get it, couldn't transmit it, there was no such thing as natural immunity, so time and time again they told us things that were not accurate."

In June 2021, Forbes reported,

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci said Wednesday. “All of the things I have spoken about, consistently, from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people.”

Fauci is no stranger to criticism. The nation’s leading infectious disease official was a frequent target of former President Donald Trump, who called Fauci “a disaster” and floated the idea of firing him. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump told reporters in October.

Indeed, Fauci said at the time the idea of firing him and putting him in jail was "totally preposterous".

WATCH: Dr. Anthony Fauci says growing Republican attacks on him are "painfully ridiculous." #MTPDaily

Dr. Fauci: "People want to fire me or put me in jail for what I've done. Mainly, follow the science. ... It's preposterous. Totally preposterous." pic.twitter.com/Koq10aIajF

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) June 9, 2021

But times are changing. As Ed Morrissey wrote in the Hot Air link I cited yesterday,

[T]he conclusion that COVID-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology sets up an accountability tree that threatened those in power during the pandemic. NIH chief Francis Collins reversed the previous ban on gain-of-function (GOF) research on pathogens over the prophetic warnings against it from the Cambridge Working Group. That decision by Collins in December 2017 allowed funding to flow through the NIH and NIAID headed by Anthony Fauci to groups like the Eco Health Alliance, which funded the Wuhan lab — even while the State Department warned the next year that their Level 4 biosafety practices were “sloppy,” and also predicted disaster as the Cambridge Working Group had in 2014.

. . . [T]he people who made those choices avoided accountability for them, and were protected by news organizations, social-media platforms, and the government’s law enforcement and scientific bureaus by suppressing any questions about it.

What's interesting is that we aren't looking at new facts at all. Much of the information on the Wuhan lab has been available since before the COVID panic began. The question is how and why relevant information was suppressed and public panic was stoked -- and questions on whether people should have been fired, and whether people should still be sent to jail, are a lot less preposterous.

On the other hand, if Trump was saying in October 2022 that he should have fired Fauci, it's worth asking him again why he didn't.

Cat Prohibitionism And The COVID Moral Panic

As I reflected on yesterday's post about the deliberations in the UK over rounding up everyone's pet cat, it suddenly occurred to me that cat prohibitionism isn't a new phenomenon. There's been a long-term movement in the UK that insists that pet cats kill songbirds, which is thought to be something that must be curbed if not halted entirely, but more recently, a body of literature has grown in the US that insists that pet cats are an environmental hazard. At the link,

Free-ranging domestic cats Felis catus, from owned pets to feral cats, impact biodiversity through predation, fear effects, competition, disease and hybridization. Scientific knowledge regarding these impacts has recently increased, making it timely to assess the role of nature conservation legislation in this connection.

. . . Many national authorities around the world are currently required, under international law, to adopt and implement policies aimed at preventing, reducing or eliminating the biodiversity impacts of free-ranging domestic cats, in particular by (a) removing feral and other unowned cats from the landscape to the greatest extent possible and (b) restricting the outdoor access of owned cats.

Factors that can influence or impair the application of these obligations include considerations of feasibility, scientific uncertainty, the interests of cat owners and the (perceived) interests of domestic cats themselves. Even if such factors may to some extent explain why many authorities have hitherto failed to take effective action to address the threats posed by free-ranging domestic cats, from a legal perspective these factors provide little ground for justifying non-compliance with international wildlife law.

Although this particular link dates from February 2020, just as the COVID panic was starting, this link from 2015 says,

Free-ranging domestic cats are an environmental disaster. They may be the most destructive invasive species, the “single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals” according to a study (pdf) co-authored by scientists at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. These authors found that domestic cats annually kill from 1.4-3.7 billion birds and 6.9-20.7 billion mammals in the U.S.

For radical environmentalists, a world without domestic cats would be a big improvement, the only obstacle to which would be legions of cat ladies that would make an effective solution unfeasible, at least in the short term. But enlightened public policy, just as it can eliminate environmental hazards like SUVs and gas stoves, requires only deliberation and fortitude in its implementation.

Yesterday we saw the testimony of Lord Bethell, a former deputy health minister in Her Majesty's government, that it was at least briefly considered that all pet cats in the UK be rounded up, ostensibly because they might carry COVID, but it's hard to avoid thinking that, COVID or not, it would be a good idea just because. After all, feral cats are an invasive species, but the problem isn't just feral cats, because not all pet cats are indoors-only, not all pet cats are spayed or neutered, and pet cats can create feral cats just like that. So round up all the cats. Check with your local animal control office for the day you must turn yours in, or we'll come for her. Past that date, harboring a cat wird schwer bestraft.

The problem is that cats aren't the only species that thrives around humans, and not just pets. Raccoons. rats, and possums thrive on human trash, as do crows and ravens in suburban areas. Lots of bird species eat seeds and fruit from lawns, gardens, and fields. Mice live in barns. And from a radical environmentalist standpoint, humans themselves are an invasive species. and even if we can't exterminate them all, the theory is that the planet has already far exceeded its capacity. An effective solution to that problem is unfeasible in the short term.

But hey, getting rid of all the cats is a good start. If the authorities can stir up a good panic, the short-term feasibility barrier might be overcome. After all, even the cat ladies are huddled in their homes in fear of the virus, right? This Ed Morrissey piece at Hot Air is a pretty good status check on the current phase of the morning after phase of the COVID moral panic, and it concludes,

The government and the media establishment weren’t interested in science. They were interested in compliance. And they imposed on us exactly what Thompson correctly identifies as an anti-science regime in which priors are never re-evaluated, conclusions never questioned, and the higher functionaries are protected from any criticism or dissent. That isn’t science; it’s a religious cult with white lab coats. And all of these institutions that are supposed to serve the people turned into its enforcement arm instead, a mass of corruption that the media still won’t address.

In some ways, the whole COVID episode was an experiment in feasibility. It sounds as though in the UK, certain feasibilities were entertained that might piggyback on the manufactured COVID crisis, but at least for now, however close the call may have been, they were quietly dropped. I very much doubt that the people who wanted those things done will drop them for good, though.

It Could Have Been A Lot Worse

Via Instapundit,

THIS ERA WILL BE LOOKED BACK ON AS ONE OF MASS HYSTERIA AND OFFICIAL INCOMPETENCE: The U.K. Briefly Considered Killing All Pet Cats Early in the Pandemic.

To be fair, that’s only because it was an era of mass hysteria and official incompetence.

Plus: “The revelations have sparked astonishment from some on social media, with users sharing images of their own cats and vowing they would have put up a fight.” Meh. Most of them would have gone along. Many would have bragged about their compliance and shamed those who resisted.

The link is to a story in TIME:

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the virus, the U.K. government briefly considered asking the public to exterminate every cat amid fears that the pets could spread the disease.

Lord Bethell, a former deputy Health Minister from 2020 to 2021, revealed the news Wednesday during an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News.

. . . Bethell added in the Channel 4 News interview that there was a moment where evidence suggested there was merit in taking the extraordinary measure but it was investigated and ultimately dismissed.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, animals do not appear to play a significant role in spreading COVID-19 to humans, but cases of animals have been documented and most of them were “infected after contact with people with COVID-19.”

I posted not long ago about the hospital ships sent to New York and Los Angeles that, with the field hospitals that were sent as well, remained mostly empty and unused for weeks until they were quietly recalled. I noted that this was during the early days of the panic, stoked by the Imperial College London model of COVID spread that was almost immediately discredited -- but it nevertheless served as the justification for continued lockdowns, closure of houses of worship, shutdown of businesses, schools, playgrounds, beaches, and the rest, for which the talking heads are only now reluctantly and tardily acknowledging there was never medical justification.

Thus it would have been only a very small step for Dr Fauci to have convinced President Trump that indeed, all cats would need to be euthanized, and Drs Fauci, Birks, and assorted other stooges in lab coats would have stood in a line at his shoulder nodding their heads in agreement. Then for all I know, the cat owners would have complained that dogs weren't included in the extermination order, and after days of public kerfuffle, dogs would have had to be rounded up as well, with Dr Fauci insisting we follow the science.

And Trump would have been on board.

This is one reason I'm skeptical of a Trump reboot. He was the one responsible for ordering the hospital ships and endorsing the national lockdowns, and he didn't utter a peep when "15 days to slow the spread" lasted for months. Someone at some point needs to ask him what he should have done in hindsight, and there's no question that even without the benefit of hindsight, Gov DeSantis maintained a much saner public policy perspective as events unrolled. Trump let himself be bullied by Fauci and Birx, two unlikely figures, and my instinct is that this severely diminished his stature in advance of the 2020 election.

Why Are The Biden Lawyers Squirrely?

One thing nobody's covered lately is the strange tendency of Biden lawyers no longer to be Biden lawyers. I've already noted here that Patrick Moore, a former Obama White House counsel who appears to have been the key individual tasked with cleaning out President Biden's Penn Biden Center office and who had quietly notified the Justice Department of the classified documents, was no longer representing Joe Biden following the January 9 revelation of the find. Via that link, his first day at a new job with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office was January 18.

More recently, one of Hunter Biden's high-powered defense attorneys, Joshua Levy, has just as quietly withdrawn from that case.

Levy has removed himself from the case, reportedly due to infighting within Hunter’s legal team and specifically with Abbe Lowell, who was hired in December to defend Hunter and the Biden family from nine congressional probes, including money laundering and wire fraud.

. . . Levy was reportedly discontented with Lowell’s legal strategies and feared that his tactics could flop. In February, Lowell was a part of the effort to send Rudy Giuliani, Tony Bobulinski, and 12 others “litigation hold” letters to preserve “Laptop from Hell” records, a move seen by some critics as a public relations tactic to change the troubling narrative for the Biden family.

The link quotes the New York Times on the chronology of Levy's engagement and details the conflicts within the legal team:

President Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, had recommended Mr. Levy for the job. But Mr. Levy had clashed with Kevin Morris, a lawyer and close adviser to Hunter Biden who has lent him money to pay his back taxes and some other bills, according to a person familiar with the strategy. Mr. Morris and Hunter Biden brought on Mr. Lowell late last year, prompting Mr. Levy’s departure.

In previous posts here, I've listed Levy and Lowell as part of Hunter's legal team, as well as Chris Clark and Keven Morris. With Levy out, that leaves Lowell, Clark, and Morris, but some of the stories I've seen suggest that Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, who appears to be a friend of Hunter as well as a financial angel, is calling the shots. But Morris is an entertainment lawyer, not a criminal defense attorney who specializes in issues like taxes and money laundering, which were Levy's skill set. Clark has been representing Hunter in his tax case with the Delaware US Attorney, but a major problem is the commingling of Biden family funds that's likely to metastasize and affect Joe and his brother Jim, if not other members of the Biden family.

Down the road, it's hard not to be suspicious that Joe continues to rely on Hunter as a key confidant, but the problem is that Hunter is an addict who's been in and out of rehab for more than a decade, and if nothing else, his judgment, especially over his own case and the family's legal exposure, is likely to be seriously impaired. And his case will always be closely linked with Joe's and the rest of the family.

This also leaves aside the separate issue of the doubts within the FBI about what led up to the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

According to the Washington Post, the raid took place only after months of debate between the FBI and prosecutors from the Department of Justice. The FBI argued that a request for a full search of the property would have sufficed, according to two senior officials from the bureau.

. . . Most of this we knew already, but not the infighting at the DoJ. So what does this leak to the Washington Post tell us? First off, it probably signals that prosecutors didn’t end up with a usable case even after the raid. Success incentivizes unity; failure incentivizes blame games. The FBI’s two “senior officials” want everyone to know it wasn’t their idea, which wouldn’t be necessary unless the raid and the prosecution has flopped.

I've posted here on what seems to be a new "deep throat" phenomenon whereby unnamed FBI officials brief the Washington Post on chicanery at the White House, just as they did 50 years ago. All I can think is this is a continuation of what we've been seeing since the middle of January, while Biden attorneys are quietly heading for the exits. Meanwhile, the reporters are still working from home.

I'm Not Sure If We're Looking At The Same Church

I note another blog post from Fr Longenecker today, Quo Vadis Traditionalists?, in which he discusses options that might be open to traditionalists who may be frustrated by recent restrictions on the Latin mass. On one hand, I'm not sure of his definition of "traditionalist", and in that light, he's been clear to say he isn't one, which separates him from someone like Fr Zuhlsdorf. But Bp Barron also calls himself a "traditionalist" if by "tradition" one means "adherence to the Church's ecumenical councils, incluiding the Second Vatican Council".

Fr Longenecker proposes avenues for Catholics who disagree with restrictions on the Latin mass:

[W]hat will be the response of those Catholics who are devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass given Rome’s latest round of restrictions? Several things: Some will migrate to the SSPX. Others will seek out other forms of reverent, traditional Catholic worship– an Ordinariate parish, a Byzantine parish or a Novus Ordo that is celebrated in a traditional manner. Others, who are more hard line, will practice subversive obedience. “We can’t have the Latin Mass in the parish church? OK. We’ll move it to the parish fellowship hall, the gym or the Rectory chapel. In fact, what we’re doing is raising the money to build a Latin Mass chapel on the church campus. We’ll worship there instead of the parish church.”

He puts this in a somewhat peculiar context:

What complicates this problem even further–and something which the Englishman [Cardinal] Roche doesn’t seem to understand at all is the entrepreneurial spirit of American conservative Catholicism.

Having been a close observer of the first ten years of an "entrepreneurial" option among those he lists, the North American ordinariate, I've got to say that the reality on the ground isn't what Fr Longenecker suggests it might be. He suggests conservative Catholics might raise money for their own projects, and indeed, that's what we've seen over and over in the ordinariate, with results that have been at best disappointing, but also in some cases like the St Barnabas Omaha ordinariate parish, flagrantly mismanaged. There, its pastor was removed for out-of-control spending that resulted in the need to sell off parish property, but a new administrator has since been faced with continuing divisive issues within the parish. As a visitor put it to me in an e-mail,

To me, those who give their typical diocesan parish a failing grade and then try to get an Ordinariate parish going are like parents who give up on the local school system and try to get a charter school going, or a private alternative . This may benefit the small number who attend, but does nothing to improve local education generally. Perhaps the issue of personal responsibility in the area of education s a political one, but in the case of the Church I think it is moral. Establishing a little enclave of "people like us" is the exact opposite of evangelisation. The financial saga of St Barnabas, Omaha is a depressing example of how “privatisation” is fundamentally the wrong approach, IMHO.

Beyond that, I've got to say that in my case, a thwarted attempt to enter the Church via a parish that failed to join the ordinariate forced me, kicking and screaming, to discover how reverent and worthwhile a diocesan parish can be. What's continued to fascinate me is that the St John's Seminary of the Los Angeles archdiocese, which has been a conspicuous target of conservative agitators who don't live here, continues to provide a steady supply of remarkable priests. Some of them rotate through our parish, either as residents while in seminary or associates after ordination, and then go on to other parishes throughout the archdiocese. What strikes me is that these priests set an example that makes me think the Catholic priesthood has actually become a viable career option for capable, healthy men seeking a worthwhile use of their talents.

Their standard of education, communication, pastoral leadeership, and management style is uniformly high. It's also plain that the level of support and the level of expectation from the archdiocese are both just as high. Our parish programs also involve parishioners from other parishes in the area, and the sense I have is that the level of pastoral care isn't unique to our own parish. Nobody I've gotten to know is disgruntled, and certainly not to the point that anyone is proposing a campaign to build aomething like a Latin mass chapel.

Fr Longenecker deosn't mention what I think are two much more significant "entrepreneurial" phenomena, Ascension Presents and Bp Barron's Word on Fire. Ascension has sponsored two widely available series on YouTube and elsewhere, Bible in a Year and now Catechism in a Year. I'm following the Catechism in a Year, which at the moment has about 110,000 subscribers on YouTube. This is the 1992 St John Paul II Catechism, which is explicitly based on the Second Council.

Word on Fire is, among other things, a high-quality publishing outlet; last year it published an edition of the Second Council documents with commentary by Bp Barron. I bought this and read it. I can only agree with Bp Barron that if people have a problem with the Council, they at least ought to read its documents and commentary. But Word on Fire publishes a great deal else.

One big point I'm taking away from the Catechism in a Year is that salvation is corporate and takes place in the context of the Church. I'm not at all sure that it solves anything to suggest that people set up little enclaves of the like-minded, especially when the US Church is currently displaying remarkable energy. I'm back to the question I used to ask on my old blog, "What problem are we trying to solve?" What problem, for instance, is the North American ordinariate trying to solve if it's attracted so few disaffected Episcopalians after ten years? After all, even Fr Longenecker acknowledges that the point of ordinariates was to allow Anglicsns to preserve their traditions and liturgy in a Catholic context, but now he's suggesting they're actually for disgruntled Catholics.

And of course, we've got to acknowledge that fairly soon after its founding, the US ordinariate extended its target market to Methodists and AME. Isn't it worth asking why this was done and why, in light of a Methodist schism even bigger than the "continuing" movement for Episcopalians, not a single Methodist parish has shown an interest? Instead, the ordinariate is being proposed as a boutique option for Catholics to practice what Fr Longenecker recommends as “subversive obedience”. I'm scratching my head.