Joe's Schedule

Over the past couple of weeks, I thought I was beginning to see a pattarn of increased activity from the big guy, if only due to the increased coverage of his fumbles and gaffes on the road. It turns out I was right, I checked his daily public schedule. Yesterday and today, he's in Texas. Tuesday,, he was in Arizona. On Saturday, he gave the Gridiron Club address; on Sunday, he had St Patrick's Day activities.

Last week, he was in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Michigan. There's been a flurry of activity ever since the State of the Union, but before that, it was business as usual, long weekends at Camp David or in Wilmington. although there were similar campaign trips in February. This is in major contrast to his schedule last year; via the Washington Times,

Leisure time has become a factor in the White House — and the Republican Party is tracking the trajectory of it while providing the damning numbers as well.

“President Biden requires a lot of vacation. In 2023, Biden spent 142 days — 38.9% of the year — on vacation. That includes at least 30 trips to Delaware, 10 trips to Camp David, portions of two visits to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and vacations in Nantucket and Lake Tahoe,” said Jake Schneider, director of rapid response for the Republican National Committee.

“After nearly three years in office, Biden remains well on track to outpace each of his modern-day predecessors in leisure,” he said in a written statement shared with Inside the Beltway.

It's become clear that the big guy is under pressure to look like he wants to keep his job. His public activities over the past couple of months, though, are campaign appearances, aimed at November, which is still eight months away, and this current level of appearances is quite a bit more than he's been used to. Beyond that, they aren't having the intended effect. In the Washingtonm Examiner, Democrat pollster John Zogby observed,

The newly energized president hit the road with a message of real projects for communities, while Vice President Kamala Harris made an historic first visit to an abortion clinic, emphasizing a key issue for Democrats in the fall.

But Biden’s approval rating barely moved. He is still at 40% approval. The national polls continue to show a close race between him and former President Donald Trump, whether in a two-way or five-way race. And, only one in four feel that the country is headed in the right direction. I could possibly copy this report card so I can paste it another time when I need to.

The problem continues to be what Nate Silver has been pointing out, increased public appearances mean increased opportunies to wander around stages, utter gaffes and malapropisms, lose his temper, and chat up pre-teen girls. So far, it's the same problem Hillary Clinton had, the more people saw of her, the less they found to like. This is an important contrast to the conventional wisdom on Biden's lawfare campaign against Trump, for instance from Byron York:

So far, the lawfare directed at Trump — two federal indictments from a special counsel appointed by the Biden Justice Department, plus two local indictments from elected Democratic prosecutors, plus a financial lawsuit from another elected Democratic prosecutor and a sex-and-defamation lawsuit financed by a Democratic megadonor — has backfired at the polls. It helped boost Trump to a runaway victory in the Republican primaries, and so far, it hasn’t hurt him in general election matchup polls against Biden.

. . . But the lawfare campaign is already having another effect on Trump. It has put the former president under severe financial stress in two ways. The first is the tens of millions of dollars in legal fees Trump has already spent defending himself against the onslaught of criminal charges and lawsuits. The other is the crippling financial penalty, $454 million, in the lawsuit brought by the elected Democratic attorney general of New York, Letitia James.

The difference is that, even if James seizes Trump Tower, the Donald still lives at Mar-a-Lago, and he's still ahead in the polls. He's still got a constantly mutating version of the Chicago Seven defense, for which Alan Dershowitz, who helped originate it in the 1960's, gives Trump his grudging admiration. Instead of a single Judge Julius Hoffman, Trump has an expanding range of foils, not just Judge Engoron, but now, in addition to Letitia James, he's got Fani Willis, Nathan Wade, Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, and no doubt more. It's not just publicity, it's comic book villain-vs-superhero material. (Isn't there an element of Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne in Trump's image?)

This is what Joe, basically an over-the-hill nebbishy mediocrity, has working against him, he's a bore, but even more so is the calendar. He's having to conduct a national campaign, which normally lasts from September to November, that's already begun in early March. I don't think he can sustain it.

Alan Dershowitz On Biden's Two-State Solution

He begins his discussion above:

The war in Gaza is becoming a major issue in the American political campaign. . . . What we're seeing is a very, very nasty debate over support for Israel, with the hard left of the Democratic Party saying to President Biden that they're not going to vote for him if he continues to support Israel, and there's no way, even if Biden were to abandon Israel, there's no way he would ever give the hard left enough. They don't want a cease fire, they want the end of Israel. . . . They don't want a two-state solution. The problem is that Biden has a two-state solution. His two states, however, are Michigan and Minnesota. . . . He's particularly focused on Michigan, because Michigan, has a population of several hundred thousand Muslims and Arabs, who will never be satisfied with a president who supports Israel in any way, and the ceasefire is just a pretext.

This is a continuation of the Democrat dilemma since the 1960s: as their middle American appeal has gradually fallen away, by the Pelosi-Biden era, they've had to appease their hard left fringe to maintain a steadily shrinking majority. But caving on hard left issues from unlimited abortion to same-sex marriage to unisex restrooms and now to Israel has driven away large swaths of their traditional base, first Catholics and now, apparently, Jews as well.

On one hand, it's understandable that Biden would cave on Israel -- he's tired, he's focused on re-election, and he seems to see Netanyahu as a lesser Satan nearly as bad as the Great Satan Trump. But this is pushing him into foreign policy, his weakest area. As the Bush-Obama fusion defense secretary Robert Gates put it, "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” It also seems as though Senate Majority Leader Schumer has now bought into the Pelosi-Biden cave:

“The world has changed — radically — since [October 7], and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” Schumer said in what was described as a major speech.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “lost his way,” Schumer added, “by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”

Schumer went on to accuse Netanyahu of aligning with “far-right extremists” who are “pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.”

The State Department has gone so far as to nuance the administration's stated position on "defeating" Hamas:

State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday that the U.S. shares the goal of “degrading” Hamas — avoiding the use of the word “defeating,” in an apparent shift of U.S. policy on the Gaza war.

On Monday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters that President Joe Biden shared Israel’s goal of “defeating” Hamas, but believed it was not necessary for Israel to attack Hamas in the last stronghold of Rafah to do so.

On Tuesday, as Breitbart News reported, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his view that while he was happy to talk to the Biden Administration about it, there was no way to defeat Hamas without entering Rafah.

. . . Later, on Tuesday, Patel was asked to respond to Netanyahu’s statement. Patel said that the Biden Administration was looking forward to discussions with Israeli officials in Washington about “alternative approaches” to “target key elements of Hamas, help secure the Egypt-Gaza border, and do so without a major ground operation in Rafah.”

Patel then referred to “our shared goal of degrading Hamas,” which is significantly different from “defeating” Hamas.

Schumer himself seems to recognize where his stance on Israel puts him with his Jewish constituents and Jews nationally:

Mr. Schumer said he spent hours after his speech talking with conservative Jewish constituencies whose members were enraged. On Tuesday, he addressed a broad spectrum of Jewish American leaders, facilitated by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, by Zoom. In a statement after the meeting, the group said “our membership continue to have deep reservations about Senator Schumer’s speech.”

In the interview, Mr. Schumer was characteristically more eager to recount the kudos he received. “Did you see Nancy today?” he said of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, who in a CNN appearance on Sunday called his speech an “act of courage.” He directed an aide to share a letter he received from Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, that called him “honest and ready to step forward and say what needs to be said.”

Pelosi, of course, isn't Jewish; she's a nominal Catholic who has nevertheless been denied communion in her home diocese. It appears that Schumer is now simply part of the Democrat movement away from traditional religious affiliation, to the point that even liberal Jews are beginning to have second thoughts about the Democrat party.

At about 12:00 above, Dershowitz says,

If Hamas knew that Israel had the unequivocal support of the United States, and it would never back down, and it would always veto resolutions at the Security Council against Israel, Hamas would not continue fighting. They would give back the hostages, call for a cease fire, the war would be over. So yes, I am pointing a finger of Blame at President Biden for not doing what he should have done, which could have ended the war more quickly, it could have saved more lives. Hectoring Israel doesn't save lives. Threatening Israel doesn't save lives.

The problem is that Biden is tired, and whatever it may specifically be, something ails him, he's sick, and he's being pushed into an area where he's never had strengths, foreign policy. He's the creature of his handlers, who right now are sending him out on grueling campaign trips that are doing nothing to help him in the polls, apparently in hopes of keeping their jobs just a little longer, and which he almost certainly can't maintain. But whatever his fate between now and November, handlers of one sort or another will be in charge, and there's not much anyone can do before then.

The Cheneys

I'm a little puzzled at Dick and Liz Cheney. The Buish dynasty's time has come and gone, the Bush family itself seems to have decided to keep quiet, but the Cheneys are raging on. Last week, "Sleazy" Liz Cheney Loses It After Bombshell Report Claims She "Suppressed Exonerating Evidence" With J6 Committee, The story refers to a Mollie Hemingway piece in The Federalist that claims she helped the January 6 committee suppress exculpatory evidence for Trump:

Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.

Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.

. . . Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review.

According to Wikipedia,

She represented Wyoming's at-large congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2017 to 2023, and served as chair of the House Republican Conference—the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership—from 2019 to 2021. Cheney is known for her vocal opposition to former President Donald Trump.

. . . She was once considered one of the leaders of the Republican Party's neoconservative wing, and was critical of the foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration while consistently voting in favor of Trump's overall agenda.

However,

Because of her stance on the Capitol riot, her impeachment vote, and her opposition to Trump's false stolen-election narrative, pro-Trump Freedom Caucus members of the House Republican Conference twice attempted to remove her from party leadership. With House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy supporting her removal, Cheney was removed from her position in May 2021.In July 2021, Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Cheney to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. Two months later, she was made vice chair of the committee. As a consequence of her service on the Select Committee, Cheney's membership in the Wyoming Republican Party was revoked in November 2021. She was censured by the Republican National Committee (RNC) in February 2022.

On August 16, 2022, Cheney lost renomination in Wyoming's Republican primary to Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman in a landslide, garnering just 28.9% of the vote.

Among other things, this suggests that Trump's influence in the Republican Party even while out of office has been underrated. And generally, Liz Cheney's star has waxed and waned with the influence of the Bushes and her father; she carried little weight on her own. Wikipedia:

Cheney worked for the State Department for five years and the United States Agency for International Development between 1989 and 1993. After 1993, she took a job at Armitage Associates LLP, the consulting firm founded by Richard Armitage, then a former Defense Department official and later the Deputy Secretary of State.

. . . In 2002, Cheney was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, a preexisting vacant post with an "economic portfolio", a mandate to promote investment in the region.

. . . After two years, Cheney left her State Department post in 2003 to work for the Bush–Cheney 2004 reelection campaign. She participated in the campaign's "W Stands for Women" initiative to target female voters.

. . . On February 14, 2005, she returned to the U.S. State Department and was appointed principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives.

She lasted another year at the State Department until Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary at the time, dissolved her area of responsibility in response to adverse press reports. Her father as vice president seems to have been unable to secure other work for her in the State Department, and it's hard to avoid thinking the jobs she held there were effectively sinecures.

In June 2007 Cheney signed on as one of three national co-chairs of Fred Thompson's 2008 presidential campaign. . . . After Thompson dropped out of the race, Cheney joined Mitt Romney's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy advisor.

After that, she seems to have had a series of failed career attempts, ranging from founding a short-lived advocacy group with William Kristol and Deborah Burlingame, to guest-hosting on Fox News, to a failed primary bid for the Republican-held Senate seat in Wyoming. Only in 2016 did she succeed in running for a House seat, but by 2021, she'd managed to ruin her career prospects as a Republican. By May of that year, it emerged

Rep. Liz Cheney secretly masterminded an extraordinary Washington Post op-ed authored by top military leaders, just three days before the Capitol riot, it has been claimed.

The letter published in the Washington Post contained a stark warning from 10 Defense Secretaries from both parties.

. . . The letter from the Defense Secretaries stated that the time for questioning election results 'has passed' and said involving the military in electoral disputes would take the nation into 'unlawful and unconstitutional territory.'

It was a key break as members of the military, lawmakers, and retired statesmen issued public statements in an effort to promote a transition in power despite Trump's refusal to concede the election.

'She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,' Eric Edelman, a friend of Cheney's and career diplomat who served as national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, told the New Yorker. 'It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.'

But it's hard to avoid she was also casting about for a new career option, given Trump's electoral loss, her limited ability to work with other Republicans in the House, and her father's diminishing influence in the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, Trump's prospects continue to improve -- in part, that's because he can use figures like Liz Cheney as foils.

Why The Continued Silence?

While the Senate bill providing roughly $60 billion in continued Ukraine aid remains stalled in the House, the overall picture for Ukraine continues to deteriorate.

The French paper Marianne has published excerpts by secret military documents that are causing an uproar in Europe and the world, for dealing with the situation on the ground in Ukraine without the disguise of propaganda that pervades almost all reports on the subject.

. . . The greatest takeaway from the documents is that ‘a Ukrainian military victory now seems impossible’. The Russian forces are waging ‘a slow and long, high-intensity war based on the continued attrition of the Ukrainian army’.

The defense reports harshly criticize the ‘disastrous’ planning done by western military and Ukraine:

“‘The planners believed that as soon as the first Russian lines of defense were crossed, the entire front would collapse […] These fundamental preliminary phases were carried out without taking into account the moral strength of the enemy on the defensive’.

"[…] These Ukrainian ‘Year II soldiers’ were launched to attack ‘a Russian fortification line which proved to be impregnable’. Without any air support, with Western equipment that is disparate and less efficient than the old Soviet equipment (‘obsolete, easy to maintain, and capable of being used in degraded mode’), the Ukrainian troops had no hope of breaking through. Let us add ‘Russian arch-domination in the field of electronic jamming penalizing, on the Ukrainian side, the use of drones and command systems’.”

In other news,

Russian President Vladimir Putin won a landslide reelection victory on Sunday, taking 87% of the vote after a three-day election derided by government critics and the West as neither free nor fair.

Going into the vote, the Kremlin was believed to seek not merely victory but a historic turnout: one that showed the country more united than ever behind their leader, more than two years into the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russia's Central Elections Commission later issued data showing 77% of the country's eligible 114 million voters had cast ballots — a new post-Soviet record.

Wait a moment. Wasn't Putin not long for this world? As of June 2022,

The US intelligence community believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s health is suffering and that he’s being treated for cancer, according to a new report.

The assessment, attributed by Newsweek to high-ranking officials at three separate intelligence agencies, comes after months of speculation that the Russian strongman is suffering from terminal ailments.

“Putin is definitely sick,” an official from the office of the Director of National Intelligence told the outlet, while noting, “whether he’s going to die soon is mere speculation.”

Two other officials — one from the Defense Intelligence Agency and one retired Air Force officer — also claimed to have access to a comprehensive intelligence assessment of Putin’s health, and said the outlook for the Russian leader is bleak, according to the report.

I assume these are among the 51 intellgence officials who signed the letter saying Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation. Well, but wasn't Putin irreparably damaged by Prigozhin's coup last June?

With a so-called 24-hour coup by Russia’s mercenary boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ending in an anticlimactic pullback, Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to avoid a dramatic and bloody standoff with his one-time ally.

Nonetheless, the fact that the outspoken Prigozhin could even mount an armed mutiny with his private military company, the Wagner Group, with little resistance and an apparently muted response is widely seen as a deep political blow for Putin and his regime.

“Prigozhin’s armed rebellion indicates a political crisis within Russia and shatters the myth of Russia’s invincibility and overwhelming power,” Hanna Liubakova, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and a journalist and researcher from Belarus, said in a note Sunday.

Except,

A top confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the plan to kill Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the security council for Russia, set in motion the operation to take out Prigozhin, according to a former Russian intelligence officer, per the Journal. The plans were later seen by Putin, who didn’t push back against them, Western intelligence agencies told the outlet.

Prigozhin died in a plane crash in August only a few months after he and his mercenary group launched a short-lived rebellion with a goal of ousting Russia’s defense minister.

We must infer that Putin never lost the support of the organs of state security (otherwise his own plane would have crashed, right?), which operated with accustomed efficiency, and less than a year later, those organs reestablished him in power with near-Stalin era levels of popular support. Recent photos show Putin in apparent perfect health.

As of May 2023, this was the US scenario for that year's projected Ukraine counteroffensive, via the Atlantic Council:

If a thrust to sever Russia’s land bridge proved successful, two options could then be considered. One would be to wheel westward and isolate Russian troops in the Kherson region. Alternatively, Ukrainian forces could turn to the east and attempt to recover Mariupol, which has been occupied by Russia since May 2022.

In either case, seizing Melitopol would cause a crisis among Russian political and military leaders, as Russian forces in the south and east would be cut off from each other, rendering a coherent defense at the operational level impossible. This would dramatically undermine Russian morale and encourage further international support for Ukraine.

If mounted in June, Ukraine’s counteroffensive could potentially be concluded by summer’s end, leaving the Crimean Bridge as the only remaining option for ground resupply of Russian forces in Crimea. Campaign success, however, would bring Ukrainian long-range missiles within range of the bridge, which would also be vulnerable to drone attacks.

Why have these projections, advanced with the prestige of the US deep state, proven so incorrect? Why is the administration so far doing nothing to telegraph necessary changes in policy and just continuing with "as long as it takes"? So far, all we've had has been Tori Nuland announcing her retirement. How many other intelligence and foreign policy chiefs should be resigning in disgrace?

It's been almost 50 years since the Church Committee. We badly need a new one. Short of that, Trump's outright firing of James Comey should be a precedent for much more decisive action -- change their office locks overnight, revoke their clearances, and publicly fire them the next day.

Whew!

I'm still amazed at how quickly this year's campaign timetable is moving. I've been saying for quite a while that even in years where Democrats lost the presidential election badly, McGovern in 1972, Dukakis in 1988, or Kerry in 2004, opinion pieces on how badly the Democrat campaigns were going didn't start to emerge until after the summer party conventions. Rush Limbaugh used to speculate that this was because the big-name reporters who had the inside info wanted to keep it secret until they published their own books as post-mortems after the election.

By the same token, the defining images of the failed campaigns, like John Kerry windsurfing in the photo above, didn't come out until fall; the Republican ad featuring him turning with the wind came out in September 2004, as did the September 1988 film of Dukakis riding an Abrams tank. The extended drama of Thomas Eagleton's electric shock treatments took place in late July 1972 following the Democrat convention; he eventually withdrew as McGovern's vice presidential running mate on August 1.

As of the middle of March in this election year, though, we're already getting doom-and-gloom insider stories and op-eds. Just this morning:

In a private meeting at the White House in January, allies of the president had just told him that his poll numbers in Michigan and Georgia had dropped over his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Both are battleground states he narrowly won four years ago, and he can’t afford any backsliding if he is to once again defeat Donald Trump. He began to shout and swear, a lawmaker familiar with the meeting said.

. . . For months, Democrats have watched the 2024 campaign unfold with rising alarm as the sitting president struggles to gain ground against his defeated predecessor. Frustrations rippling through the party have reached the top, with Biden at times second-guessing travel decisions and communications strategies that have left much of the electorate clueless about his record, interviews with nearly 20 lawmakers, present and past administration officials and Biden allies show.

As of yesterday,

There have been various solutions proposed to deal with the uncomfortable fact that Joe Biden looks like a loser heading into the 2024 election. One idea proposed by NY Times columnist Ezra Klein was for Joe Biden to stand aside and let the Democratic Party choose a successor at an open convention.

. . . In the same piece in which he proposed the open convention, Klein also addressed the other problem with his plan: Kamala Harris.

. . . Which brings us to another proposal to save Biden's chances that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday. Columnist Kathleen Parker argues that Biden's chances would improve if Harris would simply agree to step aside.

. . . This isn't the first time a columnist has made this suggestion. David Ignatius suggested it as a back up plan to Biden himself stepping down last September.

As of today, Real Clear Politics is running a poll-average November electoral map that shows Trump beating Biden 219-215 with 104 tossups.

Yesterday, the Trump campaign released a second ad purporting to be for Visiting Angels, showing Joe being shepherded into a Michigan campaign stop as though he were in need of assisted living. This was based on a clip that's been out since his Michigan visit on Thursday:

What do you do when Biden is so confused? Not only do they have to guide him around, but they have to choreograph his every move including with his "cheat sheets." He needed the notes for even reading the simplest of remarks with the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

. . . The cheat sheets not only had his remarks to make, but they also had things like Varadkar's name, his official Irish title (phonetically spelled so Biden would know how to pronounce it correctly), and they even had a picture of him so Biden could identify who he was.

The sheets also had similar descriptions and pictures of other participants in the meeting, including the Irish ambassador to the U.S. and how to pronounce their names.

That's wild that he needs such a detailed description of the Irish leader, given he's met with Varadkar multiple times in the past, including last year around St. Patrick's Day. He needs pictures to be able to identify who he is? What does that say about Biden at this point? . . . The level of scripting is intense and concerning.

Since the State of the Union, it looks like Joe's handlers had been trying to implement a modified version of Nate Silver's prescription, impromptu public appearances combined with longer press interviews, but it looks as though the hyper-scripted campaign events are starting to backfire if Trump can turn them into devastating campaign ads. Clearly a basement campaign isn't going to work this year -- the risk is there will be Kate Middleton style rumors that he's missing in action.

But proof-of-life appearances aren't going to work if they backfire this badly. And this is only March. I simply haven't lived through a presidential campaign year where things have looked this bad for one side so early, and even his own side is acknowledging it.

Nathan Wade And The Incompetence Problem

I certainly agree with the consensus expressed by Alan Dershowitz and others over Judge McAfee's ruling in the Fulton County RICO case, that in an effort to be even-handed, he split the baby, but the baby died. But most observers miss the bigger point, which I began to discuss a month ago in another post about incompetence as it relates to Nathan Wade and the eventual progress of the Fulton County case. Jordan Sekulow looks at the edges of the same problem below at 2:57:

Sekulow: . . . here's the queation, Andy: If Nathan Wade is removed, the work that he generated, the work product that he generated during this period of time, would be, under the Wong Sun case [371 U.S. 471 (1963)], normally deemed fruit of the poisonous tree.

Andy: That's right.

Sekulow: There's nothing in the order about that at all.

Andy: No, he doesn't think it out, the judge doesn't think it out.

Sekulow: What happens, then, to all the -- he was the lead prosecutor. What happens to all the witness interviews and evidence they gathered -- ?

Andy: I tell you wnat I would do if I were the defense attorney, it's called a motion to suppress. I would say that everything that was gained by this person who was improperly in the case should be suppressed, and everything that comes from that fruit of the poisonous tree should also be suppressed, and all the evidence that was accumulated by the acts, uh, and practices of Nathan Wade should be suppressed and not be permitted to be used as evidence in the case.

It looks like this will be yet one more defect in the whole case, which is generally acknowledged to have become a tainted mess. I'm sure the defense will pursue it, if only to delay the trial past the election, although this will mean more uncertainty and expense for all the defendants -- rather than facilitating the path of justice, it seems as if Judge McAfee has, with whatever good intentions, simply piled new complications on top of each other when the best course would have been to dismiss the case entirely.

But I see another problem that may cancel out the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree issue: just what did Nathan Wade do over the time he was lead prosecutor? His main accomplishment seems to have been to take DA Willis on six vacations in a five-month period. The exchange above refers to his "work product", but in another case, a 2020 investigation of Cobb County jail deaths, Wade actually generated no work product at all:

Asked about his findings for a local TV news investigation, Wade conceded that he created no “documents, communications, or records memorializing, reflecting evidence, or relating to the work,” according to the news station, 11Alive.

“I have obviously my brainchild, what’s going on in my mind about it. That’s what I have,” Wade told a lawyer for 11Alive who was trying to obtain Sheriff’s Department internal records about the probe through public records act requests.

On Wednesday, two days before he released his findings in the Willis-Wade matter, Judge McAfee dismissed six charges from the RICO indictment for being too vague. The consensus among observers was that this was a reflection of Wade's inexperience in such cases, which goes back to the question of whether he ever accomplished much as lead prosecutor -- we know now that he wasn't hired for his legal expertise in any case. His work history in the Cobb County investigation is that he simply doesn't do much other than bill the client.

I'm not a lawyer and have no experience working in a DA's office. On the other hand, I do have lots of experience working in organizations where incompetence is a problem. When incompetents are at the top, it's pervasive throughout. Competent people who can make higher-ups look bad are weeded out; others are shunted into irrelevance. I suspect it's been in the nature of things that the Fulton County RICO case was never going to come to trial, but now the problem will be whether a new lead prosecutor can make anything of the work product that's ostensibly been generated by that office since 2021 under Wade's leadership.

And this leaves aside the problem of whether Willis, given what we know of her character, can hire a lead prosecutor capable enough and strong enough to bring the case to trial under the current highly adverse conditions. I expect the farce to continue.

Joe's Staff Shuts Him Down Again

For the second time this week:

President Biden on Thursday was heard asking for permission from a staffer to “take a couple of questions” from the audience during a campaign stop in Michigan — prompting other aides to quickly move the press out of earshot.

“Can I take a couple questions?” Biden, 81, asked a female staffer as he met with supporters and campaign volunteers on the front porch of a Saginaw city council member’s home.

“Yeah, we’re going to take a few questions,” the staffer responded.

The staffer’s response apparently served as a signal to three other aides, who quickly began to herd up the reporters already positioned on the sidewalk about 20 feet away.

“Thank you, press … back in the vehicles,” they shouted, escorting the media away before Biden could take any questions.

It looks like the Post reporter saw the same possibility I entertained on Tuesday, that if Joe "asks for permission to take questions", he's really saying it's time to wrap things up and shoo the reporters away. I still think this presupposes subtlety and self-awareness that Joe simply doesn't have -- among other things, he's the sort of guy who thinks he's smarter than anyone else, and he believes if he gets to answer questions, he'll ace it.

Last month I looked at a very perceptive analysis and prescription from Nate Silver on the state of Joe's campaign. It looks like the handlers are at least aware of this, or Democrat donors are and have been pressing the handlers about it. For instance, Silver says,

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

Let’s abstract this for a moment. Say that, in any given period of time — maybe over the course of a couple months — Biden has 20 opportunities to do what you might call Improvisational Public Appearances (IPAs). We can define these as events where Biden is not merely making pre-scripted remarks and instead faces sustained questioning from the media, voters or other public figures.

Biden's appearances in New Hampahire Monday and Michigan yesterday might be characterized as quasi-IPAs, with Joe trotted out under highly controlled circumstances to be seen with small groups but not really to interact with them -- and when there's any sign that he's flagging, they're quickly wrapped up. This avoids the problem Silver notes that having Joe do more spontaneous events has risks that outweigh benefits, but a quasi-event that has to be wrapped up with a disingenuous signal that he's about to take questions has its own serious risks, especially if it happens over and over.

Let's think about what a president other than Joe might do -- a Nixon, say, either Bush, or a Clinton -- if his staff told him that there was too much risk of him saying something goofy if he took questions from the press or the public. My guess is such a president would take this to heart but work out a better signal that it was time to wrap things up. Rather than lie that he wanted to take questions, he could use a line more like, "I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed meeting with each of you today, but I'm told I have to take a security briefing. Maybe we can get back later."

My guess is that Joe's handlers simply can't have that discussion with him. Any suggestion that there's too much risk in letting him go off script at all would probably get him yelling and cussing them out, so they take his tentative offer to take questions as the sign to shut the whole thing down. For whatever reason, he doesn't cuss them out for that, at least so far. But I don't see how this can continue much longer without him either losing his temper in front of everyone or actually taking a question and bungling it badly.

In other words, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And we've started the national campaign for November, and it's only March.