Who Is Jay Bratt?

The other day, the FBI declassified another 266 pages of documents, and almost nobody seems to have noticed.

BREAKING: @FDRLST has obtained the most recent 266-page tranche of declassified FBI documents.

Because we believe in the right of the public to access and analyze these documents in their entirety, we are making the entire file available to everybody.

Link in comments. pic.twitter.com/uSYjyuw0oF

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 13, 2025

I did my best to scroll through them, but with all the redactions, I couldn't get any sense of continuity. Having no choice, I waited for someone else to begin to make sense of everything, but I didn't begin to see much until this morning. Julie Kelly's take is probably the best -- it gives a good impression of the many interfacing pieces:

Lots of the usual suspects—James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Peter Strzok to name a few—are popping up in newly-released documents related to the Russiagate hoax. But references to one individual in this week’s disclosure of records in the FBI’s multi-faceted leak investigations once again demonstrate the double standard in how the establishment Department of Justice approached the mishandling of classified information: Jay Bratt.

While Bratt is not specifically mentioned by name in the latest 266-page document dump, the powerful office he ran for six years, the DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES), is cited repeatedly.

Wait a moment. Who is Jay Bratt, and why isn't he mentioned? I had only a vague memory that he was a special prosecutor in the Mar-a-Lago classified files case, but he faded from view after the judge dismissed it. Then he briefly popped into view again this past May:

The former special counsel prosecutor Jay Bratt asserted his fifth amendment right not to answer questions during a Wednesday deposition before a Republican-led House committee looking for evidence of politicization in the prosecutions of Donald Trump, a spokesman said.

So, why is he taking the fifth? Back at the link,

Top justice department officials have made clear that they plan to investigate prosecutors who brought charges against Trump during his four years out of office. Two years ago, after Trump was indicted in Georgia on charges related to tampering with its 2020 election result, the now-attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that justice department prosecutors “will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated.”

So, even though he's hardly been mentioned, and he definitely hasn't been one of the usual suspects, his spidey sense is apparently telling him to be very, very careful. And his spidey sense has been active for some months. On January 6 of this year, just two weeks before Trump returned to office,

A lead prosecutor on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) prosecution into President-elect Trump’s mishandling of documents at Mar-a-Lago has retired from the department.

Jay Bratt left the DOJ on Friday after 34 years of working for the department, a spokesperson confirmed.

Bratt was a senior national security prosecutor who worked on the Mar-a-Lago documents case in its earliest stages, later working on detail in special counsel Jack Smith’s office.

According to the Julie Kelly story, prior to the Mar-a-Lago business, Bratt was involved in FBI investigations -- "'Foggy Falls' into the Carter Page FISA leak and 'Genetic Christmas' into Russian election hacking claims" -- that now appear to have focused on then-House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff approving committee staff leaking classified information to the press to damage Trump. Bratt

—under his predecessor and then after he took the reins of the office in October 2018—stonewalled requests by the Washington FBI field office (WFO) for help in the Page FISA inquiry. “Since DOJ CES and [the DC US attorney’s office] were not willing to obtain [sentence redacted], WFO exhausted all logical investigative steps to move the case forward and requested DOJ CES and [DC US attorney’s office] to provide WFO with a declination memorandum,” one memo read.

Buit almost immediately after Trump 45 left office,

As the apparent conduit between the Biden White House and the DOJ in concocting the classified documents case, Bratt aggressively pursued the president and his associates starting in early 2021.

Bratt visited Mar-a-Lago in June 2022 along with three FBI agents on a reconnaissance mission disguised as a legit attempt to help Team Trump locate more classified papers to comply with a subpoena in the matter.

Following the visit, Bratt pushed hard to obtain a warrant to search the president’s residence, resulting in the nine-hour armed raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. Bratt was then tasked to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office and took the lead in prosecuting Trump following Smith’s June 2023 criminal indictment in the documents case.

Kelly doesn't mention any direct connection between the new disclosure that Adam Schiff approved leaks of classified information from the House Intelligence Committee to the press to damage Trump and Bratt's apparent actions to deny information about the leaks to the FBI's Washington Field Office and subsequent closure of those investigations. According to that link,

A career intelligence officer who worked for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee for more than a decade repeatedly warned the FBI beginning in 2017 that then-Rep. Adam Schiff had approved leaking classified information to smear then-President Donald Trump over the now-debunked Russiagate scandal, according to bombshell FBI memos that Director Kash Patel has turned over to Congress.

The FBI 302 interview reports obtained by Just the News state the intelligence staffer — a Democrat by party affiliation who described himself as a friend to both Schiff, now a California senator, and former Republican House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes — considered the classified leaking to be "unethical," "illegal," and “treasonous,” but was told not to worry about it because Schiff believed he would be spared prosecution under the Constitution's speech and debate clause.

. . . But officials told Just the News that DOJ officials showed little interest in pursuing Schiff when the allegations were brought to them years ago, citing the very same excuse the lawmaker had offered.

So, was Jay Bratt among the DOJ officials who "showed little interest in pursuing Schiff" when the whistleblower raised the alarm? Where were Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray, for that matter? It can't be much of a surprise, putting these recent developments in context, that Bratt would plead the fifth in an interview with the House Judiciary Committee. Garland and Wray may one day have to do the same.

At minimum, it seems peculiar that the same guy who may have played a role in protecting Adam Schiff from being investigated for leaking classified documents should suddenly develop such a strong interest in whether Trump might have mishandled the same that he wound up being seconded from a high-level DOJ job to being the line prosecutor in the Mar-a-Lago case, at least nominally a demotion.

But it's hard not to think these are just small pieces of an intricate machine, and if Bratt found it first convenient to retire and then prudent to plead the fifth, this may in fact say things about Schiff, Wray, and Garland. I very much doubt this has escaped Bondi and Patel. Certainly Bratt's activities after 2020 could involve Schiff in a continuing conspiracy as well.

Jim Crow 2.0

Something occurred to me just this morning: the last summer of Trump's first term was marked by the George Floyd riots. Floyd was hyped for months as a paradigmatic hero-martyr, an implicit counterpoint to a racist Trump. Somehow this summer, the victim narrative has been turned upside-down: the most visible image is a law-abiding white guy, Edward Coristine, the former DOGE staffer who was badly beaten by a gang of black teens as he tried to defend his girlfriend from a carjacking.

In the aftermath, Trump launched a new administration agenda to clean up the District of Columbia. As I noted laast week, this was an implicit reversal of a major civil rights agenda item from the 1960s and 70s, Home Rule for DC, and the current civil rights establishment understands it for what it is:

South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn has insited that President Trump’s cleanup of Washington D.C. amounts to Jim Crow 2.0.

. . . Meanwhile, the city’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser was slightly more diplomatic, describing the move as “unsettling and unprecedented.”

The Nation argued, with reference to the 1960s Home Rule issues:

Washington, DC, already lacks representation in Congress, has no control over its own budget, and cannot pass laws free from congressional interference. Now under the Trump administration, the city is moving toward bantustan status. By invoking bogus emergency powers under the DC Home Rule Act, President Donald Trump has effectively federalized law enforcement within the district, delegating supervision of DC Metro police to Attorney General Pam Bondi and authorizing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to mobilize National Guard troops in Washington. Drug Enforcement Agency head Terry Cole will have operational control over Washington’s Metro Police Department as its interim federal commissioner.

On one hand, this is a retrospective acknowledgement that Home Rule for the District was a major civil rights agenda item back in the day, and it's also a recognition that Trump, as part of a new agenda, is going to dismantle the implicit 1960s civil rights settlement.

This settlement was effectively brought about by Martin Luther King's implied threat, conveyed through his advocacy of non-violence on one hand, but on the other counterpointed by the reality on the ground of race riots in major US cities throughout the decade. The actual message was surrender power to black brokers in the urban core or risk all-out race war, and the elites took the deal in city after city in subsequent years, especially in Washington.

As the Nation piece at the link makes clear, the deal waa incomplete, and as far as Washington went, it still left a lot to congress. But there was another unspoken carveout: in return for leniency toward the criminal underclass in the ghetto, the new urban elite would continue to keep the criminals out of the wealthy enclaves (in Washington, Georgetown and the strip up Wisconsin Avenue to Chevy Chase) and otherwise favor the existing upper class in policy decisions. The upper class would also look the other way over the urban elite's corruption, again in return for averting the Helter-Skelter race war.

The problem is that the 1960s deal has been falling apart. That deal was, as I've kept saying here, an alliance between the upper class and Marx's Lumpenproletariat, the criminal underclass and its political brokers in the new urban elite, which left out the working class, who've been the group primarily victimized by the policy of leniency toward the criminal underclass. It's taken the working class 60 years to catch on, but they've finally caught on.

As far as the upper class goes, the new urban elites also haven't kept their part of the deal. A key issue has been homelessness; encampments have spread to affluent neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, Mayor Bass has become the figurehead for the city's inability to protect Pacific Palisades and the neighboring unincorporated Malibu, two highly affluent areas, from destructive wildfires or enable the residents' desire to rebuild. Bass is acutely coknscious of what Trump has in mind in taking over Washington, DC law enforcement, as shown in a recent interview with Kasie Hunt on CNN:

KASIE HUNT: The president, Madam Mayor, suggested that this effort that he has undertaken to take over the DC police force to federalize the city may not be limited to Washington, DC. Did you take that as a threat?

KAREN BASS: Well, I mean, the threat was already enacted upon here and we all know that DC is in a very different situation because DC is not a state. . . You remember, we didn't just have 4,000 National Guard members, we also had about, I think it was about 700 U.S. Marines. Completely inappropriate, a political stunt and that was not needed and I believed then and I believe now that Los Angeles was a test case and I think DC is a test case as well for the president to say, well, we can take over your city whenever we want and I'm the commander in chief and I can use the troops whenever we want.

Byron York, whom I've often characterized here as a spokesman for the conventional wisdom, sees things this way:

In opposing Trump, will Democrats end up defending crime in the district or defending its right to have a high crime rate? Some are already doing just that. It puts them on the wrong side of another lopsided issue, like they are with the border.

But here is the thing. Trump is imagining a Washington with a far lower crime rate than its residents have become accustomed to. Even though they stand to benefit enormously if he succeeds, many of those residents and their political representatives will oppose Trump for trying. In the process, they will become almost protective of their crime rate now that Trump is threatening it. That is crazy. But it might be where we are headed.

What York doesn't see is that the basic 1960s civil rights consensus has broken down. Whatever the brokers for the urban elite may try to say, they've failed to deliver on their implicit promise, leniency toward the criminal underclass, whose depredations would be aimed at the working class, while the privileges of the upper class would be quietly maintained. Trump, as he's doing with other aspects of the current polity, is insisting on renegotiating the deal.

Let's Take A Closer Look At The 2WAY Morning Meeting

Yesterday's 2WAY Morning Meeting show is an example of the current media dilemma. Let's start out by recognizing that the three co-hosts are simply unlikely: Mark Halperin is in the middle of a long-march rehabilitation campaign to come back from 2017 sexual harassment allegations:

According to a May 3, 2019 report in The Daily Beast, Halperin worked on repairing his reputation during the first quarter of 2019 with a goal of returning as a pundit on television and radio. According to the article, Halperin enlisted the help of Michael Smerconish, Mika Brzezinski, and Joe Scarborough on an under-the-radar yet calculated professional rehabilitation campaign.

According to the link, more than a dozen women came forward alleging that for a 20-year period, Halperin had groped them and otherwise had unwanted bodily contact, and as a result,

On October 30, 2017, both NBC and MSNBC terminated Halperin's contract with the networks. On January 3, 2018, Showtime replaced Halperin on The Circus with then-CBS News anchor Alex Wagner.

Sean Spicer, as i've already noted, had been a "professional Republican" for years before joining the first Trump administration as Trump's first press secretary. Within six months, Trump had recognized that professional Republicans weren't what he needed, and both Spicer and Reince Priebus were edged out.

Dan Turrentine had been an also-ran professional Democrat who worked for Hillary Clinton and Jared Polis, but he mostly just has an exaggerated permanent nervous-guy grin as he utters standard Democrat talking points, as we see in the example below, which begins at 12:41 in the video embedded at the top of this post:

Halperin: I'd just like one short thought from each of you on whether this is a serious thing that the president will see through and to what extent this is some bullshit 72-hour I'm-for-law-enforcement-against-a-black-run city political ploy. Dan?

Turrentine: You said it better than I could. The latter. Hahahaha!

Halperin: Sean, is this real>

Spicer: It's absolutely real. I mean, this is all stuff that has bothered him since the first term. . .

I don't think any of these guys understands what Trump has in mind with the DC crime-and-homeless issue -- heck, I covered it better here last week. Spicer goes on after the exchange above to display his basic obtuseness at 13:50:

I will say this, in the spirit of looking forward. . . this is the opportunity for Republicans. DC was created in 1789 as a perfect square, 10 miles by 10. It was supposed to be a federal district, so that no state would have a stake in it, part of it from Maryland, part of it from Virginia. In 1846, they gave back the Virginia piece, which is now Alexandria and Arlingnton. The real solve for DC is give back everything but the National Mall from the White House to the Supreme Court, create a new federal district, and give the rest back to Maryland.

The problem is that this is exactly what Trump doesn't have in mind, which is just another indication of why Spicer went back to being just a professional Republican after six unsatisfactory months in the White House. If most of DC is given back to Maryland, that just takes its voter base and gives it to the same Baltimore urban machine that runs the state now, which changes exactly nothing. If you redefine Washington as just a narrow strip of monuments and museums where almost nobody lives, you just redefine the problem out of existence, although you make Maryland even worse.

As I said in last week's post,

But the problem of Washington, which simply can't be ignored, is the overall problem of the 1960s Civil Rights movement writ small. . . . Here we are 50 and 60 years later, and with almost every issue connected to the African-American community, we see the implicit questions: "Emmett Till died for this?" "Martin Luther King Jr marched for this?" It looks like Trump, who is gradually getting to be acknowledged as one of the most consequential presidents, is going to take this problem on[.]

Trump doesn't want to redefine the problem, he wants to fix it at the root. He singled out one of the causes in yesteday's press conference:

Trump announced on Monday that he will be working to revoke no-cash bail in cities across the country, coming as Trump has honed in on cracking down on crime in the nation’s capital.

"This dire public safety crisis stems directly from the abject failures of the city’s local leadership. The radical left city council adopted no cash bail," Trump said, noting cities that have adopted such policies like Chicago and New York City. "Somebody murders somebody, and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out."

"But we're going to change no cash bail. We're going to change the statute and get rid of some of the other things, and we'll count on the Republicans in Congress and Senate to vote. We have the majority, so we'll vote."

You can't fix Washington unless you fix the urban machines that have created the problems that are also in New York and Chicago. As I notd n last week's post, Trump delegates to highly visible point figures to take on his major agenda items, like Tom Homan with the border or Pete Hegseth with the Defense Department. In the case of Washington and the urban machines generally, it's Jeanine Pirro:

🚨 U.S. Attorney Pirro is absolutely COOKING the DC government, which allows vioIent young thugs to run the streets

“I can't prosecute them. They go to family court. And they get to do yoga and arts and crafts.

“ENOUGH. IT CHANGES TODAY!” 🔥 pic.twitter.com/l1pjivBMm1

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) August 11, 2025

On one hand, Mark Halperin is savvy enough to recognize that the public isn't satisfied with the prepackaged legacy media consensus. On the other, what he offers only pretends to be different. Dan Turrentine at the end of the day is a smug conventional Democrat, offering the same old talking points and cackling with laughter at it. Sean Spicer is a nice guy, I guess, good looking, but he just isn't terribly bright, and he doesn't understand Trump, who is a genius.

So far, after six years of his rehabilitaion tour, Halperin has managed to get himself in with Megyn Kelly, herself a has-been. Anyhow, not much for even Halperin to grope there, if you ask me. She's safe.

The Strange Patrícia Lélis Bolin Story

Last week, Project Veritas broke a two-part story (here and here) in which a Brazilian woman, Patrícia Lélis Bolin, alleges that "she was pulled into a visa fraud scheme to secure U.S. visas and green cards for wealthy clients". At the first link above,

Lélis further claims former Attorney General William P. Barr knew of the fraud and used burner phones to communicate and conceal the scheme.

. . . Lélis reported the visa fraud scheme to the FBI, which she claims triggered her prosecution while others involved remain uncharged.

Indicted in January 2024, Lélis faces 19 charges, including wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions, and aggravated identity theft. She is accused of defrauding immigrants by posing as a lawyer and soliciting payments for fraudulent E-2 and EB-5 visa services.

Project Veritas reviewed hundreds of text messages, emails, and documents, confirming a September 2022 text from Attorney Clyde Vanel to Patrícia Lélis. In it, Vanel directs her to finalize the business plan for [a Peter and Vivienne Reis' E-2 visa application] as a “back-up” measure, instructing her to act as his “paralegal” assistant without credentials. Vanel claims the visa scheme is foolproof, stating that former Attorney General William P. Barr bypasses standard government processes to expedite and “automatically approve” visas for their “business partners.”

A January 12, 2024 Justice Department press release confirming the indictment is here. The circumstances it outlines are these:

Patricia De Oliveira Souza Lelis Bolin, 29, a resident of Arlington [Virginia], posed as an immigration lawyer able to help foreign clients obtain E-2 and EB-5 visas to the United States. The EB-5 program provides lawful permanent residency, and possible citizenship, if a foreign national invests substantial funds—typically, a minimum of $1 million—in qualifying job-creating enterprises in the United States.

According to the indictment, on September 22, 2021, Lelis Bolin sent a legal retainer agreement to a victim for help in obtaining EB-5 visas for the victim’s parents. The victim made two initial payments totaling over $135,000 based on Lelis Bolin’s representation that the money was going into a Texas real estate development project that qualified for the EB-5 program. Instead, the victim’s money is alleged to have gone into Lelis Bolin’s personal bank account. Rather than investing the money as promised, Lelis Bolin allegedly used it for a downpayment on her Arlington townhouse, bathroom renovations, and paying other personal expenses, such as credit card debt.

According to the indictment, to cover up the scheme and to obtain more money, Lelis Bolin allegedly provided a victim with a fabricated U.S. District Court pleading with a false case number showing her as the litigating attorney. Lelis Bolin is not a licensed attorney. She is also alleged to have falsified U.S. immigration forms, forged multiple signatures, and created fake receipts from the Texas investment project, all of which she emailed to a victim. Lelis Bolin also allegedly created false personas associated with the Texas investment fund and sent emails from those individuals to try to obtain even more money.

According to the first Project Veritas link,

Lélis alleges she’s being set up as the fall-guy in an ongoing DOJ cover-up to protect the powerful ‘deep state’ individuals involved.

. . . hired in 2021 by Armstrong Williams’ media company, Howard Stirk Holdings, [she] claims she was pulled into a visa fraud scheme to secure U.S. visas and green cards for wealthy clients, including the parents of Superordinary CEO Julian Reis, a former JP Morgan trader and hedge fund founder. Lélis alleges that Williams and his legal counsel, NY Assemblyman Clyde Vanel, instructed her to craft business plans for fake companies, like “Reis Cosmetics,” to obtain E2 Investor Visas, which allow foreign nationals to work in the U.S. by investing in a business.

. . . Lélis further stated, “Bill Barr knows the companies that they launched for the visa was not real companies.” She revealed a suspiciously swift visa approval process, including a mere 10-minute interview in Singapore for Julian Reis’ parents, expedited through Barr’s connections. “After they got their visas, I discovered they do not have any plan to open and operate the company. So, it’s basically like they create a fake company that I helped to create with them,” she said.

Projexct Veritas then alleges that Pam Bondi is trying to cover this up:

Project Veritas sought to present evidence of this visa scheme to U.S. Department of Justice officials, who took no action. An anonymous government source has informed us of an ongoing cover-up within the Department of Justice, including by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

This is hard to believe; I'm simply not in the camp that thinks Bondi and Patel are trying to pull punches or slow-walk investigations. However, the second link above contains allegations that may not be entirely connected to those in the first link:

A whistleblower, currently under indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice and granted political asylum in an undisclosed foreign country, has provided Project Veritas with explosive evidence alleging secret meetings orchestrated by former U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr, media figure Armstrong Williams, and other prominent Washington, D.C., insiders to plan the prosecution of President Donald Trump, his allies, and January 6 defendants.

. . . Project Veritas examined photos dated March 15, 2022, of Armstrong Williams and Bill Barr, alongside Lélis’ corresponding notes from a meeting at Sinclair Broadcast Group. The notes detail discussions revealing Barr was in talks with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Jack Smith about planning prosecutions in Florida, Georgia, and New York. Lélis recorded that Barr predicted an FBI raid on Trump’s home would occur “soon.” Five months later, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.

Project Veritas also verified a January 19, 2023, text from Williams to Lélis confirming a planned meeting between Bill Barr and Fani Willis. Notes from February 27, 2023, confirm the meeting took place, with Barr advising Willis to pursue RICO charges against Donald Trump. Lelis stated, “Bill Barr was like, we should bring RICO because it's a very difficult type of charge to defend,” noting Barr described the charge as broad and challenging to counter under U.S. law.

. . . Lélis reported Armstrong Williams and Bill Barr to the FBI in June 2023 for their secret meetings and the visa fraud scheme exposed in Project Veritas’ Part 1. Text messages reveal panic from Williams and his associates upon learning of the FBI report. Lélis faced a barrage of threats and demands to return meeting notes and other documents she recorded during her employment, suggesting their authenticity and a frantic effort to conceal these covert meetings.

It’s critical to highlight that Project Veritas was first tipped off to this story by Department of Justice officials troubled by an apparent DOJ cover-up to pin Barr’s actions on Lélis. A Trump DOJ official stated, “Barr has put the entire FBI after this woman to get the documents she has.”

There can be no question that William Barr turned against Trump in the final days of his first administration. He submitted an early resignation effective December 23, 2020, and began a process of distancing himself from Trump. According to Wikipedia,

Barr testified to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack behind closed doors on June 2, 2022. Portions of his videotaped testimony were presented during the committee's public hearings days later. Barr testified that before resigning as attorney general, he had told President Trump that allegations of election fraud were "bullshit." At times during his testimony he could not control his laughter at the absurdity of some fraud allegations. . . . Barr testified Trump never gave "an indication of interest in what the actual facts were," adding the president had "become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff."

Acccording to The Guardian,

Former attorney general William Barr came to the defense of the FBI and the justice department’s (DoJ) judicial request to search Donald Trump’s Florida home and country club compound last month, saying Friday that documents seized in the search appeared to support the department’s claims of a national security risk.

“As more information comes out, the actions of the department look more understandable,” Barr told the New York Times in an interview.

“It seems to me they were driven by concern about highly sensitive information being strewn all over a country club, and it was taking them almost two years to get it back,” he said.

The former attorney general, who resigned in December 2020 as Trump ramped up his claims that the election has been rigged, also dismissed Trump’s call for an independent review of materials confiscated from Mar-a-Lago by a “special master”.

“I think it’s a crock of shit,” Barr said. “I don’t think a special master is called for.”

This blog has never been a friend of William Barr. In 2022, I wrote,

Why is this man not smiling? Based on all the images I find on the web, William P Barr has got to be one of the saddest, angriest men in current public life. . . . The man is rich. He's respected. He's in demand as a talking head. No doubt his mere stroke of the pen will get any candidate into Dalton, Horace Mann, Hackley, whichever, not to mention Columbia. I think it's because of Trump. I think it's because Trump hasn't gone away. Trump is the wrong kind of Republican, not like, say, Jeb Bush. And that has him awfully, awfully angry. Why did he ever agree to become Trump's attorney general? That's a good question, wouldn't you say?

I don't think there's any question that after he left as Trump's Attorney General, Barr went to meetings trying to forestall Trump's return. On the other hand, if the meetings were with the likes of Armstrong Williams, they would have been exercises in fecklessness, not really conspiracy. But then, Lélis Bolin says he also helped plan the Mar-a-Lago raid with Jack Smith, which would be a different matter altogether. Still, he was 70 when he quit the Trump administration, a bitter old man, his law career effectively over no matter how hard he tried to rehabilitate himself with the establishment, so I suspect he can't be taken seriously as an active conspirator.

So this is probably little more than an interesting footnote and mostly for me an indication that he was never especially bright. But I could also be wrong.

ICE Puts A Big Dent In The Los Angeles Economy

This story has been out for months, but Mayor Bass is still working it:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Wednesday blasted the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, saying the raids have put a huge dent in the city's economy.

Bass said businesses have seen a drastic reduction in immigrant customers. She's concerned some immigrant families whose breadwinners have been rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement may be on the brink of being left destitute.

A piece at Red State gives more background:

When federal immigration agents began raiding Home Depots and other businesses in the Los Angeles area recently, something strange happened:

Foot traffic vanished overnight.

Entire blocks shut down.

Sales plummeted.

And it wasn’t because customers were scared. It was because the workers were. Employees simply stopped showing up. Some owners shuttered their doors. Fear gripped the heart of L.A.’s commercial corridors.

The real story? That fear didn’t expose a broken immigration system — it exposed a network of lawbreaking employers who rely on illegal labor to line their pockets with profits.

A good example of this problem emerged just this past Friday:

Undocumented employees of the Los Angeles Equestrian Center near Burbank have reportedly been fired.

What we know: Employees told FOX11 as many as 40 employees who cared for the horses and stables were let go Friday morning.

Some who board their horses at the center were upset by the mass firing.

The city contracts private company ASM Global to run the facility.

The LA Equestrian Center says of itself,

The Los Angeles Equestrian Center offers complete boarding facilities with access from our property perimeter to over 50 miles of Griffith Park horse trails. We are also proud to host a variety of training programs for all levels of riders through its successful resident trainers.

In other words, its clientele is people who board their horses and participate in horse shows, dressage, and equivalent events. By and large, these are the very wealthy, the same people who hire illegals as domestic servants. They're upset!

Some who board their horses at the center were upset by the mass firing.

"It's terrible," said Susan Becker. "There's a lot of people whose life has been upended."

. . . "I'm devastated you know? This is a terrible situation for all these people who, a lot of these people have been working a long time and they've been working really hard," said Becker.

According to Mayor Bass,

"Apparently, I guess ICE asked for whether or not the employees had proper identification and through e-Verify, and that's all I know right now," said Bass. "But what's important to me, though is, is ICE changing their tactics? Are they changing their tactics?"

Just last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a federal judge's Temporary Restraining Order preventing ICE from stopping and questioning people about their immigration status without reasonable suspicion or a warrant.

It does not appear that today's events at the equestrian center violate that order, but still people are upset.

If I were Mayor Bass, I would be upset that a city contractor had been exploiting its workforce, quite possibly in breach of its agreements with the city over paying taxes and social security and such, but that's apparently not what bothers her or the people who board their horses. The liberals at The American Prospect also view the shortage of illegal labor with alarm:

Net immigration, which provides a steady supply of available workers in key fields, is way down this year. Employers are scrambling to find substitute workers and worrying about productivity losses. Remittance payments to Mexico have plummeted, suggesting a decline in these workers’ economic contributions, not only to their relatives, but to industries like home care, agriculture, and construction.

. . . The 2,800 arrests in Los Angeles since June, outside Home Depots and car washes and homeless shelters, massively understate the chilling effect of ICE raids on the largest city in the largest state in the union. A report from the University of California, Merced’s Community and Labor Center released last month found that 3.1 percent of the entire private-sector labor force in California didn’t show up for work between May 11 and June 8, just as ICE activity was ramping up in L.A. These numbers resemble the losses from the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic, and if anything, they’ve grown as raids intensify.

A month ago, Mayor Bass said she was even going to send the illegals gift cards to make up for them not going to work, or something like that:

Bass said a plan is being worked out to provide cash assistance to those affected by the enforcement operations, the Los Angeles Times reported. Cash cards with a "couple hundred" dollars on them will be distributed by immigrants' rights groups in about a week, Bass said.

The money will not come from city coffers, but from philanthropic partners, she said.

This was four weeks ago, but as of today, nothing more has come out about the gift cards. Maybe the people who are upset about the firings at the Equestrian Center could pool together and buy some gift cards, but they'd still need to board their horses, so maybe that wouldn't work. I tried to find out how much it costs to board a horse there, but the Equestrian Center makes you register and wait for someobne to call you to find out. I did see this on reddit:

In terms of facilities, most places in LA will be 12x12 box stall with 15 minute turnout (that you pay for). "Affordable" is going to be relative, most places are $450-$700 [monthly?] for 12x12 box stall, alfalfa, and shavings but prices will skyrocket the moment you look for a larger stall & add grass hay.

The bigger problem is that if the Equestrian Center can no longer exploit illegals, the boarding fee is going to go up to cover market wages and benefits. Heck, I'd be upset, too! Mayor Bass, you go, girl!

On the other hand, I see a problem with the gift cards. How will the illegals qaulify? Will they go down to City Hall and present evidence that they're illegal to get a gift card? Otherwise, anyone could get one, and that wouldn't be good, right? But if they have to do something like that to qualify, what's to keep ICE from waiting outside City Hall to pick them up, or even tracking the cards to people once they're used?

I don't think Mayor Bass has thought this through.

"Under Color Of"

Lately I'm amazed at how much even "independent" journalists waste my time. A good exasmple is the Morning Meeting show on YouTube and 2WAY featuring Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine. Spicer in particular is represented as an expert on Trump -- "Can you take us into Trumpworld on this, Sean?" -- when he left the first Trump administration after only six months in July 2017, apparently because Trump lost patience with both Reince Priebus and his protege Spicer as "professional Repulicans".

Just the other day, Halperin, Spicer, and Turrentine pontificated at length over where Trump and Putin might meet to resolve the Ukraine war -- maybe it would be Geneva. Maybe it would be Iceland or Greenland. Two days later, it turns out to be Alaska. In other words, they could blather on about Trumpworld or Putinworld, know absolutely nothing, and get away with it for days. Why shoud anyone waste time watching them?

The various commentators enumerating the potential charges that might be brought against Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others in Russiagate, mostly just perjury, are in the same class. I'm having more and more of a feeling that the major cases will have little or nothing to do with perjury, and people like Jonathan Turley will have been clueless.

Two cases that came up yesterday give what I think is a much better idea of which way the Justice Deparment is more likely to go. The first is a Massachusetts county sheriff:

Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins was arrested Friday after a federal grand jury indicted him for allegedly extorting a cannabis company seeking to open a dispensary in Boston.

Tompkins, 67, is accused of extorting $50,000 from an executive with the unnamed national cannabis retailer by leveraging a key partnership between his office and the dispensary. Federal prosecutors allege Tompkins first pressured the executive into selling him equity interest in the company, then into refunding his buy-in when share prices dipped.

Tompkins was arrested in Florida Friday morning on two counts of extortion under color of official right, U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley’s office said in a news release.

According to the Justice Department,

[T]he Hobbs Act (18 U.S.C. § 1951) defines extortion in terms of "the obtaining of property from another, with his consent . . . under color of official right." In fact, the under color of official right aspect of the Hobbs Act derives from the common law meaning of extortion.

. . . In order to show a violation of the Hobbs Act under this provision, the Supreme Court recently held that "the Government need only show that a public official has obtained a payment to which he was not entitled, knowing that the payment was made in return for official acts."

In the Massachusetts case, according to the first link,

According to court documents, the cannabis company in question sought to open a retail dispensary in Boston in 2019[.]

. . . The state’s Cannabis Control Commission approved the company’s license to operate a dispensary in Boston in March 2021. But while the licensing process was still underway, federal prosecutors allege Tompkins began pressuring the executive to sell him stock before the company went public. According to court documents, Tompkins specifically told the executive he “wanted to get in on the stock so [he] could make some cannabis money.”

When the executive rebuffed Tompkins, the sheriff allegedly upped the ante with a reminder that the company still needed his help for future license renewals. Purportedly fearing Tompkins would use his position to jeopardize the company’s partnership with the sheriff’s office and imperil both the dispensary license and the company’s initial public offering, the executive relented.

. . . When the value of his shares later decreased and his stake dipped below his initial investment, Tompkins allegedly demanded — and received — a full refund of $50,000.

The second, much closer to the lawfare against Trump, is a federal grand jury inmvestigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James:

The US attorney’s office for the Northern District of New York issued two subpoenas seeking information about James’ investigations into the Trump Organization and National Rifle Association, the sources said.

A grand jury investigation into James has also convened in Albany, New York, according to a source familiar. The grand jury probe into James is said to be looking into deprivation of rights, which means violating someone’s constitutional rights, against Trump.

According to the Justice Department,

Section 242 of Title 18 makes it a crime for a person acting under color of any law to willfully deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. For the purpose of Section 242, acts under "color of law" include acts not only done by federal, state, or local officials within their lawful authority, but also acts done beyond the bounds of that official's lawful authority, if the acts are done while the official is purporting to or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties.

Since the grand jury investigation is still under way, we don't know the precise acts Letitia James is alleged to have done to violate Trump's constitutional rights. If there's an indictment, we'll learn more. But it seems reasonable, as only a few people have suggested up to now, that the Mar-a-Lago search could also constitute a deprivation of Trump's Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure "under color of authority".

Since this took place under Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, this could make them vulnerable to charges connected with an overall conspiracy to deprive Trump of his civil rights, which would have covered serveillance under the FISA court in 2016-17 as well.

I'm convinced that the Justice Department action in the Russiagate cases will be much wider-ranging than just the perjury charges commentators have envisioned, and if they cover actions during the Biden administration at all, they will have to involve figures like Garland and Wray, who aren't on current lists of the usual suspects. But if the federal grand jury investigating Russiagate is empaneled in Miami, which it appears to be, that means the Mar-a-Lago raid is within its scope and is going to be treated as an act in furtherance of the whole conspiracy.

I think indictments will come faster than the conventional wisdom currently thinks, and they'll involve more people than just Brennan, Clapper, and Comey.

Let's Revisit Edward Feser

We've entered the anniversary period for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), but there's been little of the usual handwringing this year, at least in what I've seen. Edward Feser, the neo-Thomist philosopher who sometimes posts on how, at least in his view, just war doctrine makes these attacks intrinsically evil, hasn't posted directly on the subject this year. I've done more thinking about this in recent months, and I think this might neveretheless be a good time to revisit the questions he raises.

What may be the most succinct outline of his views, at least as far as I understand them, is at a post on his blog, Happy Consequentialism Day! on August 9, 2010. Although he provides a link to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy's definition of consequentialism, he himself has little to say about it other than it

is, as David Oderberg has put it, “downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine that should be avoided by all right-thinking people.” And the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, accordingly, as evil as consequentialism is.

Well, we've got that out of the way, huh? But with nothing else to do one recent afternoon, I went looking for a better definition, and I found at Wikipedia on one hand,

Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act (or in some views, the rule under which it falls) will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".

But on the other, it goes on to say,

The term consequentialism was coined by G. E. M. Anscombe in her essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958. However, the meaning of the word has changed over the time since Anscombe used it: in the sense she coined it, she had explicitly placed J. S. Mill in the nonconsequentialist and W. D. Ross in the consequentialist camp, whereas, in the contemporary sense of the word, they would be classified the other way round. This is due to changes in the meaning of the word, not due to changes in perceptions of W.D. Ross's and J.S. Mill's views.

So the whole idea of "consequentialism" dates only from 1958, and any effort to place earlier philosophers like Mill in any sort of "consequantialist" school is going to be dodgy. Certainly they never identified themselves as such, or indeed indicated that they in some way opposed it -- they never had any idea it existed. This is only the start of the problem. At the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy link Feser supplies above,

There is disagreement about how consequentialism can best be formulated as a precise theory, and so there are various versions of consequentialism.

. . . Consequentialism does not itself say what kinds of consequences are good. Hence people can agree on consequentialism while disagreeing about what kind of outcome is good or bad.

So people can agree on consequentialism while disagreeing on what it is, except that as David Oderberg has helpfully observed, it's downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine. I think this can be parsed as, "if you disagree with Edward Feser on the intrinsic evil of the atomic bombings, you're a consequentialist, case closed." But nobody can really define a consequentialist outside of that. If you say X, you agree with J S Mill, and you're a consequentialist, but nobody knows if Mill is a consequentialist or not.

But there are other problems. Feser mentions "natural law theory" four times in his post, but he never enumerates what it is. On the other hand, the Catechism of the Catholic Church does codify it in paragraph 2309:

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

Let's look at the language this statement uses. It prefaces the conditions with a reference to "the gravity of such a decision", viz, to go to war. This is an implicit recognition that, as General Sherman put it, "war is hell". It isn't just soldiers who suffer in any war; their families lose their fathers, brothers, husbands, and breadwinners. Civilian populations in the path of armies have suffered catastrophic depredations in all wars throughout history.

This is implicit before the Catechism even lists conditions. It assumes that "those who have responsibility for the common good" recognize that this is going to happen if they go to war at all. But the third and fourth conditions introduce a need to balance the factors: there must be serious prospects of success, and especially the evil to be eliminated must be greater than the evils that will inevitably result from going to war at all.

The catechism specifially calls for the "evaluation of these conditions". Isn't this a form of consequentialism? Feser says,

[I]t is never, never permissible to do what is intrinsically evil that good may come – not even if you’d feel much happier if you did it, not even if you’ve got some deeply ingrained tendency to want to do it, not even if it will shorten a war and save thousands of lives. Never.

It may be intrinsically evil deliberately to kill innocent civilians. The problem is "deliberate". For millennia, "those who have responsibility for the common good" must have recognized what happens to civilians in the path of an advancing army, even when there were no aircraft to drop bombs on cities. The scriptural accounts of sieges make it absolutely plain that when they end, women, children, and animals are slaughtered. Natural law theory in CCC 2309 is simply saying that civil and military authorities must factor this into their deliberations, and this is within their prudential judgment.

So, what is prudential judgment? The Catholic Answers site quotes the Catechism:

Prudence is the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it. . . . With the help of this virtue we apply moral principles to particular cases without error and overcome doubts about the good to achieve and the evil to avoid (1806).

The site goes on,

Because prudence is concerned with choosing the good, a prudential judgment does not reflect a merely subjective preference. So we can be held morally accountable for the judgments we make in these matters.

But unlike principles of doctrine and morality, the Church has not definitively taught which specific answers the faithful should embrace when it comes to implementing moral principles—like justice or care for the poor—in the public sphere.

So for starters, the Catechism has presumably left the choice to use nuclear weapons to the US civil and military authorities, which is to say Truman, Marshall, King, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, and others. In the words of CCC 2309, they had "responsibility for the common good". Wait a momwnt. Isn't this impllicitly saying that Truman, Marshall, King, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, and others were tasked with providing a better outcome than the alternatives? The alternatives they saw in mid-1945 would have been:

• The likelihood that the Japanese would continue genocidal policies in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia for as long as the war would continue
• The recognition by the military authorities that continuation of the war past 1945, with expected high casualties in an invasion of Japan, would seriously reduce public support
• The likelihood that the Japanese would use suicide tactics and enlist elderly men and civilian women and children to sacrifice themselves to resist an invasion
• The Allied war aim was "unconditional surrender", which implied there would be no negotiations that might allow Japan to retain territories in China and Southeast Asia that it had invaded.

Aren't these the specific factors that the US civil and military authorites were tasked with balancing, whether the use of nuclear weapons would "produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated"? These were non-trivial decisions, made with the full underatanding of wartime exigencies. But let's go back to the Wikipedia definition of consequentialism:

Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act (or in some views, the rule under which it falls) will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative.

Isn't this implicit in CCC 2309, which tasks the civil and military authorities with making the prudential judgment of whether the evils of, say, continuing the war after 1945 outweigh the evils of one or more nuclear attacks? I would go as far as saying that CCC 2309 is consequentialist!

I started out some years ago admiring Feser's arguments generally, but especially on the morality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, I've begun to see a sloppiness and lack of rigor that have troubled me about US academics since my days in graduate school. He refers to "natural law" or "just war theory", but he never ties himself to a specific definition of either. Nor does he define "consequentialism", a neologism that seems to resist any specific definition in any case. In fact, I would call it a hypostatization, an attempt to give a concrete existence to an abstraction. I've been there before in graduate-level classrooms, and I'm afraid I've come to think Feser is nothing special.

This also reminds me a little of Robert E Lee, who certainly in his lifetime heard many critiques of his generalship at Gettysburg. When one individual came up to him and said, "General, here's what you should have done," Lee answered, "Why didn't you tell me that before the battle?"