Thursday, March 28, 2024

gag order, which he euphemistically termed a"quiet zone/let's let justice work" motion.

 May 31, 2006

Gagging in Durham




Fox News reports that Durham D.A. Mike Nifong is considering a gag order for the Duke lacrosse case. The request would have more credibility had the district attorney not made 70 public statements, many of them so inflammatory that an on-line forum archived them , in the weeks before the Democratic primary for county district attorney.

Having captured the nomination, Nifong has no continued political need to speak out; he is also confronting increasingly troubling revelations about his peculiar investigation. It turns out that when he “hinted” to Newsweek that the police file would show the accuser was given a date rape drug, it appears that he either (a) hadn’t read the file, which contains no toxicology report; or (b) deliberately misled the reporter. Thursday, defense lawyers filed a motion stating that the only mention of the accuser describing her alleged attackers came in the following note by a police investigator: “I asked her questions trying to follow up on a better description of the suspects, she was unable to remember anything further about the suspects.” So, Nifong either (a) didn’t turn over all case material to the defense, despite informing the court he had done so; or (b) dealt with an accuser who couldn’t give even a basic description of her alleged attackers, but then had no trouble doing so three weeks after the incident at a photo ID that blatantly violated state guidelines. And yesterday, another defense motion revealed that a previously unreported photo ID session (which also ignored state guidelines, in that it consisted solely of photos downloaded from the Duke lacrosse website) occurred on March 21, and police records from that session revealed that the accuser did not identify at least one of the arrested players, Dave Evans, as among her alleged attackers. As Ralph Luker reminds us, the latter two items come from the defense alone—though in the form not of leaks but of formal court motions, subject to sanctions if they contain demonstrably false statements.

Nifong’s desire for a gag order is unsurprising, given that he’s also under investigation by the state bar’s ethics committee and surely wants to avoid any further bad publicity while that process moves forward. The recent action of the North Carolina NAACP, however, is more troubling. Al McSurely, chair of the NAACP’s Legal Redress Committee, has said that the organization will ask for a gag order, which he euphemistically termed a"quiet zone/let's let justice work" motion. His justification, according to the Durham Herald-Sun, is that “media coverage of the alleged rape may deprive the alleged victim of her legal rights to a fair trial.” Leaving aside the question of why the NAACP didn’t desire a “quiet zone” when Nifong dominated the airwaves, the Constitution contains no mention of an accuser’s “legal rights to a fair trial”: the accuser has the power of the state on his or her side. Nor can an accuser’s legal rights somehow trump the very real constitutional protections possessed by defendants. The NAACP’s action, though unlikely to be approved, typifies the bizarre inversion of constitutional theory that has permeated this case, what defense attorney Alex Charns has termed Durham’s “Alice-in-Wonderland” style of justice. Jason Whitlock’s admonition is worth recalling: “If the Duke lacrosse players were black and the accuser were white, everyone would easily see the similarities between this case and the alleged crimes that often left black men hanging from trees in the early 1900s.”

At least the NAACP isn’t in the classroom. This week’s Chronicle contains a memoir of one spring term class that should shame the Duke administration. Author Elizabeth Chin spent the spring 2006 term as a visiting professor in Duke’s cultural-anthropology department, where she taught a course called “Girl Culture/Power.” The class, she reports, enrolled a good number of “well-off white women who were in the most elite sororities at Duke,” balanced against three men, “several heterosexual women of color [Chin doesn’t explain how she knew they were heterosexual or why this fact is relevant], and a handful of what I affectionately thought of as my radical feminists.”

While critical of the Duke administration—which hardly went out of its way to defend the lacrosse players’ rights—for not creating a “town meeting, teach-ins, and coordinated efforts in residence halls” to address the allegations against the players, Chin committed herself “to keep the classroom a safe space for all the students, while allowing people on both sides of the issue to hear and understand each other.” That the space was a whole lot safer for one side than the other became clear when an anti-lacrosse player rally coincided with one class session. Chin stopped class and instructed the students to go outside and listen. (There’s a good strategy for an easy prep.) “After a while,” she relates, “I noticed that, one by one, the sorority girls were going back inside.” (Many of the sorority “girls” knew members of the lacrosse team.) Chin continues: “When I went after them, their pain and frustration were obvious. ‘It's just not fair being targeted as a group,’ wailed one woman.” Wailed? Imagine the appropriate condemnation from faculty members like Chin if a male professor had used this verb to describe an upset “girl” in his class.

Chin’s response to the demonstration and its aftermath effectively assumed that the players were guilty, her view of the scandal was undeniably correct, and teaching diversity is the only conceivable approach in the classroom. Her view of an in-class “olive branch” over the lacrosse issue consisted of a “radical woman” admitting that she could have a common experience with a sorority “girl”: the “radical woman” stated that she, too, knew a man who “had raped someone.” (No rush to judgment about the lacrosse players there.) Leaving aside the question of whether it was an appropriate use of class time to peruse a demonstration with whose message the instructor sympathized (Chin gives no suggestion that she also cancelled class to observe the “innocent” demonstrations that occurred later in the term), Chin might have explored with her “radical feminists” why so many on campus, including the demonstrators, seemed to presume guilt—even at an early stage of the investigation, when the lacrosse players had all denied criminal wrongdoing, their captains had told the authorities they would take lie detector tests, and the procedural irregularities that have come to characterize Nifong’s inquiry already were becoming apparent. This question appears not to have occurred to Chin, who describes herself as a “good liberal.” Apparently she doesn’t see promoting civil liberties as the kind of activity in which a “good liberal” would engage.

Chin would be proud, however, of how the Washington Post and New York Times have addressed Durham matters; as Stuart Taylor noted, “Many members of the national media have published grossly one-sided accounts of the case.” A Postcolumn by Lynne Duke relies on “facts” that are not only, at best, assumptions, but also contradict much of what is now known about the case. It’s absurd to say, based on the evidence that now exists, that the case is “some ways reminiscent of a black woman's vulnerability to a white man during the days of slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow, when sex was used as a tool of racial domination.” Commentator Julianne Malveaux even more oddly added that as"African American women are not systematically valued in our society,” the accuser is getting"no benefit of any doubt." If nothing else can be said about this case, it’s that the accuser has received the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, the state went so far in giving the accuser the benefit of the doubt that one prominent legal analyst, Andrew Napolitano, has predicted that the case could end with Nifong’s losing his license to practice law.

And in a piece behind the Times firewall, Harvey Araton cited plans by the women’s lacrosse team to wear armbands expressing sympathy with the accused men’s players at this year’s Final Four (held on May 26) and a request by the Duke athletic staff that the women’s basketball players not comment in interviews about the lacrosse case at this year’s women’s Final Four (held on April 2) to claim that “a basketball team with a majority of African-American women was in effect censored while the lacrosse gals, 30 of 31 of whom are white, are apparently free to martyr their male lax mates.” This seems like a compelling argument—if only it were factually correct. Actually, as Newsday reports today, the Duke athletic staff made the exact same request (not to comment publicly on the case in interviews with the media) of the women’s lacrosse “gals” (funny how Araton describes them as “gals” and the basketball players as “women”), and they honored the request. Araton produces no evidence that the basketball team wanted to wear armbands sympathizing with either the lacrosse players or the accuser, or were “censored” in any other way beyond receiving the same request that was given to the lacrosse team about not speaking publicly.

Specifically targeting the women’s lacrosse players, Araton wonders how “cross-team friendship and university pride [could] negate common sense at a college as difficult to gain admission to as Duke,” with the women’s players “staking their own reputations” on the case’s outcome. By making such a claim, of course, it could be said that Araton is staking his own reputation on his critique. It might be that the women’s lacrosse players have been paying attention to events in Durham that have occurred since the basketball Final Four; it’s unclear if Araton has done so. Perhaps they noticed that even though Nifong promised that DNA evidence would positively identify the guilty, the tests for 45 of the men’s team came back negative and the test for the 46th was inconclusive. Perhaps they noticed that, after being arrested with a warrant alleging he committed a 30-minute crime on March 14 (i.e., after 12.00am), Reade Seligmann produced electronic and video evidence showing that starting at 12.06am, he was either text-messaging his girlfriend, in a cab, or at an ATM machine a mile away. Or perhaps they noticed that the accuser identified another arrested player, Dave Evans, as having a mustache, which he did not, and, apparently, initially didn’t identify him at all. Maybe their willingness to evaluate new evidence and respond accordingly explains how those “lacrosse gals” were selected for “a college as difficult to gain admission to as Duke.”

Araton concludes his column by noting, “When behavioral codes intersect with the vexing subjects of sex, race and class on campuses like Duke’s, there are still many more questions than answers. Today, if I could ask just one, it would be directed at the Duke basketball women. What do they think of those sweatbands the women’s lacrosse team was planning to wear?” New York Times columnists have access to the internet (on which the women’s basketball team roster is easily found) and the ability to use e-mail and the telephone. If Araton considered this question so important, why didn’t he simply ask the women’s basketball players? Could it be that he feared the answers he received might contradict the Times’ take on the issue, which even as milquetoast a public editor as Bryon Calame has faulted for making decisions where sometimes “fairness suffered a bit,” referring “to an application for a search warrant as if it were somehow a court finding of fact,” and inexplicably downplaying Nifong’s possible political motivations? Since I too have internet access, I e-mailed Araton to ask him.

Professor Chin, no doubt, would share Araton’s outrage at the conduct of the women’s lacrosse team at last night’s Final Four. Coach Kerstin Kimel has emerged as one of the few heroes of this affair, breaking what could be termed the university’s “blue wall of silence” to become the first Duke administrator, professor, or coach to publicly say anything positive, in his or her own voice, about the men’s lacrosse players’ academic, athletic, or personal qualities. Her team seems to share her sentiments. To show solidarity with the three men’s players targeted by Nifong, women’s team members wore sweatbands with the players’ numbers, or with the men’s team slogan, in their semifinal game against Northwestern. (Despite outshooting Northwestern by double digits, Duke lost in overtime, 11-10.) After the game, Kimel said that any attention the team received for the wristbands paled in comparison to “watching your friends be arrested; watching your fellow students not support fellow students; watching professors not support students.”

My sister was a three-year starter for the Columbia women’s basketball team, and I got to know many of the players quite well; I also taught a good number of women’s swimmers at Harvard and women’s soccer players at Williams. Despite Araton's insinuation, female college athletes have never struck me as a group likely to go out of their way to stand up for males that they believed were sexist. I suspect Professor Chin would have a different view: when a sorority “girl” suggested in class that the players “might” be innocent, Chin believed that those “affectionately thought of as my radical feminists” could only interpret the remark as saying that the student protected “white privilege uncritically.” But in a jurisdiction whose district attorney appears to believe that basic state procedures don’t apply to him, and on a campus that in the past 75 days has experienced the effects of faculty “groupthink” at its most pernicious, another phrase from Chin’s ideological arsenal seems appropriate to characterize the lacrosse players’ course of action. At the Final Four, it might be said that the women’s team displayed the courage to speak truth to power.     

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Seizing Trump Assets Not That Easy

Michael Reynolds says:

@Paul L.:
Dude. Don’t ever accuse anyone of being gullible.

You’re a member of a cult of personality built around a rapist, who keeps saying he’s a billionaire and yet keeps fleecing the rubes like you with worthless NFTs and golden sneakers.

He’s a man with multiple bankruptcies. A man caught money laundering at a casino he managed to bankrupt.

A man who had his charity shut down because he was absconding with the funds.

A man so incapable of controlling himself that he lost 83 million dollars because he couldn’t stop attacking the woman he raped.

A man who lies like normal people breath.

A thief, who then committed multiple felonies trying to cover up his theft. A man who blatantly endangered national security in the process.

A man who is known to shit his diapers and walk around repulsing world leaders in that condition.

A man who praises Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Il, while attacking our own allies, and inviting the Russians to attack them, even as he betrays Ukraine. Incidentally, a man impeached for trying to extort political lies from that same beleaguered country.

A man whose daughter – you know, the one openly lusts after – was awarded preferential treatment by the Chinese Communist Party, and whose son-in-law took a 2 billion dollar payoff from Saudi Arabia.

A man who was renting rooms to the KSA while he was president.

A man who for the first time in American history refused to accept an election outcome, launched an attack on the US capitol where his goons threatened to lynch his own vice president.

You’re a toady to a piece of garbage, a vile, foul, treasonous, weak and cowardly, grubby little con man who even now, even today, is trying to squeeze money out of fucking idiots like you. Why don’t you sell your pick-up and send cult leader the cash, you utter waste of skin.

A column in the Rolling Stone as clear and concrete evidence of his claims!

Rolling Stone magazine; which magazine, I learned, is not actually solely published for manipulative character assassinations of washed-up entertainers and the dissemination of libelous false rape accusations against innocent frat boys, but purports to do Actual Journalism.

CSK says:

@Michael Reynolds:
What Trump has been called, and by whom…

Rex Tillerson: “a fucking moron”
John Kelly: “an idiot”
James Mattis: “a fifth or sixth grader”
Steve Mnuchin: “an idiot”
Reince Priebus: “an idiot”
Gary Cohn: “dumb as shit”
H. R. McMaster: “a dope”

You’re welcome.

@CSK:
Source: ” journalist” Michael Wolff rear end.

Wolff’s book, Siege: Trump Under Fire, was released on June 4, 2019. In it he claims that the Justice Department had drafted indictment documents against Trump in March 2018, accusing him of three criminal counts relating to interfering with a pending investigation and witness tampering. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is reported to have sat on these draft indictments for a year before deciding that Justice Department policy would prevent such an indictment. “The documents described do not exist,” Mueller spokesman Peter Carr said, referring to the purported three-count charging document against Trump.

Where are the Mueller Trump Indictments?

MarkedMan says:

@EddieInCA:

If one is reduced to using Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein as examples of your guy’s moral compass and innocence, you might, yourself, be an immoral cretin.

Here’s the thing: I think he’s given plenty of evidence that it’s worse than that. He becomes apoplectic with rage anytime any man is accused of rape, under any circumstances and brings every conversation back around to the sometimes decades old rape cases he considers injustices. I wish to god it wasn’t true but I think the odds are he was/is a rapist himself and perhaps worse. Unlike our other trumpers where I think engaging with them is merely a waste of time, I think with him it is actually dangerous, for some future or current victim. Riling him up is not a good thing to do.

Michael Reynolds says:

@MarkedMan:

I think the odds are he was/is a rapist himself

Yep, my take as well.


 

 

So much for Republicans for the Rule of Law.

 

Aileen Cannon Is Trying to Put Trump Beyond the Rule of Law

She's more than a bad judge. She's working to subvert the legal system itself.

1. The Fix

Here is the thing about the rule of law: If you believe in it, you have to do so knowing full well that it will frequently fail to deliver justice.

The goal of the rule of law isn’t to guarantee justice.

It’s to create a stable framework of general standards and procedures that have to be followed by everyone—even though individual outcomes will be wildly different.

Meaning: When you sign up for the rule of law, you sign up for both the good and the bad.

You will get smart prosecutors and dumb prosecutors. Reasonable jury verdicts and nonsensical jury verdicts. Guilty people going free and innocent people going to jail.1

You will get honest judges. And you will get judges like Aileen Cannon.

We should all be inured to a judge performing the way Judge Cannon has over the last several months because she is operating within the rule of law and we accept the rule of law for what it is: Not a guarantee of justice, but a coherent, transparent set of rules and processes that will sometimes deliver justice and sometimes thwart the interests of justice—but will always be consistent.

Judge Cannon has operated with the framework of the law. She has followed the processes set forth in the law. Has she used her prescribed powers of discretion in ways you or I might think are biased or unwise? Yes. But that is her prerogative under the rule of law.

Further: She is subject to judicial review.

So if Judge Cannon rules in ways you or I do not prefer, and her rulings are reviewed by appellate courts, and the stolen documents / obstruction of justice case against Trump results in an outcome that we believe is contra the interests of justice, then . . .

Well, them’s the breaks. We are committed to the rule of law and that means living with outcomes we believe are unjust so long as the process is followed.

And yet, something about Aileen Cannon’s case feels wrong in a way that does not jibe with the rule of law.

Why is that? 

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Government protects Government.

Government protects Government. Merb forgot the immunity case of Seligmann, Finnerty and Evans v. Mike Nifong. Prosecutors fill threatened by lawsuits which is why they scream when their immunity is threatened. "If somebody tells you they need absolute immunity from civil liability—even for intentional civil rights violations—they’re telling you exactly who they are and what their vocation has become. And we should listen."

Attorneys know how to kowtow to prosecutors and hide evidence of misconduct to keep their relationships intact. The cops testimony that Chilli was not true bootlicking media and had no freedom of the press was priceless. I love how the prosecution had to run from any argument about the 1st amendment and recording the police when the cop was clearly retaliating for just that .



Thursday, March 14, 2024

The “Waiting for Mueller” Mistake and the Right Wing Bubble

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/03/14/the-waiting-for-mueller-mistake-and-the-right-wing-bubble/ 

Simon Rosenberg didn’t panic about a 2022 Red Wave. As analysts everywhere were wailing that the Sky Was Falling, he was quietly confident.

Keep that in mind as you listen to this conversation he had with Greg Sargent. I have about the same cautious optimism as Rosenberg (I was less confident than he was in 2022) on this year’s election, but he’s a pro who works from fundamentals, not just last week’s poll results.

Among other things, he talks about how any of six big negatives for Trump could blow the election for him:

  1. He raped E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room
  2. He oversaw one of the largest frauds in America history and that he and Rudy Giuliani through all their various misdeeds own over $700M dollars
  3. He stole American secrets, lied to the FBI about it, and shared these secrets with other people
  4. He led an insurrection against the United States
  5. He and his family have corruptly taken billions from foreign governments
  6. He is singularly responsible for ending Roe and stripping the rights and freedoms away from more than half the population

I would add two more: First, Trump routinely defrauds MAGAt supporters. Over the last week, he turned the RNC into a means to do so on a grander scale. Republicans need to hear that they’re being taken to the cleaner by Trump — and by Steve Bannon, whose trial for doing so will also serve as backdrop to this election season.

More tellingly, Rosenberg addressed this detail when he described how Biden’s two big negatives have resolved (my biggest complaint about this interview is it didn’t address Gaza, the unmentioned third), not when he addressed Trump’s scandals.

The Biden crime family story, we just learned in the last few weeks, was a Russian op that was being laundered by the Republican party that blew up in their face.

Rosenberg treated the manufactured “Biden crime family” that was actually a Russian op laundered by the GOP as a resolved Biden negative after he made this point, the most important in the interview, in my opinion.

We have to learn the lesson from waiting for Mueller. Waiting for Mueller was a mistake by the Democratic Party. It prevented us from prosecuting the case against Trump and his illicit relationship with the Russian government that was out there all for us to see. Right? The Russians played a major role in his election in 2016. This is not in dispute in any way. And so I think now what we need to do is not wait for Jack Smith or wait for Merrick Garland. We need to use what’s in front of us and prosecute this in ways that we know is going to do enormous harm.

No superhero will come tell any one of these stories for Democrats. Trump’s opponents have to tell the story of Trump’s corruption. They cannot wait for Mueller. Or Jack Smith.

One of many reasons I’m so focused on the Hunter Biden story is that it is actually what proves the continuity of that story of Russian influence that Democrats failed to tell. Trump asks for Russian help in 2016 and gets it. As part of a campaign in which Rudy Giuliani solicited Russian spies for dirt on Hunter Biden, Trump withheld security support from Ukraine to get the same. Even after that, Trump’s DOJ created a way to launder the dirt Rudy collected from known Russian spies to use in the 2020 election. That campaign created the shiny object that has created the “Biden crime family” narrative. Like Russia’s role in the 2016 election, none of this is in dispute. It’s just not known.

You cannot wait for Robert Mueller or Jack Smith to tell this narrative. But for four months this entire story — this arc — has passed largely unnoticed, even as Trump took steps to deliver Ukraine’s bleeding corpse to his liege, Vladimir Putin.

Those who want to defeat Trump — and honestly, Republicans like Liz Cheney and Amanda Carpenter have been doing a better job of this than most Democrats — have to make sure this story gets told.

This is what I’ve been trying to say over and over and over. The reason why the moderate press hasn’t been telling the story of Trump’s role in the insurrection, of his ties to militia members and his direct inspiration for the most brutal assaults on cops on January 6 is because all their TV lawyers have been whinging instead about their own misunderstanding of the January 6 investigation. They haven’t been telling the story of what we know.

They have been complaining that Merrick Garland hasn’t compromised the investigation to tell them them more, turning Garland into their villain, not Trump.

In the few minutes after I posted these comments on Twitter, commenters have:

  • Complained that the full Mueller Report hasn’t been released, when really they’ve simply been too lazy to understand that the most damning bits have been released.
  • Bitched that Merrick Garland hired Rob Hur, rather than bitching about Rob Hur telling a narrative even after his own investigation had debunked it.
  • Complained about a delay in the January 6 investigation that didn’t happen.

Kaitlan Collins’ interview with Brian Butler, a former Trump employee whose testimony badly incriminated his one-time best friend, Carlos De Oliveira, has been drowned out by all the complaints.

The story barely made a blip. It’s not just the NYT that buries important Trump stories under complaints about Biden, it’s Democratic supporters.

Rosenberg went on to describe how Democrats need to improve this. He noted that the Right Wing noise machine provides them a great advantage on this front, one that Biden will have to spend to combat.

We have to recognize, Greg, that the information environment in the United States is really broken right now and that the power of the Right Wing noise machine to bully and intimidate mainstream media into being complicit in advancing some of their narratives is something that needs a campaign that has half a billion dollars in it to be able to draw even on. What we’ve learned is there is a structural imbalance in the information game between the two parties, that the Republicans have a significant advantage over us in a day-to-day information war.

This is true. But the insularity of the Right Wing noise machine can be made into a weakness for Republicans, even before spending the money. Because right wingers so rarely try to perform for a mainstream audience, as soon as they do — whether it is rising star Katie Britt or Kentucky redneck James Comer — they look like lying morons.

And in the face of that Right Wing noise, Democrats need to be disciplined.

The Biden campaign’s going to have to be wildly disciplined. They can’t chase the daily story. They’re going to have to pick the two or three things they know from research are the things that are a rubicon with the electorate.

[snip]

It’s going to be incumbent upon them to not allow the Trumpian mania and madness sort of push them around every day. They’re going to need to develop an offensive strategy both on what we’re selling and on what we’re indicting him with.

Rosenberg laid out the six bullets; I added two more. Trump will try to distract from that with daily outrages, with spectacle.

Trump — abetted by social media — will try to distract from that argument by demeaning all ability to make, or understand, coherent arguments.

I’m less sanguine than Rosenberg that even discipline is enough to overcome Trump’s circus. Therein lies the challenge.

But he’s right that those who want to defeat Trump have to make that case themselves. Neither Jack Smith, nor the NYT, will save you.

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