Monthly Archives: June 2017

Obstruction of Justice

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Ex-FBI Director James Comey testified earlier this week before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he was the one who orchestrated the leak of his MFR purportedly describing a one-on-one meeting with President Donald Trump.  Comey said he asked a friend (Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, and a man who should have known better himself) to leak the document and the friend subsequently read it over the phone to a New York Times writer.

Even larger than the fact that Comey leaked the thing or caused its leak are two other matters: the MFR was, and is, government property since he wrote it as a government employee; it is not, and never has been, his personal property.  Thus, the leak, having been done without government permission, was illegal.  There’s also this bit, that illustrates Comey’s dishonesty, if not directly the illegality of his leak [emphasis added]:

Two days after Comey was fired, The New York Times reported on a January conversation—allegedly sourced from those Comey told about the encounter [now known to be Richman]—in which Comey claimed Trump asked him for his loyalty. Trump has vociferously denied he made such a request and tweeted the following day: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Comey, in his Thursday testimony, said it was that tweet that prompted him to enlist Richman to help him leak memos….

More than that, though, is Comey’s stated motive for his leak: to trigger the appointment of a special counsel to conduct the investigation into Trump’s campaign staff’s alleged involvement with Russian intrusions into our election process and other involvements between those personnel and Russian persons.

That strikes me as obstruction of justice.  There already were investigations in progress, by the FBI and by four Congressional committees, into precisely those matters.  Comey didn’t like the way those investigations were going, and so he wanted to trigger another—which existence could only interfere with the existing investigations.

General Reform

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25% of us don’t see doctors because that costs too much.

32% of older millennials (is there such a thing?  Gad) skip the doctor.  13% of Americans don’t have any health coverage plan at all—paying the penalty is more valuable to them.  Half of us don’t think we’ll have affordable health insurance much less Obamacare’s health coverage welfare.

This, together with today’s other post, just illustrates the fact that no single part of our economy—or of our Federal government—can effectively be treated in isolation: not Obamacare alone, not Federal spending alone (especially not by “cutting” through reducing the rate of growth in spending), not taxing alone, not debt handling alone.

They’re a system, and the system as a whole must be reformed, not convenient parts of it.  That’s Systems Management 101.

Losing Health Coverage

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The CBO and Progressive-Democrats in Congress loudly claim that millions will lose their health coverage plans under Republican plans to repeal and replace Obamacare.

What the Progressive-Democrats are carefully ignoring (the CBO not so much; they weren’t tasked with comparing the Republican plans and Obamacare) are the real millions that already are losing or are about to lose their health coverage plans because Obamacare is collapsing now.

The nation’s second largest health insurance company, Anthem, will extract itself from the majority of the ObamaCare market in the state of Ohio by 2018, the company announced Tuesday, raising questions about the future of its exchange participation.

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The decision could leave 20 counties within the state without access to coverage under the Affordable Care Act[.]

Anthem is considering leaving Obamacare altogether in the not-too-distant future.

Anthem handles over a million customers in the health coverage market, now considerably fewer under Obamacare, and perhaps shortly none at all.  Nor is Anthem alone in being unable to continue under Obamacare.  Aetna and Humana will be leaving next year, and those customers will be losing their coverage.

Those people actually, not speculatively, are losing their coverage.

South China Sea Nonsense

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In response to Secretary of Defense James Mattis’, on his recent trip to the region, calling out the People’s Republic of China for its aggressions in the South China Sea, the PRC’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, had this to say.

China’s defense is for safeguarding China’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity[.]

This, of course, is nonsense, since the People’s Republic of China has no territory, and so no territorial integrity or sovereignty interests, in the South China Sea.

She went on to criticize us for our “Cold War mentality.”  If the PRC is truly concerned about a new cold war, it should desist from making one and withdraw from its occupation of international waters and islands.

A First Amendment Beef

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This one, I think, is a bad beef.  A Columbia University club known as the Knight First Amendment Institute, styling themselves a First Amendment advocate organization, has taken notice of the fact that President Donald Trump has blocked some folks from his personal twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, an account he’s had since well before the campaign and his election.  The Director of the Institute, Jameel Jaffer, wrote a letter to “the Trump administration” claiming that the Constitution “requires” those accounts to be unblocked.

Users who have been blocked cannot follow you on Twitter, and they are limited in their ability to view your tweets, find your tweets using Twitter’s search function, and learn which accounts follow you….  Blocking users from your Twitter account violates the First Amendment. When the government makes a space available to the public at large for the purpose of expressive activity, it creates a public forum from which it may not constitutionally exclude individuals on the basis of viewpoint. This is true even if the space in question is “metaphysical” rather than physical.

What Jaffer is ignoring, among other things, is that the government did not create the @realDOnaldTrump account; private citizen Donald Trump did.  The government created the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts.

The President’s personal twitter account is not the same thing as @POTUS or @WhiteHouse, which are public forums created by the White House some administrations ago specifically for the purpose of passing out White House announcements and, perhaps, exchanging views.

So what do we have?  This is what the 1st Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

None of that applies here.  Trump’s blocking some folks from his personal twitter feed has nothing at all to do with religion, nor does it restrict the press—NLMSM or legitimate—at all.  Even the use of social media as press—this blog, for instance, or established press’ and pressmen’s own Facebook pages, twitter feeds, Instagram setups, etc are not restricted in the slightest.

That leaves the question of free speech, peaceful assembly, and petitioning of the Government.

None of these are impacted by blocking some twitterers from a private account, either.  Those folks still have unfettered access to the government via the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts: they still can engage in free speech activities with the administration and with Trump; they still can peacefully assemble, even if that assembly is “metaphysical,” and they still can fully petition the Government.  And that’s just through the government’s twitter feeds.  These folks also have access via the White House’s Facebook page, email even via old-fashioned snail mail.

This is just some folks with more time on their hands than productive activities along with their rent-seeking lawyers manufacturing another excuse to whine.