Category Archives: ethics

Lying to a Court

Posted on by
1

Press rumor has it that the DOJ’s IG report will call out an FBI lawyer for falsifying an email used by the FISA court to authorize the FBI to spy on monitor a Trump 2016 campaign advisor. Press rumor further has it that the IG report also will say the court would have authorized the…monitoring…regardless.

Let’s assume that first rumor is true. This is no minor matter; this is no loaf of bread stolen to feed the man’s family, in which some compassion might be felt for the felon.  This was a loaf of bread stolen because the man could.  This was a loaf of bread stolen explicitly to hurt someone else.  And in the end, this was a far more serious crime than merely stealing a loaf.

The FBI lawyer will have lied on a government form.  This FBI lawyer will have lied under oath when he swore to the authenticity of his document submittal.  This FBI lawyer will have lied to a court, altering the data on which the court relied—of necessity—as it reached its ruling.

The second rumor may well be plausible, but it remains speculation—there’s no way to evaluate the fact of the matter of such counterfactual surmise.  Even if accurate, though, even if the court would have reached the same decision had the FBI lawyer not lied, or even not submitted the document (altered or not) at all, the fact remains the FBI lawyer will have lied.  Under oath.

If the first rumor is true, the sanction must begin with the permanent loss of his law license, in all jurisdictions, include jail time, and then proceed from there.

A Court Error

Posted on by
Reply

It seems the Hong Kong High Court messed up.  Recall that, last week, the court ruled Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s “emergency” rule barring Hong Kong citizens from wearing masks was illegal. Lam’s rule, the court ruled

infringed on fundamental rights more than was reasonably necessary.

Oops.

The court, having received its marching orders from Beijing, through Lam’s government corrected itself:

following an appeal from the government to freeze the ruling, the court agreed to grant a one-week suspension in view of the “highly exceptional circumstances that Hong Kong is currently facing,” local broadcaster RTHK reported.

Just in time for today’s nominally free local—district—elections (elections to the city’s legislature won’t be for another year).

Dishonesty of Journalism

Posted on by
Reply

The guild’s latest lie began with a UN lie: Manfred Nowak’s (Independent Expert leading the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty) claim that

100,000 migrant children were detained by the Trump administration and indicated that it was the “world’s highest rate” of detained children.

Then Nowak was forced to confess that the number was cribbed from ex-President Barack Obama (D) administration statistics and that it was Obama who had detained those 100,000 children.

Guild dishonesty that flowed from that was broad.

Reuters:

A Nov 18 story headlined “US has world’s highest rate of children in detention—UN study” is withdrawn. The United Nations issued a statement on Nov 19 saying the number was not current but was for the year 2015. No replacement story will be issued[.]

National Public Radio:

We have temporarily withdrawn this story because the study’s author has acknowledged a significant error in the data. We will post a revised article with more complete information as soon as possible.

Apparently, “as soon as possible” means “if and when we feel like it.” As I write, three days after the lie, NPR doesn’t seem to have found it possible to correct its tale.

Agence France-Presse:

AFP is withdrawing this story.
The author of the report has clarified that his figures do not represent the number of children currently in migration-related US detention, but the total number of children in migration-related US detention in 2015.
We will delete the story.

Associated Press:

The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about a claim about the number of children being held in migration-related detention in the United States. The story quoted an independent expert working with the UN human rights office saying that over 100,000 children are currently being held. But that figure refers to the total number of US child detentions for the year 2015, according to the UN refugee agency.

And in an example of the danger of anyone relying on claims of the journalism guild, the Democratic National Committee got caught using the lie, unchecked, uncorroborated in any way, to make political hay:

This is a disgusting result of Trump’s family separation policies- pushed by Stephen Miller who has cited white nationalist propaganda in promoting his views. It’s also, apparently, a violation of a UN treaty, the Convention on the Rights of the Child[.]

But, apparently, a UN official lying about migration statistics doesn’t violate much of anything.

Notice the breadth of this journalistic dishonesty.  The guild broadly repeated the lie without even the barest effort to verify, or even corroborate, it.

Then on the lie having been caught out, the guild tried to cover up its own role in spreading the lie by simply announcing that they were deleting their stories [sic]. They made no move to correct them, only to hide them.

And they published not a single syllable of apology for their role in proselytizing the lie.

Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson has the right of this shameful episode:

Real journalism is reporting the truth, not covering it up. When the article originally portrayed Trump negatively, it was big news. When the truth came out that Obama was to blame, not Trump, the headline and text should have been corrected, not taken down[.]

But that’s not guild practice.

A Thought on Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

Stanley Fish, Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law, thinks that when Seton Hall “disinvited” him from speaking there he wasn’t being censored.

Fish’s headline, I Wasn’t Censored When I Was Disinvited, led off his claim. Then he contradicted himself with the opening sentence of his second paragraph:

My ideas were judged unworthy of being heard.

This is precisely what censorship is. Here is a legal definition of censorship:

The suppression or proscription of speech or writing that is deemed obscene, indecent, or unduly controversial.

Here’s a “civilian” definition of censor:

To examine and expurgate.

Near the end of his piece, Fish had this:

I have no right to speak at Seton Hall….

That’s a strawman argument. No one claiming he had a right to speak or that such a right was being blocked.  Moreover, there’s nothing in either of those definitions about blocking a right to speak; censorship in the Seton Hall case was the blocking of speech itself, and the censors were precisely those managers of the school and the school’s pupils.

This is an example of how far left the Left has pushed what is permissible speech and how meekly folks who should know better have acquiesced in that push.

Balanced Journalism

Posted on by
Reply

Fox News‘ Howard Kurtz objected to MSNBC‘s use of Mr Kellyanne Conway, George, as a commentator on the President Donald Trump impeachment hearings.  He’s quite right in this but he missed a larger point wit this remark:

Kurtz said it was shocking to him that television networks would cover impeachment hearings only with partisan commentators and political pundits, rather than leaving it chiefly in the hands of bonafide journalists.

Maybe that’s because there aren’t any bonafide journalists; there are only partisan commentators and political…pundits in the journalism guild.

Kurtz and his fellow so-called journalists continue to decline to explain what standard of journalistic integrity he and they use in place of the erstwhile journalism standard of integrity that required two on-record sources to corroborate anonymous sources’ claims.