Tag Archives: courts

“Continuing to Cooperate”

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed some indictments and charges, and he “accepted” a guilty plea deal from George Papadopoulos, a volunteer associate of the Trump campaign.

I’ll leave aside the indictments (which charges are wholly unrelated to the Trump campaign or the Trump administration or anything related to them, anyway); what’s interesting is Mueller’s plea deal with Papadopoulos.

Mr Papadopoulos is continuing to cooperate in the investigation, according to his plea agreement.

And that’s what’s key:

Papadopoulos’ cooperation is central to his plea. The plea agreement provides that the government will bring his cooperation to the Court’s attention at sentencing and that sentencing will be delayed until his cooperation is complete.

The prosecution—Mueller—is holding Papadopoulos’ sentence over his head in order to get “evidence” convenient to Mueller’s case.  This is legalized extortion.

I have to ask: what honest prosecutor would find value in what a man in Papadopoulos’ position might say about others whom Mueller is targeting?  What jury could take seriously testimony that the prosecutor—Mueller—has bought and paid for, or pressured out of on threat of heavy sentencing?

This sort of thing isn’t unique to Mueller, for all that Mueller’s pressuring of a witness is very high profile.  It’s a standard prosecutorial tactic.  “Tell me what I want to hear, and repeat it in open court, or go to jail for a very long time.”

Mueller’s Grand Jury

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Judge Andrew Napolitano thinks the reason Special Counsel Robert Mueller has convened a grand jury as part of his “investigation” into alleged Russia collusion by members of President Donald Trump’s campaign staff is so Mueller can use the jury’s subpoena power to compel testimony and the delivery of documents.  Napolitano also said, in FoxNews insider‘s paraphrase, that the jury’s convening is

a sign that Mueller has found something from some source….

As an aside, I put investigation in quotes because it’s difficult to believe Mueller is conducting a legitimate investigation: he has too many leaks coming out of that thing, including the leak of the fact of this grand jury’s existence.  Grand juries are secret operations, among other reasons, so as to not tip off the target of the fact of the investigation or of its progress.  This leak is an enormous one, but it’s only one of the myriad that Mueller has allowed to occur and which stream Mueller has chosen not to stop.

Back to the topic.  Sure, the existence of the grand jury means Mueller “found something.”  It might be serious, or it might be the ham sandwich that any prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict.

Given the leaking coming from Mueller’s “investigation”—my spaghetti colander leaks less, albeit with the same deliberateness—it may well be that he has, indeed, assembled his ham sandwich.

Rule of Law

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The DC Circuit Court stacked by President Barack Obama (D) seems to be iffy on the thing.  In an appeal concerning whether the monies the Federal government pays to health care plan providers as subsidies so the plan providers will hold down premiums and deductibles can actually be paid—the funds never were appropriated by Congress, so the payments aren’t legitimate, ruled the trial court—the Circuit Court ruled in part:

The States have shown a substantial risk that an injunction requiring termination of the payments at issue here…would lead directly and imminently to an increase in insurance prices, which in turn will increase the number of uninsured individuals for whom the States will have to provide health care[.]

That may well be true, and if true, it would be unfortunate.

However.

The law is clear: monies not actually appropriated by Congress cannot be spent by the Federal government—the money, in a very real legal sense, does not exist.  It’s also illegal to take funds from other, actually extant, appropriations to spend on non-appropriated-for activities.

The decisions whether to appropriate, and then to spend, are solely political decisions, and judges cannot—may not under our Constitution—decide in any way other than what the law actually says; in particular, they don’t get to rule in accordance with what they wish the law to say.  Doing the latter is nothing other than judge-made law.

In this case, the appellate court plainly has chosen rule by men—via judge-made law, here—over rule of law.

International Censorship

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France wants to enforce a “right to be forgotten” law (recently enacted by the EU that allows persons to demand publicly available information about them to be erased from links in search engine results) inside other nations than the EU membership—inside the United States, for instance.  Google, et al., is demurring, and France has taken the matter to the EU’s highest administrative court, the Court of Justice.

The case will help determine how far EU regulators can go in enforcing the bloc’s strict new privacy law….

It has wider implications than that. It will set a legal precedent, explicitly for the EU to reach inside the United States and censor our Internet, and that won’t be limited to EU privacy sensibilities, or EU views on censorship.

It’s broader, still. It will set a precedent for the PRC, which can intercept messaging images and erase them from the message before the intended recipient gets the message, to be exercised inside the US.

The Court of Justice ruling—likely to be in favor of France—will need to be explicitly rejected by us, with strong cyber consequences taken against the EU on its every attempt to enforce this first step at rank censorship against us.

The Meaning of “Is”

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The four liberal Justices on the Supreme Court are still confused.  One of the underreported (the Wall Street Journal did its part here) end-of-term decisions that the Supreme Court announced was its ruling in California Public Employees’ Retirement System v ANZ Securities, Inc.  The Court held that the law means what it says, neither more nor less.

The case revolved around whether Calpers could proceed with a 2011 complaint over securities the pension fund purchased from offerings in 2007 and 2008. The Securities Act of 1933 says that in “no event” shall an action be brought “more than three years after the security was bona fide offered to the public.”

But Calpers’ 2011 filing was too late; it was past that three-year limit (even if only by months relative to the 2008 offerings).  Not minding how special Calpers is (a legend in its own mind as my wife puts it), the Supreme Court held that

the three-year limit “admits of no exception” and “creates a fixed bar against future liability[.]”

Interestingly, the ruling was only by a 5-4 vote.  The liberal faction of the Court was just as self-important, or perhaps confused, as Calpers in disdaining the law: with their four votes they ignored, or were confused by, the meanings of “no event” and of “three years.”