But for Trump, it seems impossible that anyone at MSNBC would find Andrew Weissmann tolerable, no less one of their “go to” federal prosecutors for all things legal, no matter how utterly ignorant he and his cohort may be about state criminal law and civil law. These are the very same prosecutors who gave us incarceration nation, who were complicit in putting tens of thousands of black men in prison, some of whom were even guilty, and happily skirted the Constitution when it served their flavor of justice.

And yet, Weissmann is an omnipresent persona on the MSNBC tube because he hates Trump and will say whatever it takes to show how everything bad in the legal universe leads back to Trump. And he does so with gravitas because of his ascribed credibility. He was a federal prosecutor. He was general counsel of the FBI. He was part of Mueller’s team. He’s a prof at NYU law school. He wrote a book deciphering the Trump indictments. And no one, but no one, challenges anything he says. Indeed, their gushing thanks for his legal brilliance would be embarrassing to anyone with a modicum of humility. But that’s not Weissmann. Continue reading →

Rarely does something happen, like a fly on a head, that makes a vice presidential debate matter. Sure, Lloyd Bentsen took Dan Quayle to the woodshed with his “I knew Jack Kennedy” retort, but did it change the outcome of the election? Dukakis got crushed in his own right, and Bentsen’s memorable line may have been perfect, but it couldn’t un-Willie Horton the vote.

Tonight, J.D. Vance will debate Tim Walz. Vance, a Yale-trained lawyer who has more than a few debates under his belt, will debate Coach Walz, whose “aw shucks” dad vibe has pretty much encapsulated the start and finish of his campaign contribution as second to Kamala Harris. Of course, with Harris at a spry 59 years of age, it’s unlikely that she’ll be unable to complete her term such that Walz will end up as president in her stead. Thus, who really cares one way or the other? Vice president is, for the most part, a non-job, a spare, a warm body just in case. Continue reading →

Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Penn prawf Jeffrey Robinson promotes his new book, Confronting Failures of Justice: Getting Away With Murder and Rape. What is he talking about when he speaks of “failures of justice”?

Most murderers and rapists escape justice, a horrifying fact that has gone largely unexamined until now. This groundbreaking book tours nearly the entire criminal justice system, examining the rules and practices that regularly produce failures of justice in serious criminal cases. Each chapter outlines the nature and extent of justice failures in present practice, describing the interests at stake, and providing real-world examples.

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Granted, Mayor Eric Adams is the first mayor of New York City to be indicted in office, but that’s hardly the same as saying that some of his predecessors weren’t dirty up to their eyeballs. So says Clyde Haberman (Maggie’s dad), who has the “lived experience” to legitimately make the case, as he ponders why American’s largest (and, dare I say it, greatest) city struggles to elect a mayor of quality.

But the New York Times has called for Eric Adams to resign.

This is the first time a sitting mayor of New York City has been indicted. The charges against Mr. Adams are serious, including allegations that he misappropriated more than $10 million in public funds for his 2021 campaign. The mayor will have his day in court and is entitled to make a vigorous defense, but that does not mean he must force New York City to wait for him to prove his innocence under the law. To serve the city that elected him, Mr. Adams should immediately resign and turn City Hall over to someone untainted by criminal charges and endless investigations.

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Sheriff Roy Templeton was in fourth grade again. The irony was not lost on Mud Lick’s top cop, who spent many a day dealing with adults who behaved like fourth graders.

Today was different. The Sheriff had been summoned to Bear Bryant Elementary School at the request of Ms. Furstenburger, Roy Junior’s fourth grade teacher. Apparently the boy’d been up to some mischief and the Sheriff had been summoned to deal with his son’s behavior.

If only Arlene weren’t at her bridge club, the Sheriff thought. I’ve got that new revised treatise from Jordan Peterson on ‘Atlas Shrugged’ waiting on me back at the station. Continue reading →

To read about it on social media is to be deluged with the belief that Missouri put to death an innocent man.  The reason, they contend, is that finality matters more than innocence. As long as a defendant received the mechanics of due process, the fact of actual innocence made no difference. And while that is, indeed, the state of the law, it wasn’t quite the state of Williams’ case.

I’m not certain that he was innocent. There was no mic drop moment that proved he had nothing to do with the murder, and there was certainly some evidence to support the conviction. He pawned the victim’s laptop, the victim’s property was found in a car that his grandfather let him drive, and his girlfriend and a jailhouse informant told the police that he had confessed to the crime.

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It’s totally understandable that Kamala Harris wants to run for president on the issue of abortion. It’s just as understandable that Harris is proposing a national law protecting the right to choose. But to get there, she’s proposed what may be the most short-sighted move conceivable, eliminating the filibuster.

“I’ve been very clear: I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Ms. Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio in the interview, which was recorded on Monday. “Fifty-one votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”

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They did it. Again. After some guy named Musk retwitted a deepfake video of Kamala Harris that made her look…not good, California snapped into action and enacted AB 2839, a law prohibiting materially deceptive election advertisements.

(1) California is entering its first-ever artificial intelligence (AI) election, in which disinformation powered by generative AI will pollute our information ecosystems like never before. Voters will not know what images, audio, or video they can trust.

It is a serious concern, standing alone, but was its impetus serious? Continue reading →

Perhaps the funniest (in the weird sense, not the humorous sense) reaction to Bruce Schneier’s apocryphal op-ed is that the small minds can’t get past his use of Israel’s exploding pagers and walkie-talkies to grasp the magnitude of what Schneier is trying to explain. If they could just let go of their hatred of Israel for a moment, they might realize that it was merely a flagrant example of a far larger, far deeper problem that cybersecurity experts like Schneier have been warning about for a long time.

Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.

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Forget the twinkie defense. The new hip defense is the “family man defense,” raised according to Jessica Grouse in the New York Times to sanitize Sean “Puff Daddy,” etc., Combs’ crimes because he’s rich.

On Monday, Sean Combs was arrested in Manhattan on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If he’s convicted of the racketeering charge, it could potentially land him a life sentence. His legal team defended him that day with references to his role as a father. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children and working to uplift the Black community,” they said in a statement. “He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal.”

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