The Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel is the office that is charged with providing the legal opinion for whether acts of government are, or are not, lawful. While it’s hardly a court opinion, it is, for the purposes of the internal management of the United States government, conclusive. When the act of government is challenged, it then falls to the courts to determine whether OLC was right, and the court decisions prevail. Or at least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

The problem is that reliance on the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel presupposes that its opinion is legitimate, and that the office has faithfully applied the law to render an opinion with legal integrity. It’s failed to do so in the past, as with John Yoo’s torture memo, which failed to provide a lawful rationale, but instead provided a facile rationalization to allow the president to do what he wanted. In that case, to waterboard prisoners. Continue reading →

Prologue. Having spent years poking at the United States Attorney’s offices and the Department of Justice, it pains me deeply to find myself in the position of defending those against whom I fought for so long. And many of you have taken me to task for saying anything kind toward the government, as the suggestion that the pre-Trump DoJ was without sin and bad players flies in the face of the many wrongs committed over the years.

But that doesn’t mean every AUSA was dishonorable or venal, and many performed their duties with honor and, dare I say it, in accordance with what they perceived to be “justice.” 

I don’t know Maurene Comey, the daughter of former SDNY assistant and later FBI Director James Comey. From available information, she served with distinction. Her performance was “outstanding,” at least according to whatever metric is used in the SDNY to decide such matters. And she played a role in some significant prosecutions, which means that somebody in the office thought well enough of her that when the office’s credibility was on the line, she was trusted to do the job. Continue reading →

To be clear, the handful of Senate Dems who flipped their votes caved. They may have been turncoats to the cause, or they may have been sacrificial lambs, since none are up for re-election in the next cycle, doing the necessary dirty work of the party to get the government up and running after realizing that Trump was pretty happy about being able to do whatever he pleased and didn’t lose a wink of sleep over the hunger of 42 million Americans, or slackers as he preferred to call them.

Did the Dems lose by caving? They certainly didn’t get any of the declared goals relating to health care subsidies. Getting the promise of a Senate vote at some unknown point in the future is about as worthless a promise as it gets, and these senators certainly know it. It was just cover, and bad cover at that. Continue reading →

In huge omnibus bills, like the Big Beautiful Bill as named by Trump using his best words, there are nuggets buried throughout that few know about or consider when voting. After all, there are the big issues that demand attention, and then there are the great many little issues that get tossed in for good measure. And that’s the situation with the bill to end the government shut down and reopen government, which garnered 60 votes from all but one Republican senator and the five Democratic senators who caved.

Not that it has anything to do with the shut down, or anything to do with trying to construct some rationalization for the Democratic turncoats to pretend they achieved something and didn’t merely give up in the face of Trump’s intransigence, but the Republicans snuck in a little nugget for their own in the bill. Continue reading →

It’s unclear whether it’s the fact that people may use the internet and technology without having any real grasp of what their use entails, or that they just don’t care. But with the advent of chatbots, people are seeking legal, medical, sexual, and other interactions that involve their most intimate and personal thoughts, queries and acts. And people believe it’s just between them and their chatbot. It’s not.

On New Year’s Day, Jonathan Rinderknecht purportedly asked ChatGPT: “Are you at fault if a fire is lift because of your cigarettes,” misspelling the word “lit.” “Yes,” ChatGPT replied. Ten months later, he is now being accused of having started a small blaze that authorities say reignited a week later to start the devastating Palisades fire.

Mr. Rinderknecht, who has pleaded not guilty, had previously told the chatbot how “amazing” it had felt to burn a Bible months prior, according to a federal complaint, and had also asked it to create a “dystopian” painting of a crowd of poor people fleeing a forest fire, while a crowd of rich people mocked them behind a gate.

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It’s not that it was credible when Trump said he would be “honored” to fund SNAP so 42 million Americans, including 16 million children, wouldn’t go hungry, except that he didn’t think he had the lawful authority. The general notion that lawful authority entered into the calculus didn’t pass the sniff test, but the specifics were outright ridiculous given the alacrity with which Trump scrounged up money to pay the military.

But after Judge John McConnell, twice, ordered payment, thus conclusively establishing that lawful basis that so concerned our law-abiding president, it seemed that there was no way, no conceivable way, that the President of the United State of America, could stand up and fight against feeding starving children. Remember the old lawyer joke? Continue reading →

When I first purchased an Apple Watch several years ago, I thought the device would be a nifty way to talk with people when I didn’t have my phone around. A sort of modern-day take on Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio, if you will. Of course the damn thing never really got that good at sending or receiving messages—or phone calls—but it was nifty.

I got a second one around the time COVID hit, this one with the fancy-dan upgraded blood oxygen monitor. Shoot, blood oxygen monitoring was all the rage at first and people thought it would be a good indicator if you were coming down with the virus. It seemed like a good idea. Only marginally better now at sending messages and phone calls still sounded like tinny messes, but hey, Apple was innovating. Continue reading →

It’s not as if the Tesla Corporation is going to hand Elon Musk a trillion dollar coin and wish him a good day, but the shareholders of the corporation have approved a compensation package that could, ultimately, pay Musk a trillion dollars. Does that mean he’ll perform 1000 times better than if he was paid a measly billion? Maybe. On the one hand, the shareholders, who are the owners of the corp, think so. On the other hand, can there ever be such a thing as too much, even if the shareholders approve?

At Tesla, based in the Austin, Texas, area, shareholders have largely bought into a winner-takes-all version of capitalism, agreeing by a wide margin to give Mr. Musk shares worth almost a trillion dollars if the company under his management achieves ambitious financial and operational goals over the next decade.

Notably, it’s not for a year, but over ten years. Also notably, it requires that Musk meet goals that seem almost impossible to meet. Then again, it would be foolish to count Musk out when it comes to reaching ridiculously improbable goals. That he’s accomplished what he’s accomplished thus far might have seemed ridiculous improbable a decade ago, yet here we are. Continue reading →

Former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall opens with an observation that should send chills down the spines of those of us who remember how the public bought into such flagrantly unconstitutional legal maneuvers as civil asset forfeiture weaseled its way into acceptability. When imposed, the marketing pitch was that it would only be used “to take the profit out of crime” for drug kingpins and mobsters.

Who doesn’t hate drug kingpins and mobsters? Who doesn’t want to take the profit out of crime? And so Americans shut their eyes and believed it when they were told it would never happen to them, never be abused, never be used to take cash from travelers. After all, we weren’t drug kingpins or mobsters. We now know better. Continue reading →

Today is the midterm midterm election day, when judges in Pennsylvania, governors in New Jersey and Virginia, mayor in New York City and a referendum in California, are on the ballot. What, if anything, will it mean?

Usually, elections that don’t involve federal positions don’t garner much interest and attention, but today’s election is being touted as a referendum on Donald Trump’s first year in office. The New Jersey gubernatorial election pits a third timer Trump sycophant against a lackluster Democrat whose foremost claim to the office is that she flew helicopters in the Navy. The Virginia Democrat is tainted by the attorney general candidate’s text messages about killing the children of his opponent, which she failed to condemn, while the Republican opponent is just plain wacky. Continue reading →