There was a reason why Trump named Lindsey Halligan, an insurance defense lawyer who was unquestionably loyal, to the position of interim United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after firing career prosecutor Erik Seibert for his refusal to indict former FBI Director James Comey. Halligan would do as ordered, no matter what obstacles stood in the way. The problem, however, was that she just didn’t have the knowledge, experience and ability to do so lawfully.

Consider two stories, both from this week alone. First, on Monday, William Fitzpatrick, a federal magistrate judge who is assisting Michael Nachmanoff, the federal judge presiding over the administration’s prosecution of James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, released an opinion about a series of staggering procedural irregularities that originated with Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s handpicked prosecutor in the case.

David French runs through the “comedy of errors,” or tragedy of incompetence if you can’t laugh about it, that permeated the Comey indictment process. Continue reading →

Calling people by insulting, if infantile, names is something of Trump’s hallmark. There was Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe, Little Marco and Lyin’ Ted Cruz. It appeared that Trump believed this somehow tainted his enemies by branding them, even if the appeal of such childish tactics failed to go beyond his most faithful supporters.

But the manner in which he addressed Bloomberg News reporter, Catherine Lucey, on Air Force One went beyond the pale.

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The New York Times headline is that Trump “bows to reality,” which would be a perfectly fine explanation for most people. But Trump? The guy who has managed to gaslight/recon January 6, seen by pretty much every American in living color, as a day of love rather than an insurrection? The guy who insists that foreign countries pay tariffs? The guy who feels the compulsion to tell America that he’s smart and a “stable genius” because he remembered five words (which the doctors say no one has ever done before) and everyone who disagrees with him is low IQ and stupid?

Since when did Trump care about reality? Continue reading →

There was an assumption, bordering on religious tenet, that computers and smartphones giving students constant access to the internet would put all of human knowledge at their fingertips at any moment, and this was going to change everything for the better. Accordingly, much of what was considered valuable in education changed. From such banal skills as handwriting to higher order skills such as reading books or knowing how to do math calculations, smartphones made them unnecessary and superfluous.

After all, who needs to write when the future is keyboards? Who needs to know math when the phone can calculate any problem a thousand times faster? Who needs to read a book (ugh, boringo) when you can google its synopsis, boiling thousands of pages into a sentence or two? Maybe school children do? Continue reading →

There are crazy neighbors, and then there’s Jason Neo Bourne,* who for reasons unknown decided he was angry with his neighbors in their Henderson, Nevada, apartment complex. So after a relatively mundane disagreement, decided to kick down the door and start shooting.

Dianne Hawatmeh and her daughter Yasmeen had just returned to their apartment complex when their neighbor, Jason Neo Bourne, confronted them in the parking lot about a noise complaint Dianne had made about him. The conversation ended without incident, and Bourne walked away. But as Dianne and Yasmeen continued to their apartment, Bourne came running after them, causing them to rush to the apartment in fear. Joseph was already inside the apartment. Two housekeepers, Veronica Muniz and a second woman, were also inside the apartment. Dianne and Yasmeen entered the apartment and closed the door but were unable to latch the deadbolt because Bourne was trying to force his way inside. Bourne ultimately kicked the door open, shot Dianne and Muniz to death, and shot and severely wounded Yasmeen.
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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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