I wish I had more time to do a thorough post on this, but I wanted to throw something up, as I think it’s important. People in Hawaii today got a false report of an incoming ballistic missile on their phones:

Our commenter shipwreckedcrew wrote a couple of comments, like this:

So, how is everyone’s day going?

Not much happening where I live.

“Inbound ballistic missle heading for Hawaii. THIS IS NOT A DRILL”.

8:07 am on my iPhone.

Other than that, kids are enjoying their pancakes.

And this:

With an hour to decompress — here’s what sucks.

Four kids at home and one off at soccer practice.

And the stunning realization there’s not a f’ing thing you can really do about it.

The 16 year old calls and says “What should I do?”

What do you tell him?

Reports are that this warning was the result of someone pushing the wrong button. Someone on Twitter observed:

When you try to exit Word w/o saving, it asks “are you sure?” No one thought about that for this?

— Brian Stack (@The_Cashcow) January 13, 2018

You can and should blame the person who pushed the wrong button, but that was probably inevitable when you had a system that allowed it.

Thank God nobody overreacted. History has examples of mistaken warnings bringing us closer to the brink of nuclear war than you’d like to think. I hope the people of Hawaii recover from the psychic shock of this horrible scare.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]

So yesterday a wily former KGB agent got over two hours to have a crack at a simpleton who knows the nation’s most prized state secrets. What could go wrong?

Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard says, a lot went wrong. Indeed, he says that Trump caved to Putin yesterday.

Hayes complains that Trump let Russia skate entirely on its efforts to interfere with the United States presidential election. But where Hayes really hits home is in his criticism of the meeting as it related to Syria:

The embarrassment wasn’t limited to interference in U.S. elections. There was Syria, too, where Tillerson claimed that American and Russian “objectives are exactly the same.”

It is absurd to claim that our objectives in Syria—where the United States has called for the end of the Assad regime that Russia is supporting—are exactly the same. Forget being identical; in most cases, they aren’t even coincidental.

. . . .

[I]n April the U.S. government accused Russia of complicity in an unprovoked chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians. And on Friday, the secretary of State claimed that America and Russia have exactly the same objectives in Syria.

And then Tillerson went even further. On matters where the United States and Russia have different views, he said, it may be that the Russians (who are actively backing a dictator slaughtering his own people) have got “the right approach and we’ve got the wrong approach.” Imagine for a moment the reaction from Republicans if John Kerry had made such a claim.

At PowerLine, Paul Mirengoff says that Hayes’s “Trump caved” characterization is “unfair.” I found Mirengoff’s argument less than fully convincing, though — especially this part:

Hayes also complains about what he thinks went down between Trump and Putin regarding Syria. He cites Tillerson’s statement that American and Russian “objectives are exactly the same.”

The statement is, as Hayes says, absurd. But there’s little reason to think that Trump, or even Tillerson, believes it.

Color me skeptical when your argument is: don’t worry about the “absurd” thing our Secretary of State just said. Probably neither he nor the President actually believes it.

But there’s a ceasefire! Isn’t that a good thing? Sure — if you think Vladimir Putin is a honest fella. Garry Kasparov, who knows a thing or two about Putin, has this to say:

Bingo. Few wars are as deadly as a ceasefire announced by Putin! Unless everyone he wanted to murder is already dead. https://t.co/CFyeLDsGVZ

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 7, 2017

To Hayes’s analysis above, I would add the shameful spectacle of a man who has ordered journalists to be murdered pointing at a group of journalists and asking Trump: “These are the ones who insulted you?” Not only is this apparent confirmation of the prediction before the meeting that Trump would whine to Putin about “FAKE NEWS!!” but it is also, to put it mildly, creepy and chilling given Putin’s history. Putin might have Trumpers fooled — but he knows that at least some of the journalists know what Putin did to journalists like Anna Politkovskaya.

I know many will say: hey, but Trump said tough stuff and took tough action regarding Russia before the meeting. Well, sure. Trump is fundamentally a coward who caters to his audience. He talks about “radical Islamic terrorism” in Warsaw, but not Saudi Arabia. He says in Warsaw: “We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression” — but when he speaks face to face with Putin, a man who kills journalists who engage in free speech and expression, he tells him he won’t meddle in Putin’s domestic affairs.

This cowardice sends a message to someone like Putin, who has sized up American leaders before. Putin determined that Bush and Obama were weaklings, and he has no doubt come to the same conclusion about Trump.

Expect aggression from Putin during Trump’s presidency. Yesterday’s meeting assured it.

UPDATE: Commenter shipwreckedcrew points out that the comment from Putin “These are the ones who insulted you?” was made “ahead of” the two-hour meeting. In the post, I said that the statement was “apparent confirmation of the prediction before the meeting that Trump would whine to Putin about ‘FAKE NEWS!!'” Since the comment was made ahead of the meeting, it was not right to call it “confirmation” of what they discussed in the meeting. It would be more accurate to say that the comment showed that Putin was aware of Trump’s attitude towards the press, and willing to exploit it in public. I find laughable the notion that Putin didn’t exploit as well in their private meeting. I find equally laughable the notion that Trump — who obsesses over his purportedly unfair treatment at the hands of the press — didn’t whine about the press during their lengthy meeting. In fact, I’d bet my house on it.

UPDATE x2: The same link shows that when Putin made the comment, Trump “chuckled.”

Scum.

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]

[guest post by JVW]

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the first 140 pages of Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, a book that details the rise and fall of the Past, Present, and Future Next Inevitable President of the United States, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, hdr22@clintonemail.com. I have since finished the book (honestly, I finished it over a week ago; I just have been too disorganized to write this blog post). I am a bit chagrined that in my earlier review I completely overlooked one of the juicer tidbits from the early chapters, that Her Clintonic Majesty and her slavish couriers downloaded the email communication of her entire 2008 campaign staff in the aftermath of her humiliating defeat that year, and then spent months poring through it in order to determine who was a true-blue ally and who was a back-stabber. It’s Hillaryworld at its most Nixonian, and I thank commenter shipwreckedcrew for reminding me of this delightful insight into her character early in the comments on the original post.

So this time around I was extra careful to flag all of the material that I wanted to relay to you, and to compile a few pages of notes to help me with this post. I will follow the same format of my first post and just present various pieces from the book as I was struck by them. So with that settled, here we go:

1) Even if you don’t think you want to read the entire book, I would urge everyone to read the chapter on election night which was excerpted in the New York Post a couple of weeks ago. We discussed earlier that the authors are almost certainly leftists who two years earlier wrote a rather flattering hagiography HRC on Hillary!’s “rebirth” as she started her campaign, but I promise you that they do a masterful job here of describing the scene as Hillary! went from certain winner to disgraced loser. Do yourself a favor and click on the link to enjoy recapping that momentous night.

2) I mentioned this in Part I of my review, but with these books it oftentimes becomes very clear which characters were the most cooperative with the authors, especially where dishing dirt is concerned. Having read the entire book, I am now certain that it is the Big Sleaze himself, Bill Clinton, who worked the hardest to cultivate the authors’ trust and present events through his prism. At several junctures the authors remind the reader that Bubba continually pushed to get his wife away from the urban areas and to campaign in places where the white middle class and underclass live, to “feel their pain” in the way that he did a quarter-century ago. But, in Bubba’s telling of events, campaign Robby Mook was far too obsessed with data and analytics and thought that Hillary would win by reassembling most of Obama’s coalition, of urbanites, minorities, and comfortable suburbanites.

3) The pivotal moment for candidate Clinton came on the mini-Super Tuesday when she swept the five states in contention: Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. That became, at least from a mathematical perspective, the moment when Bernie Sanders no longer had a viable shot at securing enough delegates to wrest away the nomination. Yet in the moment of triumph many of Hillary’s aides and donors continued to grouse that the victory margins weren’t large enough, and the professional campaign class with its extended open palm ever demanding payoff kept insisting that she was going cheap on field organization. Mook rarely gets a break in the book, and it seems pretty clear that he is assigned the role of the heavy, largely through the backstage carping by Bubba, John Podesta, Jennifer Palmieri, and other veterans of Clintonland. Hillary meanwhile slips into the conceit that when she wins primaries it is because she is the superior candidate but when she loses it is because her campaign staff fails her. According to the authors, she very seriously entertained firing Mook in March, but still stinging from her 2008 loss she had by then lost faith in her own political instincts. Meanwhile, Obama loyalists David Axelrod and David Plouffe both gossip among Democrats how bad a candidate Hillary is turning out to be.

4) There are lot of interesting tidbits about her Vice-President nominee selection. Podesta started the process right before the mini-Super Tuesday by preparing a list which he shared with Cheryl Mills. Three dozen potential VP candidates were placed into six different categories: Latinos, female Senators, male Senators, military officials, business leaders, and Bernie Sanders. Podesta, Mills, and other close associates added some additional names including Michael Bloomberg, Kristin Gillibrand (in HRC’s old Senate seat), Muhtar Kent (the CEO of Coca-Cola), and Michael Bennett (Senator from Colorado). Kevin DeLeon, the empty-suit liberal who is the leader of the California Senate, was thankfully dropped from contention. Bill wanted his old buddy (and Agricultural Secretary) Tom Vislack of Iowa. Hillary’s underling from the State Department, Jake Sullivan, favored retaining Joe Biden, an idea also pushed by Senator Claire McCaskill, but Clintonites worried that they needed a cleaner break from the Obama Administration.

Hillary apparently flirted strongly with Elizabeth Warren, and her younger aides were wild for the all-female ticket, but HRC worried that the progressive darling can’t be trusted to be pragmatic or constructive. Obama also apparently was anti-Warren. The authors report that he “had become deeply frustrated with Warren, a onetime ally, for what he saw as demagoguing against him on economic issues and for wreaking havoc when he nominated a banker, Antonio Weiss, as an undersecretary at the Treasury Department.” By mid-July the field had been narrowed down to Tim Kaine, Cory Booker, Vislack, and Warren. Warren was quickly dropped, and HRC failed to establish a personal connection with Booker when they met (she also doubted that she needed his help to secure the black vote). Obama spoke highly of Kaine (who was supposedly the runner-up in the VP sweepstakes of 2008), so even though some people in Clintonworld found Kaine to be “dull as a month-old razor” he was offered the spot.

5) Hillary supposedly personally liked Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but by last summer she was one of the few remaining Democrats who did. No one else on her campaign was too fond of DWS, mostly because she had made key decisions about the Democrats’ convention without coordinating them with the campaign. HRC aides lobbied Hillary to get DWS to step down, but Podesta and Hillary demurred because DWS had been an early endorser of Hillary back in 2008. Also, interestingly enough, Harry Reid and Biden were fond of DWS, though Chuck Schumer and McCaskill disliked her. The authors relate a sad and almost comical scene of the Clinton campaign maneuvering to prevent the embattled DWS from appearing on-stage with the candidate at a pre-convention rally in Florida, in order to avoid enraging the Sanders crowd whose votes they were carefully trying to cultivate. All of this ended with DWS painstakingly negotiating her resignation as DNC chairwoman in return for both Hillary and Obama endorsing her for reelection against her Bernie-backed primary challenger.

6) At the actual convention, Sanders had to privately plead with his supporters not to boo Hillary’s speech on the night she accepts her nomination. According to the authors, he was not very successful. Thankfully for him (and for the candidate), what the authors characterize as pretty obvious and significant booing as Hillary was formally nominated was not picked up by the television cameras and microphones, nor was the mass exodus of Sanders supporters from the convention hall once she appeared on stage to deliver her speech. Thanks, mainstream media, for covering that up.

7) Unsurprisingly, Sanders and his supporters continue to be a very sensitive subject for the Clinton campaign. Obama had to be enlisted to tell Bernie that the gig is up and that he needed to fold his campaign tent and climb aboard the Hillary bandwagon, and Sanders was a touch bit resentful about that. Later on, Sanders films a commercial for Hillary in which he tries to convince progressives that she can be trusted. The Clinton people even get him to agree to bless her plan to raise the minimum wage to $12 instead of the $15 that he had been campaigning for, yet after they play the ad to focus groups they are told that the message doesn’t seem authentically Hillary, it seems like she is just co-opting Sanders’ talking points. After working so hard to get him aboard, they shelve the TV ad and only use clips of it in HRC radio ads.

Well, this is long already and there are a few more things that I want to report, so I’ll make this into one more post in the next few days. Feel free to discuss what I have relayed above, and continue to count your lucky starts that these people were not returned to power.

[Update:] Now cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.

– JVW

Yesterday morning I linked and discussed an op-ed in the New York Times by David J. Bier, arguing that President Trump’s immigration order signed yesterday is illegal. Bier is described as “an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.” Andrew McCarthy at National Review responded to Bier with a piece that purports to rebut Bier’s analysis. I am not an immigration lawyer and do not claim any expertise in this area, but I’m capable of reading a statute and a legal argument, and I thought a post that analyzed the arguments of Bier and McCarthy might be useful to people interested in the topic.

Before I get into the weeds, let me make a couple of general observations.

First, as Bier concedes, to the extent that Trump’s order purports to suspend refugee status for refugees from Syria, Iraq, and other places, I believe it can do so — at least to the extent that no determination has yet been made with respect to a particular refugee. The controversy is not over refugee status but a more general suspension of immigration (the details of which I will discuss below.)

Second, Bier’s argument is not that the United States has no control over its borders, but that decisions to deny immigration to everyone from a particular country is a decision that must be made by Congress, not the President. Nothing in Bier’s argument says the U.S. is helpless in the face of developments in another country.

Third, this post does not address a judge’s decision last night granting a stay of certain actions pursuant to Trump’s executive order. The analysis of this post may be relevant to the litigation of that case, but we don’t know yet, as the judge has not yet released a written explanation of her reasoning.

Now, to the details. Bier argues: “The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin.” At issue is this section of Trump’s order:

I hereby proclaim that the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from countries referred to in section 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12), would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order (excluding those foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas).

Bier argues that suspending entry of people from specific countries, as Trump’s order does, amounts to discriminating on the basis of nationality or place of residence, in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1152:

Except as specifically provided in paragraph (2) and in sections 1101(a)(27), 1151(b)(2)(A)(i), and 1153 of this title, no person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.

Bier says: “Mr. Trump may want to revive discrimination based on national origin by asserting a distinction between ‘the issuance of a visa’ and the ‘entry’ of the immigrant. But this is nonsense. Immigrants cannot legally be issued a visa if they are barred from entry.”

Bier notes that Trump relies in part on a 1952 law “that allows the president the ability to ‘suspend the entry’ of ‘any class of aliens’ that he finds are detrimental to the interest of the United States.” But, Bier argues, this provision was overruled by the later 1965 amendments present in section 1152 quoted above.

McCarthy responds to this argument in several ways. His arguments are dismissive of textualism, and give excessive deference to executive power.

(more…)

[guest post by JVW]

Fox News is reporting that “an assailant” has opened fire on a nightclub in Istanbul, wounding several people. Michelle Malkin retweeted a Turkish journalist who reports witnesses claim that it was actually three assailants dressed as Santas who killed the security guards at the door and then began shooting up the club.

Acc to witnesses account to #Hurriyet: 3 attackers in Santa dresses raked the front of #Reina, killed guards then proceed into the club. pic.twitter.com/pFValNi0yH

— ilhan tanir (@WashingtonPoint) December 31, 2016

Stay tuned as we learn more about this horrible development.

Update: Fox has expanded their story (link above) to include some interesting details: they now acknowledge more than one Santa gunman, and they provide the interesting tidbit that Turkey had increased police presence over the holidays, including having undercover policemen dressed as Santas throughout Istanbul. This appears to have been a carefully laid-out plan by the gunmen.

Update II: Oh boy, this is bad: Fox now reports that there are at least 35 dead and 40 wounded in this attack. Just horrible.

Update III: It looks like we’re back to believing there was only one assailant who wrought all of this carnage.

Update IV: shipwreckedcrew alerts us to the news that twin bombs went off near Istanbul Stadium killing 38 and wounding 155. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this isn’t Russians.

– JVW

If James O’Keefe wasn’t trying to take down Mary Landrieu’s phone system, should he be facing charges? If he is technically guilty of a misdemeanor of entering a federal building under false pretenses — but intended to commit no felony — should he be prosecuted?

Maybe he did enter a federal building under false pretenses — but doesn’t every Congressperson do that every day?

If Ellie Light (true name Winston Steward) is technically guilty of a misdemeanor for writing letters to the editor under a phony name, should s/he be prosecuted?

Start with O’Keefe. In a guest post here, Federal prosecutor Shipwreckedcrew analyzed the applicable statutes. The important one is here:

18 U.S.C. Section 1036. Entry by false pretenses to any real property, vessel, or aircraft of the United States or secure area of any airport

(a) Whoever, by any fraud or false pretense, enters or attempts to enter – (1) any real property belonging in whole or in part to, or leased by, the United States…shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) of this section.

(b) The punishment for an offense under subsection (a) of this section is – (1) a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or both, if the offense is committed with the intent to commit a felony; or (2) a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than 6 months, or both, in any other case.

Shipwreckedcrew opined that, if O’Keefe did not intend to take down the phone system, then

I would not be surprised if no indictment was filed — or if something is filed, that it is a charge under Subsection (b)(2) of Section 1036, which would be a misdemeanor. A conviction under that section would likely result in a fine and probation.

I don’t believe O’Keefe entered with the intent to commit a felony.

If he merely entered the public areas of the office, in league with people dressed up in costume pretending to be phone guys, all to make a goofy point about Landrieu’s phones . . . should he be prosecuted?

Maybe you support prosecution according to the strict letter of the law. If so, then I have news for you: Ellie Light committed a misdemeanor as well.

California Penal Code section 538a states:

Every person who signs any letter addressed to a newspaper with the name of a person other than himself and sends such letter to the newspaper, or causes it to be sent to such newspaper, with intent to lead the newspaper to believe that such letter was written by the person whose name is signed thereto, is guilty of a misdemeanor.

Winston Steward violated this law by sending letters to dozens of newspapers all across the country — many of them in California. Steward lives in California, in a city called Frazier Park. Does the Kern County D.A. plan to prosecute him?

I sort of doubt it.

I do know one difference between Winston Steward and James O’Keefe. O’Keefe was searching for the truth. Steward was peddling lies.

Much depends on what O’Keefe was really up to. I hope we get to see that tape. But — depending on how the evidence shakes out — I can see how this might be a technical “crime” that isn’t worth prosecuting.

Hopefully we’ll get some answers on Hannity tonight.

[Guest post by Shipwreckedcrew]

[Note from Patterico: I asked federal prosecutor Shipwreckedcrew, formerly known as WLS, to contribute a piece that analyzes the federal statutes applicable to James O’Keefe’s criminal case.

— Patterico]

(more…)

[Posted by WLS — aka “Shipwreckedcrew” for all you coming from TPM]

The Leftwingnuts seem to believe that Chertoff is in line to be the AG — I happen to think otherwise, but that’s for another post.

But some clown named Spencer Ackerman, seriously lacking in an understanding of the Bill of Rights, or simply challenged in terms of reading comprehension, has a post up with a couple of links claiming that Chertoff lied in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee when recounting events surrounding the decision to allow the FBI to interview of John Walker Lindh without the presence of the attorney hired by his parents.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004029.php

At issue is a statement given to DOJ Inspector General investigators in 2002 by a DOJ Prosecutor named John De Pue, a 25 year veteran of DOJ.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/depue/

Bottom line — anyone reading De Pue’s affidavit would come away with the exact opposite impression given by Ackerman in his post.  Lets compare what Ackerman claims and what the affidavit states. 

Lets start with the basics — what De Pue was asked to research. (more…)