Today's welcome en banc decision of the D.C. Circuit stalls, for the moment, William Barr's effort to spare Trump the need to abuse (again) the presidential pardon power on the undeserving Michael Flynn.
A thought or two: (1) I see where Flynn's lawyers, among the other /1
indignities ostensibly suffered by Flynn, make reference to the "continuing ignominy" suffered by Flynn while the proceedings remain unfinished. Apparently, Flynn thinks that "ignominy" will disappear as soon as Barr's absurd dismissal is granted by the district court. /2
Newsflash, Mike, no dismissal can restore self-immolated integrity. The ship containing your life without "continuing ignominy" sailed when you lied to the FBI, admitted to it under oath twice in court so that you could get a plea deal, and then tried to renege /3
with the tawdry assistance of the increasingly corrupted administration of justice by an increasingly corrupted Justice Department.
I also saw where Judge Naomi Rao, ever the loyal Trumpist, bemoans how this decision undermines the "separation of powers." Oh, please. /4
As anyone who heard or has read his speech to the Federalist Society last November will recognize, this Attorney General is as contemptuous of the separation of powers as anyone who has ever sworn to "support, protect, and defend the Constitution." /5
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
There really is no reason for professed "bafflement" here. Sacrificing any semblance of principle in favor of crude opportunism, the Brennan Center allied itself with the likes of Gaetz, Boebert, Biggs, Roy, and Taylor Greene - a group that couldn't develop a coherent /1
explanation of the 4th Amendment if you supplied them with a tutor, texts, and 2 weeks of study.
The 4th Amendment is predicated on the concept of reasonableness - it guarantees that Americans will be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures. Federal courts have /2
repeatedly held that the warrant is a law enforcement construct and is not a tolerable proxy for reasonableness in the foreign intelligence context. Instead, the 4th Amd, requires a balancing of the government's interest in protecting the national security against the /3
So, let me understand this line of bulls#it. If Trump carried a document upstairs with his cheeseburger and the information in that document was, just to cite a few examples: (1) derived from NSA having decrypted a complex foreign encryption system used to transmit information /1
unavailable from any other source where disclosure of the document would compromise this critical intelligence source; or (2) derived from a human intelligence source with unique access whose safety would be compromised by disclosure of the document or its information; /2
or (3) derived from an overhead system where disclosure of the document or its contents would compromise the closely guarded capabilities of this overhead system - I'm supposed to believe that there was a standing "order" that the document and its contents were considered /3
We're not writing on tabula rasa here. E.O. 13526 prescribes, at times in excruciating detail, the handling of classified information. Without disappearing into the weeds on whether a president can unilaterally declassify information (yes) without following any of the /1
notification procedures of E.O. 13526 (unlikely w/o amending the E.O.), there is no record of Trump declassifying any of the Mar-a-Lago information while president. Once out of office, his access to classified information is fully under the purview of E.O. 13526. This means /2
he needs to establish a "need to know" as required by §4.1(a)(3) of E.O. 13526. While such a requirement can be waived for former presidents (§4.4(a)(3)), there is no indication he ever asked for a waiver and one almost certainly would not have been granted given Biden's /3
Release of the warrant and property receipt, which are the only documents subject to the DoJ motion, may not provide materially more detail other than the criminal statutes identified in the warrant and, perhaps, a more particularized description of the focus of the search. /1
The guts of the predicate for the search will be in the affidavit(s) that accompanied the government's motion for issuance of a search warrant. There seems to be considerable confusion failing to differentiate between the affidavit(s) (likely signed by one or more FBI /2
Frankly, this is just political posturing. Not cheap political posturing, to be sure, because it would cost a fortune to implement, but posturing. Full disclosure, I gave 17 years of military service to spare my (middle class) parents the cost of college and graduate school /1
debt. I then paid full boat to spend my son to college and law school. Now, you want to take my taxes to relieve millions of the decision THEY made to incur college and graduate school debt. Did all these folks get their degrees and can't find any job? /2
I doubt it. If you finished school with a serviceable major, then there are jobs for you in this economy. If you didn't finish school or pursued a degree in a marginal field, that's on you (with the understanding that provisions can be made for those who /3
If the WAPO report is true, coercion of political activity is only one of the problems with this memo. Unprocessed raw collection resides in multiple data bases at NSA and “unprocessed” means not minimized. If these data bases include FISA collection, /1
especially if collected under a FISA section 106 order, then the approval was predicated upon using specific minimization procedures for USP communications because targeting foreign communications almost inevitably produces /2
incidental collection of USP communications. Ignoring those minimization procedures violates FISA, and FISA carries criminal and civil penalties for willful violations. Additionally, even if the collection activity occurred outside the US so that FISA does not apply /3