#1
FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 for more than a year (By Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis, Washington Post)
“A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.
A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.
In November 2022, after Trump announced he was again running for president, making him a potential 2024 rival to President Biden, Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
One of the traits about President Joe Biden I have most appreciated is his apparent understanding of the perilous state of our democracy. He clearly articulates how dangerous Trump and his supporters are to our democratic institutions. That he was the person best situated to defeat Trump was the underpinning of Biden’s 2020 campaign—and his current run for re-election.
This dynamic is why I was so baffled when he nominated Merrick Garland to become Attorney General. Yes, the nation needed someone in that job who could restore the independence of the Department of Justice. It was a fun poke back at Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s machinations to prevent Garland from getting a hearing after President Obama nominated him for a position on the Supreme Court.
But we also needed a leader at the Justice Department who would not flinch at the delicate task of addressing the Trumpian attempt to steal the 2020 election and then to foster the January 6, 2021, insurrection. After all, as the progressive political writer Doug Porter rightly explained, “A coup attempt that goes unpunished becomes a training exercise.”
This Washington Post story sadly explores how my fears apparently were not misplaced. Garland and his leadership team tried not to address the leaders of the coup attempt and focused on those on the ground.
Ultimately, it was Trump’s decision to run for president that ended the Department of Justice’s slow walk of the investigation. That development led Garland to appoint Jack Smith as Special Counsel in November 2022. The fact that Smith has been able to move so quickly to secure grand jury indictments highlights for me what Garland and his team missed.
That said, I agree with the points Charlie Pierce makes in his latest Esquire column about why Garland should stay in office:
“Calls to fire Garland and other DOJ officials are simply stupid; decapitating the DOJ at this point would be disastrous. Smith seems to be advancing on every front, and Garland doesn’t seem to mind that at all. I wish the slow-walk hadn’t pushed us so close to the election season, but there’s nothing to do about that now and, anyway, the criminal culpability of an individual shouldn’t be hostage to political ambitions. Now that DOJ has righted itself, it should throttle up and get really busy.”
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#2
Fox News Worth Watching: An Hour with Hannity and Newsom (James Fallows, Breaking the News)
“As we were walking out at the end of our talk, Newsom mentioned that he was looking forward to a possible interview that Hannity had suggested, the details of which were still being worked out.
I thought but did not say, What???
Wasn’t this just walking into an opportunity to be talked over and yelled at? Didn’t he realize how California in general and its governor in particular were never-ending objects of snark and attack on Fox? Was this really a good idea—to engage in any way with the network that had just paid out $787 million for its knowing lies about Joe Biden’s election?
More precisely, he was right to take it on—given that he came in fully prepared. Prepared factually, rhetorically, and temperamentally, so that he ended up looking like the one who was having fun while Hannity blustered and stumbled and left Newsom looking like he was in control.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
We should not underestimate just how difficult it is to achieve what California Governor Gavin Newsom achieved during his interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Newsom dominated the conversation with facts, poise, and good humor. Fallows, a former presidential speechwriter, knows just how difficult it is for a politician to succeed under these circumstances. Fallows analyzes how Newsom was able to keep Hannity on the defensive. Newsom does not get enough credit for his policy knowledge, but he also demonstrated an engaging ability to discuss the facts with a cheerful temperament. Other Democratic and liberal leaders can learn a great deal from Newsom’s masterful performance.
#3
Don’t look away: The post-Dobbs attack on women’s health (Don Moynihan, Can We Still Govern?)
“To be sure, maternal health is an area where there is a lot of room for improvement. The US has staggeringly bad maternal mortality rates compared to other countries. But the actual consistent effect of the anti-abortion policies is to worsen women’s health. The post-Dobbs era will compel dangerous full term pregnancies where the life or the health of the mother is threatened, or the fetus is not viable. It will create maternal health deserts in large swathes of the country as medical providers exit, unwilling to accept being blocked from using their medical training to help patients.
The mixture of post-Dobbs state laws and practices cumulatively represents a deprofessionalization of health care. By deprofessionalization, I mean a loss of the capacity of health providers to have autonomy over their actions, relying on professional medical norms and training. In more prosaic terms, this means the freedom of doctors and nurses to act according to the wishes and best interests of their patients.
We are seeing the state intervene in the doctor-patient relationship, restricting what doctors can say and do even when it clearly increases the health risks of patients. Such deprofessionalization is not unique to health providers in our current populist moment (see also education, or election administration). Fear and uncertainty serve as a central means to compel obedience to ambiguous laws.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Don Moynihan, the McCourt Chair of Public Policy at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, writes frequently about how government works and how it can do better.
In this post, Moynihan turns his attention to how abortion bans damage the government functions that impact pregnant people and the doctors and nurses who want to help them. It is an outstanding summary of a rapidly deteriorating situation.
Moynihan explains:
- Why doctors and nurses are leaving states with abortion bans;
- How healthcare access is already noticeably deteriorating; and
- Why the so-called exceptions in abortion bans are not genuine because medical professionals are unwilling to take the risk of facing the severe consequences of providing medical care that violates the vague language included in these laws.
And while you are thinking about these issues, I encourage you to check out the latest edition of Jessica Valenti’s This Week in Abortion summary from her Abortion, Every Day Substack. There is so much happening across the country right now, and this is a great way to stay on top of developments.
#4
‘Pretty staggering’: Thousands of California police officers could be stripped of their badges under new law (Sophia Bollag, San Francisco Chronicle)
“California’s police standards commission is bracing to decertify or suspend 3,000 to 3,500 police officers each year for serious misconduct under a new state law, according to estimates from the commission.
The estimates suggest the police officers engaging in serious misconduct in any given year could represent a significant percentage of the roughly 90,000 officers working in California, although some may already be fired or retired by the time the commission moves to strip them of their certification.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
It is crucial to remove police officers guilty of serious misconduct from their positions of authority. It wasn’t until 2021 that California passed a law to create this process to strip police officers of their certification if they are found guilty of engaging in serious misconduct. The fact that up to four percent of police officers in the state could face such a hearing in the first year of the program demonstrates how overdue California is to take this issue seriously.
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#5
Well-funded Christian group behind US effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights (Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian)
“With the US besieged by a rightwing culture war campaign that aims to strip away rights from LGBTQ+ people and others, blame tends to be focused on Republican politicians and conservative media figures.
But lurking behind efforts to roll back abortion rights, to demonize trans people, and to peel back the protections afforded to gay and queer Americans is a shadowy, well-funded rightwing legal organization, experts say.
Since it was formed in 1994, Alliance Defending Freedom has been at the center of a nationwide effort to limit the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people, all in the name of Christianity. The Southern Poverty Law Center has termed it an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” that has extended its tentacles into nearly every area of the culture wars.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is among the conservative leaders who have associated with the Alliance Defending Freedom since Trump’s rise to the presidency. The group is behind many of the manufactured cultural war legal disputes, including the 303 Creative web design company case about which the Supreme Court will soon issue a ruling. As The Guardian’s Abbott explains:
“The plaintiff, 303 Creative, is a website design company. 303 Creative has never made wedding websites, but its owner, Lorie Smith, claims her first amendment rights are being impinged because, if she were to start making wedding websites, she would not want to make them for same-sex couples – which would violate Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws.”
I think we must understand the network of organizations fueling the manufactured culture war disputes that radical conservatives are using to change our country in their image. They have a huge head start.
#6
US Media Hype Yet Another Fake “ISIS” Plot, This Time Targeting a Teenager With History of Mental Problems (Adam Johnson, The Column)
“It’s one of the genuinely predictable facts of media criticism: See a headline about the FBI swooping in and “foiling” a terror plot, stopping terror financing, or thwarting a terror trip to Syria or Iraq, there’s a 99 percent chance there was no actual “terrorists” involved—but only an elaborate network of paid informants and undercover agents. And this isn’t just a number pulled out of thin air: According to one 2013 study by researcher Trevor Aaronson, less than one percent of “terror plots” foiled by the FBI are real plots, in the sense that they would have occurred whether the FBI was “monitoring” them or not.
Such is the case with a recent breaking news story, parroted last week with little-to-no criticism, involving an 18-year-old Massachusetts man allegedly attempting to send money to “ISIS” using gift cards. Fortunately, The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain decided to do some actual reporting and followed up on the hysterical claims made by the FBI and found that the suspect had mental problems and was groomed by undercover FBI agents from the age of 16…”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
The 18-year-old at the center of this story never spoke to an actual terrorist—just an undercover FBI agent who started interacting with him online when he was 16. Why are we still allowing FBI agents to entrap people in this way in 2023? Why do most media outlets take law enforcement claims at face value and uncritically share information from FBI press releases in their coverage despite what we’ve learned about similar situations? As Johnson writes:
“When the headlines of a particular genre of reporting fall apart 99 percent of the time, perhaps thinking adults working in newsrooms can stop, on cue, playing their predictable role as fear conduit—and instead try, from the outset, to question the official government narrative.”
#7
Apple Is Taking On Apples in a Truly Weird Trademark Battle (Gabriela Galindo, Wired)
“The Fruit Union Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits. But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of apples, the fruit.
“We have a hard time understanding this, because it’s not like they’re trying to protect their bitten apple,” Fruit Union Suisse director Jimmy Mariéthoz says, referring to the company’s iconic logo. “Their objective here is really to own the rights to an actual apple, which, for us, is something that is really almost universal … that should be free for everyone to use.”
While the case has left Swiss fruit growers puzzled, it’s part of a global trend. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s records, Apple has made similar requests to dozens of IP authorities around the world, with varying degrees of success. Authorities in Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia have acquiesced. Apple’s quest to own the IP rights of something as generic as a fruit speaks to the dynamics of a flourishing global IP rights industry, which encourages companies to compete obsessively over trademarks they don’t really need.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Apple has a reputation as a “good” tech company that looks out for its customers’ privacy. I love their products. But Apple—and other major companies—deserve to be called out for this kind of abuse and overreach. The success of the iPhone doesn’t give the company the right to own the IP of a fruit.
#8
I just bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print, and I regret nothing (Benj Edwards, Ars Technica)
“These days, many of us live online, where machine-generated content has begun to pollute the Internet with misinformation and noise. At a time when it’s hard to know what information to trust, I felt delight when I recently learned that World Book still prints an up-to-date book encyclopedia in 2023. Although the term “encyclopedia” is now almost synonymous with Wikipedia, it’s refreshing to see such a sizable reference printed on paper. So I bought one, and I’ll tell you why.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I loved reviewing the World Book encyclopedia in the library as a kid. I would look up something for class and then get lost reviewing entries in the pages surrounding the item I was initially interested in. (I still get lost going down informational rabbit holes on the internet today, starting looking up one thing and then ending up on a deep dive about an unexpected subject.) I’m glad to learn it is still possible to do this with a printed book.
#9
The Diplomat Is An Authoritarian Fantasy for Liberals (Noah Bertlatsky, Everything Is Horrible)
“Debora Cahn was a writer for The West Wing, and her Netflix show The Diplomat isn’t shy about its Democratic party sympathies. The aging, crusty, but basically honorable president William Rayburn (Michael McKean) is an obvious Biden analogue. His unnamed predecessor, often criticized for his failure to engage with global diplomacy, is just as obviously supposed to be Trump. The show celebrates career diplomats and civil servants, those untrustworthy deep staters that the GOP keeps villifying. It denigrates xenophobic Brexiters and right wing “compassionless conservatives.” There’s little question that the star, pragmatic, committed career foreign service officer Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) votes blue.
And yet, despite its clear liberal partisan bias, the show sets itself against voting with antidemocratic instincts that would do MAGA proud.
This isn’t that surprising; Hollywood has a long history of portraying democracy as an unsavory, and even unnecessary, barrier to virtue and good policy. But that hoary anti-populist boilerplate looks especially misguided post-J6 coup, as we face a full-blown authoritarian assault on the principles of self-governance. The supposedly progressive Diplomat inadvertently underlines the extent to which pulp tropes are incompatible with progressive principles—such as representative democracy.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I enjoyed binging The Diplomat with my girlfriend Stacey earlier this month. It is one of the kinds of shows or movies I enjoy the most. It may be unrealistic, but it gets just enough right about politics and espionage to be engaging and thought-provoking. And fun!
This is why despite being entertained, I wish I had considered these authoritarian dynamics enough until I read this piece. Yes, I would want someone like Kate Wyler to have positions of influence and power in our government. But this shouldn’t come at the expense of public opinion, political campaigns, or elections. We must not forget that part of being an effective political leader is doing the politics well.
I’m still looking forward to season two. That was quite a cliffhanger.
The Closer
I’ve watched what this San Jose Earthquakes fan accomplished dozens of times.
I hope John Fisher actually came through and paid the prize. Yes, that nepo baby billionaire policy failure is the atrocious owner of the Earthquakes as well as the Athletics.
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“TK
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