Adam Schiff addresses his Republican colleagues:

The president has just declared a national emergency to subvert the will of Congress and appropriate billions of dollars for a border wall that Congress has explicitly refused to fund. Whether you support the border wall or oppose it, you should be deeply troubled by the president’s intent to obtain it through a plainly unconstitutional abuse of power.

To my Republican colleagues: When the president attacked the independence of the Justice Department by intervening in a case in which he is implicated, you did not speak out. When he attacked the press as the enemy of the people, you again were silent. When he targeted the judiciary, labeling judges and decisions he didn’t like as illegitimate, we heard not a word. And now he comes for Congress, the first branch of government, seeking to strip it of its greatest power, that of the purse.

Many of you have acknowledged your deep misgivings about the president in quiet conversations over the past two years. You have bemoaned his lack of decency, character and integrity. You have deplored his fundamental inability to tell the truth. But for reasons that are all too easy to comprehend, you have chosen to keep your misgivings and your rising alarm private.

Knock it off, he says in nicer words than that.

If Trump pardons Manafort…

New York state prosecutors have put together a criminal case against Paul Manafort that they could file quickly if the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign receives a presidential pardon.

New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is ready to file an array of tax and other charges against Manafort, according to two people familiar with the matter, something seen as an insurance policy should the president exercise his power to free the former aide. Skirting laws that protect defendants from being charged twice for the same offense has been one of Vance’s challenges.

…

Prosecutors in Vance’s office began investigating Manafort in 2017, months before Mueller charged him with conspiracy, failure to file reports of foreign bank accounts and failure to register as an agent of a foreign country, activities stemming from his earlier work for Ukraine. Mueller’s team followed up with more charges of bank fraud, filing false tax returns and failure to file reports of foreign bank accounts in early 2018.

I wonder if they talk to each other about this. I wonder if the New York people urge the Mueller people to omit some charges in case of pardon, so that they won’t bump up against double jeopardy. I wonder if that’s seen as legitimate or sleazy.

Much of the evidence against Manafort has emerged through Mueller’s prosecutions. But Vance’s office can’t cut and paste Mueller’s charges into a state indictment. It must avoid New York’s double jeopardy law, which provides protections for defendants even stronger than those guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

Former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman anticipated this concern last year when he urged Albany lawmakers to tweak the state’s robust double jeopardy protections to allow local prosecutors to charge individuals convicted of federal crimes but pardoned by the president. The state legislature didn’t follow through on his request.

It seems extremely difficult to make good law based on the criminality of one president.

Manafort’s legal team would almost certainly challenge the state’s efforts, invoking constitutional protections. New York’s double jeopardy provisions have frustrated state authorities in the past, said John Moscow, who prosecuted global bank fraud and money laundering cases under Vance’s predecessor Robert Morgenthau.

“My suggestion is to change the double jeopardy statute in New York to permit prosecutions with this kind of conduct in mind,” said Moscow, who is now at Lewis Baach LLC and isn’t involved in the matter. “As interpreted, the statute is too broad and needs to be rethought.”

If only we could convict Manafort for what he did to Ukraine.

Another event stamped CANCELED.

Unfortunately we have had to cancel today’s Story Café and Songwriting Workshop due to be held @edcentrallib as part of @AWfest.

We hope to rearrange the Story Café event in Edinburgh on a future date. Email info@womenslibrary.org.uk to register your interest.

— Glasgow Women's Library (@womenslibrary) February 22, 2019

Had to why? Somebody has the flu? The pipes burst? All the roads and railways closed?

No.

We are committed to an inclusive
approach in working with women and do so under the terms of our own
policies. We feel that the Audacious Women’s Festival’s policy does not align with our own and so we have chosen not to run the events today.

— Glasgow Women's Library (@womenslibrary) February 22, 2019

By “an inclusive approach in working with women” they of course mean inclusive of men who say they are women, which isn’t really an inclusive approach in working with women. It isn’t inclusive of women who think women shouldn’t be forced to “include” men who call themselves women in women-only events; it isn’t inclusive of women who would like to attend a genuinely women-only event for once. It’s “inclusive” along the axis of including men, but exclusive along the axis of being women-only.

It is terrible that the women's library is cancelling events for women because of protests from biological men who want to redefine "woman" to include them. . Transwomen have exclusive events and welcome but women need to be able to call women only events that do not include men.

— maggie mellon (@maggiemellon) February 22, 2019

Every day i am seeing things like this. Why is no one prepared to back women anymore. It seems like women is a dirty word these days. Get that attitude to fuck. Are we not allowed a voice anymore? Certainly seems like it.

— Kirsty Findlay (@kirsty151283) February 22, 2019

https://twitter.com/ToFightback/status/1098923408635629568

Ironically it appears that the Audacious Women Festival doesn’t even have a policy of “exclusion” – the complaint seems to be that they didn’t word their “inclusive” policy quite absolutely enough.

In response to inaccurate claims we are transphobic, AWF provides safe single sex workshops for women, including trans women. It is not, and never has been, our policy to ask for a GRC.

— Audacious Women Fest (@AWfest) February 22, 2019

Inch resting. Seems like you sort of did imply that trans women without a GRC weren't welcome. pic.twitter.com/9ukqu5ewse

— Red (@thedreadvampy) February 22, 2019

Oh dear, not good enough – not good enough AT ALL. A man is a woman if he says she is, it’s that simple and who are you to demand that trans women be for all practical purposes indistinguishable from other women? Trans women are better than women, because they bring with them all the awesome of being male along with the magical power of saying “I am a woman.” The more manly they look the more required you are to be INCLUSIVE of them in women-only groups. Understood?

Natasha Bertrand talked to Andrew McCabe for The Atlantic. Here’s a striking bit:

Bertrand: Some question now why the public should believe your recollection of events when the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded last year that you had lacked candor when describing your interactions with the press. How would you respond to that?

McCabe: It was very hard to leave the organization that I loved, and still love to this day, under those circumstances. To spend 21 years as an FBI agent, living under the ideals of fidelity, bravery, and integrity, and then to be branded a liar the day before you were gonna retire. It was very tough. But in some ways, it’s also entirely predictable. The facts are that this president has a long and illustrious history of attacking the credibility of people who say things that he doesn’t like, and I believe strongly that that’s what’s happened here. Firing me for lack of candor was a perfect way to undermine my ability to, who knows, provide testimony against him, to tell these stories that I’ve now told in the book. I never, ever intentionally misled the FBI inspection division, the office of the inspector general, or any director of the FBI, ever. Not ever. I completely reject the findings, the conclusions, and the recommendations in that [inspector general] report. I am very familiar with investigative reports. I’ve been writing them and reading them for 21 years. That is not an investigative report. That was a pretext to reach the conclusion that was being demanded by the president of the United States.

I wondered about that at the time. Trump was jumping up and down hoping to get McCabe fired, and then McCabe was fired. So…was the inspector general report just faked? And if so, how? The word was, as I remember it, that inspectors general don’t do that; that they’re independent and incorruptible and all that. Why isn’t it an investigative report? Why didn’t anyone do anything about it? Could anyone do anything about it? How did any of this work? I want to know. I wanted to know then and I want to know now. Was Trump really able to demand and get a faked-up inspector general report so that McCabe would be fired the day before he retired? If so, how? Why didn’t they all just say no?

Why is it so easy for Trump to do all this and get away with it? I still don’t understand it, two years in.

Huh. I’ve wondered before why Claire Lehmann is a thing, and now I wonder that little bit more.

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1098690463404515328

Aw, it was a setup.

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” is a binary production. Here’s how it breaks down: The host, Tucker Carlson, either welcomes a guest with whom he agrees, in which case the segment is a facile lovefest, or he welcomes a guest with whom he disagrees, in which case the segment is a gutter-scraping slugfest.

A chat with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman was supposed to fall in the former basket, a nice, easy segment in which the host and guest find common ground on the hypocrisy of the world’s elites. In a display of common-sense advocacy, Bregman had appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos and hammered all the rich people there for avoiding taxes.

So Carlson or Fox or both were confused enough to invite Bregman on as a friendly.

In a careful effort over the past two years-plus, Carlson has attempted to cast himself as the anti-elite elite, a guy who understands the hypocrisy of the ruling class because he was born into comfort in La Jolla, Calif., and Georgetown — followed, eventually, by a well-paid career on cable news.

The anti-elite guy who lives in Trump’s pocket.

But the interview didn’t go the way Carlson expected, and Fox didn’t air it. Bregman, however, did.

Bregman, you see, was brought in as a friendly voice, a fellow who would presumably play along with the host. That very status gave Bregman enough space to turn the whole conversation into a referendum on Carlson’s own hypocrisy. “The vast majority of Americans, for years and years now, according to the polls, including Fox News viewers and including Republicans, are in favor of higher taxes on the rich. . . . It’s all really mainstream but no one’s saying that at Davos just as no one’s saying that at Fox News,” Bregman said in the discussion. Folks at Davos and at Fox News, he alleged, had been “bought by the billionaire class.”

…

After some more back-and-forth, Bregman showed that he’d really, really studied the programming values of “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: “I think the issue really is one of corruption and of people being bribed and not talking about the real issues. What the Murdochs really want you to do to is scapegoat immigrants instead of talking about tax avoidance,” he said.

As Bregman continued showing a command of Fox News’s pro-elite advocacy, Carlson blew up. He called Bregman a “moron” and couldn’t figure out how this fellow had even viewed the network’s programming. “Fox doesn’t even play where you are,” said Carlson. “Well, have you heard of the Internet?” replied Bregman. “I can watch things whatever I want.”

By this point, Bregman, thousands of miles away, was sitting where Carlson usually sits — in complete command of the interview, setting the pace, putting his interlocutor on the defensive. The host was verily gasping for air. The most telling words of the interview came when Carlson said, “Wait — but, but can I just say?” That was just shortly after Bregman said Carlson was a “millionaire funded by billionaires.”

Someone had to blow the whistle on Carlson’s high-wire attempts to portray himself as a hero of the regular guy, even as he enjoys the fat paycheck of a Fox News host. So scandalized was Carlson about the situation that he could resort only to nastiness, which he commonly deploys, and profanity, which rarely makes it onto Fox News’s air. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you tiny brain.”

It’s coz he’s an elitist, yeah?

It’s not just for university students.

A 15-year-old boy convicted of sexually assaulting a girl in a classroom has been allowed to stay at the same school as his victim.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was found guilty of two counts of sexual assault and put on the sex offenders register.

The victim said: “I have to just keep my head down, pretend he’s not there, otherwise it makes me panic.”

Is she making a fuss about nothing?

The victim told BBC Inside Out East : “It was known that boy was very ‘hands on’ with girls.

“He started making comments about me, touching my legs and putting his hands on me.

“Then gradually he started putting his hands up my skirt, touching my chest and I kept telling him to stop.

“I wanted to leave but I felt like I couldn’t do anything. I felt powerless, like I was stuck.”

Now he’s been convicted on two counts, but she is still stuck.

The victim told the BBC the guilty verdict helped her to deal with the ordeal.

“It took a massive weight off my shoulders to be listened to,” she said.

“For most part I felt I was going mad. [I was] told in court I was a liar, but to be believed was a relief.”

But she said it had been incredibly hard to stay at school, knowing her convicted attacker had been allowed to continue there too.

Probably not ideal for all the other girls at that school, either.

Another citizen of Trump’s America:

A Coast Guard lieutenant and self-described white nationalist who was arrested in Maryland last week was plotting to kill a long list of prominent journalists and Democratic politicians, as well as professors, judges and what he called “leftists in general,” federal prosecutors said in a court filing on Tuesday.

A a long list of prominent journalists and Democratic politicians plus also everyone on the planet.

Prosecutors quoted a letter that he drafted to friends in 2017 and that the authorities found on his computer. In it, Lieutenant Hasson, who works as an acquisitions officer at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, wrote: “I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth. I think a plague would be most successful but how do I acquire the needed / Spanish flu, botulism, anthrax not sure yet but will find something.”

But maybe that was just a moment of grandiosity. Apparently he’s been more focused recently.

In the last month, prosecutors said, the lieutenant used his work computer to draw up a list of prominent figures he called “traitors” and wanted to kill, including many well-known anchors and hosts on the CNN and MSNBC news networks and a number of Democratic elected officials. The list included, among others, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters, Senator Richard Blumenthal, whom he referred to as “Sen blumen jew,” and many of the senators running for president in 2020.

He had recently performed internet searches seeking information about whether senators and Supreme Court justices receive Secret Service protection, the court filing said.

He was hoping to start a race war, to “get whitey off the couch.”

Federal investigators said in the court filing that Lieutenant Hasson had begun stockpiling weapons in 2017. When federal agents searched his cramped basement apartment in Silver Spring, Md., they said, they found a cache of 15 assault rifles, shotguns and handguns and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition that the lieutenant had amassed.

The Program on Extremism at George Washington University called attention to the court filing in Twitter posts on Wednesday. In the filing, the authorities cited writings found on the lieutenant’s computer that point to extreme racist and apocalyptic views.

Shortly after the violence incited by a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, the authorities say, Lieutenant Hasson drafted a letter to a well-known neo-Nazi expressing support for the idea of building a “white homeland” in the Pacific Northwest.

Hey! No thank you! We’re just fine here, thank you very much, and we don’t need no stinkin white homeland.

The authorities said Lieutenant Hasson had studied the 1,500-page manifesto that the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, a far-right Norwegian extremist who killed 77 people in 2011, wrote in the hope of inspiring other killers.

Following Mr. Breivik’s advice about how to start a race war that would topple liberal governments, Lieutenant Hasson planned to assassinate prominent figures. He performed internet searches for the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, among others, and for the phrase “civil war if Trump impeached,” the authorities said.

Lieutenant Hasson’s efforts appeared to intensify in January. The authorities say he searched for a section of Mr. Breivik’s manifesto that advises other mass murderers to begin a six-week cycle of steroids once all their preparations for violent acts are complete. Federal agents said they had found a locked box in his apartment containing more than 30 vials of human growth hormone.

So, possibly, he was close to putting his plan into action.

Meanwhile in India Modi is locking up his critics.

Last year, the police in Maharashtra, one of India’s largest states, said they had uncovered a vast conspiracy to topple the Indian government that involved Mr. Teltumbde and other well-known writers, academics and lawyers.

Officers raided more than a dozen of their homes, confiscating hard drives and documents. Citing a broad antiterrorism law, the police have put nine of them in jail, accusing them of helping Maoist insurgents, trying to procure grenade launchers, inciting a riot and plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

One is Anand Teltumbde, “a prominent scholar and writer on Indian social issues.”

Human rights activists say the allegations are part of a crackdown on intellectuals who criticize Mr. Modi’s record, especially his government’s treatment of religious minorities and lower castes.

Mr. Teltumbde was an obvious target, activists say. He is a well-known champion of Dalits (the group formerly known as untouchables), a prolific writer with a wide audience, and an unrelenting critic of Mr. Modi.

At a literary festival in 2017, Mr. Teltumbde called the prime minister a “narcissist par excellence” who could prove to be more dangerous than Hitler. He said Mr. Modi’s politics, which are rooted in Hindu nationalism, amounted to “fascism plus something.”

He also mentioned Modi’s role in the Gujarat riots in 2002.

The case against Mr. Teltumbde has alarmed scholars across the world. Hundreds of academics, including Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, have signed petitions calling for the United Nations to interveneand for the police’s “fabricated charges” to be withdrawn.

“I enthusiastically signed this,’’ Mr. West said in an interview last week. “Anand is my brother and comrade, and I wanted to show my support for him as well as the Dalit freedom struggle.’’

Sangeeta Kamat, a public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who also signed a petition supporting Mr. Teltumbde, called him the best-known of the Indian academics under official scrutiny. She said he had made a “compelling case for how and why the present regime is anti-democratic, anti-Dalit and anti-poor.”

The struggle never ends.

BIG Supreme Court ruling, for once in a good way.

The Supreme Court struck an extraordinary blow for criminal justice reform on Wednesday, placing real limitations on policing for profitacross the country. Its unanimous decision for the first time prohibits all 50 states from imposing excessive fines, including the seizure of property, on people accused or convicted of a crime. Rarely does the court hand down a ruling of such constitutional magnitude—and seldom do all nine justices agree to restrict the power that police and prosecutors exert over individuals. The landmark decision represents a broad agreement on the Supreme Court that law enforcement’s legalized theft has gone too far.

Wednesday’s ruling in Timbs v. Indiana, authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is sharp and concise. It revolves around a single question of extraordinary importance. The Eighth Amendment guarantees that no “excessive fines” may be “imposed,” an ancient right enshrined in the Magna Carta and enthusiastically adopted by the Framers. But the Bill of Rights originally applied only to the federal government, not the states. After the Civil War, the 14^thAmendment was ratified to apply these rights to the states, which had engaged in grotesque civil rights violations to perpetuate slavery. The Supreme Court, however, slowly applied (or “incorporated”) these rights against the states one by one, not all at once. And before Timbs, it had never incorporated the Excessive Fines Clause—allowing states to exploit their residents for huge sums of cash and property.

They did so through civil asset forfeiture, a process that we would call theft in any other context. Here’s how it works: Prosecutors accuse an individual of a crime, then seize assets that have some tenuous connection to the alleged offense. The individual need not be convicted or even charged with an actual crime, and her assets are seized through a civil proceeding, which lacks the due process safeguards of a criminal trial. Law enforcement can seize money or property, including one’s home, business, or vehicle. It gets to keep the profits, creating a perverse incentive that encourages police abuses. Because the standards are so loose, people with little to no involvement in criminal activity often get caught up in civil asset forfeiture. For instance, South Carolina police tried to seize an elderly woman’s home because drug deals occurred on the property—even though she had no connection to the crimes and tried to stop them.

Now, that’s out.

In her majority opinion, Ginsburg traced the right back to the Magna Carta through the English Bill of Rights and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, all of which heavily influenced the U.S. Constitution. By the time the 14^th Amendment was ratified, 35 of the 37 states explicitly barred excessive fines. And during debate over ratification, congressmen noted that Southern states were using punitive fines to subjugate newly freed blacks. The framers of the 14^th Amendment plainly intended to incorporate the Excessive Fines Clause to rein in these “harsh inflictions … almost reenacting slavery.”

“In short,” Ginsburg wrote, surveying this evidence, “the historical and logical case for concluding that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Excessive Fines Clause is overwhelming.” She also swatted down Indiana’s fallback argument that the clause does not apply to proceedings over an individual’s property, holding that these forfeitures still qualify as “fines” that trigger constitutional scrutiny.

Good.

this shit is more terrifying with each watch pic.twitter.com/I9uHCrhHJr

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) February 19, 2019

“I don’t care, I believe Putin.”

Mueller investigation wrapping up, or being wrapped up by new AG, who knows.

Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce as early as next week the completion of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller’s confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans.

A summary. Fantastic. How will anyone know what was left out? No one will. Wonderful.

Barr has said that he wants to be as “transparent” as possible with Congress and the public, “consistent with the rules and the law.”

Under the special counsel regulations, Mueller must submit a “confidential” report to the attorney general at the conclusion of his work, but the rules don’t require it to be shared with Congress, or by extension, the public. And, as Barr has made clear, the Justice Department generally guards against publicizing “derogatory” information about uncharged individuals.

And it’s DOJ policy that sitting presidents can’t be charged yadda yadda YADDA so the reeking criminal gets to sit there like a toad for two more years and use all the power at his disposal to rig another election and sit there for four more years if he doesn’t explode in a fireball of BigMacs and ice cream first. Fabulous. We’ve got this criminal evil monstrosity in there and we cannot get rid of him no matter what we do, no matter what crimes and cheats and thefts Miller has uncovered. It’s all been pointless. Fucking brilliant.

Trump is staging another Wounded Vanity Pageant by way of alerting Dan Coats that he should start packing.

President Trump has grown increasingly disenchanted with Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, who has served as the nation’s top intelligence official for nearly two years, leading some administration officials to worry he will soon be dismissed, according to people familiar with the matter.

The president has never seen Coats as a close or trusted adviser, the people said, but he has become more frustrated with him in recent weeks over public statements that Trump sees as undercutting his policy goals, particularly with respect to reaching a disarmament agreement with North Korea.

Wellllll not really “undercutting his policy goals,” since he can’t really be said to have such things. “Not echoing his most recent opinion to the letter” is more accurate.

Trump is still “enraged” about Coats’s congressional testimony on national security threats last month, believing that the director undercut the president’s authority when he shared intelligence assessments about Iran, North Korea and the Islamic State that are at odds with many of Trump’s public statements, said one adviser who spoke with the president over the weekend.

Wellllll undercut his authority and also his vanity, his ego, his conceit, his preening performance, his narcissistic supply, his self-admiration…

Trump had seemed to put the episode behind him and claimed shortly after the hearing that Coats and CIA Director Gina Haspel told him they’d been “misquoted” in their comments at the televised hearing.

Which everybody laughed at because no they hadn’t and we all knew they hadn’t and they were just saying it to make Mr Bighead turn his rage in some other direction.

But privately, the president has continued to fume, and this weekend he told the adviser that Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, is “not loyal” and “he’s not on the team.”

Not loyal to TRUMPTRUMPTRUMP and not on the team of TRUMP and all the people who adore TRUMP.

When Coats attends Trump’s daily intelligence briefings, he has sometimes been unable to secure the president’s attention and to keep him from veering off on tangents, the former official said.

Nobody can. That’s well known.

Well, what are we supposed to do then? If the top people in law enforcement can’t do anything then how do we deal with the dangerous enraged maniac who has a death grip on the throttle? Are we supposed to just sit there with our hands folded while he drives the plane into the ground?

The Post is frowning with concern at Andrew McCabe:

In addition to facing possible criminal exposure, McCabe has said he plans to sue the department over his termination, which he believes was retaliation for having opened an investigation into Trump. Barr’s commenting could affect both the criminal probe into McCabe and the litigation over his expected suit.

Some Justice Department officials were uneasy at the time about how quickly McCabe opened an investigation into Trump, people familiar with the matter have said. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) vowed to investigate the matter, using subpoenas if necessary.

“How quickly” – when it was after Trump fired Comey, and promptly told Lester Holt and all the rest of us that he’d done it because of “this Russha thing,” and equally promptly told Lavrov and Kislyak alone in the Oval Office that he’d done it to take the pressure off himself. It was a genuine national emergency, not the fake kind at the border. Why wouldn’t the new acting head of the FBI open an investigation into the crazed racketeer sitting in the president’s chair?

If there was impropriety — by Rosenstein, McCabe or anyone else — it would be up to Barr to determine whether they should face discipline or whether department policies need to change.

“Obviously, those are matters that raise really serious concerns and questions about what was going on inside the FBI at the time,” Terwilliger said.

But what about what was going on inside the White House at the time? It’s true that we definitely don’t want the FBI running amok and trying to run the government itself, nor do we want it investigating everything to the left of centrist Democrats, but we also don’t want a reckless self-willed criminal at the top of government.

Attempted syllogism gone awry.

https://twitter.com/PinkNews/status/1098005566268547072