Coyote Blog

Last week I spent a bit of time looking at the indictment of James Comey (not hard, it's barely a page long).  At first I thought I must be missing some pages.  The indictment is for lying when Comey told Congress that he had not "authorized" an employee to leak the Hillary Clinton investigation to the WSJ.  But everyone agrees, apparently even the prosecutors, that Comey did not even know about the leak or intention to leak before it happened.  It looked to me like the whole case was built on the argument that Comey "authorized" the leak by not opposing it after he found out about it.  Could that really be the case? Seriously, that is flimsier than even some of the NY prosecutions of Trump.  As it turns out, to their credit, a number of prominent Conservatives are rallying to mock the indictment.

I get it that Trump and his supporters have some reasons to be frustrated by events over the past 8 years or so.  The Russian collusion charges that turned out to be complete inventions of the opposition party.  The prosecutions by the NY AG for (at best) borderline victimless crimes for which no one in history had ever been previously prosecuted.  The over-prosecution of rank-and-file January 6 protestor-rioters. The "election denier" prosecutions in multiple states that look a lot like attacks on political speech (particularly when similar statements made by Democrats in 2016 went un-prosecuted).

But there are two possible responses to this frustration:

1. Hold public hearings to publicize the evidence of any wrongdoing.  Fire people in law enforcement who violated the rules or abused their position.  Work hard to change the rules, controls, and accountability mechanisms so it is much harder for such abuses to be duplicated in the future.  And trust the process to work (after all, Trump overcame most all the various legal proceedings against him).
2. Go the opposition one better by doing all the same stuff, just harder

Approach number 1 holds out some hope of de-escalating abusive practices in the system and prevent further degeneration into banana-republic style political retribution after every election.  Approach number 2 is fraught with risks of spiraling out of control and creating precedents that Democrats will gleefully use when inevitably back in power.

Of course, Trump and his FAFO (f*ck around, find out) crowd have chosen #2.  They strongly believe that the far Left is violent and lawless and that Republicans have historically been far too genteel in how they play politics and that only by extreme responses can they get, uh... I don't know what.   Do they expect the Left to back down?  If Trump's supporters are characterizing the Left accurately, by Trump's own assumptions it is unlikely the Left will back down.  Republicans are risking a further devolution of the American polity -- is it for revenge only?  For the feelz of it?  What is the endgame they envision, or do they even have goal here other than watching the other side burn?

Postscript:  All of the above is also true in the realm of speech and cancel culture.  Conservatives have clearly born the brunt of cancel culture and speech limitations over the last 10-20 years (just as the Left bore the brunt in the 1950s and 1960s).  The Kimmel firing was a great example of Trump's ability to score an own-goal when he has the lead.  The initial reaction to Kimmel's reality-defying statement created sympathy for the Conservative cause, at least until Trump's FCC head lawlessly issued threats to ABC's broadcast licenses, threats echoed later by Trump himself.  Suddenly a story that that should have been about Kimmel's absurd statement and falling ratings became about the Trump Administration's lawlessness.  Had this Administration just STFU, the Leftish late night hosts would have continued their downward spiral and been an object lesson to programmers that maybe they do not want to program for just 30% of their audience.

I am sure Republicans want to send a message about cancel culture but Executive threats are just not going to work.  Of the hundreds of media articles on the whole Kimmel mess, I did not see a single one (excepting the explicitly Conservative press) that mentions Roseanne Barr or Gina Carano.  Using retribution to highlight past injustices is not going to work when the media will not acknowledge or mention past injustices -- in the media Republican retribution is portrayed instead as a first strike.

I will leave the last words on this to Ted Cruz, someone I think is very smart but with whom I often disagree.  This is from the WSJ

Mr. Carr “says, ‘We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,’” Mr. Cruz told his listeners, quoting Mr. Carr. “That’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

The Senator added that he’s no fan of Mr. Kimmel, but he warned conservatives that government power abused in this way won’t hurt only the left. “What [Mr. Carr] said there is dangerous as hell,” Mr. Cruz continued. “It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”

Exactly right.  I am not sure that Trump's supporters understand the damage they may be doing to our political environment (and if you are reading this and saying "the other side started it", then you don't get it either), but they are also damaging their future selves.  Remember Coyote's Law.

Postscript #2:  I will offer Republicans a piece of advice I often give to other business people: If you are in a dispute with another person or entity, be satisfied if you get what you want.  Do not hold out for sorrow or contrition because you are never, ever going to get them to feel guilt or honestly admit error.

Postscript #3: In thinking about it, the Comey prosecution is similar to some of the Trump prosecutions in that in both cases, I think the prosecutions are effectively acting as proxies for suspected real crimes committed that no one could prove.  Almost everyone discuss this with (depending on if they are Red or Blue team) will say about one or the other that a certain prosecution may be weak but the person is clearly dirty.  Sorry, but this is not how the US legal system is supposed to work.  I grew up in the South when it was still possible that a cop who killed/arrested/prosecuted/jailed a black man for something they did not do could argue that "yeah, but I am sure he was guilty of something."

Postscript #4:  I will remind everyone that both parties equally think the other party is lawless and their own party is too genteel. I have many times seen writers of the Left and Right lament this about their sides in writing on the same day.   I guarantee anyone from the Left reading what I wrote above about Republicans thinking themselves too genteel are saying "Republicans are the violent, lawless ones, not us!"

When Trump took office in 2017, I thought there was a reasonable chance that he would pardon Hillary Clinton.  I thought this was just the sort of schoolyard trick Trump might play -- after all, what better way to tar someone as guilty when they have not even been indicted for anything**. Trump didn't do it.

But now Biden has.  And to his own family.  Wow.

In his last hours of office Biden issued pre-emptive pardons for numerous people who have not even been charged with any crime.  Sort of blanket get out of jail free cards for any federal offense they might be accused of.  The act feels unprecedented, though I remember that President Bush did something similar for Donald Rumsfeld.  But it is certainly unprecedented in its scope.  He pardoned

• General Milley (who called Trump "fascist to the core" and a "wannabe dictator")
• Much of his family, including all his siblings and their spouses.  Republican Congressional investigators believe that Biden family members funneled foreign bribe money to Biden when he was Vice-President.   Certainly their family has extraordinarily complex financial arrangements, sending money to each other through a variety of shell corporations
• The entire J6 committee, which is sort of weird as they already should have immunity through the speech and debate clause
• Anthony Fauci

The legal case most folks are looking at right now is Burdick vs United States  which says that 1) a pardon can be rejected and 2) acceptance of a pardon carries "an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it," though it is disputed whether this latter is a binding precedent.  Getting such an un-asked for blanket pardon certainly seems a mixed blessing.  Think about John Owens, his brother-in-law.  Did anyone have him on their radar before, because NOW they do.

I know some are p*ssed off that they cannot put Liz Cheney or Anthony Fauci in jail.  Personally I am relieved.  The Biden administration set some horrible precedents in prosecution of its enemies, perhaps some of the worst since Nixon.  We are at a tipping point between dialing back on this sort of banana-republic-style political retribution or going into full-on Sicilian vendetta wars.  I have had lots of people disagree with me on this, but I think we need to turn the other cheek here and find intermediate ways to enforce accountability.  Trump's revocation of the security clearances of the folks who made up a Russian conspiracy to discredit the evidence of Hunter Biden's laptop seems like a reasonable approach.

But there is a silver lining to all this that I posted on X the morning the pardons were announced -- without the looming threat of prosecution, there is no room to plead the 5th.  The most interesting person to get under oath to answer questions is going to be Fauci, of course.  I worry that we have not found the boundaries of gain-of-function research and that dangerous research is still going on and being funded by government organizations (most recently I have seen rumors that the Department of Agriculture has been funding gain of function on diseases that affect livestock).  There is so much this guy needs to be asked under oath -- Covid origins, suppression of opposing speech, the vaccine trials, coordination with the teachers unions on school recommendations, etc etc -- that the hearings could last weeks.

Biden's legacy, such that it is, could also be in some danger.  No one is going to prosecute the guy, for the same reason that Hur did not, but there are sure a lot of suspicious financial transactions running back and forth through his family and a myriad of shell companies.

**Postscript:  For those with a short memory, Clinton moved her email to a private server in an attempt avoid FOIA and in so doing probably allowed classified information to sit on a poorly secured computer in her house.  I would have said that neither of these sorts of errors or crimes would reasonably ever be prosecuted (at least at that seniority), that is until I saw FBI agents descend on Mar-a-Lago looking for poorly secured classified documents.  It should be noted that despite the fears of many folks on the Left, Trump did not prosecute Clinton.