Category Archives: Law

AB5

A letter from a California Democrat to California Democrats: What were you thinking?

She’s being overgenerous in her assumption that there was actually anything resembling thought involved.

[Thursday-morning update]

The bill is so bad that the legislature may dump it next week.

[Bumped]

[Friday-morning update]

Now the legislature is going to require strippers and webcammers to get an occupational license.

I volunteer to help with providing the necessary training.

[Bumped]

The Democrats And 2016

They still haven’t come to terms with it.

They probably never will.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Democrat groans in response to Bloomberg’s defense of capitalism should terrify all of us.

[Update a while later]

First link is fixed, sorry.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The debate was a glorious Wrestlemania.

Bill Barr

…and his critics’ derangement syndrome.

Anti-Barr polemics dwell on the parade of horribles that might come from his tenure at Justice, without pausing to consider that a norm-busting violation of the rules targeting a politically inconvenient individual already occurred — it was the abusive FISA surveillance of former Trump campaign official Carter Page.

The supposed institutionalists and civil libertarians who are piling on Barr are more outraged that the attorney general wants to get to the bottom of this abuse — and related 2016 investigatory overreach — than by the abuse itself.

It’s no wonder that Barr has a poorly disguised contempt for his critics, many of whom are so inflamed by their opposition to Trump that they’ve lost any sense of standards. In a peppery speech to a Federalist Society conference last year that is now one of the counts against him, Barr rightly warned that “it is the Left that is engaged in a systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.”

As has always been the case.

The Flynn Case

From Sydney Powell’s latest filing:

The government’s conduct in this case has been so outrageous—and evidence of it suppressed—that FBI Director Wray immediately adopted new policies to foreclose it. No one had anticipated the leadership of the FBI and DOJ would “spy” on a presidential campaign and breach the trust of a presidential nominee and purposefully circumvent DOJ and White House protocols to interview the new administration’s National Security Advisor without counsel.

Moreover, it seems impossible for Special Assistant United States Attorney Van Grack to view these issues with even a hint of objectivity. The defense’s motions and the IG Report evince Mr. Van Grack’s plain suppression of evidence that is undeniably exculpatory to Mr. Flynn under any objective standard and a series of his retaliatory actions against Mr. Flynn. ECF No. 133. Mr.Van Grack has suppressed evidence from the formation of the “Special Counsel Investigation” and likely even prior to it—for the very purpose of putting Mr. Flynn in the unjust position he now occupies while protecting the prosecutors, his team, and the cadre of malfeasant FBI agents from the discovery of their negligence, crimes, and wrongs. There is a veritable litany of government misconduct here that is “outrageous” or “grossly shocking” and mandates dismissal of this prosecution.

Good luck with that.