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Some weeks, we have to hunt hard for topics. Other weeks, well, they rain down like a monsoon. The latter describes this week and to provide an umbrella we’ve got the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s White House correspondent Debra J. Saunders on the political topics (and a bit on San Francisco) and The Skeptical Environmentalist himself, Bjørn Lomborg, who at this moment, is the world’s second most famous Scandinavian authority in climate. Also, a new poll question (answer it!) and Lileks make a cameo appearance to award Ricochet member Kevin Creighton the highly coveted Lileks Post of The Week.
Music from this week’s show: How Soon Is Now by The Smiths
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JUST REPORTING:
Now everyone is going crazy about this. What does this tell you?
Retweeted by a nominal Republican:
4 D CHESS! lol
The Daily Beast writer. Nominal GOP. I think he’s a phony, but I’m not an expert.
I have an opinion about this tweet and this paid pundit.
I love it.
They were making it sound like Giuliani was out of control. I’m not so sure.
The President’s personal attorney just happens to be a highly-qualified former US attorney, very sharp and versed in the law. But he is not an employee of the State Dept. I am fairly certain he could run the State Dept. if he were appointed, but no, at this moment, he is not even a janitor there.
I guess some people think that means he is not qualified to travel overseas to interview people who claim to have been in contact with Obama administration employees who tried to dig up (or manufacture) dirt on Trump in 2016. Someone is going to have to spell out for me why the President’s personal lawyer should not be involved in that. It is most conspicuously not a diplomatic mission. It is a fact-finding mission – one that requires a knowledge of law.
I would say that this demonstrates Trump’s experience, not a lack of it.
In the movie “Bridge of Spies”, New York lawyer James Donovan (Tom Hanks), is recruited by a CIA operative to negotiate the release of pilot Francis Gary Powers.
Great catch!
Once again, Donald Trump imitates JFK.
Donovan was not JFK’s personal attorney, was not there at his behest, and could not claim attorney-client privilege if questioned about the work he did there. Big difference.
That said, it’s also not clear how historically accurate the movie is (maybe it is — I don’t know).
Perhaps we might gauge JFK’s legal scrupulosity from his choice of an Attorney General.* Not that the press was going to question anything he did anyway.
The choice of James Donovan certainly should have been questioned, as a conflict of interest. He had been the faux Rudolph Abel’s defense attorney just a few years before and, as a result of his negotiations, “Abel” went free. This was a major victory for the Soviet spy apparatus, as he never talked.
“[Back channel] essentially means creating a channel of communication with another government or with representatives of another government, that is discreet, that doesn’t go through the official channels of diplomatic cables, of using ambassadors and more formal methods of communicating … Every president has used them in one form or another,” explains [Peter] Kornbluh [author of Back Channel to Cuba].—https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-05-29/what-exactly-are-back-channels-and-when-it-ok-use-them
Some source explained that a big reason to do this is when a President can’t trust his bureaucracy, which is certainly the case today.
The personal attorney angle is immaterial. On the one hand, attorney-client privilege goes away if they are breaking the law. On the other, the President has executive privilege anyway.
*That is, his brother Robert.
I like.