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To the editor: There seems to be an accountability loophole when it comes to white collar crime.

Former President Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder allowed Wall Street criminals to escape untouched back in 2008. When pressed on the subject, I remember Obama saying that we should look forward, not backward. That meant, of course, that other than a few civil penalties, they were not going to prosecute anyone criminally on Wall Street. Of course their crimes brought us just hours from the complete destruction of the global financial system. But Obama and his Justice Department made the decision to let them get away with their unspeakable crimes. Let you or I go 30 mph in a 25 mph zone or the wrong person gets caught with a ounce of marijuana, etc., and for some reason those individuals cant seem to utilize the accountability loophole.

Is the same thing going to happen with Donald Trump and his corrupt organization, the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the stealing of information from members and staff of the Democratic Intelligence Committee, the disgraceful handling of the pandemic, etc.? My guess is yes.

Why? Because the minority party is running the government. Joe Biden, who has the bully pulpit at his disposal, should be making frequent addresses to the nation in order to make it clear to the American people what the Republicans, the party of no, are doing to our democracy by suppressing the vote which is, after all, the essence of democracy. He should articulate to the country how the Republicans, who were elected to work for the people, do nothing but lie and seek power.

The time has come for the president to stop the nonsense about seeking bipartisanship with the Republicans. Mitch McConnell has made it clear for months now that they will obstruct anything that Biden wants to accomplish just as they did to Obama. And as for what AG Merrick Garland is doing, I keep getting the feeling that we just might be dealing with another Eric Holder. After all, he has allowed high-level members of Trumps Department of Justice to remain in their positions. And there has been no hint of action from the Justice Department.

If the Republicans are allowed to lie and cheat their way to victory in the 2022 elections, then you can kiss our 400-year democracy goodbye.

Charles Steinhacker, Great Barrington

Excerpt from:
Letter: The opposition is running the country | Letters To Editor | berkshireeagle.com - Berkshire Eagle

Manhattan District Attorney candidate Tali Farhadian Weinstein was not a regular voter until 2016, records show and did not register as a Democrat until October 2017.

All seven other candidates for the Democratic nomination to replace outgoing DA Cyrus Vance in the June 22 primary have been consistent voters and registered Democrats for years, New York Focus review found.

Farhadian Weinstein, 45, one of the more moderate candidates in a generally progressive field, registered in New York as an unaffiliated voter in August 2008, before re-registering as a Democrat in October 2017.

In the intervening years, she voted only in general elections in presidential election years skipping votes for mayor, governor, Congress and the 2009 election of Vance, records show.

New Yorks closed primary system, in which only registered members of a political party are allowed to vote in that partys primaries, prevented Farhadian Weinstein from casting a ballot in any primary elections during that time.

Asked about her voting record by New York Focus while taking questions at the end of a June 10 campaign event, Farhadian Weinstein promised to return to the question, but her spokesperson discouraged her from doing so.

The spokesperson, Jennifer Blatus, later chastised a New York Focus reporter for asking a question unrelated to the main focus of the event, which centered on gender-based violence. She did not directly address Weinsteins voting record.

Heavily funded by Wall Street executives, Farhadian Weinsteins campaign has struck a more moderate tone than many rivals.

For instance, she supports allowing judges to take public safety into consideration in deciding whether and how high to set bail a power New Yorks bail law prohibits and that Vance advocated against.

In recent weeks, Farhadian Weinsteins campaign was also boosted by $8.2 million worth of donations from her own personal wealth, a sum greater than the total amount raised by any other DA candidate.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Farhadian Weinstein interviewed with officials in the Trump administration for a federal judgeship in 2017, just before she first registered as a Democrat.

At the time, according to her LinkedIn, Farhadian Weinstein was working for the Justice Department as an assistant U.S. attorney, having joined under Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder. She focused on public integrity, organized crime and gangs.

The following year, months after her registration as a Democrat, she went to work for Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez as his general counsel.

Farhadian Weinstein financially supported Democrats during the years she was registered unaffiliated giving substantial sums to presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, as well as to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.).

But earlier in her career, Farhadian Weinstein maintained close affiliations with high-powered Republicans in the legal world.

She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day OConnor during the Courts 2004 term. OConnor, who became the first woman on the high court when President Ronald Reagan appointed her 40 years ago, was part of the majority in Bush v. Gore, the case that awarded George W. Bush the presidency in 2000.

In late 2004, Farhadian Weinstein attended the annual convention of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that counts as current or former members all six of the Republican-appointed justices currently on the Supreme Court.

And her campaign for DA has received substantial contributions from major donors to Republican candidates and PACs, including Kenneth Griffin, Robert Granieri, and Bara and Alex Tisch.

Farhadian Weinsteins failure to vote in local elections stands out given her interest in public affairs, but its not unusual in a low-turnout and often confusing election system, said Gerald Benjamin, a professor emeritus of political science at SUNY New Paltz and a scholar of New York politics.

Our system demands more of voters than almost any other, he noted, with election dates, polling places, and offices up for election varying from year to year.

In that light, Benjamin said, he would judge her record in this area as problematic but not seriously disabling.

A rival candidate criticized Farhadian Weinsteins voting record.

We have had DAs who are disconnected and out of touch with Manhattanites for years, said Dan Quart, a New York State Assembly member. If Ms. Farhadian Weinstein couldnt do the bare minimum and vote in local elections until 2017, how can voters expect her to represent them?

The head of a Manhattan political club that has endorsed rival Eliza Orlins for DA agreed that Weinsteins absence from local elections should matter to voters.

A meaningful indication of a persons civic commitment and knowledge of and connection to a community is their participation in our electoral process, said Richard Corman, president of the Downtown Independent Democrats.

A voting record represents someones interest in the community, and so I would certainly think that whether or not they have participated in our elections and have voted in the past is a relevant indicator of someones connection, knowledge of, and commitment to a community.

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Manhattan DA Candidate Tali Weinstein Skipped Years of Voting in Local Elections, Records Show - THE CITY

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The recent news that the Trump Justice Department subpoenaed Apple seeking data from the accounts of Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell presumably to spy on two partisan opponents brought howls of outrage from leading Democrats.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called it shocking when the story broke last week. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin demanded an investigation into the appalling politicization of the Justice Department by Donald Trump and his sycophants.

Mr. Schumer and Mr. Durbin are at least as outraged as Republicans were when former Attorney General Eric Holder, President Barack Obamas self-described wing man, authorized wiretaps on journalists critical of his boss. Had the senators condemned Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder for their similar and equally outrageous abuse of power, one might take them more seriously. But they were as silent then as Trump supporters now.

Elected officials shocked only when the opposing party abuses power should be ashamed of their hypocrisy. After the attack on the World Trade Center, I joined liberals critical of the almost mindless escalation in domestic spying in the name of homeland security. My liberal friends were delighted, but I asked what they would do when a Democratic president did something similar. It didnt take long to find out.

These self-proclaimed champions of privacy and a free press fell dutifully silent within a few years as Barack Obama managed to make George W. Bush look like a civil libertarian. They only rediscovered the Bill of Rights after Donald Trump moved into the Oval Office.

The political posturing by the enablers of both parties proves once again that power is as corrupting as Lord Acton warned back in 1887. The fear that power could tempt even good men to abuse their countrymen is what led the delegates gathered in Philadelphia to draft a Constitution for the new American republic to divide power among three equal branches and included Bill of Rights to enumerate individual rights so important that government should forever be denied the power to arbitrarily ignore them.

Nearly a century before Acton, James Madison wrote of the need to circumscribe the power of elected officials to ignore the rights of those who elect them: If men were angels, no government would be necessary. But In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed, and oblige it to control itself. The Constitution was designed with limits that worked well until president after president found loopholes that allowed them to amass more and more power just as Madison and Acton feared.

While Lord Actons observation that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely is often quoted, what follows is too often ignored. Acton then wrote in the very next sentence that Great men are almost always bad men.

Many good men and women are attracted to politics and run for offices up to and including the presidency for the purest of reasons, but even the best of them once elected too often conclude that those opposed to their vision are not only wrong, but corrupt or evil and must therefore be stopped even if to do so they resort to means they once condemned.

Politicians go after their critics to enhance their own desire to win the next election, to satisfy a personal desire for power, to deny opponents any chance to thwart or roll back their plans for a better future, because they are thin-skinned or sometimes just because they can. The reasons are irrelevant. Once a president, for example, successfully manages to get away with practices that previously seemed unacceptable his successors of both parties, since they are unlikely to be angels, will do the same.

Many today consider former Presidents Barack Obama or Donald Trump great men, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that Lord Acton would have also described both as bad men. Whatever the value of their quite different visions, they both illegitimately used power to attempt to silence their critics. Earlier presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson did the same in an earlier day and were defended by those who supported them and attacked by those who didnt.

Partisans of the left and right are all too willing to defend their own right or wrong. Those who excused Barack Obamas misuse of the Justice Department to go after his opponents and to intimidate reporters he didnt like are this week appalled that Donald Trump did the same thing while those Republicans who were quick to condemn a Democratic president for spying on his opponents are silent in the face of evidence of Mr. Trumps misuse of the same power.

To survive as a free society, America needs public officials who believe in the rights they swore to protect and defend when they took office and have the courage to call out their friends as well as their opponents when they find them misusing the powers with which they have been entrusted by the Constitution and the men and women who elected them.

David A. Keene is an editor at large for the Washington Times.

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How hypocrisy thrives when an opposing political party abuses power - Washington Times

This fall, the Supreme Court is due to hear arguments on whether its constitutional for the United States to exclude residents of Puerto Rico from Supplemental Security Income. On Monday, President Joe Biden pretended to sidestep the question entirely.

In a statement declaring the exclusion to be inconsistent with my Administrations policies and values, Biden nonetheless announced that the Justice Department would be filing a brief defending the exclusion, which it did later Monday night. By way of defense, he pointed to the departments longstanding practice of defending the constitutionality of federal statutes, regardless of policy preferences.

That hand wave doesnt erase how Bidens statement and his Justice Departments actions reinforce the racist history that allowed for such exclusion in the first place. The suggestion that the president believes the matter is a policy preference implies that he does not believe the exclusion of an estimated 700,000 Puerto Rico residents United States citizens from SSI is an unconstitutional violation of equal protection guarantees. It also means, in effect, that Biden thinks the Trump administrations position that the disparate treatment of Puerto Rico is constitutional is correct.

That hand wave doesnt erase how Bidens statement and his Justice Departments actions reinforce the racist history that allowed for such exclusion in the first place.

This position, in and of itself, is disturbing. Both the district court and federal appeals court that heard the challenge found against the United States exclusionary policy. In addressing the Trump administrations arguments in the case, Judge Juan Torruella, in his final year on the appeals court bench before his death in October, wrote that the cost of including Puerto Rico's elderly, disabled, and blind in SSI cannot by itself justify their exclusion.

Noting that the appeals court considered even conceivable theoretical reasons for the differential treatment, the three-judge panel nonetheless unanimously concluded that the Constitutions equal protection guarantees even in a territory forbids the arbitrary denial of SSI benefits to residents of Puerto Rico.

As Matt Ford wrote this year in The New Republic, a deeper dive into the case leads back to a line of cases known as the Insular Cases in which racism played an unambiguous factor. The cases, Ford explained, addressed the treatment of territories acquired by the U.S. during the Spanish-American War and use reasoning described by Doug Mack in 2017 as being built on the same racist worldview as Plessy v. Fergusons since-overturned separate but equal. They also form the basis for the two more recent Supreme Court rulings relied on by the Trump administration at the appeals court in its defense of the exclusionary treatment of Puerto Ricans today.

Relying on those more recent rulings, the Biden administrations Justice Department on Monday night continued that argument, telling the Supreme Court that Congresss decision not to extend the SSI program to Puerto Rico complies with the equal-protection component of the Due Process Clause.

Bidens failure here goes beyond his punt to Congress, pressing as he does in his statement for congressional action to fix the exclusionary treatment. He's also holding back on his authority in this matter. Defending the constitutionality of statutes is, as Biden said, critical to the Departments mission of preserving the rule of law. However, there also are exceptions to that practice, exceptions that his statement ignores.

Yes, the Justice Department generally defends statutes whenever a reasonable argument can be made for constitutionality of the statute in question. But there are three main exceptions: when separation of powers questions are at issue (think of a law that purports to limit executive power); when a statute conflicts with Supreme Court precedent; or as Seth Waxman, former solicitor general in the Clinton administration, put it in cases in which it is manifest that the President has concluded that the statute is unconstitutional.

Biden knows that final exception all too well. It was during his time as vice president that the Justice Department had to decide whether to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. On Feb. 23, 2011, President Barack Obama officially made a decision that the relevant part of DOMA was unconstitutional and, as such, his attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that DOJ would no longer be defending part of the law.

Continued here:
Puerto Ricans are Americans. Biden needs to defend their rights. - MSNBC

JOURNALIST Christopher Sign revealed he and his family received death threats after he broke the news of the 2016 secret "tarmac meeting" involving Bill Clinton and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The Alabama TV anchor, 45, was found dead at his home in Hoover on Saturday and cops are investigating his death as a suicide.

Read our Christopher Sign live blog for the latest news and updates...

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Sign, a former University of Alabama football player, penned a book about the meeting between Clinton and Lynch, which happened during the presidential election in June 2016.

Its reported that the meeting took place on a private jet at Phoenix airport amid the investigation into Hillary Clintons private email server.

The book "Secret on the Tarmac" was published in 2019.

The journalist told Fox News in February last year that he and his family received death threats and his credit cards were hacked.

He said: My family received significant death threats shortly after breaking this story.

Sign revealed that he and his wife had given their children secret code words in case something happened to them.

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Clinton and Lynch claimed it was a "friendly" chat, centered around their grandchildren.

But, it took place days before the FBI decided it would not recommend criminal charges against Hillary.

The meeting sparked suspicions about whether Bill was lobbying her on behalf of his wife - at the time a presidential candidate.

Sign said the get-together "was a planned meeting, it was not a coincidence".

He said: [Secret on the Tarmac] "details everything that they dont want you to know and everything they think you forgot.

"But Bill Clinton was on that plane for 20 minutes and it wasnt just about golf, grandkids, andBrexit. There's so much that doesnt add up."

Sign's source told him that Clinton had arrived at the airport, and he was waiting for Lynch.

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The journalist said: He then sat and waited in his car with the motorcade, her airstairs come down, most of her staff gets off, he then gets on as the Secret Service and FBI are figuring out How in the world are we supposed to handle this? What are we supposed to do?

Lynch testified before the House Oversight Committee in 2018.

Sign said: "She mentioned that Bill Clinton flattered her, talked about Eric Holder, talked about how things were going at Justice, talked about her job performance, not this golf-grandkids, Brexit."

But Bill rejected the journalist's claims and said that he was "offended" over allegations of misconduct regarding the airport meeting.

Clinton told investigators, according to a 2018 report released by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz: I thought, you know, I dont know whether Im more offended that they think Im crooked or that they think Im stupid.

The ABC 33/40 newsman was found dead at his home at around 8am on Saturday and the news network released a statement mourning the loss of their colleague.

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It read: To know Chris was to love Chris. His family was the single most important thing in his life which is why he ended up returning to ABC 33/40 four years ago."

The veteran anchor worked as a reporter in Montgomery and Midland/Odessa, Texas, Birmingham, and Phoenix.

He returned to ABC 33/40 in 2017 after turning down an opportunity to work at a major news network so he could spend more time with his family.

The outlet said: "What most people don't know is Chris turned down an opportunity to work for one of the national networks to come to ABC 33/40, and he made that decision because of his family.

"That decision put him in a place where he could see his boys off to school in the mornings, watch them play baseball in the evenings, and take them fishing on the weekends."

The former college footballer played for the University of Alabama under Coach Gene Stallings in the 1990s, the outlet reported.

Sign won several awards for his journalistic work throughout the years.

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In 2014, he got an Emmy Award for breaking news for his coverage of the shootings of two Phoenix police officers.

In 2016, he earned an Edward Murrow Award for spot news for his coverage of the search for the "Baseline Killer" and "Serial Shooter" in Phoenix.

He and his wife, Laura, met while attending the University of Alabama and went on to marry and have three sons.

If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text Crisis Text Line at 741741.

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Anchor Christopher Sign who killed himself was hit with death threats after exposing Clintons 2016 tarm... - The US Sun