Wow, Colbert, that was hilarious! What a great satirical take-down of ignorant and biased Democrats who somehow can’t perceive how abnormal it is—well, not in Russia— for an entire party to seek to eliminate the primary threat to its power by searching for ways to send him to jail! Brilliant! He even perfectly evokes their disdain for due process: “everybody” knows Trump is guilty, so what are the courts waiting for? Wait, what? Colbert wasn’t trying to be funny? But I thought he was a comedian!
Meanwhile, in other ethics news involving law, courts, judges and lawyers—
1. Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “How someone reacts to the Fani Willis testimony yesterday is a litmus test for if they’re a complete partisan hack. Anyone who denies that she clearly lied, could not respond to basic questions, acted inappropriately, and corrupted this prosecution is a mindless Dem partisan.” Almost my entire legal ethics listserv basically reacted to the Fani Willis hearing by concluding that nothing she did was relevant to the prosecution of Donald Trump. The few bold souls among the legal ethics experts who are inclined to dissent are doing so timidly at best. The anti-Trump bias in my sector is shocking, and the rationalizations being grabbed onto to defend Willis are embarrassing. One very prominent legal ethics specialist wrote that he believes the Fulton County DA hiring her lover was innocent because “she couldn’t find any qualified lawyer”—David Wade is not qualified— to take the job.
2. Meanwhile, both ABC and the New York Times adopted Willis’s insulting “This is only happening because I’m a black woman!” defense.
3. Talk about “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight”: the Fulton County case is a true legal ethics clown show. The racketeering prosecution against Trump and others has been randomly assigned to Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott F. McAfee, who was once supervised by …Fani Willis! If Willis isn’t kicked off the case, McAfee needs to recuse himself unless the defense waives the personal conflict. And it might, too, because McAfee is a conservative, and was appointed by GOP Georgia Governor Kemp. On the other hand, Kemp and Trump don’t get along…
4. Now that the mainstream media has decided that Joe Biden really isn’t up to the job of POTUS and that they better help jettison him before it’s too late, some usual bastions of Democratic Party cover-up stories are letting uncomfortable truths finally seep out. For example, New York Magazine writes of the “incendiary” report by special counsel Robert Hur that triggered the intensified focus on President Biden’s creeping, now jogging, dementia: “It’s that Joe Biden knew he had highly classified documents in his home, kept them for a reason, and held on to them for years. He knew, all along. He arguably broke the law, and he definitely misled the American public. That should be the vital takeaway from Hur’s investigation — more than the report’s headline-stealing description of Biden’s advanced age and creaky memory.”
Why yes it is! How noble of you and almost journalism-like to say so!
5. Washington D.C. juries are coming in for some harsh criticism after the verdict in Michael Mann’s defamation suit against pundit/critic Mark Steyn. It was fascinating to contrast the comments about the case from Ann Althouse’s readers—these days almost entirely red-pilled—and New York Times readers on an op-ed by Mann and his lawyer extolling the value of juries (who can’t possibly evaluate climate change issue or the validity of the claims by activists like Mann) in crushing the “climate deniers.” A representative comment on Ann’s blog:
“What’s disheartening is is that the jury was comprised of such complete and utter morons (but what else should we expect in DC?), as not a scintilla of credible evidence was presented which supports their finding. Anyone who followed the trial knows that Michael Mann is a complete fraud, as is his hockey stick. It’s not that global warming isn’t real – it is – but rather that it’s magnitude and real world implications have been so grossly distorted for political purposes. That global warming fearmongers are acting in bad faith is obvious. As Mann’s attorney (who should be disbarred for misconduct) told the jury, and as Mann now advocates, anyone who disagrees must be punished. Fuck Michael Mann. I hope and pray there are a few decent and principled judges who hear the appeal.
Science by consensus is a joke, and its proponents are evil.”
Surprisingly, about half the comments at the Times echoed that one. For example,
“You talk about a “war on science,” yet you make 7 assertions in the first paragraph of the article and then proceed to say, “Those are facts, not conjectures.” You are the one, my friend, waging a war on science. If you knew the first thing about science, you’d know that it’s a process. Science doesn’t functionally establish facts, but rather, it is a process that guides its practicians toward truth. You don’t declare anything as fact other than commonly agreed-upon axioms that are irreducible. You collect data, analyze evidence, and then discuss where the evidence seems to point. More often than not, multiple papers will be written on the same subject with different interpretations than all the other papers. And in fact, many papers contradict each other. I guarantee you that if you do your research, you will find papers that contradict some of your initial 7 assumptions, because, for example, I know for a fact that I have read multiple papers that interpreted their evidence to suggest that the greenhouse gases humans are continuing to emit have a negligible effect on climate change.
This is why people are fed up with the climate narrative – they are hearing a bunch of people in the media, in politics, at work, and in their schools make such assertions that they then nail down as indisputable facts. And at the same time they know that those assertions are not facts because they have read evidence of the contrary to those assertions.
We should all expect better than this.
Still, about half the Times comments were closer to this:
“As long as the necessary actions are blocked by one political party the human situation on this planet will continue to deteriorate. Whether it’s out commitment to democracy, the out of control gun problem, or climate change, the destruction caused by the GOP is untenable. I don’t know how anyone with a conscience, with integrity, with any sense of morality can represent the GOP in government at any level, can serve as support staff for GOP officials, or can even vote for anyone with -R after their name.”
6. The rest of the story about the astoundingly unethical Oklahoma judge who was caught on camera sending 500 text messages when she was supposed to be presiding over the murder trial of a man accused of beating a toddler to death, which we covered here, came when Traci Soderstrom resigned from her position as a district judge before her own trial that was certain to end in her removal from the bench for gross neglect of duty, gross partiality in office and other judicial conduct prohibited by the state’s Constitution.
Good.
Ethics Alarms 
Science by consensus is a joke, and its proponents are evil.”
I bet Copernicus and Galileo would agree.
yup. Newton would like a word with the powers-that-be as well.
jvb
On a related note.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/02/18/president-trumps-kafkaesque-civil-trial-in-new-york-state/
Bankers took the stand at Trump’s civil trial testifying that they would have gladly made loans to Donald Trump given his extraordinary success as a businessman. It must also be noted that the banks that made loans to Trump did not take his assessment of the net worth of his assets at face value but made their own independent assessments of the value of Trump’s assets. This is apparently standard practice in the New York State real estate market where borrowers often overstate the value of their assets.
The alleged victims testified in favor of the defense.
Never forget that.
Yes, great analysis by Calabrezi. But “everyone” knows that Trump is liable or guilty in all of these trials. A relentless leftist, Trump=onsessed comic says so.
I had not considered the property tax issues but that seems like a tax plus penalties and interest case at most. Alan Dershowitz thinks James should be disciplined for what she did.
jvb
Jack: “McAfee needs to recuse himself unless the defense waives the personal conflict.”
in my experience, both clerking for a judge and appearing in Court, I have repeatedly seen judges offer to recuse themselves when they sensed an appearance of impropriety (when they also thought they could be impartial). Almost always, the offer to recuse was enough to persuade lawyers not to request recusal (which request would implicitly (if not explicitly) be granted).
such a position reinforces the appearance of impartiality. Such frankness engenders trust.
on a related note, I have had an ongoing dispute with a Judge (on a single case (I have dealt with him on other cases since then and he has maintained decorum)). He accused me of misconduct in open Court (on that one case). I reported him to the Board. I have brought by two motions to disqualify him from the case on grounds of bias (both denied).
I show up at a hearing on that case and another judge was sitting on the bench. He probably recused himself. He did not have to; the motion to disqualify was denied. But, my motion gave me an appeal issue if he was not disqualified. He apparently stepped down when he did not have to because (as I read it) he did not want his involvement to be an issue. He could recuse himself on his own terms.
I gained some respect for him in this process.
-Jut
So, MacAfee was ‘randomly’ chosen? Sure.
Remember, Atalanta is a place where they randomly bulldoze people’s houses, then charge them the demolition fee and there is nothing they can do about it. This is a place where they gave a guy a $30,000 water bill for a lot that doesn’t have water service (I am not even sure there is a water meter or a water line). When he sued, he lost and lost on appeal as well. This is a corrupt, corrupt city and Fani Wills may be the most ethical and honest person in the government there. You wonder why they gave the prosecution of Trump to someone so obviously corrupt, it is probably because she is the least corrupt one they could find.
(1) I did like the part where Willis stated that the city did not benefit financially from paying her lover a large amount of money because she reimbursed him with cash she took from her political campaign fund. Classy. I think Greenwald is trying to rationalize things himself. I would suggest that the people on his legal ethics listserv don’t think what Willis did was wrong is because they don’t. They do these things themselves and don’t see a problem with it. It isn’t that they are so partisan that they can’t see straight, it is that they are partisan and corrupt.
(5) One of the biggest problems with Mann is the ‘handle’ of the hockey stick. It is made by flattening out the last 2000 years of temperature, asserting that the climate on earth has had the same temperature from 100 AD until the 19th century. They did this with a wide range of statistical tricks and rationalizations. The Vikings farmed Greenland. Schools teach that Greenland was named so as some sort of ancient real-estate swindle with the icy Greenland named Green and the habitable Iceland named Ice to fool people. No, Greenland was green then and they farmed it. This was the Medieval Warm Period and when it ended, temperatures fell and the Vikings all died when they could no longer farm. Global Warming ‘scientists’ have eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, even though we know the latter was caused by the Maunder Minimum. Their rationalizations and methodologies make them look like Fanni Willis. A 2018 paper was published in Nature showing unprecedented warming in the Pacific. They had a math error, however. When corrected, their data showed NO warming in the Pacific in the last 60 years. Rather than let the paper stand with the correct conclusion, it was withdrawn. Funny how it was good enough to publish with a math error, but not good enough when the error was corrected.
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-journal-nature-retracts-ocean-warming.html
Michael, You said. . .
Funny how it was good enough to publish with a math error, but not good enough when the error was corrected.
I read the retraction and it was damn near doubling down on the paper. First it used a lot of frontier gibberish to explain why it was being retracted but then stood by the methodology. Then it smeared Lewis by identifying him as a mathematician but also a critic of the scientific consensus on THE CLIMATE CRISIS.
The closing paragraph reiterated the dire conclusions found in the retracted study. The only thing close to claiming the work did not merit scientific consideration was that they said the co-author took the blame for the error.
These scientists seem to believe that they are religious figures of the new age. Why not we are witnessing the inquisition of the 21st century. With editors who write slanted retractions like that you cannot trust that publication implicitly.
And now we better understand how Michael Mann lost his hockey-stick case with Mark Steyn on the merits of the evidence presented – or in Mann’s case, NOT presented – but was still granted a $1 million judgement. It was engineered such that news outlets could claim a “victory of the climate crisis over climate deniers” (which is exactly what has happened).
No case in which the “climate crisis” is on trial will EVER be allowed to lose in any way that is public. Too much control of power in the hands of government is at stake. The message being sent out is this: any “climate change denier” that ends up in the legal system will be severely punished.
Commitment to democracy: While I’m willing to conceded that Republicans are as guilty at gerrymandering, at passing laws that promote Republican turnout and suppress Democratic turnout, and at playing silly buggers to win votes as Democrats, it isn’t the Republicans who have been destroying every democratic norm of late in their fury to tear down opponent resistance and destroy a single man.
Out of control gun problem: Gun violence is highest in cities under Democratic leadership and, with some exceptions, with the strictest gun regulation in the country. This is being exacerbated by the breakdown of policing which comes from Democratic antipathy towards enforcing laws and supporting law-enforcement agents who engaged in high-stress situations and need the benefit of due process before being excoriated as racists. As order breaks down, people buy more guns for personal protection, which just by the nature of things, will cause more accidental gun deaths, suicide by gun, and homicide by gun.
Climate change: There has been bipartisan support for measure to combat climate change, but Democrats have taken the baton and run towards goals that are infeasible at best, impossible at worst, and self-destructive across the board. Solutions that require the entire human race to return to pre-industrialized standards, which are likely to doom a significant portion of the human race to death from starvation and exposure, are hardly an improvement to the human condition.
How anyone can spout this drivel is amazing to me, no matter how much I know how peoples’ opinions are shaped by poor education, lack of real-world accountability, complete misunderstanding of cause and effect, and an endless drumbeat of activist journalism that continually buries facts, distorts truth, and cares far more about narrative and agenda than seeing what is right in front of their faces.
Mann was caught manipulating data in a fashion that does not stand scrutiny, unless one is only concerned about furthering an agenda, not producing meaningful results. Mann should have suffered far more consequences in his career than he has. And once again, and I don’t think it can be said enough, the jury found that Mann had no proof of any injury. The damages awarded were meant to send a message to anyone challenging the official narrative on climate change, not to address any suffering Mann endured.