January 6 Committee

The Liz Cheney Ethics Zugswang Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Now this is an ethics conflict.

It is increasingly clear that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney broke the law as well as several ethics rules while doing her utmost to incriminate President Trump during the all-Democrat/ Never-Trump Republican J-6 committee star chamber orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi. It is wrong to break the law. It is especially wrong to break the law when you are an elected official and law-maker. Such officials should not only be held to a higher standard, but should be role models for the public that elected them. It follows, then, that when they break the law—it seems that Cheney participated in the destruction of evidence as well as coaching a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, to lie under oath while unethically meeting with her, a represented witness, without her lawyer being present—they should be treated like anyone else who breaks the law.

If elected officials are not prosecuted and held to account when they violate the law, it is the worst manifestation of the King’s Pass, the insidious and pervasive rationalization (#11 on the list) in which individuals who are famous, popular, powerful, accomplished, productive or successful are allowed to escape the earned consequences of their own misconduct when a less powerful or popular individual would face the full penalties of the law. Such episodes seriously erode public trust in our legal system and power structure. The cliche is “No one is above the law,” but except for the case of indisputable bribery or violent felonies, elected officials are seldom prosecuted, and sometimes not even for those crimes.

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Everyone, Literally Everyone, Needs To See This…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Whatever one thinks of Tucker Carlson, the interview is a public service and raises too many ethics questions to count.

It is nicely paired with this revelation…

Whatever one thinks of Tucker Carlson, the interview is a public service and raises too many ethics questions to count. Is the previous chief of the Capitol Police (full disclosure: the current occupant is an old friend) a completely reliable, objective and unbiased source of information regarding the January 6, 2020 riot? Of course not. Nonetheless, the lack of interest in his perspective displayed by the January 6 Star Chamber and the mainstream media is both indefensible and suspicious.

Your reactions should be both helpful and illuminating.

Regarding Tucker Carlson’s Newly Revealed J6 Surveillance Videos [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was given access to more than 44,000 hours of video from the Capitol rioting on January 6, 2021. Carlson and his staff reviewed the video for three weeks (that’s not enough) and last night began showing footage that he believes exposes the false narratives about the event being pushed by the House’s partisan J6 Committee and the news media. He will continue tonight.

Observations:

  • I do not endorse Tom Fitton’s characterization of the video because I have not seen it all, nor do I know what was “knowingly false.” Bias does make one stupid, after all, and regarding January 6, 2021, its hard to be more biased than Democrats, the Trump-Deranged and the mainstream media.
  • Whatever benefits Carlson’s expose may have (other than boosting his ratings), choosing him as the messenger guaranteed that the footage will be dismissed, ignored, and get less attention from those who need to consider it than if Speaker McCarthy had chosen a reliable media figure (true, there may not be any) who has a well-earned reputation as a two-faced weasel. Just last month, emails were revealed in which Carlson ridiculed claims that the 2020 election had been corrupted while be was aggressively boosting such theories on hos show. Elon Musk handled the “Twitter Files” the correct and wise way, entrusting them to independent commentators like Matt Taibbi, whose agenda appears to be the old fashioned, out-of-date, ethical journalism mission of finding the truth.
  • For what it is worth, Carlson’s video clips cast doubts on three stories that were accepted as truth by the J6 witch hunt and the media. Jacob Chansley, who is in federal prison for being the absurdly garbed “QAnon Shaman” that became the symbol of the riot, is seen being given a personal escort through the Capitol by police without indicating any violent intent at all. At one point, the officers are seen walking Chansley past seven other police officers outside the Senate chamber. They then escort him to various entrances of the chamber that appear to be locked, and eventually  help him open a door to enter the chamber. Chansley, a 33-year-old Navy veteran, has been jailed for almost two years years for “obstructing an official proceeding.” In a jailhouse interview he tells Carlson, “The one very serious regret that I have [is] believing that when we were waved in by police officers, that it was acceptable.” There is now a question of whether this footage was presented at trail in Chanley’s defense.
  • Carlson next showed a video of Officer Brain Sicknickwearing a helmet and walking inside the Capitol among the “insurrectionists” after  media reports described him as being fatally bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher by the rioter. President Biden repeated this falsehood. Sicknick died of a stroke the next day, and there has been no credible connection established between the riot and his death. No officers suffered fatal injuries on January 6.

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Donald Trump (And An Ethicist’s Zugzwang)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Let’s start with the quote: Donald Trump wrote on his Twitter alternative Truth Social in response to the January 6 kangaroo court’s withdrawal of his subpoena,

“Was just advised that the Unselect Committee of political Thugs has withdrawn the Subpoena of me concerning the January 6th Protest of the CROOKED 2020 Presidential Election. They probably did so because they knew I did nothing wrong, or they were about to lose in Court. Perhaps the FBI’s involvement in RIGGING the Election played into their decision. In any event, the Subpoena is DEAD!”

Gee, why don’t you tell us what you really think, Mr. President?

I don’t want Presidents of the U.S. to express themselves like this, essentially in the style and with the cheap-shot rhetorical flourishes of a middle school wise-ass. It harms the office; it degrades the dignity and credibility of the office-holder, it’s a terrible example for the nation’s #1 role model to set for the young, and it undermines public confidence in the judgment and trustworthiness of the individual.

Trump talked and tweeted like this all through his four years in office, as we know, and has ever since. The approximately 30% of the electorate that, in his immortal words, would continue to support Trump if he shot someone in broad daylight in the middle of Times Square love this crap—it’s so, so authentic!–and they are dead, dead, dead wrong. This kind of outburst shows why Trump should never have been elected, and why people like him should not lead the United States —and until a weird confluence of random events and factors intervened, have not. Continue reading →

A Poll That Is Invaluable To Show How Useless Polls Are

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The purported results of a Monmouth University survey make no sense whatsoever, which is illuminating…about why we should pay no attention to polls.  This one was supposed to show the impact of the endless January 6 Commission hearings. Apparently they have had no impact at all. 38% of adults said they believe Trump was directly responsible for the Jan. 6 riot compared to 42% who said the same in June before the hearings began. Well, anyone who believed President Trump was directly responsible for the riot is a) an idiot b) not interested in facts or evidence or c) so biased and determined to believe all anti-Trump media spin that they probably didn’t watch the hearings anyway.

That, of course, is what is so absurd about the poll. It didn’t isolate respondents who watched the hearings or paid attention to them from those who did not. This feature appeals to elude the news media. For example, the Washington Examiner writes, “Another 32% said they don’t believe Trump did anything wrong after viewing the hearings, compared to 30% the month before.” Wrong. All the poll shows are the numbers in June and in August after the prime time hearings were shown.  The numbers don’t reflect what respondents who watched the hearings thought before and after them. Continue reading →

Why Must I Be A Blogging Ethicist In Ethics Zugzwang?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I was going to sing it, but it doesn’t fit the music…

Here is my problem…

Describing the ugly developments arising out of the Democratic Soviet-style show trial aimed at neutralizing Donald Trump by criminalizing his post election excesses, and, if possible, intimidating and harassing his supporters past and present, esteemed former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy writes in part, Continue reading →

Ethics Villain: Surprise! (Not Really…) It’s Cassidy Hutchinson!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Even for the rarefied, rank air of Ethics Villains, Cassidy Hutchinson, the January 6 Witch Hunt “star witness,” reeks.

Hutchinson became a goddess of the Trump Deranged when  she testified in Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s prime time TV show-trial in June. The former White House aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows dramatically claimed that she “still struggle[s] to work through the emotions” of that admittedly ugly day. “As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic,” Hutchinson said. “We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie, and it was something that was really hard in that moment to digest.”

Sure, Cassidy.

You’re busted. Continue reading →

“The Cassidy Hutchinson Fiasco”…Addendum

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Lest I be accused of minimizing the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony before the House January 6 Star Chamber this week, I direct EA readers to to this National Review article by the usually fair and perceptive Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor. He calls the testimony “devastating” and inveighs, “Things will not be the same after this.“

I don’t know what he thinks isn’t going to be the same; maybe you can enlighten me. Are there really people out there who will be surprised that Trump threw tantrums, objects and ketchup bottles, or that when he was angry and excited, he was irrational? Does McCarthy really not know that many Presidents, in private, with staff, in meetings, and similarly dealing with the most stressful jobs imaginable, have behaved outrageously, except that in their case did not have dozens of leakers, disloyal aides and other staff and others determined to undermine them as well as an almost unanimously hostile press to publicize rumors, gossip, suspicions and facts indiscriminately? Really? Presidents, as a group, are not normal or emotionally healthy: if they were, they wouldn’t have sought the Presidency or achieved it. Is Trump worse than most, or even all in this regard? Maybe, probably; why do you think Ethics Alarms kept repeating for over a year that he must never be elected? Does McCarthy not know the history of the Type A CEO personality in this country? About Henry Ford employing a guy whose sole job was to chop the desks of fired Ford Executive into kindling so they would know they had been fired? Nevertheless, the fact that Trump acted and talked like anyone paying attention knew he would act and talk doesn’t mean he committed crimes.

Furthermore, once again we are getting “Trump wanted to do X” and “Trump said Y” while his staff and the Secret Service obstructed him when his stated desires were extreme, rash, an abuse of power, or just plain nuts. The staff did their jobs, in other words, just like dozens of Presidential staffs have done in other administrations. I’m impressed, in fact: Trump, thanks to the most competent old hands in the Washington swamp being bullied away or scared off for fear of becoming pariahs and not getting invited to swank Capital Hill wine parties, had a distinctly sub-par batch of advisors. They came through when they had to. Good for them. They were far from the first to stop a POTUS from doing stupid or reckless things.

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The Jan. 6 House Witch Hunt Just Gets Worse And Worse As The MSM Cheers: The Cassidy Hutchinson Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

This is a “Bias Makes You Stupid” spectacular. It’s kind of sad, really. The Democrats, the NeverTrump Republicans and the disgraced news media hate Donald Trump so, so much that they have allowed confirmation bias and desperation make total fools of them all. Oh, the American who are dim, gullible, ignorant or just as warped by hate and bias won’t notice, but it’s still a tragic spectacle.

I’m not watching the hearings; sock drawer emergency, you know. I didn’t learn about 23-year-old, Cassidy Hutchinson, the aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, testifying before the single-minded, hyper-partisan “Get Trump” “commission” until I was snagged by the title of a column in Commentary by my old friend (acquaintance, really) John Podhoretz, its editor. The title was “Trump Is In Deep, Deep, Deep, Deep Trouble.” John—I love ya, man, but—is a true NeverTrumper, and he was positively giddy over what he saw as damning revelations from Cassidy under oath. “If what she has testified to, sworn under oath, is not countered or contradicted by Meadows or Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cippolone,” he wrote, “then there is a credible criminal case that Trump violated the law in ways not dealt with by the second impeachment, and from which he would not be shielded by executive privilege…she has reported directly on things that went on inside the White House and around the Oval Office on January 5 and January 6 that go beyond the merely circumstantial.”

I read John’ piece, and I couldn’t imagine what he thought was so explosive. Most of her testimony, as far as I can see, is hearsay. John informed his readers,”You’re going to hear people call this ‘hearsay.’ It is not hearsay. It is direct testimony of contemporaneous things said in Hutchinson’s earshot about events that were taking place while she was listening.”

John is a smart guy, but he isn’t a lawyer, and most of what Cassidy testified to is hearsay. It is hearsay whenever one person’s account of what a second person said is used to prove that what the second person said is true. It doesn’t matter if the speaker she is quoting was describing events “contemporaneous” ti when she was listening. It still doesn’t prove what she heard others say was true. For example, Podhoretz writes, “She reported Meadows saying of the chant to hang Vice President Mike Pence that Trump “doesn’t want to do anything,” and that “he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

A. So what? and B. That doesn’t prove Trump felt or thought or even said anything of the kind, and isn’t evidence, except of what Meadows said he thought Trump thought. Maybe.

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January 6 Commission Witch Hunt Update

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The January 6 Commission, as many have pointed out, branded itself as nothing more than an extension of all the “Get Trump and Punish His Allies!” plots, lies an and conspiracies that began almost from the moment he was elected. The mark was indelible as soon as Nancy Pelosi refused to allow any Republican to participate who had not already proved to be a NeverTrumper, eager to pin something on the ex-President. Lots of investigations are called witch hunts in Washington, D.C., but this really is one: the goal is to keep digging until the commission finds something new to use as a metaphorical stake to thrust into Trump’s political heart. This is, of course, unethical. deciding that someone must be guilty of something and spending more than a year and millions of dollars to figure out what is the essence of unethical prosecution as well as totalitarian instincts.

I keep wondering when the public will figure out just how rotten the exercise is. Televising the fiasco in prime time may well be a major blunder.

Here are two recent noxious developments:

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