Month: April 2019

Newly released body camera footage appears to show that a man in Charlotte, North Carolina, was trying to obey police’s orders to drop his weapon prior to being shot and killed.

On March 25, officers with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department responded to at least one 911 call about a man “pointing [a gun] at employees” of a local Burger King, according to CNN. When officers arrived at the scene, they encountered 27-year-old Danquirs Franklin in the parking lot. Franklin had a gun and would not obey multiple commands to drop it, police said. Eventually, one of the officers, Wende Kerl, shot and killed him.

The shooting sparked considerable controversy in the Charlotte area due to some conflicting witness statements about what happened, The Charlotte Observer reported. The shooting occurred in the same city where Keith Scott was killed by police back in 2016. Conflicting reports about whether or not Scott was armed were never really settled, and the officer who shot him did not face criminal charges.

In Franklin’s case, Kerl’s lawyer and the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office did not want body camera footage to be released. A judge disagreed, ruling that the footage must be released to the public Monday.

The footage, which is below, shows police approaching Franklin, who’s squatting next to the passenger seat of a car in the Burger King parking lot. Officers, including Kerl, scream at him multiple times to put his gun down. It’s not even clear that Franklin has a weapon until his right hand slowly comes into view with what appears to be a handgun in it. Franklin was not pointing the gun at anyone; in fact, it looked as though he was trying to put it on the ground. But as soon as the gun becomes visible, Kerl fires two shots at him.

“You told me to…” Kerl can be heard saying:

Franklin was taken to a local hospital, where he died. A man with a blurred out face can be seen sitting in the passenger’s seat of the car, right next to where Franklin was kneeling. That man told WCNC that he had been praying with Franklin.

This is clearly a situation where there are many questions remaining. We don’t, for instance, know exactly what happened in the lead-up to police involvement. However, it looks as though Franklin was trying to obey their orders to put down the gun. He certainly didn’t look to be drawing the gun with the intent of firing it. Hopefully, more answers will come out in the days to come.

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The Thai government is reportedly demolishing a seastead that briefly appeared off the coast of Phuket.

According to the Bangkok Post, the Thai government thinks the act of floating around just outside their 12-mile coastal zone breaches “Section 119 of Criminal Code. The section concerns any acts that cause the country or parts of it to fall under the sovereignty of a foreign state or deterioration of the state’s independence. It is punishable by death or life imprisonment.”

Chad Elwartowski, one of the seastead’s two former inhabitants, writes in a Facebook post: “This is ridiculous. We lived on a floating house boat for a few weeks and now Thailand wants us killed.” The “wants us killed” likely refers to that potential punishment for violating Section 119.

“We had to go underground because our contact warned us before this came out,” Elwartowski adds. He also insists that he and his Thai companion Nadia Summergirl were merely tenants of the seastead and were not responsible for designing or building or placing it directly.

“We were hoping to bring tourism to Phuket with an underwater restaurant, floating hotels and medical research, tech jobs, etc,” he writes. “We had 3 wealthy entrepreneurs in the past week tell us they were coming to live in Phuket because they were excited about the project. We love Thailand. Nadia is a proud Thai. She is a proud Buddhist who does not support violence. I am a pacifist who would not harm a fly.”

Elwartowski’s post calls for legal help in negotiating with the Thai government regarding any possible punishment he and Summergirl might face.

“We just wanted to be free,” he writes. “If just for one day.”

Ocean Builders’ post on the crackdown says that the seastead is “in the process of being demolished by the Thai navy” and reiterates that although “Chad and Nadia are safe for now…understand that Thailand is currently being run by a military dictator. There will be no trial if they are caught. They already demonstrated that by being judge jury and executioner of the historic very first seastead.”

The Thai government apparently claims that the seastead was a hazard to shipping lanes. Ocean Builders’ response: “The seastead is 6 meters wide. It has a very bright anchor beacon and has a registered AIS beacon which can be detected by any boat with any sort of navigation in the vicinity.” The group further says that the seastead was in a “heavy fishing area with many many fishing boats trawling the water there daily. The fishing boat captains used to wave at Nadia and Chad as they passed by. They were in no way bothered by the floating home. The seastead takes up less space in the shipping lane than a fishing boat.”

Plans to sell and build new seasteads around Thailand are on hold. Elwartowski has told me in the past that by his understanding, the law did not require them to get the Thai government’s permission to be where they were doing what they did. Apparently the Thai government disagrees.

Patri Friedman, founder of the Seasteading Institute and co-author of the book  Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians, has written a Facebook post describing the mistakes he feels Elwartowski’s team made. While their location was 12 nautical miles out from Thailand, he notes, it is still in what is legally considered that country’s “‘Contiguous Zone,’ where a state has many rights, several of which seem likely to pertain here.” He adds that even being 200 miles from land does not necessarily create “a magical realm of freedom where you can just plant a flag and be an independent polity. There are many rules and regulations that apply—including the need to plug into international law through the flagging system (for a vessel) or coastal state approval (for a fixed structure).”

Friedman also writes that anyone trying that strategy needs to be aware they would be outside all human systems of legal rights, with “ZERO rights, other than what you yourself can enforce with your diplomatic, economic, and military power, against anyone (like a nation-state) who you bother in any way.”

Until seasteading “is big enough to change the system,” Friedman concludes, “our beliefs about what international law should be, our imagined individual rights, our perception that the nation-state cartel is unjust, are all irrelevant to present strategy. We need to acknowledge the system in which we’ll be working for the next 10-30 years, because only with a clear understanding of the present can we create our desired future.”

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If I had a dollar for every time Bernie Sanders has inveighed against “millionaires and billionaires,” I’d be…well, still probably not as rich as Bernie Sanders, who revealed last week that he is now a millionaire. Sanders’ newfound wealth is due in part to the success of his book, Our Revolution, which earned him roughly $885,000 in 2017 after hitting number three on the New York Times best-seller list, a fact about which Sanders is justly pleased.

“I wrote a best-selling book,” he said, explaining how he ended up at the high end of America’s wealth spectrum. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

That’s right—and that’s how it should be.

Sanders spent years building himself and his name into a successful national brand by identifying and filling a relatively unique niche in the market for national politics. Based on the success of that brand, he then negotiated a deal with a publisher to bring a product—his book—to market. The product sold well, and Sanders, who had invested a significant amount of personal time in conceiving and producing the product, reaped the financial rewards. Now he’s better off, and I suspect that he, at least, would argue that the people who bought his book are better off too. Everyone wins.

Sanders, in other words, was acting as an entrepreneur, a person who made something new in the world, something for which there turned out to be considerable market demand. And Sanders clearly feels no shame about earning a large return on his labor as a result.

Folks, that’s capitalism. Whether he means to or not, Bernie is making an argument for the existence of rich capitalists, and for the value they bring to the world. And it’s an argument that both could and should extend beyond book writing to, say, the founders and inventors behind some of the nation’s most successful businesses, some of whom have made a lot more than $885,000. If, just for example, you start an online bookstore that eventually revolutionizes the entire retail sector, making it incredibly easy to download Sanders’ book to a convenient digital device for just a few bucks, you can be a multi-billionaire too. (Sanders, who blasted Amazon for paying low wages to its distribution center workers, probably made a significant chunk of his book earnings off of Amazon sales.)

But wait a minute—is Sanders really arguing against the existence of millionaires and billionaires? Maybe not explicitly. But by repeatedly singling them out, he was certainly implying that there was something unsavory, something vaguely illegitimate about their existence. And some of Sanders’ fellow democratic socialists have certainly suggested that the very existence of a billion-dollar personal fortune is a moral problem, or a “policy failure.” (The Sanders brand was, in many ways, first to market. But as with many popular products, his success has led to a legion of imitators.)

Maybe, then, there’s a difference between millionaires and billionaires, with the former being a little less objectionable? It’s hard to make a coherent argument that there’s a clear line at which some amount of wealth suddenly becomes unacceptable—that at some point, you’ve sold so many books, and made so much money from doing so, that it’s immoral.

For Sanders, at least, that line seems to be moving. As the folks at ThinkProgress recently noticed in a video, Sanders appears to have become less focused on millionaires and more interested in the problems with billionaires at the same time his own income increased. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence. (Sanders objected to the ThinkProgress video, suggesting it was influenced by corporate money.)

In any case, I think it’s genuinely great that Bernie Sanders is a millionaire, and that in becoming a millionaire, our nation’s most well-known democratic socialist has, however inadvertently, started defending one of the core tenets of capitalism—that if you come up with an idea for a product, make that product a reality in the world, and sell it to lots of willing buyers, it’s perfectly just and reasonable for you to earn a lot of money as a result. One can only hope that there are more best-sellers, and more millions, in Sanders’ future.

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President Trump calls the indictment of President Obama’s White House counsel, Gregory Craig, “a really big story.”

That it is, but probably not precisely in the way that Trump means it.

Craig is a pillar of the Washington establishment. He’s a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy; of Harvard, where he was chairman of the student government and graduated Phi Beta Kappa; and of Yale Law School, where he was in the same class as Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was a partner at two top law firms, first Williams and Connolly and then Skadden, Arps. He did stints as an aide to Senator Edward Kennedy and as director of policy planning in Madeleine Albright’s State Department. He helped defend Bill Clinton during impeachment.

So it’d be easy to read this as a story about the corruption of our liberal elites.

The more you get into it, though, and the more it looks like a story about overly zealous prosecutors and FBI agents, and laws drafted in ways that allow such prosecutors and FBI agents enormous discretion to depict routine, non-criminal activities as somehow sinister. It’s the sort of thing that Trump, in other contexts, has described as a witch hunt or a perjury trap.

“This prosecution is unprecedented and unjustified,” Craig, who has pleaded not guilty, said in a YouTube statement.

What was Craig’s supposed crime? According to the indictment, his crime wasn’t doing legal work that was paid for by an individual from Ukraine. That’s legal—American lawyers do legal work for foreign clients all the time. It wasn’t even failing to register that legal work with the U.S. government. Such registration isn’t required by law unless it crosses the line into “political activities” or “public relations counsel.” No, the supposed crime here, at least in part, is that Craig, according to the indictment, was less than completely forthright in telling his law firm colleagues and the government about his dealings with two reporters, David Sanger and David Herszenhorn, who wrote a news article about the legal work for The New York Times. Sanger is Craig’s neighbor in Washington’s Cleveland Park neighborhood.

That article appeared in the Times under the headline, “Failings Found in Trial of Ukrainian Ex-Premier.” It began, “In a report commissioned by the government of Ukraine, a team of American lawyers has concluded that important legal rights of the jailed former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, were violated during her trial last year on charges of abusing her official power, and that she was wrongly imprisoned even before her conviction and sentencing.”

By the federal prosecutors’ bogus logic, legal work for a foreign client is legal so long as the American public doesn’t know about it. If the lawyer dares talk to a New York Times reporter about the work or provide the reporter with a copy of it, though, all of a sudden, the lawyer had better file as a “foreign agent” or else pack his toothbrush for a stay in the federal penitentiary.

The indictment claims that Craig “withheld information regarding his contacts” with the Times reporters “from a number of attorneys” at Skadden, where he was then a partner. Even if this were true, not every dispute between law firm partners about information-sharing or candor rises to the level of a federal crime.

The indictment makes reference to “an interview conducted by the Special Counsel’s Office,” but the charges came not from Robert Mueller but from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.  The press release says the case “is being investigated by the FBI’s New York Field Office,” but the charges are brought not in New York but in Washington, D.C.

The first count on which Craig is charged is Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001. That’s the same section to which Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to violating, and also to which Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty to violating. It provides or a fine or up to five years in prison for anyone who “knowingly and willfully” makes any materially false statement or representation “in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States.” The provision also is the one that James Comey used against Martha Stewart, and the one that prosecutors used during the George W. Bush administration against Vice President Cheney’s aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was pardoned by Trump.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has accurately warned of the “sweeping generality” of Section 1001, writing, “the prospect remains that an overzealous prosecutor or investigator—aware that a person has committed some suspicious acts, but unable to make a criminal case—will create a crime by surprising the suspect, asking about those acts, and receiving a false denial.”

The second count on which Craig is charged is violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. That’s a law passed in 1938 amid anxiety about Nazi influence in America on the eve of World War II. It’s so broadly written that it could conceivably require the Times itself to register as a foreign agent of Mexican investor Carlos Slim.

These issues aren’t ones that I have only suddenly discovered following the indictment of Craig. I’ve been writing about Section 1001 since the 2004 New York Sun editorial “Martha Stewart and the Law.” In a 2017 column, I suggested that it was time for Congress or Congress to revisit the Foreign Agents Registration Act “with an eye toward narrowing its scope or even repealing it altogether.”

The whole situation is an opportunity for Trump to display some presidential leadership. He could do this by exercising his constitutional authority over the Justice Department and encouraging them to use their prosecutorial discretion to decline to prosecute this one. He could do it by using his pardon power in cases where there have been or will be convictions. Or the president can ask Congress to repeal or substantially narrow these provisions. Trump could then sign new legislation into law.

Perhaps the one redeeming feature of the Craig indictment is that, because Craig is a Democrat who served Clinton and Obama, it could allow Trump to take such corrective action while seeming not partisan or self-serving but, rather, principled.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of JFK, Conservative.

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