A Republican congressional candidate in Tennessee is so eager to prove he supports Donald Trump’s immigration policies that he released a campaign ad where he literally builds a brick wall.
“It all starts with a good foundation. If your foundation is solid, it’ll take care of itself for many years to come,” Jason Emert says at the start of his 30-second ad, appropriately titled Brick By Brick, in which he puts mortar on bricks and lays them on top of each other.
When Emert’s wife Lauren asks if he’s “really going to help President Trump build the wall,” he responds, “you bet I am.”
Emert is one of seven candidates seeking the GOP nomination in Tennessee’s Second Congressional District. Incumbent Rep. John Duncan (R–Tenn.) has held the seat for nearly 30 years, but he is retiring at the end of his term.
Emert’s video parodies an insurance ad starring former University of Tennessee football coach Butch Jones, who was fired last year. “Unlike Butch Jones, when I say I’m going to do something, I actually mean it,” Emert says. Both ads feature men in orange polo shirts building brick walls, along with similar wording and the use of the phrase “brick by brick.”
But Emert’s ad is more literal-minded than its model. The candidate wants a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, even though such a wall would cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
The Miami-Dade Police Department must return nearly $20,000 in cash to a woman after prosecutors admitted that officers illegally searched her car and seized several lawfully owned guns.
The Miami Heraldreports that the department will also pay $3,000 in legal fees to Lizmixell Batista, a dancer at the local Cheetah Gentleman’s Club, and her husband, Ras Cates. The case is textbook example of how asset forfeiture laws and the drug war incentivize constitutional violations and bad police work.
Batista and Cates were arrested following a traffic stop in May. Police allegedly smelled marijuana in their car, and a subsequent search turned up six guns, several large bottles of what cops suspected to be codeine cough syrup, and nearly $20,000 in cash in Batista’s purse.
At the time, police touted it as a major bust. CBS Miami ran an “exclusive” story about the “arsenal of weapons, cash and illegal drugs”:
“It’s amazing how something as simple as a traffic stop can lead us to crack a lot of cases,” said Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta. “A lot of serial killers are behind bars because of traffic stops. These traffic stops lead to so many things in the criminal world and they are never routine. We warn our officers that there is no such thing as a routine traffic stop. You never know what you are going to get.”
Just like life, and boxes of chocolate. But for police, what looked like a delicious nougat of a drug bust turned out to be the coconut cream of disappointment.
Prosecutors dropped the charges against Batista and Cates when body-cam footage showed police didn’t have permission to search the couple’s trunk. The guns were all legally owned, Cates had a concealed carry license, and no testing had been done on the suspected codeine or hash oil to determine if they were illicit drugs.
“What is most disturbing is that immediately following the arrest, the department went on TV and engaged in incendiary speculation without knowing the facts or even acknowledging the rampant violations of my clients’ constitutional rights,” defense attorney Jude Faccidomo tells the Herald.
But there was still that sweet, sweet cash. Under civil asset forfeiture laws, the department could still claim it even though there were no longer any criminal charges against Batista.
Batista had explained to officers why, given her profession, she would be carrying large amounts of cash, but the department initiated a forfeiture case against the money anyway. The Herald reports:
The Miami-Dade police department’s legal bureau, suspecting it was dope money, asked a civil-court judge to allow the department to keep the $19,934 seized in the car. The department said a Miami-Dade police dog, Roxie, alerted that the cash had been “in close proximity” to large amounts of narcotics.
But at the hearing, a fellow stripper named Haley Heath testified that her friend, Batista, earned “significant cash tips” at the Cheetah club.
“I felt that the glitter on the seized cash was compelling evidence, but apparently the police department disagreed,” said defense lawyer Jude Faccidomo.
The judge agreed with Faccidomo and ordered the cash to be returned.
There will be no shortage of radical anti-statists challenging Bill Weld or any other former or current major-party elected official thinking about chasing the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination and likely 50-state ballot access in 2020.
“On the first day of my presidency,” Vohra tweeted Thursday, “I will pardon those in prison who have neither harmed anyone nor stolen anything. I will start with @Snowden and @RossUlbricht.” Next comes “all nonviolent drug users, all nonviolent drug traffickers, all nonviolent drug kingpins…anyone that’s in jail for crypto-currency crime [and] gun possession where they didn’t actually hurt anybody.”
“My number one goal,” the candidate tells me, “is to end the welfare state and abolish the income tax. I’m going to be using my campaign to spread that message on the policy level, but also to help people realize there are so many ways to reduce government without changing policy, including opting out of government schools, including using cryptocurrency, including using the power of jury nullification.”
Vohra, who served two terms as national vice chair, has been the Libertarian Party’s single most controversial figure the past year and a half. In February, he survived attempted suspension and censure motions from the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) over his age-of-consent and military remarks; in April, a second effort to suspend after the school-shooting joke came one vote short. Vohra’s self-conscious controversialism—what movement graybeards call the “libertarian macho flash“—was a recurrent, negative theme throughout the three-day national convention.
“When I hear talk about ‘edgy approaches,’ I feel like saying, ‘Been there, done that, already gave the shirt to Goodwill,'” said four-decade L.P. activist Joe Hauptmann during the LNC vice-chair debate, which I moderated. “You’re at a cocktail party, and the little old lady comes up to you and says, ‘What’s a Libertarian? What do you believe?’ And you look at her and you say, ‘Fuck the state!‘ You’re right, you’re right; you’ve said it concisely, you’ve said it simply, you feel morally superior. And you have guaranteed there’s at least one person who will never cast a vote for a Libertarian!…The only way we get power is with the vote, and there aren’t enough of us.”
Hauptmann finished in second place to eventual winner (and cheerleader for party unity) Alex Merced in all three rounds of voting. (The ballot after the first round lops off all candidates below 5 percent plus the lowest candidate above that threshold, then euthanizes the low vote-getter in each subsequent round until someone wins a majority.) Merced’s percentages progressed from 35 to 44 to 51, Hauptmann’s from 25 to 28 to 29, Steve Goldstein‘s from 16 to 14 to 9; Vohra’s limped along at 9–8–10. Party delegates had ample opportunity to weigh in on the incumbent’s provocative rhetorical strategy, and the conclusion was unmistakable: two thumbs way down.
Vohra sounds cheerful about seeking his party’s presidential nomination after such a snub. “I’m going to be trying to bring a lot of new people into the party,” he explains. Also, “a presidential campaign to me is just different from being a vice chair. A vice chair is about kind of half externally focused, half internally focused, and realistically most people objected to my internally focused messaging….A presidential campaign…is 99 percent externally focused, and so the type of messaging that goes into it is just different.” In other words, he says he’ll tone it down at least a little.
What about Bill Weld, who was bouncing around all over the convention two weeks after receiving a nationally syndicated valentine from George Will? Weld, who in his Republican days served six years as governor of Massachusetts, was the party’s vice-presidential pick in 2016.
“I just don’t see, based on what he’s done in the past, that he’s the right choice,” Vohra said. “From what I understand, Bill Weld does not support the total abolishment of the welfare state. And that for me is a basic prerequisite for libertarianism. Libertarianism is not something that co-exists with support for the welfare state. Libertarianism means the absolute opposition to all parts of the nanny state and all parts of the welfare state.”
Weld has admittedly moved more libertarian since his 2016 vice presidential run, particularly on the issues of guns, drugs, and war. But in a somewhat tepid VIP speech Sunday (the audience Q&A was much feistier) he still sounded like a somewhat more bold version of a 1990s moderate Republican governor, talking about deficit reduction, flat taxes, privatization, and sentencing reform. Though he did have some kind words for Kokesh, who earlier in the year had been bumrushing Weld on the state-convention circuit.
“Adam is a very smart young man,” the former governor said. “I’m halfway through his book and it’s a work of substantial intelligence.” (Vohra is also a Kokesh fan: “Adam and I have a lot of similarities, and I have a huge amount of respect for him. Honestly, if I wasn’t running, I’d probably support him, and honestly I do support him. I think he has a lot of great positions. I think he does a lot of good work.”)
Kokesh, who during the convention put on a “March for Dead Veterans” past the local V.A. hospital (you can watch some of my footage here), returned the favor, with the caveat that Vohra’s provocative comments about military service were “unnecessarily abrasive and pushed away some of the people most likely to join” the party.
“I really admire Arvin’s passion for the cause of freedom, I respect the work he has put in, and I think overall he is a great asset to the moment,” he told me. “My only major disagreement with him that I know of stems from his strategy based on the idea—if I understand it correctly—of pushing people away who he thinks are not ready to hear the message. Every human being on earth is ready to hear the message of freedom.”
Will longtime Libertarian Party–builders have the stomach to watch a candidate lead every conversation with legalizing cocaine and automatic weapons and abolishing the welfare-warfare state? “I imagine that things that I’ve said have driven away some people,” Vohra acknowledges. But he thinks “they’ve also attracted some people.” At the vice-chair debate, much of which centered around Vohra’s antics of the past 18 months, he maintained that “if you are being deliberately controversial, with the right mindset, you can create a huge amount of free media….You can start to actually change, not just pander to, hearts and minds. And you actually put forth the ideas of the libertarian movement.”
Vohra’s more successful competitors had a different view: “For 40 years we’ve been saying ‘It’s all or nothing!’ And we’ve got exactly what we’ve demanded: nothing,” Hauptmann said. “We’ve lived in our own echo chamber for 40 years. We have people out there who when you say ‘Taxation is theft,’ their eyes glaze over. You cannot take a person who has spent their entire life chained to a hospital bed, and say ‘Yes, you can run a marathon! Let’s go!’…Government is too damn big. But the other problem is, we’re too damn small.”
Last week I suggested that whoever replaces Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court probably will be more receptive to cases that challenge gun control laws on Second Amendment grounds. That certainly seems to be true of Brett Kavanaugh, who by some accounts is the leading contender for Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court nomination, which the president plans to announce on Monday night.
Kavanaugh, who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit since 2006, dissented from a 2011 decision in which a three-judge panel upheld the District of Columbia’s ban on so-called assault weapons and its requirement that all guns be registered. Kavanaugh disagreed with the majority’s use of “intermediate scrutiny,” saying an analysis “based on text, history, and tradition” is more consistent with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment precedents.
The D.C. “assault weapon” ban covers a list of specific models as well as guns that meet certain criteria. A semi-automatic rifle that accepts a detachable magazine is illegal, for instance, if it has any of six prohibited features, including an adjustable stock, a pistol grip, or a flash suppressor. “The list appears to be haphazard,” Kavanaugh noted. “It bans certain semi-automatic rifles but not others—with no particular explanation or rationale for why some made the list and some did not.” In any case, he concluded, the law is inconsistent with the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller.
“In Heller,” Kavanaugh noted, “the Supreme Court held that handguns—the vast majority of which today are semi-automatic—are constitutionally protected because they have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens. There is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction between semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles. Semi-automatic rifles, like semi-automatic handguns, have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the home, hunting, and other lawful uses. Moreover, semi-automatic handguns are used in connection with violent crimes far more than semi-automatic rifles are. It follows from Heller‘s protection of semi-automatic handguns that semi-automatic rifles are also constitutionally protected and that D.C.’s ban on them is unconstitutional.”
Although Heller suggested that various “longstanding” gun restrictions would pass constitutional muster, Kavanaugh said, D.C.’s gun registration system does not qualify. “Because the vast majority of states have not traditionally required and even now do not require registration of lawfully possessed guns,” he wrote, “D.C.’s registration law—which is the strictest in the Nation and mandates registration of all guns—does not satisfy the history- and tradition-based test set forth in Heller.”
Kavanaugh also is sensitive to the constitutional implications of regulations that interfere with freedom of speech. In 2009, a year before the Supreme Court overturned statutory restrictions on the political speech of unions and corporations in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, he wrote an opinion rejecting FEC rules that made it harder for advocacy groups to raise money.
The FEC regulations, which were challenged by the abortion-rights group Emily’s List, required nonprofit organizations to pay for election-related activities largely with “hard money” subject to donation limits. “Because donations to those hard-money accounts are capped at $5000 annually for individual contributors,” Kavanaugh noted, “the FEC’s allocation regulations substantially restrict the ability of non-profits to spend money for election-related activities such as advertisements, get-out-the-vote efforts, and voter registration drives.” That burden, he concluded, cannot be reconciled with the First Amendment, which “protects the right of individual citizens to spend unlimited amounts to express their views about policy issues and candidates for public office” as well as “the right of citizens to band together and pool their resources as an unincorporated group or non-profit organization in order to express their views.”
Kavanaugh seems to take a narrower view of Fourth Amendment rights. In 2010 he dissented from the D.C. Circuit’s decision not to rehear a case in which a three-judge panel had ruled that police violated a suspected drug dealer’s Fourth Amendment rights when they tracked his movements for a month by attaching a GPS device to his car without a warrant. Kavanaugh rejected the idea that the tracking constituted a search because of the quality and quantity of information it collected, although he anticipated the argument that ultimately persuaded a majority of the Supreme Court: that the physical intrusion required to plant the tracking device amounted to a search.
That rationale would not support invoking the Fourth Amendment in cases where information is collected without trespassing on someone’s physical property, as when police use cellphone location records to figure out where a suspect was at particular times on particular dates. Last month the Supreme Court ruled that looking at such data is a search, meaning it generally requires a warrant.
Kavanaugh also dissented in a 2008 case involving a man named Paul Askew, who was stopped by D.C. police because his clothing was similar to an armed robber’s. The cops patted Askew down for weapons, as permitted under the 1968 Supreme Court ruling in Terry v. Ohio, but found nothing. Later they unzipped his coat, supposedly to facilitate an eyewitness identification, and found a gun.
The D.C. Circuit concluded that police went too far when they unzipped Askew’s coat and that the gun, which became the basis for a weapons charge, should not have been admitted as evidence against him because it was the product of an illegal search. Kavanaugh disagreed, saying unzipping the coat could be justified as “an objectively reasonable protective step to ensure officer safety” after Askew “actively resisted” the pat-down or because “police may reasonably maneuver a suspect’s outer clothing—such as unzipping a suspect’s outer jacket—when, as here, doing so could help facilitate a witness’s identification at a show-up during a Terry stop.”
While Kavanaugh typically has not sided with criminal defendants, whether they were seeking to overturn their convictions or shorten their sentences, there are some notable exceptions. In 2012, for instance, he wrote the majority opinion that overturned a military commission’s conviction of Salim Hamdan, who admitted serving as Osama bin Laden’s driver, for providing material support to terrorism:
When Hamdan committed the conduct in question…the international law of war did not proscribe material support for terrorism as a war crime. Indeed, the Executive Branch acknowledges that the international law of war did not—and still does not—identify material support for terrorism as a war crime. Therefore, the relevant statute at the time of Hamdan’s conduct—10 U.S.C. § 821—did not proscribe material support for terrorism as a war crime.
Because we read the Military Commissions Act not to retroactively punish new crimes, and because material support for terrorism was not a pre-existing war crime under 10 U.S.C. § 821, Hamdan’s conviction for material support for terrorism cannot stand.
In another 2012 case involving an unsympathetic defendant, Kavanaugh dissented from a decision upholding an armed robber’s conviction for carrying a machine gun in the course of a violent crime. Kavanaugh argued that the offense—which triggers a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years, compared to 10 years for a violent criminal who carries a semi-automatic firearm—requires knowledge that the gun is capable of automatic fire.
“The majority opinion holds that a person who committed a robbery while carrying an automatic gun—but who genuinely thought the gun was semi-automatic—is still subject to the 30-year mandatory minimum sentence,” he wrote. “The majority opinion thus gives an extra 20 years of mandatory imprisonment to a criminal defendant based on a fact the defendant did not know. In my view, that extraordinary result contravenes the traditional presumption of mens rea long applied by the Supreme Court.”
It is doubtful that Donald Trump, a “law and order” advocate who is not keen on due process or other legal niceties, understands the importance of the principles that might lead a judge to side with a bank robber or a member of Al Qaeda. But it is reassuring that the president’s leading choice for the Supreme Court does.
The State of New Jersey is about to spend $5 million to tackle a “growing crisis” in local media coverage. More specifically, it is about to spend $5 million subsidizing the press.
The legislation in question creates a nonprofit group, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, charged with approving grant applications for local news. The bill has passed both houses of the state legislature; Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, has not yet signed it, but on Sunday he did sign a state budget that sets aside the money.
The liberal Free Press Action Fund has been pushing for such legislation for years. The group initially asked for a much larger endowment of $100 million, but it still greeted the news with pleasure. “Never before has a state taken the lead to address the growing crisis in local news,” State Director Mike Rispoli said in a statement, calling New Jersey “a model for the rest of the nation.”
Rispoli’s group fears that because New Jersey stands between two major cities, Philadelphia and New York, there’s less focus on local news in the state. The organization argues that recent layoffs and consolidation in the news industry have made this situation worse. And it is pleased that the legislation “emphasizes the importance of fulfilling the information needs of communities of color. Mainstream media outlets have long underserved people of color, who have also been misrepresented in news coverage of their communities.”
But is state-funded local news coverage really the answer? New Jersey is among the nation’s most corrupt states, so there’s a lot for journalists to investigate. But as Politico‘s Jack Shafer points out, it’s hard to believe a state-funded journalism initiative will actually do that:
Even if the consortium stays clean, won’t it avoid politically charged stories of great watchdogging potential because it will fear to bite the hand that feeds it? Government-funded news outfits like NPR and PBS, ever fearful of offending their funding sources, avoid hard-hitting government news for this reason. Public media may follow the news pack on a story about government corruption, but generally, they’re too compromised to lead.
Local news is important—too important to be left to state media.
In the #MeToo era, HBO’s Sharp Objects will inevitably be proclaimed a work of eloquent female empowerment. It isn’t. It’s slow, confusing, over-gothed and under-articulated. There’s a good story squeaking from underneath all the messy baggage it carries, but it’s probably easier to just go to Kmart for another suitcase rather than unpack this thing.
HBO’s miniseries—at eight episodes, probably too long by a quarter—is based on the first novel by creepy-crime writer Gillian Flynn, written some years before Dark Places and Gone Girl made her a star. Though not quite so fluid as her later two books, Sharp Objects shares their disquieting sense that behind every white picket fence there lurks a psychopathic axe murderer about to hack his way out. Television critic Glenn Garvin explains how the adaptation fails to capture Flynn’s work.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has sided with John McAdams, a conservative political scientist who had been fired by Marquette University over a blog post.
In November 2014, McAdams wrote a post calling out graduate student instructor Cheryl Abbate by name after she shut down a classroom discussion of gay rights. According to McAdams, the “Theory of Ethics” instructor did not give a conservative student room to voice his opinions. The student then approached the instructor after class to engage in a brief debate regarding gay marriage and gay adoption.
The conversation took a turn when Abbate informed the student that some opinions were “not appropriate.” When the student argued that he had a right to an opinion, Abbate told him that the right did not extend to homophobic comments and invited him to drop the class. McAdams spent the remainder of the post discussing political correctness, liberals, and speech.
McAdams was suspended without pay in January 2015. In a letter obtained by The Atlantic, Dean Richard C. Holtz criticized McAdams for his delivery of the information:
You posted this story on the Internet (1) without speaking with Ms. Abbate or getting her permission to use her name; (2) without contacting the Chair of Ms. Abbate’s Department (who had met twice with the undergraduate student) to get her perspective or express your concerns; (3) without contacting anyone in the College of Arts & Sciences to get their perspective or express your concerns; (4) without contacting anyone in the Office of the Provost to raise concerns that you believed had been ignored at the Department or College level; (5) without describing what had happened in the very next class following the one you wrote about—when Ms. Abbate discussed and addressed the student’s objection (without identifying him); and (6) without even reporting fully or accurately what the student had disclosed to (and concealed from) others in the University about these events.
The university gave McAdams the option of writing a letter of apology to Abbate if he wanted to be reinstated. He refused. Instead he sued the private university.
McAdams’ suit, filed in 2016, argued that his punishment violated his academic freedom. Ralph Weber, the university’s lawyer, retorted that the school had suspended McAdams not because of his views but because he had engaged in cyberbullying. A press release from the university mirrored Weber’s sentiment, saying McAdams would not have been penalized had he omitted Abbate’s name and contact information. (Abbate reports that she received threats after McAdams posted her name and linked to her website.)
On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the dismissal was a breach of contract and ordered that McAdams be reinstated immediately. “Just because vile commentary followed the blog post does not mean the blog post instigated or invited the vileness,” the decision stated. The dissenting judges disagreed, claiming that “McAdams indeed did ‘instigate’ or ‘invite’ the vileness that followed his blog post. He knew what would happen, and he actively ensured that it would happen.”
The Federal Reserve plans to continue its consistent increases in interest rates. This may pour cold water on President Donald Trump’s hope for high economic growth.
The minutes from the Fed’s last meeting were released to the public yesterday afternoon. They indicate optimism about the economy’s strength, with consumer spending, capital expenditure, and employment all increasing. But concerns about a possible recession are not absent.
Fed officials perceive some business uneasiness regarding trade policy—unsurprisingly, since the White House’s most recent round of tariffs could easily spark a destructive trade war. Some of the Fed’s business contacts have already cut back on production because of the new tariffs. But unless the trade war gets completely out of hand and severely depresses economic growth, the White House’s approach to trade will probably have little impact on monetary policy. Fed officials think Trump’s “recent fiscal policy changes” may “lead to a greater expansion in economic activity over the next few years than the staff projected.”
The Federal Reserve has met its goal of a 2 percent inflation target. Some of the meeting’s attendees fear inflationary pressures and a possible recession. This worry that the economy could “overheat” is based in flawed reasoning, but below-market interest rates can indeed promote unsustainable economic growth, which is something to watch out for.
Discussion of the Fed’s enormous bond portfolio was noticeably absent. In the wake of the 2008 recession, this portfolio grew from less than $1 trillion to a monstrous $4.5 trillion; Fed officials began to shrink it last year, looking to bring it down to $3 trillion by 2020.
Most importantly, the Federal Reserve will continue its gradual interest-rate hikes, looking eventually to reach the neutral rate of interest, where the central banking system will neither promote nor slow economic growth. It’s unclear whether the Fed would allow the rate to go beyond neutral rate estimates, which may be reached as soon as 2019.
Though the neutral rate is difficult to determine, moving closer to it would do us all a favor by ameliorating the severity of future recessions. Ideally, market forces would point us to the neutral rate, but for now we’re stuck with the guesstimates of central bankers.
Venezuela didn’t try real socialism. Bitcoin is a tool for criminals. Without big government, warlords will take over.
We traveled deep into the woods of New Hampshire to ask the libertarians at the 2018 Porcupine Freedom Festival, a.k.a. PorcFest, what lines they’re most tired of hearing.
Organized by the Free State Project, the annual festival is a week-long campout for libertarians, anarchists, and other self-identified fans of freedom. They gathered to attend workshops, purchase cannabis-infused coffee with cryptocurrency, and talk philosophy around a raging bonfire.
There was plenty of ideological diversity, but the attendees seemed united by the reactions that their friends and family members have to their political views.
Produced, shot, and edited by Justin Monticello. Music by Dan Lebowitz, The Grand Affair, Geographer, and Matt Harris.
President Donald Trump rails against the media’s use of anonymous sources, but reporters say Trump himself has been an anonymous source many times over the years.
Addressing supporters Thursday at a rally for Montana Auditor Matt Rosendale, a Republican running for Senate, Trump claimed that the media often fabricate sources:
They quote sources. ‘A source within the Trump Organization said.’ A source. They don’t have a source. They never use names anymore. The old days, you have to use names. ‘Jim Smith said that Donald Trump is a bad guy.’ They don’t do that anymore. They say ‘a source within the administration.’ They make the sources up. They don’t exist in many cases….I saw one of them said 15 anonymous sources. I don’t have 15 people—forget it. 15 anonymous sources have said all source of stuff. These are really bad people.
Trump’s “anonymous source schtick is complete BS,” Fox Business correspondent Charles Gasparino then said on Twitter. “Just heard @POTUS at this rally complaining about the use of anonymous sources,” Gasparino tweeted. “For the record he was one of mine over the years.”
Just heard @POTUS at this rally complaining about the use of anonymous sources. For the record he was one of mine over the years.
Gasparino wasn’t the only one who Trump would speak to as an unnamed source, according to Paula Froelich, a writer who used to work for the New York Post. “I believe he was all of ours,” she wrote in response to Gasparino.
In fact, reporters have been saying for years that Trump used to pose as an anonymous source. According to Axios‘ Jonathan Swan, Trump was known as “one of the Manhattan media’s most notorious anonymous sources” during his days as a real estate tycoon. He was also notorious for pretending to be his own publicist, using aliases like “John Barron” or “John Miller” to brag about himself in conversations with reporters.
That sort of behavior hasn’t necessarily ended. In his book The Trump White House, released in April, Ronald Kessler claims that the president still speaks to reporters as an unidentified source. “Trump phones Maggie Haberman of the New York Times directly, as well as Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, and Jonathan Swan of Axios, feeding them stories attributed to ‘a senior White House official,’ creating the impression the White House leaks even more than it already does,” Kessler writes.
Trump’s habit as a serial anonymous source looks even more hypocritical in light of his administration’s war on leaks. Last August, Attorney General Jeff Sessions indicated the Department of Justice may be willing to subpoena reporters to trace leaks, and last month it followed through by demanding the phone and email records of New York Times reporter Ali Watkins in an attempt to find out whether her source, a former Senate aide, had leaked classified information. As the Timesnotes, this move suggested that Trump administration prosecutors “will continue the aggressive tactics employed under President Barack Obama.”
According to former Times reporter James Risen, who fought the Obama Justice Department’s attempts to force him to reveal his confidential sources, just three cases “involving leakers and whistleblowers” were prosecuted by previous administrations. During the Obama administration, nine such cases were prosecuted.
A Republican congressional candidate in Tennessee is so eager to prove he supports Donald Trump’s immigration policies that he released a campaign ad where he literally builds a brick wall.
The Miami-Dade Police Department must return nearly $20,000 in cash to a woman after prosecutors admitted that officers illegally searched her car and seized several lawfully owned guns.
There will be no shortage of radical anti-statists challenging 
“When I hear talk about ‘edgy approaches,’ I feel like saying, ‘Been there, done that, already gave the shirt to Goodwill,'” said four-decade L.P. activist 
Weld has admittedly moved more libertarian since his 2016 vice presidential run, particularly on the issues of guns, drugs, and war. But in a somewhat tepid VIP speech Sunday (the audience Q&A was much feistier) he still sounded like a somewhat more bold version of a 1990s moderate Republican governor, talking about deficit reduction, flat taxes, privatization, and sentencing reform. Though he did have some kind words for Kokesh, who earlier in the year had been 
Last week I 
The State of New Jersey is about to spend $5 million to tackle a “growing crisis” in local media coverage. More specifically, it is about to spend $5 million subsidizing the press.
In the #MeToo era, HBO’s Sharp Objects will inevitably be proclaimed a work of eloquent female empowerment. It isn’t. It’s slow, confusing, over-gothed and under-articulated. There’s a good story squeaking from underneath all the messy baggage it carries, but it’s probably easier to just go to Kmart for another suitcase rather than unpack this thing.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has sided with John McAdams, a conservative political scientist who had been fired by Marquette University over a blog post.
The Federal Reserve plans to continue its consistent increases in interest rates. This may pour cold water on President Donald Trump’s hope for high economic growth.
President Donald Trump rails against the media’s use of anonymous sources, but reporters say Trump himself has been an anonymous source many times over the years.