Category: reason

Americans have probably never heard of Carrefour. The company, headquartered just outside Paris, opened its first grocery store in 1963. Today, the company operates more than 12,000 stores in more than 30 countries, boasts nearly 400,000 employees, and generates more than €100 billion in annual sales. As of last year, according to the Financial Times, it was “the world’s second-largest retailer in terms of revenues.”

Despite top-flight revenues, critics, including some key players inside the company itself, have long painted Carrefour as stodgy and stuck in its ways. But the company made perhaps its biggest impact recently by openly flouting a set of ridiculous EU regulations that caused millions of farm seed varieties to be banned. These longstanding and mind-numbingly stupid EU seed rules were as awful as they sound.

Carrefour challenged the rules in an effort “to provide its patrons with more options while supporting agricultural diversity.” The company did so through a campaign dubbed invariably “Forbidden Market” or “Black Supermarket,” which saw the hyperstore selling “illegal cereals, fruits and vegetables” from forbidden seeds in an effort to mock and overturn the rules.

This wasn’t a risk-free protest, writes Baylen Linnekin. Carrefour risked steep fines with its black-market tactics. Put in American terms, the company’s actions might be the equivalent of Walmart protesting dumb laws by selling raw milk in all its stores or giving away untaxed grocery bags in stores forced under the law to collect bag taxes.

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A long, long time ago in 2012, there was a real estate developer named Donald J. Trump who lambasted Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for losing the election with his “crazy” and “maniacal” talk of promising to create conditions so miserable for unauthorized immigrants that they would “self deport.” What did Romney say that was so bad? That he would crackdown on employers who hired illegals. “It sounded as bad as it was,” said the developer. “He lost all of the Latino vote … He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”

Fast forward four years, and the same developer realized that, actually, the problem with Romney’s “crazy” and “maniacal” plan was that it was not crazy and maniacal enough. Stirring the racial pot, he found, could pull out just enough votes from the bottom of the barrel to win an election and become president. It might sink his party in the long run, but it would work for now.

And it did.

As soon as he entered the White House, Trump made not just self-deportation but actual deportation of every single one of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country the singular objective of his administration (along with other atrocities like deterring fleeing migrants seeking legal asylum by illegally snatching their children from them). Raids—complete with SWAT teams and sometimes black helicopters—on 7-Elevens, farms, immigrant neighborhoods, and sensitive places followed.

No one was to be spared from his draconian dragnet—not even Dreamers or people who were brought to this country illegally as minors but have grown up here as Americans and know no other country. He had promised to protect these people during his campaign. “They don’t have to worry,” he said. It was a lie. He scrapped the Obama-era DACA program that offered them a reprieve from deportation and offered them temporary work permits and told Congress that if it wanted to protect them, it should pass a law. He told lawmakers—Republican and Democrat—on television in front of the whole world that he would sign whatever bill they sent his way without any conditions, and even offer political cover to Democrats in red districts where his party had stirred up voters against “amnesty.”

But then a few days later, his evil nativist aide Steve Miller seemingly got to him and snuffed out whatever little humanity may have flickered from time to time in the president’s breast. He started making all kinds of impossible, Sophie’s Choice demands in exchange for giving Dreamers a reprieve (even as his attorney general quoted passages from the Bible to justify ripping babies from the breasts of mothers seeking asylum).

The Southern border might be turning into a scene straight from the Apocalypse, but everytime this president’s draconian demands is met in exchange for protecting the Dreamers, he ups the ante and demands more—never mind that vast majorities of Republicans and Democrats support a clean fix for these folks. Just this morning, he declared that he would not sign the “moderate” Dreamer fix. What would this “moderate” bill do? Cato Institute’s David Bier points out:

• On balance cut legal immigration by 1.8 million over two decades. (Even though it would increase the number of employment-based visas, it would scrap the diversity visa lottery program, slash family-based immigration, including for the siblings, married adult children, and parents of sponsors, and slash the annual asylum quota in half. Further, any unclaimed Dreamer green card quotas would just be scrapped, not handed to other categories.)

• Allow very few Dreamers to convert their renewable temporary visas into green cards or citizenship. Only those who maintain incomes above 125 percent of the poverty level would be eligible unless they were in school or taking care of a child. This means that those who opt for professions such as the priesthood, social work, and other jobs that pay very little would be disqualified, as would any Dreamer who had skipped removal orders or court hearings.

• Terminate 3 million applications for legal immigration that have already been submitted and are being processed, even though these people have been playing by the rules and waiting in line as restrictionists say they should. Oh, and it will also confiscate their fee.

• Make even the measly asylum quota arguably impossible to fill by raising the bar impossibly high. In order to prove that asylum seekers have a “credible fear” of being beaten and killed at home, they would have to meet a “more probable than not” test that their claims are true. The only way they could do it is if they carry all their papers and proof on them as they swim across rivers and climb mountains to get there, which very, very few would be able to do.

• Allocate about $24 billion for border enforcement spending including for Trump’s useless wall, an unnecessary biometric system that would track everyone who leaves the country, including Americans, fast-track deportation of unaccompanied minors and much else.

There are some good elements in the bill, such as extending a path to citizenship (no matter how shitty) to legal Dreamers; those who have grown up in America to parents whose green cards have been stuck in a processing maize for decades so that they are reaching an age where they don’t have a sponsor and can’t stay with their parents. It would also repeal per-country limits on green cards that have extended wait times for foreign techies from India and China to up to 70 years, creating the legal Dreamer problem in the first place.

But all of this is just too rational and humane for this president who says he’ll only sign some version of the Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-Va.) Securing America’s Future Act, a nativist wet dream, as I’ve noted before. It has nearly all the bad elements of the “moderate bill” in exchange for far less.

It will offer only non-immigrant status on a renewable basis to a small slice of DACA recipients who can meet its onerous eligibility criteria. The bill excludes Dreamers who have already lost DACA. Oh, and those who were under 15 years of age and therefore never covered by DACA. And those who were over the age of 31 on June 2012. And those who entered after 2007. All in all, two-thirds of all Dreamers wouldn’t qualify—not even if they are veterans.

But the real kicker is that Dreamers who do qualify would have to maintain income levels above 125 percent of the poverty line, or they would be subject to deportation. In effect, the bill would criminalize poverty in this sweet land of liberty!

And to add insult to injury to legal immigrants, it would bar those who have green cards but not citizenship from bringing even their spouses and children here!

This is not immigration reform. It is an anti-immigration bill that would cut legal immigration by 40 percent at a time when America is facing a demographic slump of epic proportions with birth rates at their lowest level ever. Congress hasn’t considered a bill this horrible since it passed the racist National Origins Act in 1924, which it then scrapped in 1965.

Yet this is the only thing that this president would sign. The good news is that no one thinks that either of these bills will pass, thanks to the implacable opposition of Democrats.

Donald Trump, however, is resolutely leading his party back to the early 20^th century, a time of bald nativism and Know Nothingism. And he accomplished that giant leap back to the future in just four short years.

Talk about “crazy” and “maniacal.”

Hawaii’s asset forfeiture program doesn’t properly track what happens to property seized from people or properly spend those funds, according to a report released this week by the Hawaii State Auditor.

Honolulu Civil Beat reports:

According to the audit, the Office of the Attorney General, which administers the program, has failed to account for property obtained by forfeiture, inadequately managed program funds and failed to allocate some $2 million for drug prevention as required by law.

In addition, the audit said, the AG’s office has failed to promulgate administrative rules needed to provide guidance to law enforcement and county prosecutors, who initiate forfeitures, and the public, who might have their assets seized.

“With the bar to seize and forfeit private property in Hawai’i so low, the department must manage the program with a heightened degree of transparency and accountability,” State Auditor Les Kondo said in a statement. “We found that not to be the case.”

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property—cash, cars, even houses—suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner is never charged with a crime.

According to the audit, 26 percent of the $11.5 million-worth of civil asset forfeitures by Hawaii law enforcement between 2005 and 2017 were not accompanied by criminal charges.

Law enforcement say civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime by targeting its illicit proceeds.

However, civil liberties groups across the political spectrum say the practice has too few due process protections for innocent property owners, and that the perverse profit incentive created by asset forfeiture leads police to target everyday citizens, rather than cartel lords.

Many states also lack strict reporting requirements for asset forfeiture, which, as the Hawaii state auditor noted, is a bad combination.

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning law firm that has challenged forfeiture laws in several states, released a report last year that found 26 states had little or no transparency requirements for asset forfeiture. Furthermore, 14 of those states “do not appear to require any form of property tracking, leaving in doubt even such basic questions as what was seized and how much it was worth, who seized it, when it was seized, where it was seized, and why it was seized.”

For example, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting published a report last year that found state law enforcement seized $200 million in personal property, nearly all of it cash, but “regulation of the program is inconsistent, and the reports designed to inform government officials about how and when the money is used are often missing data.”

In response to these concerns, several state legislatures have passed or are considering laws requiring law enforcement to keep track of both what they seize and what they spend asset forfeiture funds on.

More than half of all states have passed some form of asset forfeiture reform over the past five years or so in response to bipartisan concerns.

Roger Clark, alleged to have mentored the person who ran the dark-web site Silk Road, has been in prison in Thailand since 2015. Today, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced Clark’s extradition to the United States to stand trial under a just-unsealed indictment. Clark, who is alleged to have operated under the pseudonym “Variety Jones” among others, had told Ars Technica in a 2016 interview that he didn’t think the extradition attempt would succeed.

The indictment charges Clark with narcotics trafficking conspiracy; narcotics trafficking; distributing narcotics by means of the internet; conspiracy to commit, and aid and abet, a computer hacking conspiracy; conspiracy to traffic in fraudulent identification documents; and money laundering conspiracy. These charges all stem from his alleged involvement with the Silk Road, a dark-web site that hosted the anonymous bitcoin-fueled sale of drugs and other illegal items and services.

The government claims Clark was engaged in illegally “promoting the Silk Road underground website by hiring and managing a computer programmer, who assisted in developing computer code and maintaining Silk Road’s technical infrastructure; providing advice…regarding managing and operating Silk Road, including security advice, and advice regarding the rules and policies on Silk Road; assisting in promoting sales on the Silk Road website, including providing help with coordinating a large-scale promotion for the sale of narcotics and other contraband on Silk Road; and conducting research and collecting intelligence on the efforts of law enforcement to investigate Silk Road.”

In addition to whatever jail time they can get—which could be 10 years to life if Clark is convicted—the indictment also announces the government’s intent to force Clark to “forfeit to the United States…any property constituting, or derived from, any proceeds the defendant obtained, directly or indirectly, as a result of the offenses and any property used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part, to commit, or to facilitate the commission of, the offenses.”

Ross Ulbricht is currently in American prison on a life sentence without parole for crimes connected with starting and operating Silk Road. While lurid tales of planned-but-uncommitted murders-for-hire surround the Silk Road case, Ulbricht never faced trial for such crimes. Although Clark (or whoever operated under the pseudonyms said to be his, according to seized computer records already released and quoted in this Wired report on the indictment) seems to have been strongly encouraging Silk Road’s operator to pay for such murders, the indictment does not charge Clark with anything related to that allegation.

Reason has written much on the overreach and injustice of Ulbricht’s life sentence without parole, and of his ongoing attempt to appeal his conviction and sentencing to the Supreme Court. His mother Lyn Ulbricht is interviewed on those points in our July print edition.

The trade war between Washington and Beijing escalated again today. President Donald Trump announced a new round of tariffs on Chinese imports, and the Chinese government immediately responded with threats of new tariffs on American goods.

Trump’s new 25 percent tariffs will target $50 billion in Chinese imports across a wide variety of industries.

“These tariffs are essential to preventing further unfair transfers of American technology and intellectual property to China, which will protect American jobs,” Trump claimed in a statement. “In addition, they will serve as an initial step toward bringing balance to the trade relationship between the United States and China.”

As Reason has noted repeatedly, tariffs are unlikely to be an effective tool in getting China to stop infringing American intellectual property. They are also unlikely to “protect American jobs.” And the trade imbalance between the United States and China is not as big of a problem as the president seems to believe it is.

But those tariffs will have an effect on the domestic economy.

“Although this trade action is often referred to in shorthand as imposing ‘tariffs on China,’ it is in reality a policy of ‘taxes on Americans,'” points out Bryan Riley, president of the National Taxpayers Union. “It is American taxpayers—businesses and workers—who will literally pay for these tariffs.”

That’s why dozens of businessmen and businesswomen from across the country came to Washington, D.C., last month to beg the administration to abandon its ill-conceived plan to tax Chinese imports. Those efforts were apparently in vain.

The consequences of tariffs are not theoretical. Last year, Trump slapped tariffs on Canadian lumber, despite warnings from the construction industry that they would inflate the price of housing. That’s exactly what’s happened:

Who’s paying for those lumber tariffs Trump imposed? We are. Homebuilders anticipate over 9k in lost jobs and a price hike on homes of over $6k @Morning_Joe pic.twitter.com/6tWPIpg9bv

— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) June 13, 2018

Earlier this year, the Trump administration put new tariffs on imported washing machines. Prior to the tariffs, the price of a new washing machine had fallen to an historically low level. Since then, well, this:

Similarly, Trump’s tariffs have increased the price of steel and aluminum, which in turn has increased production costs for myriad American businesses and left those same businesses at a competitive disadvantage against foreign competitors. Another wave of tariffs against thousands of Chinese goods—not to mention the retaliatory tariffs from China—will do further damage to American farms and businesses.

As part of the tariff announcement this morning, the White House promised to “pursue additional tariffs if China engages in retaliatory measures, such as imposing new tariffs on United States goods, services, or agricultural products.”

That doesn’t appear to bhave deterred Beijing. Within hours of the White House’s announcement, the Chinese government issued a statement threatening to “immediately introduce taxation measures of the same scale and the same strength,” CNBC reports. “All the economic and trade achievements previously reached by the two parties will no longer be valid at the same time.”

Unemployment is low, the stock market is booming, and the economy continues to grow.

In short, things are pretty great. But are they too great?

After Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s press conference on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal published an analysis suggesting that unemployment is well below the so-called natural rate of unemployment, and predicted that “by 2020 the economy will be well into overheating territory, the sort of situation that usually leads to dramatically higher interest rates and a recession.”

Federal reserve officials project that the jobless rate will drop to 3.5 percent by the end of 2019, significantly lower than the approximately 4.5 percent natural unemployment rate—that’s the term economists use to describe the minimum unemployment that can exist in a healthy market economy.

All this, in the Journal’s Greg Ip’s view, suggests an economy that’s growing too fast and could overheat, leading to a recession.

Mainstream economists typically use the phrase “overheated economy” to describe an economy that has had extended economic growth leading to high inflation because of the greater wealth held by consumers. This can lead to an inflationary spiral and a recession, or so their logic goes. As Ip says, “so long as unemployment is below its natural rate, inflation will tend to go up, not down.” To prevent this, central banks such as the United States’ Federal Reserve step in to raise interest rates and, effectively, save the economy from its own success.

This reasoning is dubious at best. Inflation is often defined as a general increase in price levels, but that is simply a consequence of inflation. Inflation is really an increase in the money supply, which consequently makes each dollar less valuable, therefore increasing the prices of goods and services. If individuals in the marketplace are wealthier, and thus spending more, there will be no “overheating,” provided the resources exist to meet the production requirements.

“I don’t think the way to think about price inflation is to look and see what the unemployment rate is,” argues Robert Murphy, research assistant professor at the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and senior fellow at the free-market Mises Institute. “Yes, you can see correlations, but it’s not that the unemployment rate causes price inflation. It misleads people.”

Does this mean that there’s nothing to worry about? Far from it. The Federal Reserve’s policy of artificially holding down interest rates is the real problem.

“Since the fall of 2008 and beyond kept interest rates artificially low, with its easy money policy that created an unsustainable boom. That fueled bad investments and now that the Fed is raising rates, those malinvestments are going to reveal and manifest themselves,” says Murphy.

With the low interest rate policies espoused by the Federal Reserve, people are more inclined to borrow in order to invest in long term projects. However, the resources for those projects don’t exist, which pulls them away from goods actually demanded, thus leading to malinvestments, which eventually causes a “bust,” as the economy purges itself of the unsustainable investments of the boom.

So yes, Ip is right that a recession is a-coming, but it’s not because the economy is growing too fast and overheating. As Murphy says, “The economy is not like an engine that’s going too hard.” So let’s stop analyzing it like one.

As Seattle repeals a literal tax on jobs, a similarly bad idea is taking hold further south.

Passed by a unanimous vote of the city council in May, the city’s so-called Amazon tax, which imposed a $275 annual fee for every worker employed by a company grossing over $20 million a year, was on the books for barely a month before city elders nixed it, hoping to avoid a bruising voter initiative campaign that sought its repeal.

The move provoked howls of betrayal from some of the tax’s most ardent supporters. Councilmember Kshama Sawant called the repeal a “shameless capitulation.” One impassioned activist told the city council in a public hearing that “when it’s our turn, we won’t make excuses for the terror.” Accusations like bootlicker were thrown around with liberal abandon.

Yet while the Amazon tax might be dead for now in the Emerald City, a Google tax is gaining steam in Mountain View, California.

Last week the Mountain View City Council gave its preliminary endorsement to putting an employee head tax on the upcoming November ballot. The proposal would levy as much as $150 per employee for firms that employ more than 50 people in the community.

This is projected to raise $6.1 million. Over half of that—roughly $3.4 million—would come from Google, which employs 23,000 people in the town.

The idea is to get Google to kick a little back to the town for the problems their growth has wrought.

“We want everyone to pay their fair share. We’re asking for something that can begin to cover the impacts that we’re seeing,” one tax proponent tells the Mountain View Voice, comparing Google to a restaurant patron ordering the most expensive meal at the table and then slipping away to the bathroom when the check arrives.

“If we’re lucky, some of the companies won’t expand here and they will expand elsewhere, where the workers live,” Mountain View Mayor Lenny Seigel says in the San Francisco Chronicle. (Seigel has previously described his town’s problem as having “too many good jobs” and not enough transit.)

Seigel’s hope is precisely the fear of many Mountain View businesses, who worry that they’ll be the ones to suffer should Google decide to shrink its Mountain View workforce.

In a survey conducted by the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce, 54 percent of local businesses say that they oppose an employee head tax, with 38 percent in support and 7 percent undecided. If larger corporations skip town to avoid the tax, 62 percent of local enterprises say they would be negatively affected.

Similar uneasiness from the wider business community, along with unions and other city stakeholders who don’t see economic growth as a bad thing, was enough to kill Seattle’s head tax. Of course, the backlash there also had a lot to do with popular resentment toward a city government that people see as out of touch and ineffectual. Politics is presently less fractious in Mountain View, where a city-sponsored survey shows two-thirds of voters favoring an employee head tax.

The idea is catching on in a number of other Silicon Valley towns as well. Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, like Mountain View, is mulling the idea of putting a head tax on the November ballot. San Jose, Redwood City, and Sunnyvale all have job taxes already.

Whatever their popularity, these taxes are bad ideas. They’re predicated on the mistaken notion that thriving tech firms are growing at the expense of communities.

As opposition from the wider business community demonstrates, corporate behemoths are not hording all the growth to themselves. Other businesses benefit from their proximity to large corporate campuses and the customers they bring, as do the employees of those smaller businesses. Mountain View property owners are no doubt happy to see the value of their homes increase as a result of Google’s growth in the town, even if they don’t like the added traffic congestion.

The prosperity these companies bring, in short, is spread as widely as whatever negative impacts they might have.

Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation says employee head taxes “are rare and for good reason.”

Walczak thinks cities have legitimate concerns about the impact of large commuting workforces on their town’s infrastructure. But the revenue projections for these head taxes are often based on the current levels of employment in the towns that are looking to adopt them. And as Walczak notes, “Tech firms tend to be mobile. The jobs themselves can be located elsewhere, whether that’s down the street or across the country.”

This is particularly true of companies like Google, which has large corporate campuses around the country. They would in all likelihood minimize the impact of a head tax by reassigning jobs elsewhere, just as Amazon promised to do in Seattle. When those employees go, so does the revenue the cities were going to rely on.

Paul Manafort, formerly President Donald Trump’s campaign manager, is heading to a jail cell after a judge revoked his bail today.

Manafort faces a host of federal charges. He is accused of concealing millions of dollars in income while representing pro-Russian political interests in Ukraine, and of not properly reporting this money to the IRS. When he was initially charged in February, he was granted bail.

Bail comes with conditions, like not committing any additional crimes while you’re free and not contacting or otherwise meddling with witnesses. Earlier this month, prosecutors said Manafort broke these conditions by contacting two witnesses and trying to get them to say that Manafort’s work lobbying for Ukraine did not include work in the United States. They charged him with a new obstruction of justice complaint and asked for his bail to be revoked.

Today, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed. The Washington Post reports:

“This is not middle school. I can’t take away his cellphone,” [the judge] said. “If I tell him not to call 56 witnesses, will he call the 57th?” She said she should not have to draft a court order spelling out the entire criminal code for him to avoid violations.

“This hearing is not about politics. It is not about the conduct of the office of special counsel. It is about the defendant’s conduct,” Jackson said. “I’m concerned you seem to treat these proceedings as another marketing exercise.”

None of the current charges against Manafort connect back to Trump. (As Trump would yell, “No collusion!”) It might be worthwhile to remind Trump that Manafort’s charges don’t connect to him, because he responded to the judge’s decision by tweeting in outrage:

Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns. Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2018

Manafort does not actually have a “tough sentence,” or any sentence, because he has not been convicted. But Trump’s typical way of misspeaking does inadvertently highlight some serious problems with America’s bail system. There are, in fact, hundreds of thousands of Americans sitting in jail cells who have, like Manafort, not yet been convicted of crimes.

While judges frequently keep defendants in jail cells because of concerns that they’ll interfere with the trial or because they’re flight risks, many others are stuck simply because they cannot afford the financial demands of cash bail. As a result, low-level offenders often end up serving the equivalent of a short prison sentence while sitting in jail waiting for the wheels of justice to turn—or, more frequently, for the defendant to give up and accept a plea deal.

So for some people, not getting bail is equivalent to a “sentence.” There is a significant reform push underway to attempt to make pretrial criminal justice less punitive and less likely to demand that people shell out money for the right to be free before their trial. Indeed, the bail reform movement is the subject of Reason‘s next cover story, for the August/September issue, written by yours truly.

As for Manafort, he’ll be facing trial in July and September for his charges. That’s a pretty speedy trial when compared to what many others experience.

Donald Trump says his decision to fire FBI Director James Comey is vindicated by the report that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released yesterday. “The IG Report is a total disaster for Comey, his minions and sadly, the FBI,” the president tweeted this morning. “Comey will now officially go down as the worst leader, by far, in the history of the FBI. I did a great service to the people in firing him.”

Since Horowitz’s report criticizes Comey, Trump’s claim is superficially plausible. But Horowitz’s conclusions about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices as secretary of state are exactly the opposite of Trump’s complaints about the investigation. While Horowitz says Comey treated Clinton unfairly, Trump has long argued that Comey let Clinton off easy. Which is it? Anyone who cared about logic or principle would have to choose, but Trump is either oblivious to the contradiction or assumes it will not faze his fans.

This is not the first time the president has asked us to believe he fired Comey because of actions that hurt Clinton, the woman whose imprisonment was a regular theme of Trump’s campaign rallies. The initial explanation for Comey’s dismissal, laid out in a May 9, 2017, memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and endorsed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, focused on the same two incidents that Horowitz found most troubling: Comey’s July 5, 2016, press conference, during which he said Clinton should not be prosecuted but criticized her “extremely careless” handling of classified material, and his October 28, 2016, letter informing members of Congress that he had reopened the investigation in light of newly discovered evidence that ultimately added nothing to the case.

Horowitz says Comey’s press conference was not only “extraordinary and insubordinate” but violated Justice Department norms aimed at protecting subjects of investigations that do not result in criminal charges. “We concluded that Comey’s unilateral announcement was inconsistent with Department policy and violated long-standing Department practice and protocol by, among other things, criticizing Clinton’s uncharged conduct,” the report says. According to Horowitz, the public reopening of the investigation 11 days before the presidential election was also a glaring departure from department policy and “a serious error of judgment.”

Rosenstein said much the same thing in his 2017 memo. Sessions, who had never before criticized Comey for these decisions and had in fact defended both of them, nevertheless concurred with Rosenstein’s conclusions. So did Trump, who appended Rosenstein’s memo and Sessions letter endorsing it to the letter informing Comey that his services were no longer needed. “I have received the attached letters from the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General of the United States recommending your dismissal,” Trump wrote. “I have accepted their recommendation.”

Trump dropped that pretense two days later. “I was going to fire Comey,” Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt. “Regardless of [the] recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.” He also conceded that the Russia investigation was on his mind at the time, which helped explain his otherwise puzzling statement in the dismissal letter that “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” According to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Comey’s refusal to say that publicly was one of the main reasons the president fired him.

Now Rosenstein, who helped Trump obscure his motive for firing Comey, is overseeing an obstruction of justice investigation in which that motive looms large, and Trump is once again pretending that he, like Rosenstein and Horowitz, was offended by Comey’s shoddy treatment of Clinton. That position seems somewhat at odds with Trump’s insistence that Comey should have recommended charges against “Crooked Hillary,” who was obviously guilty and got off only because of the FBI’s anti-Trump bias. “James Comey lied and leaked and totally protected Hillary Clinton,” Trump tweeted last October. “He was the best thing that ever happened to her!”

Horowitz, by contrast, concludes that the decision not to charge Clinton, who arguably violated a law criminalizing “gross negligence” in the handling of information “relating to the national defense,” was “based on the prosecutors’ assessment of the facts, the law, and past Department practice.” The prosecutors concluded that the offense “likely required a state of mind that was ‘so gross as to almost suggest deliberate intention,’ criminally reckless, or ‘something that falls just short of being willful,’ as well as evidence that the individuals who sent emails containing classified information ‘knowingly’ included or transferred such information onto unclassified systems.” While the decision not to bring that charge was controversial, Horowitz says, “we found no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations.”

Trump’s reaction to Horowitz’s report suggests that he thinks Comey was terribly unfair to Clinton, departing from Justice Department policy in ways that hurt her election prospects. Yet Trump also thinks Comey “totally protected Hillary,” who belonged in prison rather than the White House. Can those positions be reconciled? Trump does not care, and neither do his supporters.

The landmark Supreme Court decision striking down the federal ban on most sports gambling rightly restores state legislatures’ right to decide whether to legalize the multibillion-dollar sports-betting market.

In anticipation of the decision, West Virginia, Mississippi, and four other states passed laws legalizing the practice. Many more states are likely to follow in their footsteps. But they should be on guard against special interests clamoring for a piece of the action.

Professional sports leagues have been sending lobbyists to dozens of state legislatures asking that they institute an “integrity fee” that would entitle the leagues to 1 percent of all the money bet at sportsbooks, write Jason Huffman and Russ Latino.

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