Tag: hit&run

Having reported on Ross Ulbricht’s prosecution since the beginning, I’ve found a startlingly large number of people who didn’t follow the case closely believe his life sentence without parole for acts connected with launching the darkweb sales site Silk Road was because he tried to pay for the murder of people who’d stolen from or threatened him.

That’s not true; such charges were no part of the crimes he was actually convicted for. The waters were muddied, almost certainly with cold deliberation, by the federal government because they had a separate indictment out of Maryland hanging over him for the past nearly five years that did include such accusations.

Last week Robert Hur, U.S. Attorney for the district of Maryland, filed a motion to have the indictment containing those charges dropped.

“Mr. Ulbricht’s conviction and life sentence in the case handled by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York have been affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case,” Hur said in a written statement. “We have dismissed the federal charges based on the same conduct pending against Mr. Ulbricht in Maryland, which allows us to direct our resources to other cases where justice has not yet been served.”

Hur’s statement contained an important misleading element. It isn’t true that he’s serving his ridiculously punitive sentence based on the “same conduct” as in the dropped indictment from Maryland. That indictment includes a charge of “attempted witness murder” and many lurid details of the specifics of his alleged involvement in a case of (never actually committed) murder and torture. Those charges were no part of what Ulbricht was actually tried and sentenced for.

The real tragedy haunting this otherwise good news is the mere fact of the accusations, despite never being proven in court, played into the insanely and unprecedentedly draconian sentence Ulbricht received. The failed appeal to the Supreme Court wanted them to judge the propriety of sentencing based on unadjudicated accusations, but alas the Court didn’t want to bother.

Some close to Ulbricht’s defense, such as his mother Lyn Ulbricht, also wonder if the fact that the murder for hire accusations rely on the work of federal agents who were themselves charged for crimes committed in the course of the investigation into Silk Road might have played a role in the failure to ever go to trial on those accusations. The U.S. Attorney’s office would not comment today on any possibility that might have played any role in their decision to drop that indictment.

It’s good that the charges have been dropped, but the government’s careless use of them as a media weapon to destroy Ulbricht’s reputation and to encourage the sentencing judge to be far harsher than the crimes he was convicted on actually would warrant have alas already done their damage. It’s hard not to think that was exactly why the indictment came down yet never went to court.

Now that Ulbricht has no chance of having his initial conviction and sentencing overturned or adjusted, it’s likely the feds out of Maryland decided the indictment no longer was needed make sure the government had some further means in their back pocket to punish Ulbricht for showing a safer, saner way around their insanely damaging drug war.

President Donald Trump and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, held a joint White House press conference on Wednesday afternoon to announce an agreement to work towards ending the budding trade war between the United States and the European Union.

Though details remain sketchy, it seems too soon to call this a truce in the trade war—more like an agreement to stop further escalations of the conflict, at least for now, in the hopes that a truce can be worked out.

At that press conference, Trump said a deal with the E.U. would would be a “win” on both sides of the Atlantic. He said Europe would agree to buy more soybeans and liquefied natural gas from the U.S.

In a joint statement, Trump and Juncker agreed to “work together towards zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods,” but offered few specifics beyond the vague promises to increase soybean and natural gas trade. The two leaders also promised “to launch a close dialogue on standards in order to ease trade, reduce bureaucratic obstacles, and slash costs.” Again, that all sounds great but it leaves out the important details about how those things will be accomplished.

In the end, what Trump and Juncker outlined Wednesday sounds more like a handshake deal that could lead to a formal deal—but also might not.

“It’s just a big nothingburger,” Dan Ikenson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies, told Reason. “As expected, there were no agreements reached.”

Though, he added, “at least Juncker and Trump got some face time.”

That the two sides are talking and at least trying to give the impression of working towards a deal is important, but it’s probably right to remain skeptical of Wednesday’s supposed deal.

After all, we’ve seen this page from the Trump playbook before. In April, shortly after slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and targeting $34 billion worth of Chinese goods with additional tariffs, Trump met with Chinese officials in Washington. What at first seemed to be a productive meeting that reportedly included concessions from China ended up being little more than a brief respite before further escalations ensued. The two sides now seem to be much farther apart, with Trump threatening last week to place tariffs on literally all goods imported from China and Chinese officials recently telling Politico that they don’t even know what Trump’s goals are—something that makes it decidedly more difficult to engage in serious negotiations.

Hopefully, Wednesday’s agreement between Trump and Juncker is a more significant deal—or at least the pathway to a more significant deal. Only time will tell.

Alice Marie Johnson spent 21 years in federal prison, but she doesn’t consider the time wasted.

During her years behind bars, serving a life sentence without parole for her role in a drug conspiracy, Johnson became an ordained minister, wrote plays, and was a role model for countless other inmates.

“Time is a gift from God, and it’s so important what you do with that time,” Johnson, now free, said at the George Washington University Law School Wednesday for an event on clemency. “I know many people mourn those years I was away. My family mourned those years. I mourn the separation, but I don’t mourn it in the sense that my life was useless or I had no impact.”

President Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence in June—the first commutation of his presidency—after a personal appeal from reality megastar Kim Kardashian, who was moved by a video detailing Johnson’s case.

It was an almost unbelievable turn of luck for Johnson, who had been inexplicably denied clemency by the Obama White House despite her model conduct. Johnson said she is now dedicated to speaking out on behalf of the inmates she left behind:

I don’t take freedom lightly, because this is a gift I have received. It’s a miracle. I try to speak from my heart. I don’t have a prepared speech. I may not have the most glowing and fancy words, but what you hear from me is straight from the heart. I don’t feel that I was denied or delayed. I was destined for this. I believe the Lord has raised up my voice for such a time as this, that this is the moment he called me into to speak out, to be not just a number, to not just be someone that they read about, but a human being. It’s an issue that should prick the conscious of every American citizen that sees what happened to me, to know that but for the grace of God, I could have been them, and they could have been me.

I’m thankful to be a face of hope not only for prisoners, but a face of hope for those who are free yet in prison.

As Johnson noted, and as Reason has reported, there are many, many more Alice Johnsons in prison.

On gay marriage, the ship has indeed sailed. Never was that more apparent than at Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit on Wednesday, where an audience of two hundred conservative teens erupted into wild applause after speaker Dave Rubin said he was in a same-sex relationship.

“I’m gay married,” said Rubin. “You people don’t care about that, do you?”

They did not. In fact, they cheered Rubin.

“The ship has sailed. We’re equal. It’s great.” – @RubinReport on gay marriage. Lots of applause from crowd. #HSLS2018

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) July 25, 2018

Make no mistake: this was a deeply conservative, politically active audience. When former Fox News anchor Eric Bolling polled them earlier in the day, I estimated just 40 percent of them self-identified as libertarian or center-right (Trump skeptical, in other words). The rest are conservatives. The vast majority seem both pro-life and passionate about the pro-life cause. I saw Make America Great Again hats and National Rifle Association hats. The teens cheered for Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. They even broke into chants of “lock her up” whenever anyone uttered the name “Hillary Clinton”—something that attracted considerable derision from the mainstream media. (This was not an edifying moment for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, though the press made too much of it: he didn’t actually join the chant.)

If these teens represent the future of the right, then the right will continue to be pro-Trump, pro-gun, and pro-life. But thwarting gay marriage has faded as an animating cause, and that’s certainly something for liberals and libertarians to be happy about.

No person on Planet Earth has gotten so much as a cough, wheeze, sniffle, or bellyache from eating foods using ingredients derived from any current variety of genetically modified crop. Current varieties safely incorporate genes for traits such as herbicide or pest resistance into crops like corn, cotton, and canola. Unfortunately, scientifically illiterate activists have managed to frighten portions of the public and politicians into adopting ridiculously onerous regulations that have stymied and slowed the deployment of these beneficial new biotech crop varieties. This is particularly the case in Europe.

With the advent of CRISPR gene editing, modern crop breeders and biotechnologists had hoped that politicians and regulators would agree not to apply their uselessly onerous GMO regulatory schemes to new gene-edited crops. For example, in the U.S. the Department of Agriculture declined to regulate a mushroom gene-edited to prevent browning. Even more happily, the USDA announced in March that it would not regulate new crop varieties developed through gene-editing techniques. Hooray!

But now the idiots sitting on the European Court of Justice have ruled that the European Union’s absurd GMO regulatory scheme must be applied to gene-edited crops. “Organisms obtained by mutagenesis are GMOs and are, in principle, subject to the obligations laid down by the GMO Directive,” ruled the court.

This a sad day for European crop breeders and farmers. CRISPR allows a directed form of mutagenesis in which plant breeders seek to make specific modifications that will enhance some trait in a crop. Suppose plant breeders identify a gene variant in a less productive landrace variety of a crop that confers disease resistance on it. The commercial variety has the same gene, but not the specific order of DNA base pairs that confer disease resistance. People are already eating both the landrace and the commercial variety safely.

It would typically take years of cross-breeding to transfer the disease resistance gene variant from the landrace into the commercial varieties, and in the process you’d mix in lots of undesirable genes from the landrace variety. Using CRISPR, plant breeders could simply edit the gene in the commercial variety to match the one found in the landrace while keeping all of the other desirable traits that boost its productivity, harvestability, and taste.

The court further ruled that the GMO Directive “does not apply to organisms obtained by means of certain mutagenesis techniques, namely those which have conventionally been used in a number of applications and have a long safety record.” By “certain mutagenesis techniques,” the court means crop varieties randomly mutated by blasting them with ionizing radiation and harsh chemicals. In fact, hundreds of conventional mutagenic crops are widely grown throughout Europe and the world now.

If unregulated randomly mutated crops are safe to eat (and they are), then precisely gene-edited crops will be even safer and should also require no regulatory scrutiny.

Professor Johnathan Napier, who leads the UK’s field trials of CRISPR-edited crops at Rothamsted Research, has quite properly denounced the court ruling, telling The Guardian that it is “a backward step, not progress.”

He added: “This is a very disappointing outcome, and one that will hinder European innovation, impact and scientific advance. The classification of genome-edited organisms as falling under the GMO directive could slam the door shut on this revolutionary technology.”

Twitter appears to be “shadow-banning” several conservative leaders. In other words, their accounts don’t show up when users search for them in the dropdown bar.

Those affected include Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Donald Trump Jr. spokesperson Andrew Surabian, as well as the verified accounts of Reps. Mark Meadows (R–N.C.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), according to Vice News. Twitter users can still find their profiles with a manual search, but the accounts don’t auto-populate in the search bar.

Something similar has happened to white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and right-wing trolls such as Mike Cernovich, Gizmodo reports. But other controversial figures on the far right, including Infowars founder Alex Jones and Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler, still show up in the dropdown search bar.

There does not appear to be a comparable crackdown on the left, says Vice:

McDaniel’s counterpart, Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress—including Reps. Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan—all continue to appear in drop-down search results. Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same in Twitter’s search.

So why are prominent Republicans being shadow-banned while their Democratic counterparts aren’t? It’s not exactly clear, and Twitter doesn’t seem willing to provide an answer. “We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address this,” a spokesperson for the social media company tells Vice, adding that “our technology is based on account *behavior* not the content of Tweets.”

Twitter did announce in May that it planned to address the issue of trolls in a way that ensures that “people contributing to the healthy conversation will be more visible in conversations and search.” This may be why Spencer and Cernovich don’t autopopulate in the search bar anymore, but it doesn’t explain what’s happened to McDaniel, Surabian, and various Republican legislators.

Conservatives have long accused Twitter and Facebook of censoring their viewpoints. In May, McDaniel and Brad Parscale, who’s running President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking them to look into their companies’ alleged anti-conservative bias.

Both companies say they’re taking the accusations seriously, but many conservatives don’t seem to be placated. “This type of opaque behavior by social media companies is exactly why conservatives are speaking out and demanding more transparency and accountability,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tells Vice. “The bias has to stop.”

Between 400,000 and 500,000 people are behind bars but haven’t been convicted—they’re just awaiting their day in court. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is unveiling legislation today to help them, by ending the use of money bail on the federal level and nudging the states to do the same.

The No Money Bail Act would prohibit the federal government from using any payment of money as a condition of pretrial release for criminal cases. It would call for grants to develop alternatives to money bail and to improve pretrial practices with the aim of reducing the number of people detained in jail prior to trial. And it would push states to come along with the shift by denying them access to Justice Department grants if they continue using money bail.

Poverty is not a crime and hundreds of thousands of Americans, convicted of nothing, shouldn’t be in jail because they can’t afford cash bail. Our destructive and unjust cash bail process is part of our broken criminal justice system and must be ended. https://t.co/IETZaldTwS

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 25, 2018

A House companion bill was introduced by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.). He has intrduced similar bills in previous sessions that haven’t gone far. This time he argued, in a prepared statement, that the

money bail system is irrational and dangerous. People who are not at high risk but are poor remain incarcerated, while people who may be dangerous are set free if they have the funds. It’s maddening to see that those with money can buy their freedom while poor defendants languish behind bars while awaiting trial. I’m grateful Sen. Sanders is introducing a bill that moves to end our justice system’s reliance on money bail. I previously introduced legislation in the House that addresses this issue and I look forward to working with Senator Sanders. The money bail system warrants sustained outrage because America should never be a nation where freedom is based on cash on hand.

This legislation is unlikely to get anywhere. Last year Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced a bill that would create a grant fund to help states research alternatives to money bail. It has been languishing in committee since last July. What Sanders and Lieu are proposing goes further, and it faces a White House and Justice Department that have been largely hostile to criminal justice reforms.

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately declared its support for the legislation. “Cash bail keeps close to half a million people in jail before trial because they can’t afford to pay,” ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel Kanya Bennett noted in a statement. “It criminalizes poverty, disproportionately impacts people of color, and entrenches thousands of Americans in an unjust and unfair system. The only winners of the cash bail system are bail agents and their insurance backers who profit between one to two billion dollars a year.”

New Jersey eliminated most cash bail as part of a suite of criminal justice reforms that were researched before implementation. Initial results are promising, but the state is still collecting data from its first full year of a system focused more on pretrial monitoring and communication with defendants. (Check out Reason‘s cover story for our August/September issue for a closer look at how it has all worked out for them.) But bail reform doesn’t always work out as planned. In Maryland, a requirement that judges should consider money bail as a last resort led to defendants being denied any form of pre-trial release. The result: more people detained in jail. So there may be drawbacks to a top-down push for fast-tracked changes from people who won’t have to deal with anything that might backfire.

Sanders’ bill gives states three fiscal years to implement new bail systems before cutting off grants, so it’s not expecting a miraculous, immediate shift. But there’s been a lot of resistance to these reforms: from the bail industry, from judges who face public backlashes if somebody they’ve allowed out commits crimes, and from jail and prison staff whose jobs are linked to high incarceration rates.

The Senate confirmed Robert Wilkie as the nation’s new secretary of veterans affairs on Monday. He now faces the task of implementing the VA Mission Act, a half-baked quasi-market reform aimed at transforming an infamously inefficient government bureaucracy.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is still recoving from a major scandal that broke in 2014, when the world learned that the VA had been keeping secret wait lists to avoid cuts to hospital bonuses. The operation may have killed more than 1,000 veterans, but only eight employees were reprimanded for their roles in the mess.

“The VA is so astonishingly bad it makes the DMV look competent,” says Adrian Moore, vice president of policy at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this blog) and a veteran himself.

The VA has had constant problems managing transactions with private health care providers. Private care already exists in abundance, but the VA is unable, most of the time, to connect the provider with the veteran and to execute the necessary transactions. Moore says the agency should focus on “improving the operation of the interface between the veteran, the VA, and the health care provider.”

That’s the aim of the Mission Act, a bill passed this year to expand veterans’ access to private care providers. Among other things, the law authorizes the VA to enter into contracts with some community health care providers. That will help more veterans gain access to the health care they need, and it will also help cut costs.

The Mission Act is a wobbly step in the right direction, but more serious structural reform is necessary if the VA is “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan,” the agency’s motto since its inception. “There has to be high pressure, top-down, well thought-out reform to the management structure of the VA,” says Moore. At the very least, that means more transparency, more willingness to fire incompetent bureaucrats, and more willingness to transfer services to the private sector.

That last item will be the toughest one. While the White House says that David Shulkin, Wilkie’s predecessor, resigned, he maintains that he was fired for his opposition to privatization. Yet Wilkie has pledged not to privatize the agency either. Whether he’ll privatize parts of it remains to be seen.

In his capacity at the VA, Wilkie has the ability to affect serious reform, independent of Congress. But his track record shows little willingness to do much more than toe the party line. He’s not likely to go much further than the mandate extended to him by the Mission Act.

After being denied a special exemption from President Donald Trump’s tariff on steel, a Texas-based pipeline company will have to pay what the company’s chief operating officer calls an “unjust retroactive tax” of $40 million.

When Trump ordered his 25 percent steel tariffs in early March, Plains All American GP applied for an exemption because it had placed a major order for steel pipes in December 2017—part of the company’s ongoing construction of a 550-mile crude oil pipeline system across New Mexico and western Texas. The Commerce Department has been slowly reviewing more than 20,000 applications for tariff exemptions filed by more than 1,200 American businesses trying to avoid the new import taxes; so far, the department has approved only a few. On July 13, the department ruled against Plains All American, citing evidence that American steel manufacturers could supply the same pipe ordered in December for the project.

But the order placed in December was already being filled by a Greek steelmaker. In fact, deliveries of the pipe started earlier this month. Because the company did not get an exemption from the Commerce Department, it will end up having to pay $40 million in tariffs on an order placed three months before the tariffs existed.

“We are now dealing with a major unexpected, unjust retroactive tax that affects the project’s economics,” the pipeline company’s chief operating officer, Willie Chiang, told the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday. “Ironically, the denial of our exclusion request provides no relief to the U.S. steel industry. We have already begun to receive shipments of the steel, so even if we were able to substitute product specifications, it is too late to cancel our order from Greece and shift it to a U.S. mill without incurring substantial economic loss and major delays in the schedule.”

Trump’s steel tariffs were imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gives the president broad authority to order tariffs on “national security” grounds. The Trump administration has claimed that steel protectionism is necessary to ensure American steel mills can supply raw materials in the event of an armed conflict that cuts off global trade, but industry analysts have cast doubt on that argument. Even Trump himself has suggested the tariffs are not grounded in national security concerns.

The exemption process set up by the Commerce Department is similarly flawed—and it grants the department virtually unchecked power to pick winners and losers. As Chiang pointed out Tuesday, there is no mechanism for companies to appeal the department’s decisions, and there is limited opportunity to communicate with the bureaucrats deciding which exemptions will be granted.

“A petitioner’s ability to state its case is limited to the submission of a standardized form and supporting electronic documentation,” Chiang said. “No forum is provided for interaction with those determining the merits of either the petitioners’ or the objectors’ arguments. In addition, there is no opportunity to respond to objections—even if the objections contain incorrect information.”

That’s exactly what happened to Plains All American. Several American steel mills responded to their exemption application by telling the Commerce Department that the mills could step in to fill the pipeline company’s order. But Chiang says his company never had a chance to rebut those claims, something it could have done by simply pointing out that the order was already in progress.

That’s another problem with this mess: It opens the door to serious cronyism. As CNN reported last month, large companies such as U.S. Steel are actively trying to block many exemption requests made by smaller business—because, of course, U.S. Steel is better able to absorb the added cost of tariffs than, say, a small metal fabrication business with 20 employees.

Congress has an opportunity to roll back Trump’s authority to impose tariffs on national security grounds, and it could follow up on recommendations made by Chiang and other businessmen by requiring the Commerce Department to use a more transparent and fair process for granting tariff exemptions. At the very least, projects that started before the tariffs existed should be exempted from the new trade barriers, as suddenly higher material costs will force contracts to be renegotiated or construction to be halted. So far, though, not enough Republicans have been willing to stand up to the president.

When Shirley Stegall cast her vote for Donald Trump in November 2016, she never imagined that his immigration crackdown would affect her family. Now the Missouri woman’s daughter-in-law has been shipped to Mexico.

The Associated Press tells the story. Letty, the Shirley’s daughter-in-law, immigrated illegally to the United States in 1999, at age 21. After she married Shirley’s son Steve, she obtained a Social Security card, a work permit, and a driver’s license. The couple bought a house, became the owners of a Kansas City Bar called The Blue Line, and are the loving parents of a 17-year-old daughter, Jennifer, from Letty’s previous marriage.

In 2012, Letty was pulled over and charged with misdemeanor drunk driving near her house. She spent a month in jail, and her case was transferred to immigration after the authorities discovered her illegal status. Under President Barack Obama’s administration, Letty could stay in the country if she agreed to being fingerprinted, paid processing fees, regularly checked in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and, of course, had no other incidents. In February of this year, Letty was arrested in her driveway and placed on a plane to Brownsville, Texas, without her family’s knowledge. She was then forced to cross the border back into her native Mexico.

While Letty hopes to return to her husband and daughter soon, Shirley has found herself questioning her support for Trump. Though the president claimed that he would use his tough immigration policies to get “the bad ones—the really bad ones,” the number of immigrants arrested without criminal records rose by 150 percent from 2016 to 2017, NBC reports.

Shirley cast her vote believing that Trump would direct resources to deporting immigrants with criminal records. “They didn’t take out the people who are dangerous,” she said. “The murderers are still there. The gangsters are still there. The rapists are still there.”

“I’ve always been proud to be an American,” Shirley said. “But now I’m ashamed.”

Jerry Rosetti, a patron in the Stegalls’ bar, tells the AP that while he still supports Trump and thinks illegal immigration was wrong, he doesn’t believe that Letty should have been deported.

“I would trade places with her in a minute,” he said. “She shouldn’t be in Mexico. She should be right here, right now.”

Letty has been barred from returning to the United States for the next 10 years, but she and her family hope that her marriage to Steve will be enough to allow her to return within the next two. Letty did not apply for a green card after her marriage, because an attorney assured her that she had little to worry about since her husband and daughter were citizens. But now that Trump has signed an executive order that put all illegal immigrants under the threat of arrest, marriage to a U.S. citizen is no longer the simple path to citizenship as it once was.