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Trump May Tank TikTok Deal With Oracle Because Government Doesn’t Get a Cut

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It’s looking more and more like a TikTok deal won’t be reached before President Donald Trump’s executive order against the app’s parent company, ByteDance, takes effect next week.

For a moment, it looked like at least a compromise on TikTok might be had. But Trump is upset that the U.S. government wouldn’t get a cut for brokering a deal between TikTok parent company ByteDance and potential U.S. buyer Oracle. (And by brokering, we mean banning a foreign product unless the owner sells it to a U.S. company.) Trump also had concerns that it’s not an outright acquisition but a loosely defined “partner” situation between ByteDance and Oracle.

From the Associated Press:

President Donald Trump said he expects to get a report Thursday about Oracle’s bid for the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok and admitted there is no legal path to letting the U.S. Treasury get a cut of the deal—a proposition experts had criticized as unprecedented and possibly illegal.

“I’m not prepared to sign off on anything. I have to see the deal,” Trump told White House reporters Wednesday evening about Oracle’s interest in TikTok.

The president seems to have lost enthusiasm for the deal, in part, after realizing there was no cut for the federal government. “Amazingly, I find that you’re not allowed to do that,” Trump said. “If they’re willing to make big payments to the government they’re not allowed because … there’s no legal path to doing that. … How foolish can we [the United States] be?”

Very foolish, it seems, and heading down a dangerous path.

“The Trump administration’s decision to force the sale of TikTok to a U.S. buyer is, to many, the latest sign the global internet is splintering into national and regional blocs,” suggests University of Washington professor Huatong Sun.

“This has been a concern for several years now, as authoritarian countries such as Russia, China and Iran erect walls around their cyberspace, and democracies like the U.S., India and the European Union cite national security when blocking specific foreign companies like ByteDance’s TikTok and Tencent’s WeChat.”

The administration did assure U.S.-based TikTok employees (in response to a recent lawsuit) that they won’t be in trouble for continuing to be paid by the company.

On Monday evening, “the Department of Justice filed court papers stating that the Department of Commerce will not enforce the Executive Order to prohibit the payment of wages, salaries, or benefits to TikTok employees, or bring any civil or criminal actions against such employees simply for doing their jobs,” announced the Blackstone Law Group.

The Justice Department also said in a court filing this week that the Commerce Department “does not intend to take actions that would target persons or groups whose only connection with WeChat is their use or downloading of the app to convey personal or business information between users.”

The WeChat clarification comes after a nonprofit group called the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance “and several people who say they rely on the app for work, worship, and staying in touch with relatives in China sued to stop the ban in federal court in California,” CNBC reports:

The suit says the ban violates its U.S. users’ freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, and other constitutional rights.

The WeChat users, who say they are not affiliated with WeChat or its parent company, Tencent, are seeking an injunction against the order, and a hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

All of this makes Trump’s order concerning TikTok and WeChat less bad, but still quite bad.

QUICK HITS

  • The proposed response to D.C. protesters in Lafayette Square this June turns out to be more insane than it appeared at first:

  • U.S. District Court Judge Allison Nathan is ordering all federal prosecutors in New York’s Southern District “to read a ruling she issued Wednesday that blasts prosecutors for their handling of evidence in a criminal case involving alleged violations of sanctions against Iran” and questions the “completeness of the government’s account of why prosecutors failed to turn over one key piece of evidence to the defense until the middle of trial.” More here from Politico.
  • “While past elections suggest that Asian Americans have moved significantly toward the Democratic Party, this year’s results show that some groups are moving to the right,” notes NBC News.

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Judge Upholds Pseudonymity of Cincinnati Police Officer Who Is Suing His Critics for Libel

I wrote about the case (in which news outlets, the defendants, and I are opposing pseudonymity) a few weeks ago here. Yesterday, WKRC (James Pilcher) wrote about the latest hearing, in which Judge Megan Shanahan has ruled that the case can continue to proceed pseudonymously:

Shanahan said the officer faces danger in the current climate for the reason in keeping his name out of the court record. She listed off several examples of other attacks on police nationally.

“Must we wait until this officer’s wife is stabbed in the eye with an ice pick on her doorstep before we find real-world evidence [of malice or threat], which just happened a few states away?” Shanahan said as she issued her ruling….

[The officer’s lawyers] argued the officer had been threatened online, including threats to post his home address.

I appreciate the judge’s concern about the officer’s possible safety, but her approach is not consistent with the general American rule regarding openness of court records: Under the “officer faces danger in the current climate” theory, essentially any lawsuit against or by police officers—or other controversial public officials—would be pseudonymous. For better or worse (I think for better), that is not the way our system handles such matters: Knowing the identities of the parties, especially public officials, are involved in legal controversies is important to allowing the public to monitor what courts are doing:

Judicial proceedings are supposed to be open, as [the precedents] make clear, in order to enable the proceedings to be monitored by the public. The concealment of a party’s name impedes public access to the facts of the case, which include the parties’ identity.

To be sure, pseudonymity is sometimes allowed, but it’s not enough to cite the regrettably everpresent risk that some people will be upset at a public official involved in the case.

The judge has agreed with much of a different part of our request, which is to unseal the police officer’s affidavit; more details on that should emerge Monday. Many thanks to my pro bono lawyer Jeffrey Nye (Stagnaro, Saba & Patterson) for all his work on the case, including doing much of the pro-unsealing oral argument today.

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Judge Upholds Pseudonymity of Cincinnati Police Officer Who Is Suing His Critics for Libel

I wrote about the case (in which news outlets, the defendants, and I are opposing pseudonymity) a few weeks ago here. Yesterday, WKRC (James Pilcher) wrote about the latest hearing, in which Judge Megan Shanahan has ruled that the case can continue to proceed pseudonymously:

Shanahan said the officer faces danger in the current climate for the reason in keeping his name out of the court record. She listed off several examples of other attacks on police nationally.

“Must we wait until this officer’s wife is stabbed in the eye with an ice pick on her doorstep before we find real-world evidence [of malice or threat], which just happened a few states away?” Shanahan said as she issued her ruling….

[The officer’s lawyers] argued the officer had been threatened online, including threats to post his home address.

I appreciate the judge’s concern about the officer’s possible safety, but her approach is not consistent with the general American rule regarding openness of court records: Under the “officer faces danger in the current climate” theory, essentially any lawsuit against or by police officers—or other controversial public officials—would be pseudonymous. For better or worse (I think for better), that is not the way our system handles such matters: Knowing the identities of the parties, especially public officials, are involved in legal controversies is important to allowing the public to monitor what courts are doing:

Judicial proceedings are supposed to be open, as [the precedents] make clear, in order to enable the proceedings to be monitored by the public. The concealment of a party’s name impedes public access to the facts of the case, which include the parties’ identity.

To be sure, pseudonymity is sometimes allowed, but it’s not enough to cite the regrettably everpresent risk that some people will be upset at a public official involved in the case.

The judge has agreed with much of a different part of our request, which is to unseal the police officer’s affidavit; more details on that should emerge Monday. Many thanks to my pro bono lawyer Jeffrey Nye (Stagnaro, Saba & Patterson) for all his work on the case, including doing much of the pro-unsealing oral argument today.

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Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Homicide Stats Show “Minneapolis Effect”

This morning the Wall Journal Journal published my op-ed on the subject of the nation’s homicide spikes. There I summarize my new research study, which explains how a “Minneapolis Effect” of reduced policing in the wake of anti-police protests best explains the terrible surge in gun violence. Here are the op-ed’s first several paragraphs:

Cities across the country suffered dramatic increases in homicides this summer. The spikes were remarkable, suddenly appearing and widespread, although often concentrated in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This year is on track to be the deadliest year for gun-related homicides since at least 1999.

The homicide spikes began in late May. Before May 28, Chicago had almost the same number of homicides as in 2019. Then, on May 31, 18 people were murdered in Chicago—the city’s most violent day in six decades. Violence continued through the summer. July was Chicago’s most violent month in 28 years. As of Sept. 1, murder is up 52% for the year, according to Chicago Police Department data.

Chicago’s shooting spike reflects what is happening in many major cities across the country. Researchers have identified a “structural break” in homicide numbers, beginning in the last week of May. Trends for most other major crime categories have remained generally stable or moved slightly downward.

My much longer research paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Federal Sentencing Reporter.  That paper explains the basis for estimating that the Minneapolis Effect has led to about 710 more homicides and 2,800 more shootings in June and July alone, with the victims heavily concentrated in disadvantaged communities. The paper provides supporting examples from five cities–Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and New York City–which all have suffered a Minneapolis Effect.  The policy conclusion of my longer article: The best way for the nation to deter shootings and homicides is to restore proactive policing to its previous levels before the anti-police protests.

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Is COVID-19 Causing a New Wave of Opioid-Related Deaths?  

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One consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be a spike in drug overdose rates.

The Washington Post reports that as of March 2020, combined fatal and nonfatal drug overdoses were nearly 20 percent higher than through the same month in 2019, according to data collected by the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program. The New York Times, which collected data directly from state and local health agencies, reported in July that fatal drug overdoses were up 13 percent compared to the first half of last year.

Physicians and harm reduction advocates say COVID-19 has disrupted medical care for substance use disorders and imposed financial crunches on treatment centers and local health agencies. Medical examiners interviewed by the Post pointed to an increase in synthetic drugs on toxicology reports.

But this COVID-19 story is really a prohibition story. While 2020’s numbers, if they keep up, would likely be the worst ever, the U.S. also set a record for overdose deaths last year, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in July. “The increase in the last few months of 2019 was steep enough to push it over the top by a little more than 200 deaths,” a CDC official told Politico.

With border and port traffic reduced, drugs like heroin and cocaine, which are generally shipped in large quantities, may be harder to move into the United States right now. But synthetic drugs that are far more potent, and thus more profitable to ship in small quantities, have been a major factor in overdose deaths for years. In 2018, the CDC says that synthetic opioids such as fentanyl were involved in 68 percent of overdose deaths, an increase of 10 percent over 2017.

To the federal government’s credit, COVID-19 has led to a few long overdue policy changes. In March, for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration relaxed restrictions on the prescribing of the medication-assisted therapy drugs methadone and buprenorphine, which people with opioid addiction can safely take to satisfy cravings. Doctors can now start a new patient on buprenorphine through telemedicine rather than an in-person visit, and continue an existing patient’s methadone protocol through telemedicine.

There are other methods for harm reduction—even short of legalizing recreational opioid sales—such as authorizing more clean needle exchanges, passing more robust “Good Samaritan” laws to protect people who call 911 during an overdose, and allowing the construction of supervised injection facilities. Given the scale of the crisis, these potentially life-saving reforms are needed now more than ever.

 

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Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Homicide Stats Show “Minneapolis Effect”

This morning the Wall Journal Journal published my op-ed on the subject of the nation’s homicide spikes. There I summarize my new research study, which explains how a “Minneapolis Effect” of reduced policing in the wake of anti-police protests best explains the terrible surge in gun violence. Here are the op-ed’s first several paragraphs:

Cities across the country suffered dramatic increases in homicides this summer. The spikes were remarkable, suddenly appearing and widespread, although often concentrated in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This year is on track to be the deadliest year for gun-related homicides since at least 1999.

The homicide spikes began in late May. Before May 28, Chicago had almost the same number of homicides as in 2019. Then, on May 31, 18 people were murdered in Chicago—the city’s most violent day in six decades. Violence continued through the summer. July was Chicago’s most violent month in 28 years. As of Sept. 1, murder is up 52% for the year, according to Chicago Police Department data.

Chicago’s shooting spike reflects what is happening in many major cities across the country. Researchers have identified a “structural break” in homicide numbers, beginning in the last week of May. Trends for most other major crime categories have remained generally stable or moved slightly downward.

My much longer research paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Federal Sentencing Reporter.  That paper explains the basis for estimating that the Minneapolis Effect has led to about 710 more homicides and 2,800 more shootings in June and July alone, with the victims heavily concentrated in disadvantaged communities. The paper provides supporting examples from five cities–Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and New York City–which all have suffered a Minneapolis Effect.  The policy conclusion of my longer article: The best way for the nation to deter shootings and homicides is to restore proactive policing to its previous levels before the anti-police protests.

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