Month: April 2022

Did Ketanji Brown Jackson Flout the Law When She Reduced a Drug Dealer’s Sentence?


Ketanji-Brown-Jackson-3-22-22-b-Newscom

Discussing Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination today, Sen. Charles Grassley (R–Iowa) brought up her resentencing of a heroin dealer named Keith Young—a case that Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) grilled her about during her confirmation hearing last month. Grassley, like Cotton, suggested that Jackson had flouted federal law by retroactively applying a sentencing reform that Congress had chosen not to make retroactive. But the issue is not so straightforward, since federal appeals courts have disagreed about the legality of Jackson’s rationale for shortening Young’s sentence.

In July 2018, Jackson, then a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sentenced Young, who had been convicted of possessing with intent to distribute one kilogram or more of heroin, to 20 years in federal prison. That penalty was mandatory once prosecutors invoked 21 USC 851, which applies to defendants with certain prior drug convictions. Two years later, Young filed a motion for “compassionate release” under 18 USC 3582(c)(1)(A), which allows judges to shorten sentences for “extraordinary and compelling reasons.”

The FIRST STEP Act, a package of criminal justice reforms that Congress enacted in December 2018 (five months after Young was sentenced), allowed prisoners to file such motions directly after exhausting administrative remedies. Previously, requests for sentence reductions under the compassionate release provision had to come from the Bureau of Prisons. Young, like many other prisoners who filed such motions during the pandemic, argued that he should be released in light of the danger posed by COVID-19, citing his asthma and smoking history as factors that made him especially vulnerable to the disease.

Although Jackson rejected that request, she shortened Young’s sentence from 20 years to 10, which is the term he would have received without the Section 851 enhancement. During her confirmation hearing, she noted that the FIRST STEP Act had tightened the requirements for such enhancements so that Young’s prior conviction would not have triggered Section 851 had he been sentenced after the law took effect on December 21, 2018. While that change was not retroactive, it meant that Young’s prison term would have been half as long had he been sentenced five months later. Jackson viewed that fact as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason to shorten his sentence.

As Grassley sees it, Jackson improperly substituted her policy judgment for the one reflected in the FIRST STEP Act. “Judge Jackson said she based her ‘extraordinary [and] compelling’ finding on the nonretroactive change in the law,” he said during a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee today. “This is a terrible and dangerous interpretation. Congress chose…which provisions of the FIRST STEP Act would apply retroactively…The Senate is currently considering legislation that I cosponsored with [Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin (D–Ill.)] that makes some of the FIRST STEP Act retroactive. But Congress must make that change.”

It makes little sense for Congress to decide that penalties for certain drug offenses are excessively severe while forcing current prisoners to continue serving sentences it now considers unjust. Yet that is what Congress did, and Grassley argues that such inconsistency was the price of winning approval for the FIRST STEP Act. “The compromise that I brokered with Sen. Durbin on the FIRST STEP Act,” he said, “wouldn’t have been possible if we thought that the activist judge would insert their own views into the law. Decisions like this represent serious separation-of-powers concerns and will make bipartisan work harder in the future.”

Grassley noted that neither the compassionate release provision nor the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s guidelines mention nonretroactive penalty changes as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason for reducing a prison term. “It’s a radical position,” he said, “and it’s outside of the confines of law.”

Not according to several federal appeals courts, which have held that the phrase “extraordinary and compelling reasons” is broad enough to encompass Jackson’s rationale for shortening Young’s sentence. In the 2020 case United States v. McCoy, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld “compassionate release” reductions for several defendants who had been sentenced under 18 USC 924(c), which prescribes a five-year mandatory minimum for anyone who possesses a firearm “in furtherance of” a drug trafficking offense, whether or not he actually used it. The gun sentence, which must be served in addition to the sentence for the underlying offense, rises to 25 years for each subsequent violation.

Prior to the FIRST STEP Act, first-time offenders who owned guns and were convicted of multiple drug charges could receive draconian sentences under 18 USC 924(c). One notorious case involved Weldon Angelos, a 24-year-old Utah record producer who received a 55-year mandatory minimum sentence in 2004 based on three 8-ounce marijuana sales to a government informant. Angelos, who was released in 2016 after prosecutors declined to oppose his petition for resentencing, never threatened or harmed anyone with a gun. But the fact that he possessed one was enough to trigger what could have amounted to a life sentence.

Outrageous cases like that persuaded Congress to prohibit the sort of “stacking” that prosecutors used against Angelos. Under the FIRST STEP Act, the 25-year mandatory minimum applies only to defendants with prior convictions for possessing a gun “in furtherance of” drug trafficking. But that change was not retroactive. The question for the 4th Circuit was whether it could nevertheless be considered in the context of a compassionate release motion. The appeals court said it could.

“Today, the defendants’ sentences would be dramatically shorter—in most cases, by 30 years—than the ones they received,” the court noted. While the compassionate release provision prohibits “sentence reductions that are not consistent with ‘applicable policy statements issued by the Sentencing Commission,'” the 4th Circuit said, the commission had not addressed the issue of what counts as “extraordinary and compelling reasons” when prisoners file the motions authorized by the FIRST STEP Act. “Nor was it otherwise improper,” the appeals court said, “for the district courts to consider the First Step Act’s declaration of the appropriate level of punishment under § 924(c) in assessing the defendants’ cases, on an individualized basis, for compassionate release.”

The government argued that sentencing commission guidelines issued before the FIRST STEP Act precluded consideration of nonretroactive reforms. Those guidelines said the justification for a reduced sentence could include a prisoner’s health, age, or family circumstances, along with “other reasons” that the Bureau of Prisons deemed “extraordinary and compelling.” But that “policy statement,” the prisoners successfully argued in McCoy, had plainly been superseded by the FIRST STEP Act: It was based on the assumption that only the Bureau of Prisons could file a “compassionate release” motion.

In the absence of an “applicable policy statement” from the sentencing commission, can the contrast between current penalties and the ones they replaced count as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason? The 4th Circuit thought so.

“Multiple district courts have concluded that the severity of a § 924(c) sentence, combined with the enormous disparity between that sentence and the sentence a defendant would receive today, can constitute an ‘extraordinary and compelling’ reason for relief under § 3582(c)(1)(A),” the 4th Circuit said. “We find their reasoning persuasive….We think courts legitimately may consider, under the ‘extraordinary and compelling reasons’ inquiry, that defendants are serving sentences that Congress itself views as dramatically longer than necessary or fair.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit reached the same conclusion in the 2021 case United States v. Maumau, which involved the same sentencing provision. In the 2022 case United States v. Ruvalcaba, which involved the 25-year mandatory minimum for defendants with two or more prior convictions for a “serious drug felony,” the 1st Circuit likewise held that a court “may consider the [FIRST STEP Act’s] non-retroactive changes in sentencing law on an individualized basis, grounded in a defendant’s particular circumstances, to determine whether an extraordinary and compelling reason exists for compassionate release.”

In the 2020 case United States v. Brooker, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit agreed that “the First Step Act freed district courts to consider the full slate of extraordinary and compelling reasons that an imprisoned person might bring before them in motions for compassionate release.” It noted that the authority granted by that provision is “broad” and that federal judges had cited “overly long” sentences as a reason for granting relief. “Congress seemingly contemplated that courts might consider such circumstances when it passed the original compassionate release statute in 1984,” the 2nd Circuit said, citing the Senate report on the bill, which said relief might be appropriate when “other extraordinary and compelling circumstances justify a reduction of an unusually long sentence.”

In the 2021 case United States v. Andrews, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit agreed that judges are not bound by the sentencing commission’s outdated compassionate release guidance. But it held that neither “the duration of a lawfully imposed sentence” nor “nonretroactive changes to the § 924(c) mandatory minimums” qualify as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason for granting a compassionate release motion.

Agreeing with Grassley’s take on the issue, the 3rd Circuit said “considering the length of a statutorily mandated sentence as a reason for modifying a sentence would infringe on Congress’s authority to set penalties.” And it noted that “Congress specifically decided that the changes to the § 924(c) mandatory minimums would not apply to people who had already been sentenced.”

The 6th Circuit and the 7th Circuit have taken a similar view. The 8th Circuit this year agreed that “a non-retroactive change in the law…cannot constitute an extraordinary and compelling reason for reducing a sentence.”

Grassley, in other words, is hardly alone in thinking that Jackson exceeded her statutory authority when she shortened Keith Young’s sentence. But given the circuit split and the ambiguity of “extraordinary and compelling reasons,” it goes too far to describe Jackson’s view as “a radical position” that is clearly “outside of the confines of law.”

The post Did Ketanji Brown Jackson Flout the Law When She Reduced a Drug Dealer's Sentence? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Coach K’s Final Four Upset Against UNC Sparks Ticket Deflation For Championship Game 

Coach K’s Final Four Upset Against UNC Sparks Ticket Deflation For Championship Game 

It’s the end of the era for Duke University coach Mike Krzyzewski, also known as “Coach K,” whose 4-decade span with the Blue Devils basketball team came to an abrupt end on Saturday night’s Final Four game when his team lost by four points to the North Carolina Tarheels. On Monday, Coach K’s loss sparked a crash in ticket prices for the Final Four championship in New Orleans. 

Tickets that were once listed for hundreds of dollars, if not more, ahead of the Final Four games last weekend have plunged in value because Duke was eliminated. We noted last week that prices for Final Four games were the most expensive in recent history as there was a strong demand to see Coach K go all the way. 

Ticket resellers Gametime, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, TickPick, and others have listed tickets for tonight’s game as low as $24-$30. TickPick told Yahoo Finance that the lowest ticket 5 minutes left of the Duke-Tarheels Saturday night game was around $130. Soon after, prices went on a downward spiral. 

Gametime lists the cheapest ticket for $24 (as of 1400 ET). 

SeatGeek lists the cheapest ticket for $26 (as of 1400 ET). 

TickPick cited Coach K’s loss as a significant reason for plunging ticket prices and Caesars Superdome stadium’s size, which can seat 77k fans. 

Saturday’s night upset has sparked ticket deflation, though good for consumers who will only have to spend less than a quarter tank of gas to attend a national championship game. Tonight’s game will be Kansas Jayhawks versus Tarheels. 

Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/04/2022 – 16:40

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Did Ketanji Brown Jackson Flout the Law When She Reduced a Drug Dealer’s Sentence?


Ketanji-Brown-Jackson-3-22-22-b-Newscom

Discussing Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination today, Sen. Charles Grassley (R–Iowa) brought up her resentencing of a heroin dealer named Keith Young—a case that Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) grilled her about during her confirmation hearing last month. Grassley, like Cotton, suggested that Jackson had flouted federal law by retroactively applying a sentencing reform that Congress had chosen not to make retroactive. But the issue is not so straightforward, since federal appeals courts have disagreed about the legality of Jackson’s rationale for shortening Young’s sentence.

In July 2018, Jackson, then a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sentenced Young, who had been convicted of possessing with intent to distribute one kilogram or more of heroin, to 20 years in federal prison. That penalty was mandatory once prosecutors invoked 21 USC 851, which applies to defendants with certain prior drug convictions. Two years later, Young filed a motion for “compassionate release” under 18 USC 3582(c)(1)(A), which allows judges to shorten sentences for “extraordinary and compelling reasons.”

The FIRST STEP Act, a package of criminal justice reforms that Congress enacted in December 2018 (five months after Young was sentenced), allowed prisoners to file such motions directly after exhausting administrative remedies. Previously, requests for sentence reductions under the compassionate release provision had to come from the Bureau of Prisons. Young, like many other prisoners who filed such motions during the pandemic, argued that he should be released in light of the danger posed by COVID-19, citing his asthma and smoking history as factors that made him especially vulnerable to the disease.

Although Jackson rejected that request, she shortened Young’s sentence from 20 years to 10, which is the term he would have received without the Section 851 enhancement. During her confirmation hearing, she noted that the FIRST STEP Act had tightened the requirements for such enhancements so that Young’s prior conviction would not have triggered Section 851 had he been sentenced after the law took effect on December 21, 2018. While that change was not retroactive, it meant that Young’s prison term would have been half as long had he been sentenced five months later. Jackson viewed that fact as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason to shorten his sentence.

As Grassley sees it, Jackson improperly substituted her policy judgment for the one reflected in the FIRST STEP Act. “Judge Jackson said she based her ‘extraordinary [and] compelling’ finding on the nonretroactive change in the law,” he said during a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee today. “This is a terrible and dangerous interpretation. Congress chose…which provisions of the FIRST STEP Act would apply retroactively…The Senate is currently considering legislation that I cosponsored with [Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin (D–Ill.)] that makes some of the FIRST STEP Act retroactive. But Congress must make that change.”

It makes little sense for Congress to decide that penalties for certain drug offenses are excessively severe while forcing current prisoners to continue serving sentences it now considers unjust. Yet that is what Congress did, and Grassley argues that such inconsistency was the price of winning approval for the FIRST STEP Act. “The compromise that I brokered with Sen. Durbin on the FIRST STEP Act,” he said, “wouldn’t have been possible if we thought that the activist judge would insert their own views into the law. Decisions like this represent serious separation-of-powers concerns and will make bipartisan work harder in the future.”

Grassley noted that neither the compassionate release provision nor the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s guidelines mention nonretroactive penalty changes as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason for reducing a prison term. “It’s a radical position,” he said, “and it’s outside of the confines of law.”

Not according to several federal appeals courts, which have held that the phrase “extraordinary and compelling reasons” is broad enough to encompass Jackson’s rationale for shortening Young’s sentence. In the 2020 case United States v. McCoy, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld “compassionate release” reductions for several defendants who had been sentenced under 18 USC 924(c), which prescribes a five-year mandatory minimum for anyone who possesses a firearm “in furtherance of” a drug trafficking offense, whether or not he actually used it. The gun sentence, which must be served in addition to the sentence for the underlying offense, rises to 25 years for each subsequent violation.

Prior to the FIRST STEP Act, first-time offenders who owned guns and were convicted of multiple drug charges could receive draconian sentences under 18 USC 924(c). One notorious case involved Weldon Angelos, a 24-year-old Utah record producer who received a 55-year mandatory minimum sentence in 2004 based on three 8-ounce marijuana sales to a government informant. Angelos, who was released in 2016 after prosecutors declined to oppose his petition for resentencing, never threatened or harmed anyone with a gun. But the fact that he possessed one was enough to trigger what could have amounted to a life sentence.

Outrageous cases like that persuaded Congress to prohibit the sort of “stacking” that prosecutors used against Angelos. Under the FIRST STEP Act, the 25-year mandatory minimum applies only to defendants with prior convictions for possessing a gun “in furtherance of” drug trafficking. But that change was not retroactive. The question for the 4th Circuit was whether it could nevertheless be considered in the context of a compassionate release motion. The appeals court said it could.

“Today, the defendants’ sentences would be dramatically shorter—in most cases, by 30 years—than the ones they received,” the court noted. While the compassionate release provision prohibits “sentence reductions that are not consistent with ‘applicable policy statements issued by the Sentencing Commission,'” the 4th Circuit said, the commission had not addressed the issue of what counts as “extraordinary and compelling reasons” when prisoners file the motions authorized by the FIRST STEP Act. “Nor was it otherwise improper,” the appeals court said, “for the district courts to consider the First Step Act’s declaration of the appropriate level of punishment under § 924(c) in assessing the defendants’ cases, on an individualized basis, for compassionate release.”

The government argued that sentencing commission guidelines issued before the FIRST STEP Act precluded consideration of nonretroactive reforms. Those guidelines said the justification for a reduced sentence could include a prisoner’s health, age, or family circumstances, along with “other reasons” that the Bureau of Prisons deemed “extraordinary and compelling.” But that “policy statement,” the prisoners successfully argued in McCoy, had plainly been superseded by the FIRST STEP Act: It was based on the assumption that only the Bureau of Prisons could file a “compassionate release” motion.

In the absence of an “applicable policy statement” from the sentencing commission, can the contrast between current penalties and the ones they replaced count as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason? The 4th Circuit thought so.

“Multiple district courts have concluded that the severity of a § 924(c) sentence, combined with the enormous disparity between that sentence and the sentence a defendant would receive today, can constitute an ‘extraordinary and compelling’ reason for relief under § 3582(c)(1)(A),” the 4th Circuit said. “We find their reasoning persuasive….We think courts legitimately may consider, under the ‘extraordinary and compelling reasons’ inquiry, that defendants are serving sentences that Congress itself views as dramatically longer than necessary or fair.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit reached the same conclusion in the 2021 case United States v. Maumau, which involved the same sentencing provision. In the 2022 case United States v. Ruvalcaba, which involved the 25-year mandatory minimum for defendants with two or more prior convictions for a “serious drug felony,” the 1st Circuit likewise held that a court “may consider the [FIRST STEP Act’s] non-retroactive changes in sentencing law on an individualized basis, grounded in a defendant’s particular circumstances, to determine whether an extraordinary and compelling reason exists for compassionate release.”

In the 2020 case United States v. Brooker, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit agreed that “the First Step Act freed district courts to consider the full slate of extraordinary and compelling reasons that an imprisoned person might bring before them in motions for compassionate release.” It noted that the authority granted by that provision is “broad” and that district courts had cited “overly long” sentences as a reason for granting relief. “Congress seemingly contemplated that courts might consider such circumstances when it passed the original compassionate release statute in 1984,” the 2nd Circuit said, citing the Senate report on the bill, which said relief might be appropriate when “other extraordinary and compelling circumstances justify a reduction of an unusually long sentence.”

In the 2021 case United States v. Andrews, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit agreed that judges are not bound by the sentencing commission’s outdated compassionate release guidance. But it held that neither “the duration of a lawfully imposed sentence” nor “nonretroactive changes to the § 924(c) mandatory minimums” qualify as an “extraordinary and compelling” reason for granting a compassionate release motion.

Agreeing with Grassley’s take on the issue, the 3rd Circuit said “considering the length of a statutorily mandated sentence as a reason for modifying a sentence would infringe on Congress’s authority to set penalties.” And it noted that “Congress specifically decided that the changes to the § 924(c) mandatory minimums would not apply to people who had already been sentenced.”

The 6th Circuit and the 7th Circuit have taken a similar view. The 8th Circuit this year agreed that “a non-retroactive change in the law…cannot constitute an extraordinary and compelling reason for reducing a sentence.”

Grassley, in other words, is hardly alone in thinking that Jackson exceeded her statutory authority when she shortened Keith Young’s sentence. But given the circuit split and the ambiguity of “extraordinary and compelling reasons,” it goes too far to describe Jackson’s view as “a radical position” that is clearly “outside of the confines of law.”

The post Did Ketanji Brown Jackson Flout the Law When She Reduced a Drug Dealer's Sentence? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Fauci’s United Front Is Collapsing

Fauci’s United Front Is Collapsing

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

Last week, medical journalist Katherine Eban posted at Vanity Fair the results of a long and detailed investigation into the lab-leak theory of the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The subject is moving ever more to the front-and-center of efforts to find out exactly what was going on at the highest levels in early 2020 that resulted in the greatest societal, political, and economic upheaval of our lives. 

How precisely did we move so quickly from the “germ games” of October 2019 – when the virus was already circulating in the US – to full-scale global lockdown by March? Why did Anthony Fauci, who in early February was downplaying the seriousness of the virus, flip to the other side (which we know from emails)? It was Fauci, according to many reporters, who tapped Deborah Birx to huddle with Trump and convince him that the only way to battle the virus was to “shut down” the economy – as if anything like that was possible much less effective for controlling a respiratory virus. 

For two years now, and despite endless writing and reflection, this change from the top has puzzled me. Lockdowns contradicted not only a century of public-health practice but even WHO guidelines. Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. Within days, everything changed. 

There were hints of extreme measures in the CDC pandemic planning manuals since 2006 but the idea was hardly orthodoxy in the profession. It’s also true that there were elite scientists who longed for the chance to try out the new theory of virus suppression. But how did Fauci and Birx, to say nothing of Jared Kushner, become converts of the idea to the point that they were able to convince Trump to betray everything he believed in?

This is quite probably where the lab-leak theory comes in. It’s not so much about whether the virus was an accidental or even deliberate leak that matters so much as whether Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrrar of the UK’s Wellcome Trust believed it was possible or even likely. In that case, we have our motive. Did they deploy the chaos of lockdowns as a genuine if wildly misguided attempt to suppress the virus as a way of avoiding culpability? Or perhaps it was deployed as a kind of smokescreen to distract from a closer examination of the Wuhan’s lab’s funding sources? Or possibly there is a third reason. 

We have a very long way to go before the full truth is out. But Eban’s article adds tremendous detail about the great lengths to which our Fauci-led cabal of officials worked hard to suppress dissent on the question of lab-vs-natural origin. They kept papers from being posted on preprint servers, held Zoom sessions with authors in an attempt to intimidate them, and spent tremendous energy making it clear that there would be a no-leak “united front” no matter what. 

Writes Eban: “At the highest levels of the U.S. government, alarm was growing over the question of where the virus had originated and whether research performed at the WIV, and funded in part by U.S. taxpayers, had played some role in its emergence.”

Eban’s intrepid journalism now has former CDC director Robert Redfield opening up about how he not only warned about the possibility of a lab leak but also that he was then excluded from all strategy meetings thereafter. 

To Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC at the time, it seemed not only possible but likely that the virus had originated in a lab. “I personally felt it wasn’t biologically plausible that [SARS CoV-2] went from bats to humans through an [intermediate] animal and became one of the most infectious viruses to humans,” he told Vanity Fair. Neither the 2002 SARS virus nor the 2012 MERS virus had transmitted with such devastating efficiency from one person to another.

What had changed? The difference, Redfield believed, was the gain-of-function research that Shi and Baric had published in 2015, and that EcoHealth Alliance had helped to fund. They had established that it was possible to alter a SARS-like bat coronavirus so that it would infect human cells via a protein called the ACE2 receptor. Although their experiments had taken place in Baric’s well-secured laboratory in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who was to say that the WIV had not continued the research on its own?

In mid-January of 2020, Vanity Fair can reveal, Redfield expressed his concerns in separate phone conversations with three scientific leaders: Fauci; Jeremy Farrar, the director of the U.K.’s Wellcome Trust; and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO). Redfield’s message, he says, was simple: “We had to take the lab-leak hypothesis with extreme seriousness.”

In sessions from which Redfield was excluded from early February, Fauci’s chosen participants strategized a statement published in the form of a medical paper: “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The publication date was March 17, 2020, the day following Trump’s lockdown press conference. The paper was in fact written as early as February 4. Eban makes the salient point: “How they arrived at such certainty within four days remains unclear.” 

[Redfield] concluded there’d been a concerted effort not just to suppress the lab-leak theory but to manufacture the appearance of a scientific consensus in favor of a natural origin. “They made a decision, almost a P.R. decision, that they were going to push one point of view only” and suppress rigorous debate, said Redfield. “They argued they did it in defense of science, but it was antithetical to science.”

Two weeks following the drafting of the paper, “in a letter published in the influential medical journal the Lancet, [Peter Dazsak of EcoHealth, which had funneled US money to the Wuhan lab] joined 26 scientists in asserting, ‘We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.’”

A conspiracy theory!

We know for sure that those never turn out to be true!

Surely there was no such thing as a powerful cabal plotting to force a single orthodoxy on science in order to protect themselves from too much investigation into their own role in funding gain-of-function research! Except that this appears to be exactly what was happening. 

This strategy of information suppression and intimidation of dissent, along with the manufacturing of a fake consensus that in fact did not exist, continued through 2020 and arguably to the present. Among the other victims of such propaganda and smears were the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. We know from emails that Fauci and Collins collaborated in a deliberate attempt to drum up a “quick and devastating” takedown. 

It was a rather bizarre thing to do. The GBD was a rather conventional statement of public health principles along with a warning against the devastating consequences of extreme measures of coercion. Today it reads almost like a summary of what most people have come to believe after long and terrible experiences. Why did the Fauci cabal believe it was so very important to stop this statement?

What we need now is a clearer linkage behind the now-documented attempt to forge a single narrative on the lab leak question and the decision to forge a single narrative about the need to lock down, and thus overthrow a century of public-health practice. What was the motivation here? What were they discussing in private in those crucial weeks in February 2020 leading up to the disaster? 

What is unbearably clear at this point is that this gang’s obsession with covering up a possible lab leak, in the interest of keeping their own fingerprints off the deed, completely distracted the leadership of the National Institutes of Health from what it was supposed to be doing at the time. And what was that? It’s not complicated. If you have a new pathogen sweeping a country, you want to focus on ways to keep vulnerable populations safe (for example, not forcing nursing homes to admit Covid-infected people) and discovering the best therapeutics to minimize severity for the general population.

This is not what happened. Instead, we had a plot against the US president, the deliberate cultivation of mass panic, forced closures of schools and businesses, wild demands for mass human separation, travel restrictions, ineffective mask and vaccine mandates, and the general triumph of crank science over experience, at the great cost of human liberties and rights and hence social and economic well-being. 

The reason for the chaos appears, in part, that during those crucial early months, public-health leadership in the US had another private agenda centered not on health but their own reputations and professional standing. Two years later, we live with the devastating consequences that have affected the whole of our lives. 

Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/04/2022 – 16:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/bXloYni Tyler Durden

Bullion, Big-Tech, & Black Gold Bid; Bitcoin Battered As Bond Curve Steepens

Bullion, Big-Tech, & Black Gold Bid; Bitcoin Battered As Bond Curve Steepens

The big story of the day today was the acceleration of the recession/QE trade – a return to growth over value…

Source: Bloomberg

Which meant long-duration tech dominated the gains today (with Nasdaq up  over 2% and S&P outperforming). Dow and Small Caps underperformed…

The S&P rallied back above its 50DMA, but the Dow and Nasdaq could not manage it…

Unprofitable tech extended its rebound…

Source: Bloomberg

On yet another short-squeeze…

Source: Bloomberg

But when’s the slide back down?

Which makes some sense given the market is now pricing in 9 more rate-hikes this year and a 80% chance of a 50bps hike in May and conditioned on that a 75% chance of another 50bp hike in June… which will then all be followed by almost 4 rate-cuts in 2023/24…

Source: Bloomberg

There was some modest steepening in the yield curve today (long-end underperformed the short-end, 2Y -3bps, 10Y +4.5bps)…

Source: Bloomberg

…as 2s10s steepened (but remains inverted)…

Source: Bloomberg

…but the curve broadly speaking remains significantly inverted from 3s out…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold (in USD) managed gains today…

As Gold in Rubles hovers above The Bank of Russia’s gold price floor…

Source: Bloomberg

The Ruble remains glued at pre-invasion levels…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar extended its very recent rebound…

Source: Bloomberg

However, Bitcoin was battered lower after yesterday’s spike back up towards its 200DMA…

Source: Bloomberg

Crude oil prices rallied today with the Saudis hiking premia to record highs. Brent rallied significantly as it became clear from Biden and Zelenskiy’s rhetoric that any peace deal is a mile away and WTI ripped back above $100…

 

Finally, the world’s richest man found a new plaything…

Would be fun to see if he reinstates Trump?

Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/04/2022 – 16:00

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Biden’s “Absolute” Defense Of Hunter Leaves Media & Justice Department In A Muddle

Biden’s “Absolute” Defense Of Hunter Leaves Media & Justice Department In A Muddle

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in The Hill on President Joe Biden doubling down on his absolute defense of his son Hunter Biden. The comments only magnify the concerns over Attorney General Merrick Garland refusing to appoint a special counsel despite the clear basis for such an appointment.  It is clear that the President “absolutely” stands by his son and that the media absolutely stands by the President. The question is whether Garland will stand by justice and appoint a special counsel.

Here is the column:

“We absolutely stand by the president’s comment.” With those words, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield reaffirmed that President Biden maintains his son Hunter Biden did “nothing [that] was unethical” and never “made money” in China.

Those claims appear demonstrably false – and they make the positions of both the media and Attorney General Merrick Garland absolutely untenable.

For the media, the ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden by U.S. Attorney David Weiss in Delaware has presented a growing danger of self-indictment over its prior coverage (or noncoverage). Weiss has called a long line of witnesses before a grand jury, and there is growing expectation of criminal charges against Hunter Biden.

Nothing concentrates the mind as much as a looming indictment.

Thus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media faced the embarrassing prospect of an indictment based on a story they previously suggested was either a nonstory or Russian disinformation. Suddenly, in recent days, they all rushed to declare the story legitimate, 18 months after the New York Post reported it in October 2020.

What quickly emerged, though, was a new narrative: None of this implicates President Biden. On CNN, White House correspondent John Harwood declared, “There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done.” Anchor Brianna Keilar then added for emphasis that Harwood was making “an important distinction.”

It was important, but not because it was true. While many media figures now willingly admit the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s abandoned-laptop story, they are avoiding what the emails found on that laptop actually contain. Hundreds of emails appear to detail a multimillion-dollar influence-peddling enterprise by the Biden family, including Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden.

Influence peddling has long been the way Washington’s elite enriches itself. This common source of political corruption involves the relatives of powerful government figures who shake down corporations or countries for access and influence.

The Bidens would seem to be standouts in this common practice, engaging in a virtual family business. James Biden has been accused of marketing his connection to his brother. And in the emails discovered on his abandoned laptop, Hunter Biden practically sold timeshares of his father by dangling meetings and dinners for investors.

The key in any influence peddling scheme is to protect the principal. People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.”

Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.

Despite President Biden’s repeated claims he knew nothing about these dealings, Bobulinski has said he personally met with the senior Biden to discuss Hunter Biden’s business activities. Bobulinski had been selected by the family to handle these deals.

As vice president, Joe Biden flew to China on Air Force Two with Hunter Biden, who arranged for his father to meet some of his business interests. Hunter Biden’s financial interest in a Chinese-backed investment firm, BHR Partners, was registered within weeks of that 2013 trip. Yet, President Biden repeatedly insisted that he never discussed such dealings with his son, a claim Hunter Biden has contradicted.

There are emails of Ukrainian and other foreign clients thanking Hunter Biden for arranging meetings with his father. There are photos from dinners and meetings that tie President Biden to these figures, including a 2015 dinner with a group of Hunter Biden’s Russian and Kazakh clients.

It is important to note that when these foreign interests were clamoring to give Hunter Biden millions of dollars, he was, by his own admission, a hopeless addict. In his 2021 memoir, Hunter Biden admits he was “drinking a quart of vodka a day” and “smoking crack around the clock,” up until his father’s 2020 presidential campaign began. So why would Russian, Chinese and other foreign figures give Hunter Biden all of this money, if not to influence his father?

The new narrative suggests that, while Hunter Biden maintained one of the largest influence-peddling schemes in recent history, it did not involve the object of that scheme — his father.

Even if President Biden was not influenced by all of this, it’s hard to believe he didn’t know his son was selling access. In his book, Hunter Biden claims his father repeatedly intervened due to his addictions — and yet we are to believe that Joe Biden did not express curiosity about how his addicted son was raking in millions from foreign sources?

The point is that President Biden really did not have to ask: Hunter Biden had nothing to sell but influence. All President Biden had to do to facilitate such schemes was to be accessible — to allow his family to deliver face-to-face meetings and photo ops.

And that brings us to the untenable position of Garland.

It is hard to imagine a stronger case for a special counsel. Any effort to investigate Hunter Biden’s dealings will lead investigators to encounter repeated references to the president and how he may have benefited from those schemes. At the same time, the president is “absolutely” standing by his denial that his son did anything wrong or made any money from China.

The White House statement this week serves as a reminder to investigators that the president is heavily invested in this narrative and his denial of now-established facts.

This is not to say that Weiss, the U.S. Attorney investigating Hunter Biden, will not be independent in his efforts. However, the concern is the appearance of how a conflict might affect the investigation or limit the scope of any potential charges. Moreover, absent a special counsel, there is unlikely to be a report on these apparent influence peddling schemes.

Garland pledged to protect the Justice Department from such conflicts and to avoid even the appearance of political influence. He now has a president stating that alleged wrongdoing by his son is “absolutely” untrue, including dealings possibly impacting the president personally and financially. If Garland declines to appoint a special counsel, he will absolutely fail on his pledge.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/04/2022 – 15:45

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Airlines Canceled Thousands Of US Flights Over Weekend 

Airlines Canceled Thousands Of US Flights Over Weekend 

Airlines canceled more than 3,500 US flights this weekend and delayed thousands more, citing weather-related issues in Florida and airspace congestion, according to AP News. 

On Saturday morning, storms in Florida caused widespread cancelations and delays at several Florida airports (including Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa, and Orlando), along with ones in Baltimore and New York, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware. 

“Severe weather in the Southeast and multiple air traffic control delay programs have created significant impacts on the industry,” a JetBlue spokesperson told AP News in an email. 

“Today’s cancellations will help us reset our operation and safely move our crews and aircraft back in to position,” the spokesperson continued. 

Southwest Airlines said “weather and airspace congestion” in Florida resulted in more than 1,000 canceled flights over the weekend. The airline noted that “technology issues” were also a factor but didn’t expand on those problems. 

In a separate issue, Alaska Airlines canceled flights after a pilot shortage emerged as pilots striked at major West Coast airports. These pilots demanded more pay and more flexible schedules. 

“Alaska Airlines failed to properly plan for increased travel demand and take the steps necessary to ensure it attracted and retained pilots,” the pilots union said on Friday. 

The flight woes come as travel demand surges despite increasing ticket prices due to soaring jet fuel costs. It also comes during the busy spring break travel season. 

Air travelers were furious this weekend, some told Southwest, “Unbelievable!! Canceled our flights again!! Looks like we need to start using another airline.” 

“I hope you are compensating your customers for their rental cars, hotels, and re-bookings on other airlines. The last time this happened, you blamed it on weather because that way you’re not responsible for any re-booking costs. I’m sure you’re doing the same thing now,” another traveler told Southwest. 

The good news is that FlightAware data on Monday morning shows the weekend mayhem of flight cancelations has abated. 

Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/04/2022 – 15:24

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Putin Driving Up Oil Prices Is An “Outrageous Lie”: USF Geology Professor Dr. Marc Defant

Putin Driving Up Oil Prices Is An “Outrageous Lie”: USF Geology Professor Dr. Marc Defant

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

About two weeks ago, I published an interview with Dr. Marc Defant about why he thought President Biden’s oil policies were “bat-shit crazy” and creating more turmoil than they were helping alleviate problems in markets.

This past weekend, I was happy to welcome him onto my podcast for a discussion about the current state of energy in the U.S., including pros and cons of natural gas, fracking, shutting down pipeline projects in the U.S. and the cost benefit analysis of extreme activist environmentalists.

Why We are Alone in the Galaxy | Marc Defant | TEDxUSF - YouTube

Dr. Marc J. Defant is a professor of geology/geochemistry at the University of South Florida. He worked for Schlumberger Well Services and Shell Oil for three years, with two years at Shell working as an exploration geologist.

He has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the American Chemical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, and has published in many internationally renowned scientific journals including Nature. He has written a book entitled Voyage of Discovery: From the Big Bang to the Ice Age and published several articles for general readership magazines such as Skeptic and Popular Science and appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. You can reach him via this contact form.

First, we talked about how the price of oil got so high to begin with.

Dr. Defant told me: “Gas was up 40% and oil was up 80% before the Ukrainian war started. What got me a little incensed was that Biden is going around saying the price of gasoline is due to to Putin.”

“It’s kind of an outrageous lie,” he continued. “Most of [what’s pushing prices up] is totally unrelated to the war in Ukraine.”

“There was literally nowhere to put the oil, there was so much of it,” I said to him about oil’s crashing price several years ago.

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“They’re saying right now that the average family in America can expect to pay an extra $5,200 because of the rise of oil prices. For some people, that’s the difference between food on the table and no food on the table. It’s becoming a crisis and Biden isn’t taking the steps to mitigate this major problem,” Dr. Defant continued.

“Biden is literally destroying the U.S. economy trying to get to net zero pollution,” he continues. “I consider myself an environmentalist, but not a radical environmentalist.”

Dr. Defant told me: “I think we do have global warming but I’m not willing to destroy the economy to do some of the crazy things they’re trying to do. We’re supposed to go to net zero carbon emissions while the rest of the world is burning it as fast as they can.”

Net Zero Carbon Emissions 2050

Chart: Scitech Daily

He added: “If we do it, we’re just being foolish and we’re losing out to these other countries – many of whom are still burning coal!”

“We’ve reduced our carbon imprint more than any country in the world over the last 10 years, and I think we need a pat on the back for that.”

“[Environmentalists] are creating an evil boogeyman where there isn’t one and telling people it has to be addressed in a certain amount of time with certain methods and it doesn’t matter what the collateral damage,” I tell Dr. Defant about the country’s obsession with net zero emissions.

“B of A says it’ll cost America $150 trillion in 30 years to go to net zero emissions. I don’t know an economy in the world that can do that and not have a major crisis. We and Europe seem to be the only countries interested in doing this,” Dr. Defant tells me. “We’ve seen how Germany has failed. Now Germany is completely dependent on Russian oil because they’ve tried to go to net zero. They’ve realized it’s going to take a long time and it’s going to be very expensive.”

“I read a lot of the literature on global warming and for AOC to come out and say 2 or 3 years ago that the world was going to end in 12 years – that’s just hysterical craziness. I don’t know where that hysteria comes from,” he adds.

From there, we go on to discuss the pros and cons of fracking, petroleum’s use in our everyday lives, why the U.S. is now dependent on countries like Iran for oil and what the future of energy generation will look like in the future.

You can read my interview with Dr. Defant from March 22, 2022, here and you can listen to our full podcast, for free, here:

Thank you for reading QTR’s Fringe Finance . This post is public so feel free to share it: Share

Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/04/2022 – 15:05

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The War in Ukraine, III

Alert readers will recall that about a month ago, a few days after the Russians invaded Ukraine, I predicted (and placed a $50 wager with a willing Commenter) [here] that the war would be over and the Russians on their way out of Ukraine by the first of April.

Obviously, I’ve lost my bet. Russian forces are still in Ukraine, and the war rages on.

I was optimistic last week, with the news that the Russians were pulling their forces from western Ukraine and the area around Kyiv, that the two sides appeared to be close to a negotiated settlement, and that Putin announced that he would be willing to meet with Zelensky once the terms of a completed draft agreement had been settled on. Unfortunately, those hopeful signs have not borne fruit – though I am still optimistic, or at least hopeful, that while my timing may have been off the ultimate outcome will nonetheless be as predicted, and that the end will come sooner rather than later.

The post The War in Ukraine, III appeared first on Reason.com.

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Why Does Border Patrol Need the Ability To Delete Messages?


borderpatrol_1161x653

The same government that wants to demand access to all our secure phone and online communications nevertheless wants to destroy its own to keep it out of the public’s hands? Say it isn’t so!

Yes, probably few are surprised, but it’s worth taking note whenever our own grabby government uses privacy technology to keep secrets. On Sunday, NBC News reported about Customs and Border Patrol’s (CBP) use of an Amazon-owned app called Wickr, a conferencing, file-sharing, and messaging service that can be customized to automatically delete messages.

The purchase and use of the app by CBP has prompted concerns by the National Archives and Records Administration that the agency could be using the app to delete messages or communications that are supposed to be stored under the Federal Records Act. The chief records officer of the National Archives sent the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) a letter last fall expressing his concerns and asking for documentation about policies for proper use. CBP hasn’t fully responded to his questions. Now the agency is being sued by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) because it hasn’t responded to Freedom of Information Act requests for documentation about how Wickr has been implemented.

DHS famously wants to access as much of our data as possible with as few privacy protections as it can get away with. CBP historically has demanded access to electronic devices of people attempting to cross the border into the country legally, without any warrants or even suspicion of criminal activity. Only recently have federal judges ruled that border agents need to be able to articulate a reasonable suspicion before demanding to access the private contents of travelers’ phones, tablets, or laptops. CBP searched thousands of these devices every year and even copied their contents, often without ever finding any evidence of wrongdoing.

Of course, the CBP’s bosses at DHS are notably against the public having unrestricted access to tools like end-to-end encryption. Encryption makes it all the much harder for the government to access our private data without us knowing and without our permission. Federal law enforcement leaders like FBI Director Christopher Wray want to force online communication platforms to give government bypasses or back doors around the same kinds of tools that help CBP staff keep communications secret. Not only would this compromise Americans’ privacy protections against secret domestic surveillance, but it would also potentially render all our records vulnerable to criminal hackers and foreign governments.

There is also the massive accountability issue here. The CBP has authorization to use force against not just foreign travelers at the border but also against Americans within 100 miles of border crossings, and yes, some of them have gotten overly violent with citizens, just like members of other law enforcement agencies. As a federal government agency, the CBP is supposed to operate with transparency about its behavior and the behavior of its agents.

The communications between officers can help establish intent to engage in misconduct or violent behavior. The ability of a government agent to conceal or delete these messages impacts the ability to investigate and, when necessary, prosecute bad behavior. And when the federal government fails to police misconduct on its own, the ability to delete these messages also makes it harder for outside media outlets or accountability organizations like CREW to monitor what’s going on.

“Privacy for me, but not for thee,” is a terrible position for anybody to take, but it’s downright dangerous coming from a law enforcement agency full of armed officers.

The post Why Does Border Patrol Need the Ability To Delete Messages? appeared first on Reason.com.

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