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A uranium company launched a concerted lobbying campaign to scale back Bears Ears National Monument, saying such action would give it easier access to the area’s uranium deposits and help it operate a nearby processing mill, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and top Utah Republicans have said repeatedly that questions of mining or drilling played no role in President Trump’s announcement Monday that he was cutting the site by more than 1.1 million acres, or 85 percent. Trump also signed a proclamation nearly halving the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which is also in southern Utah and has significant coal deposits.
“This is not about energy,” Zinke told reporters Tuesday. “There is no mine within Bears Ears.”
But the nation’s sole uranium processing mill sits directly next to the boundaries that President Barack Obama designated a year ago when he established Bears Ears. The documents show that Energy Fuels Resources (USA) Inc., a subsidiary of a Canadian firm, urged the Trump administration to limit the monument to the smallest size needed to protect key objects and areas, such as archeological sites, to make it easier to access the radioactive ore.
Dershowitz’s argument, to the extent I understand it, is broader than simply that the president cannot obstruct justice by exercising his constitutional authorities. It is that while “Government corruption should be prosecuted, Congress has a role to play in overseeing the executive branch, and our intelligence agencies are right to raise concerns about foreign interference in our elections,” none of these entities should play these roles in the context of L’Affaire Russe. It is not entirely clear whether he means this in general, or merely with respect to the President himself, but he also seems to oppose the investigations of Hillary Clinton, Robert Menendez, and others who are not presidents. So I think it’s fair to say that he is not simply arguing against the availability to Mueller of the obstruction statutes.
As he explains it, his concern is “the use of politically neutral but overly malleable laws on obstruction of justice, corruption and conspiracy that can be used to prosecute the ethically questionable, but not necessarily criminal, activities of political rivals.” Specifically, Dershowitz warns that “elastic criminal laws should not be stretched to cover Mr. Trump’s exercise of his constitutionally authorized power” to manage the executive branch: ...
The fundamental problem with Dershowitz’s confident thesis is that he is assuming the outcome of the Mueller investigation and then using that assumed outcome to discredit the enterprise. How does he know that the results of the investigation won’t show criminality without taking advantage of elasticity in any law?
More broadly, if we assume, as he allows, that “Government corruption should be prosecuted,” it follows that we need to investigate allegations of government corruption before we can determine that proceeding against it, even on the basis of malleable laws, would be the criminalization of politics—rather than, say, the prosecution of criminal activity in the course of politics.
One word that does not appear in Dershowitz’s article is “predication.” But the FBI actually does not open investigations on the basis of the desire to harass a politician (at least, it doesn’t do so without violating its rules). It opens investigations on the basis of identifiable factual predicates—either a criminal predicate if there’s suspected criminal conduct, or a national security predicate in counterintelligence matters. If there’s no predication, there is no investigation.
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I’m trying to imagine a world governed by the vision Dershowitz lays out in this oped, and how L’Affaire Russe would have played out in it—and I’m frankly having a little trouble. The basic reason is that he seems to be simply assuming that the FBI should not proceed with respect to matters where the standards of predication are fully met. Hence my questions.
Assuming that the information that came to the FBI in July 2016 properly met the standards for predication of either a national security investigation or a criminal investigation, should the FBI have declined to investigate it?
When the FBI is conducting a properly predicated national security investigation of a Russian intelligence operation against a domestic presidential campaign, and the investigation learns of millions of dollars of money laundering, should the FBI ignore this information?
When the FBI is conducting a properly predicated national security investigation of a Russian intelligence operation against a domestic presidential campaign, and people associated with that campaign lie to investigators, should the FBI ignore the lies?
Given this pattern of behavior and the fact that certain efforts to obstruct an investigation—for example, witness tampering—are decidedly not within the purview of the presidential role in supervising the Executive Branch, should the Mueller investigation have entirely declined even to look at the President’s pattern of behavior with respect to the Russia investigation?
By saying that such conduct shouldn’t even be investigated in the political context, aren’t you really arguing for a zone of impunity for criminal conduct when it involves politicians? That is, aren’t you saying that the FBI and the Justice Department should ignore behavior they normally investigate and prosecute?
These are not rhetorical questions. I mean them very seriously and would love to publish Dershowitz’s thoughts in response to any or all of them.
The man who launched America’s largest and longest-running Christian music festival has been “indefinitely suspended” from the ministry and his church following his arrest Wednesday on charges of child molestation.
Harry L. Thomas, founder of the Creation Festival and senior pastor of Come Alive New Testament Church in Medford, New Jersey, has been accused of sexually assaulting four children over a 16-year period between 1999 and 2015.
The church stated that the alleged misconduct was “unrelated” to his leadership.
Thomas, 74, has been charged with one count of aggravated sexual assault, three counts of sexual assault, and four counts of endangering the welfare of children, according to the prosecutor’s office in Burlington County, New Jersey, where Thomas lives and where his church is located.
Authorities have refrained from releasing further details in order to protect the identity of the victims.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J.Trump slurred his speech during his announcement about Jerusalem on Wednesday because of “low-battery issues” with Vladimir Putin’s remote, the White House said on Friday.
Speaking to the White House press corps, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that Trump’s slurred speech was “a case of what happens when President Putin doesn’t change the batteries in his remote frequently enough.”
“President Trump makes public appearances several times a day,” Sanders said. “In the course of those appearances, President Putin’s remote can drain its battery very quickly.”
Calling Putin’s remote-control operation of Trump “far from glitch-free,” Sanders said that there have also been problems with the Russian leader’s attempts to control Trump’s thumbs when he tweets in the early-morning hours.
“Sometimes President Putin has tried to operate President Trump’s thumbs and there has been the same low-battery issue,” she said. “This has resulted in random capital letters, misspellings, and, in some cases, gibberish.”
Sanders scolded the press for speculating that Trump’s slurred speech was the result of problems with dentures or his brain. “We are working with tech support to resolve the issue,” she said.
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