Dear Weekend Jolter,
The wheels of motivated justice turn quickly.
Since this newsletter last checked in on Donald Trump’s thirst for revenge probes and prosecutions, the president has seemingly moved on, for now, from accusing Barack Obama of “treason.” But his desire to use the DOJ to punish political foes has not abated. Not one bit.
You can find NR’s coverage here on last weekend’s social media outburst in which he pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi to go after James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff — right around the time the top federal prosecutor in a Virginia district was pushed out amid complaints that he wasn’t pursuing a mortgage fraud case against James and a separate case against Comey aggressively enough.
Surprise: the wheels turned as soon as a new interim U.S. attorney was in place. By Thursday evening, Comey had been indicted — related to questionable allegations that he gave false testimony about whether he authorized a leak. The move came just days before a statute-of-limitations deadline. The James case also is moving ahead, Bloomberg reports.
This doesn’t mean Trump will get his wish. The irony in these developments, as Andy McCarthy writes, is (1) that Trump’s intervention “will make it incalculably harder for the president to get pending and future Justice Department appointees confirmed” and (2) that “by openly demanding prosecutions of Comey, James, and Schiff,” Trump has made it harder to pursue them. That is, judges will “have no compunction about throwing them out on selective-prosecution grounds (and insufficient-evidence grounds . . . and statute-of-limitations grounds . . .).” The Comey case itself should never see a trial court, Andy says, and the indictment should be dismissed “because there is no factual basis” for either the perjury charge or the obstruction charge.
Trump’s obsession with vengeance at any cost, using any lever, is an outrage, as NR’s editorial observes. And, as the editorial notes, Democrats helped pave the way here with their own lawfare probes, notably the investigation run by New York State Attorney General James, “who tried to ruin Trump and his family financially with a massive civil fraud case — an abusive prosecution with no fraud victims in which the absurdly astronomical damage award was recently voided by an appellate court.”
So the question now is the one Andy keeps raising: Which party will get the message that lawfare is bad for the country and unpopular with voters, and commit to stop doing it? Will either? Will neither?
Without de-escalation, there will be only escalation. We can speculate where habitual and retaliatory misuse of the justice system leads, and it has a certain third-world flavor. (In Pakistan, modern history suggests that the title “prime minister” should be joined with “and future inmate,” for the sake of accuracy and expectations setting.) One thing is for sure: this misuse will have unintended consequences and complications.
As Axios reports, the DOJ probe of former CIA Director John Brennan over Russiagate — an investigation that already has other problems — is imperiled by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s withdrawal of security clearances for potential witnesses. Oops. As Andy writes, Trump’s meddling with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has created new uncertainty over the replacement’s eligibility. Then there’s the reasonable expectation that GOP abuses today beget more Democratic abuses tomorrow. In the latest issue of NR, Andy charts the history of modern lawfare — a story of gradual but persistent escalation — and musters, in spite of this, a note of hope for the future:
Challenges are now working their way up the court system. With the Republican Congress too paralyzed to check the president’s overreach — much of it usurping Congress’s own power — it will be up to the judiciary to restore order. The Supreme Court will do its part.
Of course, there is a limit to what judges can do. They can decide only the cases that come to them and have no power to enforce their judgments. But if law is still king in America, it is not because of courts. As Alexis de Tocqueville recognized, it is because regard for the law is basic to the American character. The resulting culture cannot be snuffed out by a president’s indifference to it. It will always present an opportunity for new leaders to rise on the promise of restoring the rule of law.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
This is a disturbing trend: The Attacks on ICE Must Stop
On the indictment: The Deeply Flawed Comey Indictment
On the autism announcement: More Evidence Needed for Trump Administration’s Tylenol Warning
Law enforcement should use the tools it already has: We Can Smash Antifa Without Designating Them
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: The Left’s Ongoing Anti-Trump Terrorism Campaign
Jeffrey Blehar: Kamala Harris Will Never Be Ready for Primetime
Jeffrey Blehar: The Aggregate Costs of Cheap Rhetoric
Kamden Mulder: Suspect in ABC Station Shooting ‘Politically Motivated,’ Left Note Warning Trump Officials ‘They’re Next’
Christian Schneider: There’s Too Much of Everything
Audrey Fahlberg: Virginia Dem AG Nominee Took It Easy on Criminals as a Legislator. Now He Wants to Prosecute Them
Clarke D. Forsythe: The Wrong Tool for Protecting Women from Abortion
Benjamin Rothove: Charlie Kirk’s Movement Will Not Die with Him
Noah Rothman: Palestinian Statehood Declarations Are an Insult to Palestinians
Haley Strack: How a Male Sex Offender Got Away with Leering at Girls in a Virginia School Locker Room
James Lynch: Trump Claims Link Between Tylenol Use During Pregnancy and Autism. Here’s What the Evidence Says
Michael Brendan Dougherty: What the Kirk Memorial Reveals About the Right
Andrew McCarthy: What to Make of the Tom Homan Bribery Allegation?
Raleigh Adams: Why Our Nation Needed a Buckley Stamp
Dan McLaughlin: Where Is the Never Mamdani Movement?
CAPITAL MATTERS
Alexander William Salter, on the proper way forward for the Fed: The Fed Should Do One Thing — and One Thing Only
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Another Francis Ford Coppola movie gets the documentary treatment. Armond White has the story: Megadoc Scrutinizes Coppola’s Art-and-Politics Folly
Brian Allen checks in on a thriving Texas experiment: Visiting a New University in Austin, Texas
BEYOND THE HEADLINES
We appear to be entering a vicious cycle of political violence. If the political class won’t turn down the temperature, it’s up to others to do so. NR’s editorial weighs in on the rash of attacks on ICE that are one bloody symptom of the larger problem:
This week featured yet another violent attack on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On Wednesday morning, three detainees of ICE were shot in an attack that appears to have targeted Dallas-based ICE agents. One of the detainees died, and the others are in critical condition. The suspect, identified as Joshua Jahn, was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Law enforcement relayed that, like the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, the shooter in Dallas inscribed political messages on the bullets or their casings. The messages were “anti-ICE” in nature.
This has to stop. It’s part of a very disturbing trend.
In July, eleven left-wing agitators ambushed an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, opening fire on agents and shooting one in the neck. In Portland, Ore., an incendiary device was thrown at officers. That same month, another attacker in McAllen, Texas, shot two police officers and a Border Patrol employee, sending them to the hospital. An ICE facility in Washington suffered an arson attack. The left has tried to popularize a push to unmask and dox ICE agents.
This anti-ICE movement has been implicitly cheered on by elected Democrats who adopted a party line of invoking fascism when talking about immigration enforcement. “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” said Tim Walz at a May commencement address. “When you compare the old films of the Gestapo grabbing people off the streets of Poland,” opined Congressman Stephen Lynch, “and you compare them to those nondescript thugs who grabbed that graduate student, it does look like a Gestapo operation.” Other commentators have called ICE Trump’s Praetorian Guard.
Kamala Harris’s book is out, and Jeff Blehar is here for it:
Kamala Harris’s tale of terror, 107 Days, finally hits stores today, and the reviews are already in: Her career as a politician is over, and her career as an author doesn’t seem terribly promising either.
For those who have forgotten — and don’t we all wish we could — 107 Days documents America’s real-life political psychotic break last year, from the perspective of its chief instigator. (Sort of like remaking the recent film Weapons from the point of view of the witch.) I want to emphasize that I have not read it myself, and never for a moment considered doing so. Like nearly every political memoir nowadays, 107 Days is a book designed to be read via extended excerpt and news summary, not purchased — leave that for journalists who can expense the $30 later, and people like me who are hoping to score an autographed copy when she arrives in Chicago in October for her book tour.
In particular, I recommend this excellent analysis from Semafor’s Dave Weigel, which takes the global view of the revelations in Harris’s book and draws at least one undeniable conclusion: Harris has no answers for the entropic forces currently unraveling the Democratic Party’s coalition, only grievances. She ran a cautious campaign that refused to separate herself from the Biden legacy (whether or not it ever could have is a separate matter; the issue is that she did not try). She is not the future, and the hard-branded progressive past that she represents will almost certainly be left behind by the next victorious Democratic administration. . . .
Each time I have written about 107 Days at NR, I have jokingly framed the book as an experiment in “horror fiction.” That’s an acknowledgment of my lingering resentment toward the insanity of the entire 2024 campaign season and the central role she ended up playing in it. But at least to give Harris her due, she was thrust into this situation by Joe Biden’s reckless vanity, not by her own. She was nevertheless wholly inadequate to the task she was given, and the result was a campaign surrounded by a suffocating reality-distortion field.
Perhaps the spookiest thing about 107 Days, then, is the fact that, while it was assuredly ghostwritten, the ghostwriter accurately captures the reality of Harris’s personality: The excerpts indeed read at times like an “as told to” memoir, a chronicle of her petty resentments unleavened by any proper sense of perspective. Her president betrays her, his staffers undermine her, her own staffers let her down, the cruel realities of politics conspire to keep her from making the right choices — and each time, in her account, it is somebody else’s fault. It is not a vision for leadership; it is a rationale for failure. The book may not be a horror novel, but it ends nonetheless in a graveyard: 107 Days might as well have been etched as Kamala Harris’s political tombstone.
Haley Strack has an update on a case out of Virginia that she’s been following for months:
When a man was reported for loitering in an Arlington Public Schools women’s locker room last October, district staff ignored concerned parents because the man, they said, identified as a woman.
“The patron is an adult swim class participant,” the director of aquatics management at APS said in an email. “I have spoken on deck and at the front desk with several people. I have told them that APS policy is to provide equitable and inclusive spaces for all community members and that the individual using the locker room identifies as a female and, therefore, permitted to use the women’s locker room.”
Richard Cox, the man in question, is a tier-three sex offender forbidden to be in close proximity to children. Cox was convicted in 1992 of taking indecent liberties with children after exposing his genitals and masturbating in front of a child at a gymnasium, according to court records. In 2007, he was convicted of six counts of possessing obscene material with a minor.
While district staff say they were not aware of Cox’s status on the sex offender registry until after police arrested and charged him with indecent exposure late last year, concerned residents warned APS of Cox’s inappropriate behavior months prior to his arrest. Had staff simply looked Cox up, they would have found his criminal history.
APS permitted Cox to use women’s facilities despite concerns about his behavior under a district policy that makes access to locker rooms and bathrooms contingent on gender identity rather than sex. APS and multiple Virginia districts with similar policies are now embroiled in a war with the Trump administration over their refusal to keep private spaces sex-segregated.
New documents obtained by the Education Freedom and Parental Rights Initiative at the Defense of Freedom Institute and shared exclusively with National Review reveal the degree to which APS staff members reflexively sided with Cox while ignoring the concerns of parents.
One Virginia woman, who reported in September that she saw a male in the women’s locker room at the APS-run Washington-Liberty Aquatics Center, told staff that “he sits there without clothes on and watches the women and girls.” She said she had already seen him multiple times in the locker room when children were present.
“They told [the district’s aquatics director] 4 times, but she says he identifies as a woman,” a report submitted to the Arlington School Board said. “She has encouraged [Cox] to use the family bathroom, but he has not. They took it upon themselves to tell the fathers waiting outside for their daughters.”
CODA
Confession: I watched a Netflix film last weekend called Metal Lords, assuming I’d have the natural resistance to avoid getting sucked into a coming-of-age, high school movie and be able to turn it off after ten minutes. I watched the whole thing. I found the clichéd-character-heavy story of social outcasts seeking purpose in a metal band and metal music . . . relatable. Whether you get invested in the plot or not, the movie provides a reliable playlist of metal essentials. The soundtrack is here; and there’s one original song that binds the plot together and is both a parody of the genre and awesome.
Have a great weekend, and thanks for reading.