Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel.
Advertising
Start your day with National Memo Newsletter
Know first.
The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning
Chief Justice John Roberts
Youtube Screenshot
Legal and political experts are blasting the U.S. Supreme Court’s investigation that failed to determine who leaked the draft opinion in the Dobbs case that ultimately served to overturn Roe v. Wade and void the decades-old previously-constitutional right to abortion. Some, having read the Court’s report on the investigation, state it appears the Justices and their spouses were not interviewed or investigated.
In an unsigned statement Thursday the Court announced after a long investigation, “to date” it had been “unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence.”
Frank Figliuzzi, the well-known former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence and MSNBC national security analyst, served up strong contempt for the process chosen by the Court, and what he suggested was the underlying reason the investigation failed to produce the leaker.
Asked point-blank on MSNBC's Deadline: White House if he believes the leaker is already known to the Court, he responded with one word: “Yes.”
Noted national security attorney Mark S. Zaid, who also handles government investigation cases, says investigators did not interview or investigate the justices or their spouses.
“Having read [the] investigative findings, I am completely struck by fact [sic] does not appear Justices (or their families) were interviewed, much less investigated,” he tweeted.
“Since bare min[imum] ‘preponderance of evidence’ was standard that could not be met w/staff, who else does that leave as leaker?” he asked.
“When is an investigation really not an investigation?” Figliuzzi also rhetorically suggested to MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace. “When you’re told what you can and can’t do, you can’t do what you need to do or talk to the people you need to talk to to solve the investigation, and, when the investigation isn’t conducted by professional investigators.”
Figliuzzi, himself an expert investigator who served as the Bureau’s chief inspector, blasted the decisions made about how the investigation would be conducted and who would conduct it.
“The U.S. Marshal Service did not conduct this investigation. This investigation was conducted by someone called the Marshal of the Supreme Court. I’m sure she’s a wonderful person. But she has no law enforcement training or experience. She’s in charge of securing the building called the Supreme Court building and its justices. That’s what she does.”
He also criticized who he says was not investigated: former clerks and current justices.
“If you want to do a real, serious leak investigation, you’re going to talk literally to every person who may have had access to whatever it is that leaked. From what we can see so far, while they may have talked one hundred people, they didn’t talk to ex-clerks. They didn’t talk to the very universe of people who may have done the leaking and then left the court,” he noticed.
“They didn’t call the FBI, because you know what would happen, then a real case would have happened. They wouldn’t have actually had the criminal process.”
“Someone stole government property, someone mishandled government records, potentially a crime. They could have had subpoenas of former clerks and former employees they would have had that leverage over them. They could have subpoenaed phone carriers and internet providers, and they could have see who was talking to whom and when, at the media platform that obtained this information,” he said, presumably referring to Politico which obtained and published the leaked draft opinion. “All of that could have been done.”
“We still have, according to The New York Times reporting today, we have no evidence that the justices themselves were interviewed.”
There was “no serious intent to get to get to the bottom of it, in my opinion,” Figliuzzi added.
Wallace at that point specified she was calling it “a sham investigation,” and then asked, “Why would a sham investigation be ordered? If Justice Alito felt that his quote assassination was possible because of the leak?”
Former Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, Peter Strzok, also points to the fact, based on the report from the Marshal of the Supreme Court, that the Justices and their spouses were not investigated, and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s claim affirming the quality of the investigation.
“Kind of blows a huge hole in Chertoff’s statement that he ‘[could] not identify any additional useful investigative measures,'” Strzok wrote.
\u201cTrue the Justices themselves weren\u2019t part of the Dobbs leak investigation? \n\nKind of blows a huge hole in Chertoff\u2019s statement that he \u201c[could] not identify any additional useful investigative measures.\u201d\n\nHere\u2019s one: include the Justices\u201d— Pete Strzok (@Pete Strzok) 1674158478
Former RNC chairman Michael Steele went even further, while agreeing with Figliuzzi’s take that the Court knows who the leaker is.
“I don’t think they want to know,” he alleged, also on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House.
“I don’t think they want to know because I think they already know. I think they already know enough to know who, what, where, when and why, inside that building.”
Steele, a veteran of politics, declared, “the worst outcome here is not a judicial one. It is a political one. It is one that steeps this building, and its justices in a political vortex that they cannot escape from. Sitting at 26 percent approval among the American people because of the prior bad acts and opinions in how people are perceiving how this Court is operating.”
“You layer on top of this, someone within their own ranks, whether it was a staffer or a justice, God forbid – which I do not take off the table here – leaking this for nefarious political reasons, whether to create outcome ‘A’ or create outcome ‘B’ around this opinion, that does not create an avenue to further entrust or garner the trust of the American people.
Slate’s legal expert Dahlia Lithwick added to the conversation, “I think that the decision was taken to do this is in-house using the Marshal Service, but probably other choices could have been made, to have a different, perhaps more thorough investigation. But I think the takeaway is exactly what you just heard, that for a leak that was characterized by most of the justices as the single most shocking, egregious violation of norms like trust. It’s still being credited for destroying collegiality amongst the justices.”
“This was a nuclear bomb that went off into court. And now the answer seems to be, ‘so sad, too bad, I’m good,'” she observed. “It’s pretty amazing in light of how absolutely consequential this has been, not just for the justices amongst themselves, but for the sort of integrity and reputational interests of the court.”
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
Keep reading...Show less
Former President Bill Clinton
I write explainer columns like this one whenever they seem necessary. What’s also necessary is keeping this column from running a deficit. You can help out with that by buying a subscription right here.
If you’re anything like me, these periodic tussles over the debt ceiling, like the one that officially got underway yesterday, are one of those “whatever the hell that is” things you would rather not get too far into for fear of losing what’s left of your functioning brain cells. But we’re here, so let’s burn off a few more synapses trying to understand what the hell is going on.
It all starts with the budget. That’s the thing that the Congress is supposed to pass and the president is supposed to sign by April 15 of each year. The way it’s supposed to work is, Congress passes tax laws, the Treasury collects the taxes, and Congress appropriates money to spend on the various functions of the government – for defense, homeland security, law enforcement (the Department of Justice), education, health, the State Department, and all the other ways our tax dollars are spent.
In the years – yes, there have been a few – when the amount of taxes collected equals or exceeds expenditures, then the budget is said to be balanced. From 1970 to 1997, the United States ran budget deficits year after year. That means, the government did not collect enough taxes to cover our expenditures. In 1999, 2000, and 2001 under President Bill Clinton, amazingly, there were budget surpluses. Then George Bush was elected, the Republicans went on a spending spree (chiefly on “The War on Terror” after the attacks on September 11), while at the same time going on a tax cutting spree, quickly reducing taxes twice. When Bush, at a meeting of his cabinet, asked an innocent question about the wisdom of cutting taxes while one war was going on in Afghanistan and another, against Iraq, was being contemplated and planned, his vice president Dick Cheney answered, “It’s our due,” and they went ahead and cut taxes.
We’ve run a deficit ever since. What that means is, we have to borrow the money we didn’t take in from taxes in order to fund the expenditures that exceed tax revenue. We do that chiefly by issuing bonds, which are bought by governments (like China), banks, insurance companies and other organizations like labor unions, and individuals seeking a place to invest their money safely. The reason U.S. government bonds are considered safe is because they are backed by what is commonly referred to as “the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.”
It's not talked about much, but this is apparently the case because the Constitution contains a clause, “The validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned,” that guarantees the federal government will pay its debts.
There are a lot of “buts” involved in the entire mishigas of the way taxes are collected and budgets are set and money is spent on government programs in this country. This is a gross simplification, but the biggest “but” involves the essential difference between our two political parties. The Democratic Party wants the government to do stuff that helps keep the country going and people from starving and being homeless and so forth, so the Democrats are generally in favor of larger expenditures in the budget for reasons like those, and that means Democrats are more likely to be in favor of higher taxes (chiefly on the rich). The Republican Party is less disposed to want government to spend on so-called “entitlement programs” and more disposed to want to cut taxes (chiefly on the rich). This means, in short, that we spend more money than we take in.
It's important to note that the budget deficits we run are to cover money that has already been spent from appropriations in the previous year or years. In other words, it’s as if we used a credit card to buy stuff we already have and now it’s time to pay for it.
The debt ceiling is a law passed by Congress that puts a limit on the borrowing the government can do in any fiscal year or portion of a year. The debt ceiling has been modified, or raised, more than 100 times since World War II to cover the borrowing we have done through issuance of our government bonds. The fight that arises periodically over the debt ceiling is usually associated with one party controlling one part of the government and the other party controlling the other part, which is where we are right now. The Democratic president in the White House proposes budgets, including deficit spending, and the now Republican-controlled House is supposed to pass them with negotiations over how much should be spent and how much taxes should be collected to cover those expenditures, including how much money should be borrowed to cover the excesses that arise from spending exceeding tax revenues.
This involves periodically raising the debt ceiling so more money can be borrowed to cover the debts we have already incurred in the previous year, which in this case, was in the previous Congress. Republicans have discovered that they can hold raising the debt ceiling hostage so they can achieve with blackmail what they couldn’t achieve at the ballot box, which would be the last Congress, which they did not get enough votes to control, which passed the continuing resolution which substituted for the budget that didn’t pass, no budget having been passed since 2015.
I’m sure that I’ve probably gotten some things wrong in this down and dirty summation of the situation we find ourselves in, but isn’t it fascinating? Doesn’t it hurt your head?
It hurts mine, too, but the only thing you need to remember as this clusterfuck over the deficit plays itself out is this: it’s both parties’ responsibility, but it’s the Republicans’ fault.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
Keep reading...Show less
