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Update

Trump v. Clinton et al.

It may be that President Donald Trump is most loved (to the extent he is loved at all — his approval ratings are way down) for they edgy things he says:

That last was directed towards Hillary Clinton in the Second Presidential Debate of 2016. But, once winning the presidency, Trump did nothing against her. In this, his second administration, he is doing something against her, sort of, for the the administration “asked the Supreme Court on Oct. 9 to revive his dismissed civil lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and others.” This is from The Epoch Times:

The president alleges they conspired to create and spread a false story that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

Lower courts rejected the case and ordered Trump and one of his attorneys, Alina Habba, to pay almost $1 million in sanctions. The trial judge and the appeals court called the lawsuit “frivolous,” saying it had no legal merit and appeared aimed at political grievance rather than a valid claim.

Trump is now asking the nation’s highest court to review the appeals court’s decision upholding both the dismissal and the sanctions.

While he was out of office after losing the 2020 election, Trump initiated the lawsuit in federal court in Florida in March 2022, under a federal racketeering law known as civil RICO. That law allows private individuals to seek damages when they claim someone engaged in a pattern of illegal activities, such as fraud or conspiracy.

Arguably, President Trump is aiming to salve an itch first scratched in that debate, and which his supporters have been feeling all jittery about since, if saying nothing.

The Epoch Times article does not discuss the political element so much as the legal one:

In September 2022, U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks threw out Trump’s lawsuit against Clinton on multiple grounds, including that Trump waited too long to pursue some of the claims. Middlebrooks compared Trump’s lawsuit to a “two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him.” The judge later imposed sanctions on Trump and Habba for filing a case he said was calculated “to ‌dishonestly advance a political narrative,” and for misusing the courts.

In 2025, the 11th Circuit affirmed Middlebrooks, including the sanctions, saying that many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments “were indeed frivolous.”

In the new filing, the attorneys said the time limit for launching the suit should have been extended because Trump opted to delay filing during his first term of office so he could focus on executing his constitutional responsibilities as the nation’s chief executive.

The attorneys argue that the heavy demands of being president justify pausing the normal deadline for filing a private lawsuit while Trump is in office, so he should not have to choose between running the country and defending his own legal rights.

The attorneys also ask the Supreme Court to decide whether a lower court can fine a president and his lawyers close to $1 million merely for making that argument, even if the court rejects it in the end.

Categories
Thought

Frank Herbert

I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.

Frank Herbert, “Dune Origins,” Omni, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July 1980), p. 72.
Categories
Today

The Big Book Debuts

On October 10, 1957, Ayn Rand’s dystopian/utopian (quasi-science fiction) novel of ideas, Atlas Shrugged, was published. Written to advance an individualist, freedom/free-market point of view and to show the consequences of statist ideology, it became one of the most influential and literarily successful didactic novels ever written.

Atlas Shrugged appeared on The New York Times Bestseller List for 21 weeks, and continued to sell thereafter, averaging 74,000 copies per year in the 1980s, over 95,000 copies per year in the ’90s, and in 2011 sold 415,000 copies. Atlas Shrugged has also appeared on numerous “best of” lists. In 1991 the Book of the Month Club and Library of Congress asked readers to name the most influential book in their lives: Atlas Shrugged came in second only to the Bible. Numbered among the book’s fans have been many artists, politicians, and thinkers, not least of whom was Ludwig von Mises.

Categories
crime and punishment litigation

An Anti-Lawfare Law Firm

lawfare, justice, Jeffrey Clark, law

We witness lots of lawfare, so we need lots of anti-lawfare. 

That’s why former Trump administration official Jeffrey Clark, a victim of lawfare himself, is opening a new law firm.

Democrats went after him because, he says, “I am a strong Trump supporter and thought Georgia investigating its election in 2020 at a deeper level was worth doing.” As part of this vindictive campaign, the DC Bar has been pushing to revoke Clark’s license to practice law.

On the X social media platform, Clark says that the firm, which he is leading, will combat all kinds of weaponization of the law, “but especially abuses of congressional and state legislative branch oversight, perversion of bar discipline processes, and . . . bogus criminal indictments.”

He is looking for help. “We already have a small team of dedicated lawyers with Article I, Article II, and/or Article III branch experience at the federal level and state government experience as well. You would join them and me in this important effort to turn our country around.”

He links to a page on itsyourgov.org describing the positions.

There you’ll learn that your duties would include “preparing rapid-response filings and ethics defenses for attorneys facing bar complaints, representing clients in constitutional, administrative, and investigative proceedings, and pursuing strategic litigation — including civil suits and possibly counter-complaints — against entities abusing legal and regulatory processes.” 

So if you’re an ace lawyer who finds this project exciting and worthwhile, and think you could help, you know what to do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Thought

Jack Woodford

Louella remarked that when foreign nations had intercourse with this country they knew they had been intercoursed.

Jack Woodford (John Woolfolk, 1894–1971), The Autobiography of Jack Woodford (1962).
Categories
Today

Roger Williams

On October 9, 1635: After many religious and policy disagreements, Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Categories
ideological culture tax policy

Kill the Class Warfare

wealth, taxes, socialism, capitalism, envy, resentment, Mises, egalitarianism

In his 1922 book Socialism, Ludwig von Mises explained why socialist policies are, in reality, forms of “destructionism.” They create nothing, just erode and destroy the economic bases of civilization.

The motive animating the socialists’ rationalizations — exploded in systematic detail by Mises — is resentment and envy.

Which are also behind a new tax on billionaires slated to appear on California’s November 3 ballot as Proposition 40.

Billionaires haven’t done anything wrong merely by earning great wealth. Typically, they’ve done something right. They’ve been industrious and entrepreneurial and helped people improve their lives. Typically, they earn their billions; which, incidentally, they don’t stuff under a giant mattress but invest further.

This doesn’t stop the tax’s demagogic proponents, like Ro Khanna, from claiming that the interests of the “donor class” are inherently opposed to those of the “working class.”

Khanna wants government to privilege one “class” over the other. But as Dmitri Bolt points out, neither should get a government-enforced advantage. “The real choice is between freedom and its absence: between an economy in which people are free to work and keep the fruits of their labor, and one in which politicians get to decide how much success is too much and which class deserves to pay for everyone else.”

Investors create opportunities for everybody, of whatever “class.” And when the walls seem to be closing in economically, it’s often because politicians like Khanna have “chosen to restrict one group’s freedom while pretending [to expand] opportunity for the other.”

Californians have a great opportunity to choose freedom over internecine class warfare in November.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Frank Herbert

It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. 

Princess Irulan in The Humanity of Muad’Dib, in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965).

Categories
Today

Solzhenitsyn for the Win

On October 8, 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in literature. In his acceptance speech, given after his deportation from the USSR, he said that “during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known.” In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev had allowed Solzhenitsyn’s short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch to be published, and defended the novel at the presidium of the Politburo, claiming that there is “a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.” Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn’s works were not published in the Soviet Union from 1964 through 1989. Stalinists won, for a time, with Solzhenitsyn being deported to West Germany in February 1974.

Categories
crime and punishment international affairs

Chinazi Repression in America

Xi Jinping, China, CCP, spying, police

“A California woman was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 4 on a charge of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government,” reports The Epoch Times. “The woman is accused of surveilling Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s U.S.-based son.”

Foreigners spying on Americans, and on other foreigners on American soil, goes back at least to 1798, when the Adams Administration kicked Constantin François Chassebœuf — that is, Volney, author of The Ruins (1791) — out of the country.

But it’s not just spying. “A Bronx man was convicted of the same charge in May, accused of operating a Chinese undercover police station in New York City for China’s Ministry of Public Security.” The Epoch Times’s article calls it “transnational repression.”

These “police stations” are all over the place. Four years ago, I quoted one source saying that there were at least “54 of these Chinese ‘service stations’ in 30 countries . . . including one in New York City.” While this all technically follows under the rubric of “rendition,” these fake cops don’t usually “arrest” and transport targets as prisoners. Instead, they threaten harm, often to relatives back home. 

The Epoch Times quotes Attorney General Todd Blanche, who says the Department of Justice will keep investigating “as long as the conduct persists.” The AG admits, however, that it’s “hard to catch because once you catch one, there’s a lot of others.”

The problem, Blanche says, is not the lack of existing laws to counter transnational repression, but that there is just so much of it and it is inherently hard to sort out.

But worth the attempt, surely . . . if America is to continue to be the “land of the free” and a refuge for dissidents fleeing totalitarianism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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