Washington Free Beacon

With Trump’s executive orders flying at us like the Eagles defense, the president’s opponents are turning to the courts for legal recourse. One judge actually denied the secretary of the Treasury from accessing the payment system of… the Treasury. Some of these cases will wend their way to the High Court. So it’s only fitting that we feature David J. Garrow, who reviews The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States by Stuart Banner.

“Prior to the late 1860s, all of ‘the justices spent most of their time serving as circuit judges rather than as members of the Supreme Court,’ for the young nation’s incipient lower federal courts depended upon the justices’ regular presence, a practice known as ‘riding circuit’ and which was ‘a grueling job’ when all interstate travel was via horse and carriage or if lucky a riverboat. Thus ‘the justices were not in Washington very much,’ and when they were they ‘lived together in a boarding house, where they ate their meals, discussed their cases, and wrote their opinions.’

“Without a building of their own, oral arguments were heard in a small chamber deep in the Capitol. ‘Living together seems to have encouraged the justices to downplay their differences and to speak with one voice most of the time,’ Banner observes, for published dissents were surprisingly infrequent. What’s more, since the justices did not control their own docket, almost always ‘the Supreme Court was an ordinary court that decided banal legal disputes with no political implications.’ Thus ‘the great cases are unrepresentative’ of the justices’ pre-Civil War toils, and ‘this was a Court that scarcely resembled the institution it would become.'”

“Giving the Court mastery over the docket ‘transformed’ the justices ‘from passive recipients of cases to active participants in the making of the law,’ Banner emphasizes. Additionally, ‘once the Court gained the power to choose which cases it would hear, the norm against expressing dissent evaporated.’ In 1925 only 6 percent of cases featured a published dissent, but 20 years later that figure had risen to 50 percent. Likewise, ‘as the composition of the Court’s caseload shifted from mostly humdrum cases to mostly important ones, the Court’s physical surroundings changed to match,’ Banner writes, as the huge, grand new building ‘made the Court seem like a more august institution’ than when it had been relegated to the innards of the Capitol. ‘The Court of 1935,’ Banner adds, not only “looked very different from the Court of 1920. It had become much more like the Court we know today.’

“Another consequential byproduct of the 1925 [Judiciary] Act was how the Court’s control of its caseload soon began to witness ‘the biggest burst of new constitutional rights in the Court’s history’ as the justices gradually restored the 14th Amendment to meaningful life. Prior to the late 1930s the Court was always ‘a profoundly conservative institution,’ but between 1937 and 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to appoint seven new justices, ‘all political allies with no judicial experience.’ Roosevelt’s appointees pushed the Court in decidedly more liberal directions even as several duos among them came to loathe each other, with William O. Douglas calling Felix Frankfurter ‘utterly dishonest intellectually’ and Frankfurter in turn labeling Douglas ‘completely evil.'”

From the origins of the Court to a completely different origin story: Sean Durns reviews The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China by Michael Sheridan.

“The elder Xi was persecuted and jailed, his family cast out. His son, Xi Jinping, was denounced by the Red Guards and ostracized. Once a privileged ‘princeling,’ Xi Jinping was forcibly detained. He escaped confinement only to be turned away by his own mother who feared that taking him in would lead to grave consequences for both her and her other children. Xi was only 15 at the time.

“Sent to the countryside, Xi became one of the ‘sent-down youths,’ those who fled the inner cities during the Cultural Revolution, making their way to rural China and, they hoped, redemption. Chinese people call the Xi Jinping generation ‘those who were raised on wolf milk’ to describe their toughness, suffering, survival skills, and sheer ruthlessness. Xi learned to mingle with peasants. And he learned discomfort, from flea bites and lice to a hard day’s toil. His response to these trials and tribulations was to become ‘redder than red.’

“These years have become part of the Xi legend, burnished by state propaganda. But Xi also benefited from his revolutionary lineage, which eventually helped him obtain plum jobs and credentials. As Sheridan notes: ‘Today’s cult of Xi Jinping leads people to believe that he and his family came back from disgrace when China entered its age of reform, conveniently associating them with a saner era. The truth is that they were rehabilitated by Mao Zedong himself and owed their survival to his say-so: the restoration of their fortunes began four years before Mao’s death.’

“Xi would lean on the connections of his rehabilitated father, serving as an aide to a former defense minister and then an official in several provinces. A defector who knew Xi at the time later told the CIA that Xi had one abiding and unmistakable characteristic: ‘from day one he never showed his hand.'”

When it comes to mystery fiction, Weekend Beacon contributor John Wilson is turning Japanese (I really think so). He reviews Keigo Higashino’s Invisible Helix: A Detective Galileo Novel.

“By the end of the 19th century, translations of mystery fiction (novels as well as short stories) from Britain, France, the United States, and elsewhere had appeared in Japan, where they attracted considerable interest. In fact, during the period when ‘mysteries’ became a global phenomenon, Japan was one of the principal nodes of the genre, as it continues to be today, though you wouldn’t have guessed that in the 1960s, when, in my mid-teens, I first began to read Japanese fiction. Novels by Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and other masters of ‘literary fiction’ were on the shelves of our public library in English translation, but, for instance, Seichō Matsumoto’s brilliant 1961 mystery Suna no utsuwa (‘Vessel of Sand’) didn’t appear in English until 1989, lamely titled Inspector Imanishi Investigates.

“Thankfully, that has changed: Translations of crime fiction from Japan appear routinely now—and I wouldn’t mind seeing even more of them. A case in point is Keigo Higashino, who is described on the dust-jacket of one of his novels as ‘the single best-selling, best-known novelist in Japan and around Asia.’

“Higashino, born in 1958, earned a degree in electrical engineering and worked in that field for several years after his graduation before he became a full-time writer. ‘A good electrical engineer,’ so an AI bot informs me, ‘has a combination of technical skills, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills.’ Who knew? Higashino’s novels are intensely ‘orderly,’ not at all in a way that conflicts with his depiction of human beings (like us) at their best, at their worst, and in the midst of what we sometimes call ‘everyday life.’

“Like many crime novelists, Higashino often works in a series, as he does with Invisible Helix, featuring one of his most popular characters, Manabu Yukawa, a professor of physics nicknamed ‘Professor Galileo’ by members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department after he assists them with a case. … To some degree Yukawa resembles the gifted ‘amateurs’ who help the police solve cases in many so-called Golden Age mysteries. That’s no surprise, since Higashino himself is deeply versed in the history of the genre.”

From the archives: As Israel fights to bring the last of its hostages home, it’s worth revisiting Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World. Meir Y. Soloveichik gave us a review in late October 2023, a mere three weeks after the October 7 attacks.

“The question with which Senor and Singer begin is pithily put: ‘Why are Israelis so damn happy?’ This query was first posed by the journalist Tiffanie Wen, when she noticed that Israel ranks consistently close to the top among countries when it comes to the happiness of its citizens, even as these very same citizens remember, every year, relatives who have fallen in the country’s many wars, and almost every Israeli knows someone murdered in a terror attack. While their previous book—the hugely influential Start-Up Nation—focused on how Israeli life cultivates creativity in the technological and financial sectors, Senor and Singer now eloquently outline the emotional aspects of Israeli life. They explain how a society marked by its constant confrontation with its enemies, and by the angry exchanges of its democratic debates, is actually one of the most contented countries on the face of the earth.

“Like most ingenious explanations, it is only obvious once it is given. Genuine joy in life comes not from hedonism or escapism but from a sense of being part of, and contributing to, something larger than one’s self. In contrast to the atomistic sense of identity cultivated in much of the Western world, and the epidemic of loneliness now impacting so much of America, Israel has succeeded in creating a culture in which individuality is celebrated but is always placed within the context of family, community, and country.”

“In the past several weeks since the horror of Hamas descended on Israel, the familial unity described by Senor and Singer can be seen everywhere. In Tel Aviv, once riven by religious debates, several high-end restaurants became kosher in order to cater to religiously observant soldiers. Israelis continue to create families; weddings that had been meant to take place in halls and hotels have been moved to homes and even army bases, with at times both bride and groom wearing the IDF green under the wedding canopy. In one notable story, a soldier returned from the front for one evening to wed the love of his life, and his neighbor offered him a large backyard in which to hold the ceremony. As the groom’s mother prepared for the wedding, her hairdresser asserted that he would ensure Ishay Ribo, one of the most famous singers in Israel, would perform. Ribo did indeed come, singing the song of the Passover seder: ‘In every generation they rise up to destroy us, and God saves us from their hands.'”

The post Weekend Beacon 2/16/25 appeared first on .

UCLA law professor Stuart Banner’s new book is simply the finest and most valuable book ever written about the U.S. Supreme Court, a work of such erudite breadth and interpretive sophistication that in a world governed by merit, it would be a slam-dunk winner of an upcoming Pulitzer Prize. Yet in today’s deeply degraded media landscape, only one major publication—the Wall Street Journal—has seen fit to give it the review attention it so richly deserves.

Banner served as a law clerk to the late justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 1991-92 (the term best known for Planned Parenthood v. Casey), so he brings an insider’s familiarity with the institution. But to this reader, his book’s greatest originality concerns the Court’s many decades preceding World War II, times less familiar to most of us than the post-1945 era.

Everyone who knows most anything about the pre-Civil War Court can cite two names: John Marshall, chief justice from 1801 until his death in 1835, and his best known opinion, Marbury v. Madison (1803), which is widely understood as having created the Court’s power of judicial review of all state and federal statutes. Yet Banner convincingly demonstrates that “the Court had the power of judicial review from the very beginning.” Creating the Court received “unanimous approval” at the otherwise often-discordant Constitutional Convention, and in the ensuing state ratifying conventions, there was likewise “no debate over whether the new Supreme Court would have the power to declare statutes unconstitutional.” While “the Court’s judicial review cases of the 1790s,” most importantly Ware v. Hylton (1796), “are not well-known,” by 1803, when Marbury struck down for the first time a federal statute, “there was nothing new or controversial about judicial review. American courts had been invalidating legislation as unconstitutional for many years.”

Yet John Marshall was without question the dominant justice of his era; during his 34 years as chief justice he authored 547 opinions while all the other justices combined penned 574. Banner rightly highlights McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) as the most important of Marshall’s decisions, for it “would become the canonical expression of the view that the federal government can wield broad powers implied by, but not explicitly set forth in, the Constitution.”

Twentieth-century justice Felix Frankfurter would write in 1955 that Marshall’s declaration in McCulloch that “it is a constitution we are expounding” was “the single most important utterance in the literature of constitutional law,” and Banner correctly concludes that Marshall’s jurisprudence “helped create the vision of the United States that is by and large taken for granted today.”

Prior to the late 1860s, all of “the justices spent most of their time serving as circuit judges rather than as members of the Supreme Court,” for the young nation’s incipient lower federal courts depended upon the justices’ regular presence, a practice known as “riding circuit” and which was “a grueling job” when all interstate travel was via horse and carriage or if lucky a riverboat. Thus “the justices were not in Washington very much,” and when they were they “lived together in a boarding house, where they ate their meals, discussed their cases, and wrote their opinions.”

Without a building of their own, oral arguments were heard in a small chamber deep in the Capitol. “Living together seems to have encouraged the justices to downplay their differences and to speak with one voice most of the time,” Banner observes, for published dissents were surprisingly infrequent. What’s more, since the justices did not control their own docket, almost always “the Supreme Court was an ordinary court that decided banal legal disputes with no political implications.” Thus “the great cases are unrepresentative” of the justices’ pre-Civil War toils, and “this was a Court that scarcely resembled the institution it would become.”

Nonetheless, “the justices’ policy views profoundly affected their decisions in politically inflected cases,” most notoriously in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) when the Court unnecessarily yet fulsomely embraced race slavery. While critics “were not shy about proposing legislation to curtail the Court’s authority,” the justices’ embrace of white supremacy survived the postwar adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. When in 1876 the Court fundamentally gutted the 14th’s protections for the newly freed African Americans, even northern commentators embraced the decision, with the New York Times praising “the impartiality and wisdom of the court.” As Banner observes, “the justices considered racial inequality an ineradicable fact of life” and thus “the Court normally acquiesced in the southern states’ establishment of the Jim Crow regime of race discrimination.”

Although not nearly as famous as John Marshall, former president William Howard Taft, who served on the Court for less than nine years (1921-30), was an almost equally consequential chief justice, although not for any opinions he authored. Taft’s two institution-redefining achievements usually go unacknowledged, although not by Banner: championing congressional passage of the Judiciary Act of 1925, which gave the justices almost total control of their docket, and initiating the construction of the Court’s own building, the “Marble Palace,” into which the justices moved in 1935.

Giving the Court mastery over the docket “transformed” the justices “from passive recipients of cases to active participants in the making of the law,” Banner emphasizes. Additionally, “once the Court gained the power to choose which cases it would hear, the norm against expressing dissent evaporated.” In 1925 only 6 percent of cases featured a published dissent, but 20 years later that figure had risen to 50 percent. Likewise, “as the composition of the Court’s caseload shifted from mostly humdrum cases to mostly important ones, the Court’s physical surroundings changed to match,” Banner writes, as the huge, grand new building “made the Court seem like a more august institution” than when it had been relegated to the innards of the Capitol. “The Court of 1935,” Banner adds, not only “looked very different from the Court of 1920. It had become much more like the Court we know today.”

Another consequential byproduct of the 1925 Act was how the Court’s control of its caseload soon began to witness “the biggest burst of new constitutional rights in the Court’s history” as the justices gradually restored the 14th Amendment to meaningful life. Prior to the late 1930s the Court was always “a profoundly conservative institution,” but between 1937 and 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to appoint seven new justices, “all political allies with no judicial experience.” Roosevelt’s appointees pushed the Court in decidedly more liberal directions even as several duos among them came to loathe each other, with William O. Douglas calling Felix Frankfurter “utterly dishonest intellectually” and Frankfurter in turn labeling Douglas “completely evil.”

“No President has ever transformed the Court so thoroughly” as Roosevelt, Banner notes, and four additional new appointees followed under FDR’s successor, Harry S. Truman: two former Senate buddies and two of his own cabinet members. “All four of Truman’s appointees remained close to Truman while they were on the Court,” Banner notes, especially Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, and FDR appointee Hugo Black refused to recuse himself from a case being argued by his former law partner.

Vinson’s death in 1953 paved the way for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s appointment of California governor Earl Warren, “a politician who had never been a judge on any court.” Everyone of course speaks of “the Warren Court” and associates it first and foremost with its unanimous landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down racial segregation in public schools. Brown “was intensely controversial in its day,” Banner reminds us, and not only among Southern white racists but also among top-rank law professors. Warren was “an unlikely figurehead for any liberal movement or institution,” but “for a brief period,” lasting “scarcely a decade and a half,” the Court “became a force for social change.”

“Neither before nor since has there been a period in which the Court changed the law so much” as 1954-69, especially with regard to criminal procedure, but “perhaps the most fundamental change the Court made to the American legal system during this period was to require equality in political representation” per Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), Banner accurately observes.

“When people with life tenure wield enormous power, much can depend on precisely when they die,” as occurred in late 2020 when President Donald Trump was able to replace liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg with top-notch conservative Amy Coney Barrett. All three of Trump’s appointees were “well regarded court of appeals judges … who could have been appointed by any Republican president,” Banner rightly states.

Banner’s impressively expert, nonpartisan judgment suffuses this wonderful book. People who envision “the past as a time when the Court was not as controversial as it is now” are “mistaken,” for no such time has ever existed. “The Court’s importance lies in its decisions,” and some of those decisions “have always aroused great controversy.” Detractors who assert that the justices are embracing politics rather than the law “have always leveled this criticism at decisions they did not like,” and their complaints “have been the same critiques for a very long time.”

“The Court has changed much less than is commonly believed,” Banner concludes, and “ordinary cases” still occupy “most of the justices’ time.” Implicitly invoking his own year there in 1991-92, Banner writes that “the Court can look very different from the inside, where most workdays are consumed with the daily grind of cases that most people will never hear of. It is hard to feel powerful or political while laboring” on such seeming minutiae.

Anyone—indeed everyone—seriously interested in today’s Supreme Court is frankly obligated to read this meticulous, masterful, and compelling book.

The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States
by Stuart Banner
Oxford University Press, 658 pp., $39.99
David J. Garrow’s books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Luther King Jr. biography Bearing the Cross and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

The post A Supreme History appeared first on .

By the end of the 19th century, translations of mystery fiction (novels as well as short stories) from Britain, France, the United States, and elsewhere had appeared in Japan, where they attracted considerable interest. In fact, during the period when “mysteries” became a global phenomenon, Japan was one of the principal nodes of the genre, as it continues to be today, though you wouldn’t have guessed that in the 1960s, when, in my mid-teens, I first began to read Japanese fiction. Novels by Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and other masters of “literary fiction” were on the shelves of our public library in English translation, but, for instance, Seichō Matsumoto’s brilliant 1961 mystery Suna no utsuwa (“Vessel of Sand”) didn’t appear in English until 1989, lamely titled Inspector Imanishi Investigates.

Thankfully, that has changed: Translations of crime fiction from Japan appear routinely now—and I wouldn’t mind seeing even more of them. A case in point is Keigo Higashino, who is described on the dust-jacket of one of his novels as “the single best-selling, best-known novelist in Japan and around Asia.”

Higashino, born in 1958, earned a degree in electrical engineering and worked in that field for several years after his graduation before he became a full-time writer. “A good electrical engineer,” so an AI bot informs me, “has a combination of technical skills, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills.” Who knew? Higashino’s novels are intensely “orderly,” not at all in a way that conflicts with his depiction of human beings (like us) at their best, at their worst, and in the midst of what we sometimes call “everyday life.”

Like many crime novelists, Higashino often works in a series, as he does with Invisible Helix, featuring one of his most popular characters, Manabu Yukawa, a professor of physics nicknamed “Professor Galileo” by members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department after he assists them with a case. (He was introduced to American readers in The Devotion of Suspect X, published in English in 2011, but there were two previous books in the series in Japan. Invisible Helix is the fifth book in that series to appear in English.) To some degree Yukawa resembles the gifted “amateurs” who help the police solve cases in many so-called Golden Age mysteries. That’s no surprise, since Higashino himself is deeply versed in the history of the genre. In a mini-interview in connection with the book that preceded Invisible Helix in the series, Silent Parade, Higashino was asked what writers “inspired the story line” of that novel. Here is his answer:

For those who haven’t read Silent Parade, spoiler warning—it was inspired by a famous book by Agatha Christie. There’s also a key plot point derived from John Dickson Carr’s classic Sir Henry Merrivale locked-room mystery novel, The Judas Window.

Some readers may be enticed by this, as I am, but others may say “Meh! Too much cerebral game-playing; not enough humanity.” In fact, with Higashino, nothing could be further from the truth. Part of the reason I enjoy him so much is that he combines the playfully cerebral with the deeply humane. This new novel, Invisible Helix, is set in motion by a particularly ugly case of “domestic abuse.” Higashino treats this with sympathy—he’s not simply pressing plot-buttons. As “Professor Galileo” becomes involved in the investigation—and as it finally becomes clear that this case has roots in his own past—the novel presents and then solves a dazzling intellectual puzzle. There is no contradiction between these intertwining strands. Like Sherlock Holmes, like Hercule Poirot, like Miss Marple, “Professor Galileo” is patently a figure of fantasy and at the same time compellingly “real.”

I often encounter dismissals of mysteries as too “formulaic” (not only the “classic” variety but contemporary examples as well). But I do wonder at times what’s behind that objection to the “formulaic,” which would of course consign Homer’s epics to the trash-bin. Fiction such as Higashino’s, set in a culture much different from our own, may in some cases disarm that preemptive disdain. May it be so.

Invisible Helix: A Detective Galileo Novel
by Keigo Higashino
Minotaur Books, 288 pp., $28

John Wilson writes about books for First Things, Prufrock News, National Review, the American Conservative, and other outlets.

The post Mysteries of the Orient appeared first on .

Adam Schiff and Chuck Schumer have described Donald Trump’s dismissal of 17 inspectors general as a “chilling purge” aimed at eliminating “accountability for malfeasance.” Scott Walter and Sarah Lee of the Capital Research Center say it’s not just the fulfillment of a Trump campaign promise, but there’s no scandal in sight.

Though the federal government’s 74 IGs are ostensibly independent, half of them “are appointed by agency heads—that is, by the very people who should be in the crosshairs of the IGs,” Walter and Lee write. IGs report both to those agency heads and to Congress, a body not exactly known for encouraging “honest appraisals of the federal programs they take credit for.”

Trump pledged on the campaign trail to make IGs “independent and physically separated from the departments they oversee so they do not become the protectors of the Deep State.” He has the power to remove nearly all of them. And judging by the gusher of wasteful government spending highlighted in recent weeks, the federal government’s IG offices could use some shaking up.

Read the full piece here.

The progressive view of diplomacy “is mostly about fostering good feelings,” writes the Hudson Institute’s Mike Watson. Liberals and their allies “tend to hope that the process of negotiating will create trust and hopefully goodwill.” Donald Trump’s view of diplomacy is different. He “thinks that the United States is bound by agreements only to the extent that the other side complies—and even then, he reserves the right to pull out when he finds it advantageous.”

The Beltway’s mandarins have long insisted that the latter approach is catastrophic, viewing Trump’s aggressive demands that Hamas honor the details of its ceasefire agreement with Israel, for example, as “hamfisted amateurism.” But as Trump navigates that ceasefire and negotiates with Russia and Ukraine, the Left shouldn’t be so confident that its approach is the right one, argues Watson.

Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden hoped that a nuclear deal with Iran would be the first step to calming down the Middle East. Both failed, since the mullahs are not interested in getting along with the Great Satan. James Hansen, one of the intellectual godfathers of the climate movement, lambasted the Paris Agreement on climate as “a fraud really, a fake,” since it is nonbinding and had no chance of reaching its targets. But for Beltway progressives, Trump’s withdrawals from the agreement in 2017 and last month were signs of the apocalypse.

Trump cherishes his reputation for unpredictability, and as of this writing, the contours of the Ukraine deal are not yet clear. But his interest in developing Ukraine’s mineral deposits indicates he is not planning on throwing Kiev under the bus. And during the last congressional debate about aiding Ukraine, Trump wrote, “As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us! GET MOVING EUROPE!” …

Trump is betting that he can shock the Europeans out of their post-Cold War slumber. German chancellor Olaf Scholz is now calling for another Zeitenwende, a strategic reorientation. But the German Army is less prepared for battle than it was when he announced the last Zeitenwende three years ago.

Trump is also betting that Putin wants a deal that meets his bottom line. Perhaps. But Russia is winning the war, and Putin may decide that humiliating America is worth the wait.

Read more on Trump’s art of diplomacy here.

Down in Florida, Trump’s attorneys are battling the members of the Pulitzer Prize board over their 2018 awards honoring the New York Times and the Washington Post for their intrepid Russiagate coverage. Trump’s lawsuit argues that the Times and Post stories were replete with bogus references to collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. So far, judges in the Sunshine State are siding with the president.

On Wednesday, a Florida appeals court judge denied the Pulitzer board’s motion to dismiss the suit, taking the board to task for its decision to stand by the “now-debunked allegations that [Trump] colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 presidential election.” One day later, our Chuck Ross reports, the board dropped its opposition to a Trump effort to obtain a confidential internal report that reviewed and defended that Pulitzer board’s decision to dole out awards for the Russiagate coverage.

“The internal report, authored by former Reuters editor in chief Stephen Adler, is key to Trump’s lawsuit against the board’s members over their 2018 award to the newspapers for a series of stories that ‘dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections’ to Trump, as the board originally put it,” writes Ross. “The board referred to Adler’s review—though without identifying him—in a July 2022 statement that reaffirmed its award four years earlier to the Times and Post and said none of the stories had been ‘discredited.'”

Trump’s attorneys proposed a subpoena of Adler aimed at obtaining the report and all communications related to it in late January. The Pulitzer board filed an objection one week later but withdrew it on Thursday, citing circuit court judge Robert Pegg’s ruling that the board’s internal communications can’t be shielded during the discovery process.

“The withdrawal does not guarantee that Trump will obtain internal documents from Adler—the president’s attorneys first need to secure approval for the subpoena in New York, where Adler lives, and Adler can launch his own effort to shield the documents from there,” reports Ross. “The withdrawal does, however, come on the back of a string of positive developments for Trump in the lawsuit, which he filed in December 2022.” We’ll have updates as they come.

Away from the Beacon:

• Canadian hockey fans booed the U.S. national anthem when the boys in red, white, and blue played in the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament in Montreal on Thursday night. America went on to win 6-1. Enjoy statehood, guys.
• Donald Trump has already hosted three foreign dignitaries in the Oval Office—and all three walked by a photo of Trump’s mugshot framed in gold before they entered, photos show.
• Axios put out a big scoop on Friday: “Trump’s immigration arrests,” the outlet wrote in a headline, “appear to lag Biden’s.” Three paragraphs in, it explains why: “The publicity surrounding the new president’s tough talk on immigration has fueled a dramatic dip in the number of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally.” Details, details.

The post Schiff and Schumer’s Bogus IG Scandal, Trump’s Divergent Diplomacy, and the Pulitzer Board’s Russiagate Retreat appeared first on .

This year’s Munich Security Conference is an unusually consequential one since it begins as the Trump administration turns its attention to the Russo-Ukrainian war. Even as Trump’s delegation discusses terms with Ukrainians and Russians, and occasionally updates the other Europeans, the Middle East is watching to see if the ceasefire deal in Gaza will hold.

To many in Washington, the teetering Gaza deal is both a potential humanitarian catastrophe and a sign of Trumpian incompetence. Donald Trump’s threats and demands that Hamas honor the agreement seem like hamfisted amateurism to the Beltway’s mandarins and their overseas friends. That is because Trump’s view of how diplomacy works is fundamentally different from how they think.

For progressives and their allies, diplomacy is mostly about fostering good feelings. They tend to hope that the process of negotiating will create trust and hopefully goodwill that should improve the overall relationship between the countries involved. In this view, having something to sign is more important than driving a hard bargain that protects American interests. Withdrawing from any deal is a terrible misstep, even if staying in accomplishes nothing or if the other side is violating the terms.

That is not how Trump views things at all. He thinks that the United States is bound by agreements only to the extent that the other side complies—and even then, he reserves the right to pull out when he finds it advantageous. The ceasefire-for-hostages deal between Israel and Hamas only exists because of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s assurances that if Hamas cheated on the deal, the United States would not force Israel to continue complying. Joe Biden tried for months to get a similar deal, but he could not credibly make the same offer to Jerusalem and thus failed.

So when Hamas threatened to stop releasing its hostages on schedule, Trump responded, “If all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock … I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out.” Hamas seems to have backed down—after hitting Gaza with another rocket.

Trump wants a deal with Vladimir Putin, and his 2018 summit in Helsinki dismayed the Americans who had been on the receiving end of Putin’s misdeeds. But Putin’s best offer was unacceptable to Trump, who hurt Russia’s economy by boosting American shale oil production and became the first U.S. president to send weapons to Ukraine. And when the Russians repeatedly violated agreements that banned intermediate-range ballistic missiles and permitted flights to observe Russian and NATO conventional forces, Trump withdrew from both treaties. This is closer to the Kissingerian version of détente—lowering the temperature in some areas while ruthlessly pursuing advantages in more promising ones—than the kinder, gentler version promoted by Jimmy Carter and followed by today’s progressives.

That version is much less successful, even on its own terms. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden hoped that a nuclear deal with Iran would be the first step to calming down the Middle East. Both failed, since the mullahs are not interested in getting along with the Great Satan. James Hansen, one of the intellectual godfathers of the climate movement, lambasted the Paris Agreement on climate as “a fraud really, a fake,” since it is nonbinding and had no chance of reaching its targets. But for Beltway progressives, Trump’s withdrawals from the agreement in 2017 and last month were signs of the apocalypse.

Trump cherishes his reputation for unpredictability, and as of this writing, the contours of the Ukraine deal are not yet clear. But his interest in developing Ukraine’s mineral deposits indicates he is not planning on throwing Kiev under the bus. And during the last congressional debate about aiding Ukraine, Trump wrote, “As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us! GET MOVING EUROPE!”

Getting Europe moving is a major goal. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in Brussels Wednesday, “Any security guarantee [for Ukraine] should be backed by capable European and non-European troops” and that “Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.” He walked back some of his remarks the next day, saying “everything is on the table,” but the overall thrust of American policy is in that direction.

Trump is betting that he can shock the Europeans out of their post-Cold War slumber. German chancellor Olaf Scholz is now calling for another Zeitenwende, a strategic reorientation. But the German Army is less prepared for battle than it was when he announced the last Zeitenwende three years ago.

Trump is also betting that Putin wants a deal that meets his bottom line. Perhaps. But Russia is winning the war, and Putin may decide that humiliating America is worth the wait.

The post Donald Trump’s Art of Diplomacy appeared first on .

The Pulitzer Prize board dropped its opposition this week to President Donald Trump’s efforts to obtain a confidential report that defended the board’s awards to the New York Times and Washington Post for their coverage of Russiagate.

The internal report, authored by former Reuters editor in chief Stephen Adler, is key to Trump’s lawsuit against the board over its 2018 award to the newspapers for a series of stories that “dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections” to Trump, as the board originally put it. The board referred to Adler’s review—though without identifying him—in a July 2022 statement that reaffirmed its award four years earlier to the Times and Post and said none of the stories had been “discredited.”

On Jan. 23, Trump’s attorneys proposed a subpoena of Adler, requesting all documents and communications related to his report. Pulitzer board members filed an objection one week later, arguing that the request should be directed to them rather than Adler, an outside party, and that Adler should have the ability to designate certain information as “confidential.”

The Florida judge overseeing the case, however, denied that confidentiality request last week, handing Trump a win. Shortly thereafter, on Thursday, lawyers for the board informed the judge that they were withdrawing their opposition to Trump’s proposed subpoena of Adler, who retired from Reuters in 2021.

The withdrawal does not guarantee that Trump will obtain internal documents from Adler—the president’s attorneys first need to secure approval for the subpoena in New York, where Adler lives, and Adler can launch his own effort to shield the documents from there. The withdrawal does, however, come on the back of a string of positive developments for Trump in the lawsuit, which he filed in December 2022.

On Wednesday, a Florida appeals court judge denied the Pulitzer board members’ motion to dismiss the suit in a lengthy ruling that took the board to task for standing by the “now-debunked allegations that [Trump] colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 presidential election.” Before that, on Feb. 3, circuit court judge Robert Pegg ruled that the board’s internal communications regarding the award are fair game for the discovery process in the lawsuit.

That could pave the way for the release of internal deliberations involving board members, a prestigious list that includes Post columnist Eugene Robinson, Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger. Pulitzer’s lawyers cited the judge’s ruling on the internal communications as the reason for the reversal in Thursday’s filing.

In his lawsuit, Trump alleged that the Times and Post stories were replete with references to the FBI investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But that investigation, Trump said, was “based on manufactured political disinformation paid for by the Clinton Campaign.”

That’s a reference to the Steele dossier, the salacious report funded by the Clinton campaign that claimed there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and Russia. The report, authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, also alleged without evidence that the Kremlin had sexual blackmail on Trump.

Many of the articles cited for the Pulitzer Prize made reference to the Steele dossier, including a Post story that said the FBI had an agreement to pay Steele to gather information about Trump. The story said the arrangement suggested the FBI found Steele credible.

But the Steele dossier has largely been debunked. Special Counsel John Durham found that Steele’s primary source for the dossier fabricated most of the allegations about collusion. The Department of Justice’s inspector general found that the FBI and Department of Justice improperly used the dossier to obtain warrants to surveil the Trump campaign. The Post story did not mention that the FBI cut ties with Steele in October 2016 because he leaked information to the media.

The board sought to keep Adler’s involvement a secret, but Semafor revealed him as the author last month. After Trump took office in 2017, Adler issued a memo that Reuters would cover Trump similarly to how it covers authoritarian regimes in Russia, Iran, and elsewhere.

Trump’s lawsuit could also unveil the deliberations of the five-person jury that awarded the 2018 prize. One of the jurors, former McClatchy editor Kristin Roberts, peddled debunked claims about Russiagate.

In 2018, Roberts defended two controversial McClatchy reports that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen met with Kremlin operatives in Prague in 2016—a central claim of the since-debunked Steele dossier. After Cohen vehemently denied the McClatchy stories, Roberts accused him of lying. She doubled down on the stories even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed in a report in 2019 that Cohen had not visited Prague.

The board did not address questions about the Adler report but instead provided a generic response about the Trump lawsuit.

“This lawsuit is about intimidation of the press and those who support it—and we will not be intimidated,” said a spokesperson for the board. “The Pulitzer Board will continue to recognize the accomplishments of journalists, writers, artists, and composers at the highest level. We look forward to continuing our defense of journalism.”

The post Pulitzer Board Members Drop Bid To Block Disclosure of Confidential Report at Center of Trump’s Russiagate Lawsuit, Turning Focus to Former Top Reuters Editor appeared first on .

Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former legislative aide to Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.) who lost his job after filming a backdoor sex romp in a Senate hearing room, has launched a new career as an independent sex worker. Before his retirement this year, Cardin served alongside notorious Democratic pervert Ted Kennedy as well as convicted felon Bob Menendez, also a Democrat.

The defrocked aide appears to have relocated to Sydney, Australia, where he recently launched accounts on porn websites OnlyFans and Just For Fans under the moniker “Senate Twink.” Urban Dictionary defines “twink” as “a gay or effeminate man, or a young man regarded as an object of homosexual desire, usually a ‘bottom.'” For just $9.99 a month, subscribers can gain access to a trove of Senate Twink (he/his) content, including “hardcore bareback sex, Q&As, kink and custom content, and lots of nudes.”

The submissive Democrat also posts content for free on Bluesky, the alternative social media app for liberals suffering from mental illness and personality disorders. Senate Twink also has an account on X, where he also posts revolting content from time to time alongside comments such as “time for an elevator b—ing,” “first p— video up on my just for fans btw,” and “ran into daddy on the beach, decided to let him h— his w— with me.” Another caption reads, “I wonder where I took this one,” which seems to imply that the graphic image was taken somewhere in the U.S. Capitol complex.

See also: Virginia Democrats Distance Themselves From Pornstar Candidate

The alleged twink’s notorious smut tape, in which he bragged about receiving some “thick German sausage & a jager sauce finish,” was notable for its location—Room 216 in the Hart Senate Office Building. That is where Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor had her confirmation hearing. It is also the same room where Joe Biden said the n-word multiple times during a different confirmation hearing in 1985.

Read more: Dem Staffer Filmed Backdoor Love Romp in Same Building Where Joe Biden Said the N-Word

Maese-Czeropski could still have a bright future ahead of him in Democratic politics. The party has struggled to fill its gaping leadership void after the disastrous 2024 election, seeking guidance from younger, weirder figures such as David Hogg, the obnoxious 24-year-old activist who was recently elected vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.

The Senate Twink is not the only degenerate liberal to revive his career after getting fired for defiling himself in public. Famed masturbator Jeffrey Toobin was recently handed a job at the New York Times as a contributing writer. Toobin lost his job at the New Yorker in 2020 after “adjusting his mic” on a Zoom call with colleagues. Congrats to all!

The post UPDATE: Democratic Aide Fired for Backdoor Love Romp in Senate Hearing Room Finds New Role as Bottom-Tier Sex Worker appeared first on .

Iran paraded a cache of highly advanced ballistic missiles across Tehran following a series of threats by President Donald Trump to “bomb the hell” out of the country if it doesn’t roll back its atomic weapons program. As the hardline regime worked to prove its military might, a senior Iranian military commander dared Trump to strike, saying he “does not have the courage to attack Iran.”

The charged rhetoric signals that Tehran is choosing confrontation with the United States after Trump reimposed his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on the country, which specifically aims to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and deny it intercontinental ballistic missiles—the same ones used to attack Israel twice last year.

At the same time, Trump has expressed a willingness to pursue diplomacy with Iran, saying he favors that approach over conflict. But the military demonstrations across Tehran this week, held to celebrate the 46th anniversary of the regime’s “Islamic revolution,” indicate the president is facing an uphill battle.

“Trump does not have the courage to attack Iran,” General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force, said on the sidelines of Monday’s military display. “Iran, as a powerful nation, does not bow to coercion.”

Iran unveiled two types of ballistic missiles, the Khorramshahr and Hajj Qassem, as well as a satellite carrier dubbed the “Omid.” The towering ballistic missiles can travel around 1,800 to 2,000 kilometers, putting them well within reach of not only Israel but U.S. military outposts across the region. The Khorramshahr “can carry multiple warheads,” while the Hajj Qassem is a “precision strike missile” that can penetrate enemy air defense systems, much like those Israel used last year to fend off a swarm of Iranian missiles, according to the Iran’s state-controlled media.

Other missiles in Tehran’s arsenal are nuclear-capable and based on North Korean technology. Iran emphasized that it can now build much of this equipment on its own, without help from allies like Russia and China.

For regional observers, Tehran’s military posturing is part of a bid to restore its image in the wake of Israel’s devastating October strike on the country’s air defense systems and key military installations.

“These highly public shows of force are how the regime hopes to repair its battered deterrence after Israel’s successful military pushback against it in 2024,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a nonproliferation expert who analyzes Iran’s weapons program for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

As part of this image rehabilitation, Tehran ran additional air defense drills this week and revealed a “new solid-propellant medium range ballistic missile,” according to Ben Taleblu, who said he expects Iran to continue testing Trump in the coming months.

“While Trump’s new presidential memorandum will be a bright green light to enforce maximum pressure sanctions which long atrophied under Biden, Iran in the short term will continue to ramp up its nuclear capable missile threat,” he said.

During a Wednesday public appearance, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei praised the country’s military establishment for making advances on ballistic missiles and other weapons technology.

“Iran’s defense power is known to everyone today,” he said. “While the friends of the revolution are proud of it and the enemies are afraid of it.” Khamenei’s remarks came after he toured a military facility producing a series of new “kamikaze” drones, which appear similar to those used by Hezbollah during its siege on Israel’s northern border.

Amid this flurry of military activity, Iranian diplomats on Tuesday filed a formal complaint with the United Nations Security Council over Trump’s repeated threats to bomb the country if a diplomatic deal cannot be reached.

“I would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear,” Trump told the New York Post on Saturday. “I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it.” The president made similar remarks a day later on Fox News.

Iran’s ambassador to the U.N., Amir Saeid Iravani, complained that Trump’s “reckless and inflammatory statements flagrantly violate international and the U.N. charter.”

“The Islamic Republic of Iran firmly rejects and condemns this reckless threat,” Iravani said before the international body. “The U.N. Security Council must not remain silent in the face of such brazen rhetoric, as normalizing the threat to use force sets a dangerous precedent and must be unequivocally condemned.”

The post Iran, Facing Threats From Trump To Roll Back Nuclear Weapons Program, Parades Ballistic Missiles Across Tehran appeared first on .

An American citizen held hostage by Hamas since October 7, 2023, thanked President Donald Trump in a video on Friday, saying that Trump is “the reason I am home alive.”

“Since February 1, I am a newly released Hamas hostage. I’m a survivor. I was held for 484 days in unimaginable conditions. Every single day felt like it could be my last,” 65-year-old Keith Siegel said. “President Trump, you are the reason I am home alive. You are the reason I was reunited with my beloved wife, four children, and five grandchildren.”

Siegel is the first American released since the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal took effect on January 19. The deal came just days after Trump reiterated his warning that “all hell will break out” if the hostages held in Gaza were not freed by the time he took office on January 20. The Biden administration had failed to secure a lasting ceasefire deal.

The ceasefire appeared fragile this week after Hamas said on Monday that it would stop releasing hostages. On Thursday, however, it announced that it “reaffirms its commitment to implementing the agreement as signed, including the exchange of prisoners.” The terrorist group has released 21 hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, with 73 hostages, including American citizen Edan Alexander, remaining in Gaza.

The terrorist group is set to release 36-year-old American citizen Sagui Dekel-Chen and two others on Saturday. The Israel Defense Forces have confirmed that at least 35 hostages are dead.

Siegel in the video noted that Trump’s “leadership, power, and authority are necessary to enforce the ceasefire and put an end to the unnecessary daily dangers to the lives of innocent hostages and civilians.”

“I trust in your strength and leadership, Mr. President,” Siegel continued. “The helpless hostages in the dark, cold tunnels in Gaza also trust you. Please bring them home.”

Siegel, who grew up in North Carolina and moved to Israel four decades ago, was among seven American citizens taken hostage during Hamas’s October 7 attack. The Palestinian terrorists killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel and abducted 251 others, prompting a years-long Israeli offensive in Gaza.

The post Freed Hamas Hostage Praises Trump, Calls for Him To Bring All Hostages Home appeared first on .

President Donald Trump has revolutionized the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by ousting 18 Democratic appointees from the board of trustees and replacing them with normal Americans. On Wednesday, the new board unanimously elected a fabulous chairman (Trump) who is determined to preside over a “Golden Age of Arts and Culture” in this country after four years of vapid slop under former president Joe Biden. “I think we’re going to make it hot,” Trump said on a conference call with Kennedy Center board members. “And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.”

Liberal elites have grumbled that Trump’s actions amount to a sinister “purge” or “coup.” The New Republic, a once-respected left-wing publication, accused Trump of appointing “the weirdest board ever” at the Kennedy Center. This couldn’t be more wrong, according to an in-depth analysis of the new and outgoing members. Based on the available evidence, it’s safe to say that Trump has assembled one of the most diverse, equitable, and inclusive groups of qualified experts since the Kennedy Center opened its doors in 1971. By purging the board’s ranks of likeminded elites and replacing them with individuals who are more relatable and representative of our country’s beautiful and complex demographic tapestry, Trump has pulled off an impressive coup—for DEI.

Respecting victims’ voices

Brown is beautiful

Love is love

America was built by immigrants

Glass ceiling, shattered

 

Kickin’ ass for the working class

In Trump’s America, nice guys finish first

The post Analysis: Trump’s Kennedy Center Purge Is a Total Coup—for Equity and Inclusion appeared first on .