What Happened Today: August 4, 2023
Trump pleads not guilty, again; Espionage in the Navy; Background actors are getting scanned
The Big Story
Former president Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Thursday to all four felony counts brought against him related to actions following his November 2020 loss to Joe Biden. The courtroom gallery included somewhat surprising guests, including Chief Judge James Boasberg, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, and members of presiding judge Moxila Upadhyaya’s family.
“Every one of these many Fake Charges filed against me by the Corrupt Biden DOJ could have been filed 2.5 years ago,” Trump wrote on Friday on his social platform, Truth Social. “But they waited and waited until I became dominant in the Polls, and then they filed them all, including locals, right in the middle of my Campaign. They want anybody but ‘TRUMP.’ Not fair and perhaps, not legal. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!”
According to the latest polls, it appears that Republican voters are sensitive to the difference between a trial and a conviction. As a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows, while 75% of likely Republican voters believe Trump’s legal troubles are “politically motivated,” 45% of voters would not vote for Trump if he were “convicted of a felony crime by a jury.”
In The Back Pages: Justice for the Tree of Life Killer?
The Rest
→ Israel has become the latest nation to host Amazon cloud-computing data centers, with the tech company pledging to invest $7.2 billion in the Jewish State by 2037. The Tel Aviv data center will add $13.9 billion to Israel’s GDP over the same time period by helping to “further the development of the technological ecosystem in Israel,” according to Israel accountant general Yali Rothenberg.
→ Two Chinese-born naturalized American citizens and U.S. Navy sailors, Jinchao Wei and Wenheng Zhao, have been arrested on charges related to the sale of military secrets to China, the Department of Justice announced Thursday. Wei, a sailor on the USS Essex in San Diego, is accused of sending classified information about the Essex as well as the location of other U.S. Navy ships to a Chinese intelligence officer in exchange for at least $5,000. Located at another California base, Zhao was allegedly paid nearly $15,000 for sending “sensitive military information” to a Chinese intelligence officer. It is unclear whether the cases are connected, but they will be prosecuted, says U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California Randy Grossman: “When a sailor or soldier chooses cash over country and hands over national defense information in an ultimate act of betrayal, the United States will aggressively investigate and prosecute.”
→ Austria has established a task force to examine the possibility of making the use of cold hard cash a constitutional right in a nation where 54% of the citizens still use paper money to buy groceries. “People in Austria have a right to cash,” says Chancellor Karl Nehammer. As digital currencies become more popular worldwide, with 130 countries now considering implementation of them, the debate in Austria over that very “right to cash” may prove a bellwether for the future of paper payments.
→ A Politico analysis of donations to ActBlue, the website that processes small donations to the Democratic Party, found that over the first half of this year, small donations were down about $30 million from the same point in the 2020 presidential cycle. It also found the numbers of donors had dropped 32% over that same time period. “There has to be a quick examination among Democrats about what is creating this enthusiasm gap,” Ari Rabin-Havt, former deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, told Politico. During the first half of 2023, Democrats received a surge in donations at the end of monthly or quarterly fiscal periods, and Republicans were more generous with their political contributions when president Donald Trump appeared in court. Rabin-Havt says part of the slowdown in Democrat-directed funds is that Trump has been the “principal villain” for nine years now, and people simply aren’t as motivated by opposing him.
→ During a recent three-day campaign jaunt through New Hampshire, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to toughen up his image by saying that if he were president, Mexican drug cartels would be “shot stone cold dead” and that he would “[slit] throats” of deep-state bureaucrats on “Day One.” The latest Ipsos/Reuters poll of likely Republican primary voters finds Trump leading DeSantis by a 34-point margin.
→ Last Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) had to prompt nonagenarian Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) three times to “say aye” during an appropriations committee vote on the new Defense Appropriations bill. Feinstein was on bed rest for months earlier this year due to a case of shingles, and on Thursday it was reported that she has given her daughter, Katherine Feinstein, power of attorney. Despite calls from her colleagues to step down from office, she says she will not leave Congress until the end of her term.
→ A motivating factor in the SAG-AFTRA decision to join the ongoing writers’ strike in Hollywood is the fast-approaching development of AI technology that might soon make background actors obsolete. Far from being a small part of the biz, last year 30,000 SAG members did at least one job in the background, for which they are usually paid $187/day. But in the past few years, producers have made an unusual request of their background actors: that they be fully scanned by multiple cameras while making various facial expressions that convey a wide range of emotions. The actors, and their union, now believe the scanning is the studios’ attempt to build an essentially free workforce of background actors using the likenesses of those scanned. The union is requesting that actors be able to approve any use of their digital likeness and be compensated for its use.
→ Graph of the Day:
It was assumed that cruise ship companies would never recover from the mortal blow of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they certainly weren’t supposed to survive the recession we were told was coming this year, but as this Financial Times chart shows, cruises are back, baby. Or, at least, investors seem to think so. The bad news? Hedge funds who tried to short the sector lost $6 billion on the play.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Value of Inclusion by Elana Moscovitch
When I went to summer camp, it wasn’t a safe space to come out as a queer woman. A generation later, my daughter’s camp shows how much has changed.
The Blue Model: Rise and Fall by What Really Matters
Walter and Jeremy discuss weed vs. booze, the God wars in Africa, Trump’s Hispanic base, how Britain botched victory, and America’s Blue Model society
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Justice for the Tree of Life Killer?
By Charles Fain Lehman
On the morning of Oct. 27, 2018, 46-year-old Robert Bowers committed the deadliest mass murder of Jews in American history. A little before 10 in the morning, as worshippers took part in three separate Shabbat services at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, the shooter entered the building and opened fire. Over the next two hours he would kill 11 people and injure six more before police took him into custody.
These murders, and attempted murders, were not random. They were hate crimes, motivated by a profound and ideological antisemitism. Hours before the attack, the shooter blamed Jewish aid organization HIAS for “bring[ing] in invaders that kill our people” on social media. Upon entering Tree of Life, he reportedly shouted,“All Jews must die.” Even as he was taken into custody, the shooter insisted on telling law enforcement about his commitment to killing Jews.
Robert Bowers deserves to die. This is not only my opinion. It is the opinion of many of those who loved his victims. And, most important, it is the opinion of a jury of his peers who, on Wednesday, sentenced him to death. The jury’s conclusion came after a monthslong trial. It came after hearing over 100 “mitigating” factors that his defense hoped would spare him death. It came unanimously, in a state where just one dissent would have given him a life sentence instead.
Robert Bowers deserves to die, but the disturbing reality is that he might not. If he is put to death, it could be decades from now. It might never happen. He could grow old and die on death row, as though a jury never decided his actions warrant more than life without parole.
Contemporary capital punishment takes a long time. For people executed in 1984—the first year with available data since the Supreme Court ended its national moratorium on capital punishment—the average time elapsed between sentencing and death was roughly six years. The average capital defendant executed in 2020 had been on death row for almost 19 years, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2019, the figure was 22 years.
This incredible slowdown is not attributable to an increase in capital sentences: The rate of admissions to death row has declined steadily since the late 1990s. Rather, it reflects a deliberate campaign on the part of opponents of the death penalty, who believe that nobody—no matter how heinous their crimes—deserves to die.
This campaign takes the form of endless successive appeals, such as the set of complaints that have kept Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev alive for the past decade, even though no one contests his guilt. It involves millions of dollars in funding from progressive backers who often operate through dark-money channels. It even involves lobbying of foreign pharmaceutical firms to cut off supplies of lethal injection drugs, a tactic Justice Samuel Alito once called a “guerilla war against the death penalty.”
This campaign is also reflected in policy, to often-paradoxical results. The Tree of Life shooter faces capital-eligible charges in both his state and federal trials (the county district attorney held the charges while the federal case was ongoing). But both the federal and Pennsylvania death penalties are currently under executive “moratoria.” In other words, the same governments that identify Bowers’ individual crime as deserving of death have taken the principled stance that carrying out that death is beneath them.
In spite of the horror of his crimes, the anti-death-penalty campaign will now coalesce around the Tree of Life shooter. Indeed, it already has. His defense team included Judy Clarke, an expert death-penalty litigator who also defended the Unabomber, the Boston Marathon bomber, and the Olympic Park bomber, in part out of a principled opposition to the death penalty. Legal experts are already discussing the grounds on which Bowers’ capital sentence could be challenged.
It is not unreasonable to worry, as some readers no doubt do, about the death penalty—to fear that it can be applied inequitably or in error. Both concerns are, in my view, unmerited. The racial composition of death rows roughly mirrors the racial distribution of homicide offenders. Even plausibly innocent executions are rare, and the risk of them has grown even smaller in the era of DNA evidence and modern procedural safeguards. Still, well-meaning Americans are not wrong to worry that there are dangers in capital punishment, as in any punishment.
But against those worries we must balance the imperative of justice. “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” the Torah tells us, “that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” Justice means many things, but if nothing else, it must mean the holding of people to account for their actions.
The reason that a jury sentenced the Tree of Life shooter to death is not simply that his guilt is indisputable. It is that his crime was so heinous and horrific in its particulars. It was offensive to the sensibilities of a civilized society—that rarest of societies, one that tolerates and even celebrates its Jewish citizens. In the face of such a crime, death is the only just answer a court of law can give.
Robert Bowers deserves to die. The question is, will the law let that justice be done?
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He writes on Substack at “The Causal Fallacy.”