What Happened Today: June 23, 2023

IRS whistleblower comes forward; Graham and Blumenthal turn up the heat; 3M has to pay up

Jun 23, 2023

The Big Story

Two IRS agents provided whistleblower testimony to Congress alleging government interference in the IRS investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter, according to a report released Thursday by the House Committee on Ways and Means. One of the whistleblowers, Gary Shapley, says that Hunter Biden wrote off the charges for prostitutes he had hired as business expenses, and misrepresented other payments, including one $10,000 payment to a sex club labeled as a golf club membership. A WhatsApp message provided to the committee seems to implicate President Biden in Hunter’s unsavory practices, capturing an exchange between Hunter and businessman and Chinese Communist Party member Henry Zhao in which Hunter demands Zhao fulfill a commitment and tells him that “if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

The other IRS investigator, who is referred to only as Mr. X and identifies as a Democrat, claims that he was told by a prosecutor not to interview Hunter’s children regarding expenses that were deducted in their names, as it might “get us into hot water if we interview the president’s grandchildren.” Both investigators also claim that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who had been running the investigation, was himself stymied by higher-ups who refused to assign him expanded powers as a “special counsel” and did not allow him to file charges against Biden in D.C., where they would have had the most impact.

“As the Attorney General has said, U.S. Attorney Weiss was given full authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction he deemed appropriate,” Patricia Hartman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., told The Washington Post. “He did not need approval from this office or the U.S. Attorney to bring charges in the District of Columbia.” While two sources do not a story make, no one has yet contradicted the whistleblowers’ claims on a substantive basis.

In the Back Pages: Crimes Against Reason

The Rest

→ Fiddler on the Roof lyricist and Pulitzer Prize winner Sheldon Harnick passed away at the age of 99 on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. Harnick left his hometown of Chicago for New York in 1950, enamored with songwriting and ready to make his mark. He started working with composer Jerry Bock in the late 50s, eventually finding some success with their Pulitzer-winning look at New York’s legendary mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Fiorello!, which ran for 800 performances. The men then took on the works of Sholem Aleichem and adapted them into what would become Fiddler. Their different points of view on life were reflected in the score, with Bock’s bubbliness infusing the music with life, and Harnick’s self-described skepticism infusing the lyrics with humor. It was the hit of a lifetime, and a work of art—something full and real and frightening and beautiful. Thanks, Sheldon. Zichrono livracha.

→ In yet another escalation of the proxy war between the United States and Russia, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced a resolution to the Senate on Thursday stating that any use of a tactical nuclear weapon or the destruction of a nuclear facility that releases radioactive material that subsequently lands on NATO territory would be considered an attack on NATO itself, triggering a response in kind from the United States and its NATO allies. The resolution, according to Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov, “exemplifies those who really pursue the course towards a direct global conflict between Russia and NATO.”

→ When Silicon Valley Bank went under in March, a national debate ensued about why depositors at a bank for venture capitalists were being made whole for deposits over $250,000, when the same treatment would not likely be given to retail clients at banks without “systemic risk.” Now that some of the depositors names are being made public, the answer is clear. Influential depositors who were made whole with U.S. tax dollars include famed VC firm Sequoia, an investor in Apple, Google, and WhatsApp to the tune of $1 billion, and Chinese tech company Kanzhun, for $902 million. Silicon Valley Bank’s financial arm, SVB Financial Group, is hoping to recover $2 billion in deposits that it had at its own poorly run bank.

→ After passing a new law on Thursday called the Online News Act, the Canadian Senate will now require platforms like Google and Facebook to pay news outlets a share of the revenues their stories bring in on the websites. In response, Facebook has announced it will be pulling all news from its Canadian accounts, while Google is still trying to cut a deal with the government to get an exemption to the law by working directly with the media companies, as it was able to do in Australia.

→ Graphic of the Day:

Apparently, fungi are on the move in the United States. One potentially deadly strain, Candida auris, has surged in the past decade, increasing from 63 identified infections between 2013 and 2016 to 2,377 in 2022. Often, fungal infections can be treated if caught early, but due to their similarity to other diseases and their historically rare rate of occurrence, doctors often discover them too late to save patients, leading to a total of 2,800 deaths in 2020 and 2021. “It’s going to get worse,” said Dr. Tom Chiller, head of the fungal-disease branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

→ PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” were created by consumer product giant 3M in the 1940s and have been used widely since the 1960s by firefighters to put out liquid fuel fires. Unfortunately, since they never degrade, these chemicals made it into the ground water supply and remain there, contaminating our drinking water. Now the company has agreed to settle more than 4,000 lawsuits related to the contamination for $12.5 billion, to be paid out over 13 years to communities across the nation forced to upgrade their water filtration systems at huge cost to try and remove these synthetic contaminants from their supply. PFAS have been known to cause reproductive issues, developmental delays in children, increased risk of cancer, lower immunity, interference with hormones, and increased cholesterol.

→ Eliza Kanner is the Zionist Superwoman: Jewish philanthropy worker by day, New England Patriots cheerleader by night. Kanner, a senior development officer at Boston-based Combined Jewish Philanthropies, became involved with Israel engagement at Hillel when she attended University of Connecticut. After college, she moved to Boston and worked her way up at CJP—and auditioned for the Patriots squad three times before being accepted in 2021. It’s a tough gig to land, even for a Miss Connecticut winner like Kanner. Apparently, Jewish owner of the Patriots Robert Kraft took an interest in her work in the Jewish community, telling her, “Congratulations for making the team, but I’m even more proud of the work that you’re doing for the Jewish community.” Kanner says previous Jewish Patriots cheerleaders have reached out to share their admiration for her combined mission.

→ A classroom recording of a Year Eight teacher at Rye College in the United Kingdom excoriating two students for denying the identity of a fellow student, who claims to identify as a cat, was published on Monday by the Daily Mail. One of the girls, defending her position, told the teacher, “I just said if they want to identify as a cow or something, then they are genuinely unwell, and they’re crazy.” The teacher goes on to attack the students for refusing to accept someone’s identity and expands the conversation to issues of gender identity, asserting that “gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with” and that it was “despicable” to associate genitals with gender identity. The teacher then concludes that “if you don’t like it, you need to go to a different school.” After an outcry against the school, a spokesperson said the teacher should have done a better job of creating a dialogue around the issues and assured that something like this would not happen again. Ultimately, the girls will not be punished, nor will they be transferring to another school.

→ Cambridge, England-based bit.bio says it is now capable of “industrializing human cell manufacturing.” The company has pioneered a new method of programming stem cells at scale, which will allow them to be used more widely to treat a variety of illnesses. While stem cell research has been a hotly debated field for decades, one of the biggest obstacles to its widespread adoption for therapeutic applications has been the difficulty of getting the raw material. Previously, each patient had to give their own cells, which could then be manipulated for treatment and re-inserted. According to Roger Pedersen of Stanford University School of Medicine, who chairs bit.bio’s scientific advisory board, the breakthrough “will lead to the development of novel treatments in the next five years for neurodegenerative and other serious illnesses.”

TODAY IN TABLET:

The Hunt for Judah P. Benjamin, the Spy Chief of the Confederacy by Jay Solomon and Jane Singer

Suspected of orchestrating the Lincoln assassination, the South’s most prominent Jew escaped to London to start a new life as a high-powered lawyer. The U.S. government secretly tried to bring him home to face justice.

Son Volt Gets Some Doug Sahm by David Meir Grossman

On ‘Day of the Doug,’ alt-country legend Jay Farrar pays mellow tribute to the Texas hippie idol

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.

Crimes Against Reason

The new criminal justice reform movement is destroying our ability to debate

By Hannah Elka Meyers

Last month, New York City mayor and one-time progressive reformer Eric Adams was heckled by the graduating class of the City University of New York Law School. When he noted his own history as a protestor within the police department, he was heckled more. “Adams had the audacity to compare his tenure in NYPD to the discipline, principles, and commitment of our class,” one student was quoted saying. “Within our short time at CUNY Law, we’ve served and protected the citizens of New York City more than his 20-plus years as a cop.”

This kind of virtue-preening is now de rigueur among the progressives behind the national criminal justice reform agenda. While claiming moral high ground by demonizing both the system itself and a previous generation of reformers like Adams, the results of the movement’s efforts so far are not encouraging. Snowballing reform policies and shrinking police departments and prosecutors’ offices have contributed to national homicide rates 34% higher last year than in 2019, auto theft rates up 59%, and organized retail crime so rampant that Walgreens closed 10 San Francisco stores in recent years.

The larger trend, however, is a war against individual reasoning that is both enacting harmful policies in the name of “criminal justice reform” while also crippling the ability of young people to think critically. Law students like the ones in New York are being indoctrinated into an ideology that actively degrades their capacity to understand and interpret the law. How did this happen? It stems from the movement’s hostility towards not only fact-based dialogue but the very idea that individuals should use their critical faculties and reason to determine fairness. Unlike more rational calls for reform, the movement behind ideas like defunding the police and decriminalizing the resistance of arrest thrives by preventing individuals from challenging its assumptions. It also limits the role of individual judgment by all players within the criminal justice system: judges, cops, and even criminal defendants and victims.

The current reform movement also blocks actors from even having facts to evaluate. For example, while it was reformers who initially pushed the NYPD to maintain a gang database for the sake of transparency, the newer, more extreme criminal justice activists now claim that keeping such data itself criminalizes black and brown youth. That’s the argument made by the Legal Aid Society, despite the results from a half-decade long probe by the NYC Department of Investigations concluding in April that there was no “evidence of harm” to suspects listed in the database.

Similarly, the progressive group the Bronx Defenders just won a five-year suit after a judge ruled in March that the NYPD can no longer access sealed arrest records. There are civil liberties concerns that need to be considered with access to sealed records, but the public safety ramifications are also quite real. As former NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea noted, a sealed case “does not always equate to a determination of innocence.” An accused child rapist, for instance, could have a dozen previous arrests for child molestation in which parents chose each time to forego the case—say in the interest of protecting their child from a prolonged trial—rather than make their child testify. Now police will not be able to know these sealed records even exist.

A quintessential example of the current movement’s antipathy to fact-based reasoning is that they built a blackhole for records right into New York State’s 2017 Raise the Age legislation. Under this law, essentially all misdemeanor cases involving 16 and 17-year-olds go to Family Court, as do 83% of felonies. But none of these Family Court case records are maintained. That means that victims are unable to learn case outcomes, as are prosecutors. Even Family Court judges themselves are not allowed to know if the defendant in front of them has seven previous gun arrests the same year.

While ostensibly protecting persecuted individuals from the state, in practice the movement insulates government policymaking from aggressive probing. Official policy discussions now happen within silos, where the people advocating for new laws and regulations do not have to satisfy practical or moral challenges posed by other stakeholders. When Raise the Age was enacted, one prosecutor told me that prosecutors at implementation hearings asked: “but what about the impact on crime victims?” The response: “We’re not talking about victims right now.”

Similarly, when discovery reform passed in the New York State Assembly in 2019, it monumentally increased prosecutors’ compliance burden, requiring them to rapidly collect and share even patently irrelevant and non-substantive material for each case–or risk the case's automatic dismissal. Correctly, officials forecasted higher case dismissal rates and ballooning costs, but were pooh-poohed as “fearmongerers” by progressive legislators in charge. Presiding NYS Senator Jamaal Bailey, Chairman of Committee on Codes, flatly sidestepped concerns that the legislation had been irresponsibly pushed through with unresolved issues: “I think about, what's irresponsible? Is it responsible to allow people not to have access to information that relates to their freedom, to their liberty?” But after the new policy took effect, New York City’s dismissal rate jumped from 44% of cases to 69% over the next two years, while also requiring millions of additional dollars in funding. These cases were dropped, not out of considerations of justice, but because overwhelmed assistant district attorneys simply ran out of time. When the same New York Senators held a hearing in February on criminal justice data, they blocked Albany’s District Attorney from testifying due to his critical interpretation of reform policies’ impact on public safety for Black New Yorkers.

Perhaps the most determinedly superficial policy discussion in New York has been about the impact of 2019 bail reform legislation. The law prohibits judges from setting bail on over 350 categories of offenses, primarily nonviolent felonies, which originally included manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. Judges were also forbidden from considering a defendant’s criminal record or likeliness of reoffending in deciding whether to detain him pretrial—only his likelihood of returning to court. When the law went into effect on January 1, 2020, over 2,000 inmates detained for offenses made bail ineligible were released from New York City jails. In just the following two-and-a-half months before the Covid pandemic hit, such offenses skyrocketed: car theft rose 68%; robbery 34%, and burglary 27%.

The population of offenders who can no longer be held in jail pretrial have continued to contribute to ballooning crime. As of mid-June 2023, NYC car theft is up 268% year-to-date over 2019; robbery is up 37% and burglary up 43%. The actual number of violent felony arrests committed pretrial has also more than doubled in the first three years following bail reform—even as the overall number of arrests fell.

And yet, as showcased in the same 2019 NYS Senate hearing presided over by Senator Jamaal Bailey, progressive legislators insisted that crime had not increased since the new law began forcing judges to release more defendants, even those deemed dangerous. Yet nowhere in the hearing were proponents forced to publicly reckon with key qualifiers. Doesn’t it matter that the cited “reoffending rate” only counts whether or not a defendant commits another crime, but not how many times? That only prosecuted arrests are counted, and prosecution rates have dropped? And since the number of individuals released pretrial has gone up significantly, even if the same percentage of them reoffends, won’t the actual number of crimes be that much higher? But state legislators are simply given a pass from confronting these logical next questions.

Beyond policymaking, the movement also quashes individual judgment within the practice of law enforcement, prosecution, and incarceration. As noted, New York’s 2019 bail reform laws curtailed individual judges’ discretion in detaining offenders they found dangerous to society. Discovery reform limited individual criminal defendants’ discretion in plea bargaining. The progressive New York City Council’s 2020 “diaphragm law” inhibits cops’ discretion in restraining dangerous suspects. While police chokeholds have long been a felony under state law, the new ban covers a slew of other physical restraints, including applying any pressure to someone’s neck or kneeling on a person’s back—even by accident during a tussle with a resisting suspect. While guilt in last month’s subway killing of Jordan Neely is still being adjudicated, leading progressives like U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City councilwoman Tiffany Caban will not even entertain the idea that restraining Neely saved commuters from grievous harm, or that defense, not murder, may have been the motive.

One of the great allures of this narrative is that it feels more virtuous and ideologically safe to rage against the system than against individual criminals, so sympathies over the last few years have swung from the victims of crime to the offenders. Root cause theories that blame criminality on poverty, lack of education, and other disadvantages, have removed responsibility from individuals. Yet these claims ignore evidence showing that, if anything, crime is a key contributor to poverty. And by sidelining the individual in its push for complete group equity, the movement runs afoul of basic fairness. Criminal culpability and criminal victimization should be judged in court at the individual level: to judge anyone by identity group is unfair. Without holding bad actors responsible, bullies run our spaces, determine whose opinion can be heard, and how safe we feel on the subway.

And as CUNY Law School’s bullying graduates made clear, Adams now only represents the system, which permits students to virtuously attack him with no obligation to consider what he says as an individual or to consider their own roles and obligations within that same system. “We’re watching a clear lack of desire to even participate in healthy dialogue,” Adams told the students.

But students, like so many grownups around them, are terrified of what conclusions they might reach if allowed free thought. What if some people really should be in jail? What if shoplifting should have consequences? And what if disparities between racial groups are not always and necessarily proof of racism, fixable by dismantling the system?

Like many of the assumptions powering the reform tidal wave, the notion that systemic racism is responsible for disparities in arrest and incarceration rates simply does not stand up to scrutiny. It is a narrative that relies on bypassing substantiation, and invites other illogical arguments like when mass anti-police demonstrations in 2020 were sanctioned by Covid epidemiologists while gathering for any other purpose was considered lethal.

Activists may succeed in shutting out debate and relevant data, but eventually attacking the system will unfairly harm individuals at the other end. New Yorkers will suffer fare hikes this summer while roughly $690 million was lost in fare evasion last year. Shoppers will pay more for basics at Target, since organized retail theft is fueling their roughly $1 billion in merchandise “shrink” this year—almost two-thirds more than last year. And residents in poor neighborhoods disproportionately shoulder the burdens of surging homicides and car thefts in our cities.

The thought-stifling impact on display among CUNY Law students is widespread throughout New York’s schools, where the criminal justice reform narrative is exacerbating a wider trend in lower grades of not teaching students to reason—of teaching students to share feelings instead of facts. When I was invited to Governor Kathy Hochul’s “Unity Summit” last month, New York State’s nine-year-old poet laureate performed his work. He is adorable, but why are we pretending that he is our state’s best poet? He recited, with fist in the air: “Who Am I?/ Power to speak out without a doubt/ George Floyd, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, and Sean Bell/ Do those names ring a bell?”

Are we teaching kids that criminal justice outrage will get you on the podium but not that rhyming Bell with bell is weak writing?

The attack on reason also results in targeting Jews as the representatives of a wicked system it seeks to dismantle. At the same CUNY Law ceremony last month where Mayor Adams was heckled, the commencement speaker was Fatima Mohammed, who had previously called for “Zionist professors” to be banned from teaching at the school. Of course, individual professors committed no crime other than being Jews or supporters of the Jewish state. Yet Mohammed accuses them of affiliation with the same global system of evil that she assailed in her speech, charging Israel with indiscriminately gunning down worshipers, murdering young and elderly, and encouraging lynch mobs. Horrifically, the dean applauded.

In his own address to the students, Mayor Adams offered them a challenge: “To those who believe that their beliefs are the only beliefs in a diversified city like New York, my message to you, instead of being a detached spectator in the full contact sport called life, get on the field and participate about improving the lives of the people of this city.”

Adams’s bold call for each individual student to take on the messy challenges of creating a safe, diverse society should be echoed by all of us. The system isn’t the problem. We each need to be the solution.