OPEN LETTER #3 TO PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP: A JOB FOR JEFF SESSIONS

Posted on November 21, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Dear President-elect Trump,

Sometimes your lack of impulse control works for you. For example, on Friday night, you lashed out at the Broadway hit, Hamilton. With the stroke of a few tweets, you dominated the weekend news cycle. The fun ended Sunday morning, when Vice-President-elect Mike Pence told CBS’s John Dickerson that Hamilton was “a great show.”

Pence “wasn’t offended” by a 90-second post-performance comment on behalf of the cast and producers. Your tweets had demanded an apology from them, but it turned out that you now owe one — for misstating the facts and challenging First Amendment principles.

You achieved a larger objective. Your twitter tantrum diverted popular attention from: your thumbs-up group photo after meeting with business partners developing a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex in India; white nationalists convening in Washington to celebrate your election; and your selection of National Security Adviser-designate Mike Flynn, who called Islam a “cancer” and a “political ideology hiding behind religion.” He’s also a board member of ACT for America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “far and away the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in America.”

Master Distracter

Your Hamilton tweets also moved the spotlight away from your attorney general-designate. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan’s Republican Senate put Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and made William Rehnquist chief justice. But even at the height of the Reagan revolution, Alabama’s then-U.S. attorney Sessions became only the second nominee in 48 years to be rejected for a federal judgeship. Now he’ll be your attorney general.

In a normal world, Sessions’ earlier defeat would doom your nominee. But you’re normalizing the abnormal. When Steve Bannon is the baseline for comparison, even Jeff Sessions looks good. He shouldn’t.

Sessions on the Merits

The junior senator from Alabama is one of its most conservative members. He opposes: any path to legalizing undocumented immigrants, gay marriage, abortion, and the legalization of marijuana. He voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. His portfolio is a distressing compilation of what you seem to mean by “Make America Great Again.”

Sessions is far out of step with most Americans. (Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory — 1.5 million ballots and growing — proves that you are, too.) But resigned to his confirmation, I propose a bipartisan assignment for him: restore the integrity of the FBI. It will require a public investigation into events culminating in your election.

Roll the Tape

In October, polls showed you losing so badly that you were likely to cost Republicans the Senate. Three months earlier, FBI Director James Comey had announced that no reasonable prosecutor would bring criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. But in an unprecedented press conference, he’d opined about her recklessness anyway. That kept your “Crooked Hillary” rally theme alive. Even so, as summer turned to fall, the email-gate story was losing its legs.

On October 25, your key surrogate, Rudy Giuliani appeared on Fox & Friends. When a host asked whether you had anything other than “some more inspiring rallies” planned for the remaining 14 days of the campaign, Giuliani chuckled.

“Yes,” he grinned.

“What?” a co-host asked.

“You’ll see,” Giuliani answered in a full-throated laugh. “We’ve got a couple of surprises left. I call them surprises in the way we’re going to campaign, to get our message out there. Maybe in a little bit of a different way. You’ll see, and I think it’ll be enormously effective.”

Giuliani then discussed how “all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton, finally, are beginning to have an impact.”

On Oct. 26, Giuliani appeared with Fox reporter Martha MacCallum. As the interview ended, he interrupted her to volunteer, “And I think he’s [Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days.”

MacCallum tried to conclude the interview, but Giuliani kept pushing: “I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”

Finally, MacCallum took the bait.

“I heard you saying that this morning,” she said. “What do you mean?”

“You’ll see,” Giuliani laughed.

Friday, October 28

Only days after Giuliani’s teasers, Comey violated Justice Department guidelines with a letter informing Congress that the Bureau was reviewing additional evidence relating to the Clinton email investigation. Conservative radio talk show host Lars Larson interviewed Giuliani.

“There’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original [July] conclusion being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face of the FBI’s integrity,” Giuliani said. “I know that from former agents. I know that even from a few active agents who, obviously, don’t want to identify themselves.”

Later, Giuliani backpedaled.

“I don’t know anything about leaks from the FBI or the Justice Department,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “I haven’t talked to anybody in the FBI or Justice Department.”

When Blitzer confronted Giuliani with the Lars Larson interview, Giuliani responded, “Well, the information I’ve been getting is from former FBI agents. If I did say that, that was wrong.”

In 48 hours, Giuliani had gone from “I know that even from a few active agents who, obviously don’t want to identify themselves” to “the information I’ve been getting is from former FBI agents.”

But Giuliani’s distinction didn’t help the Bureau. Whether the leaks came directly from active agents, or whether active agents leaked to retired agents who then went to Giuliani, they originated within the FBI. In addition to professional responsibilities of confidentiality under the ABA Standards on Prosecutorial Investigations, agents sign employment agreements that have sharp non-disclosure teeth. Certain FBI personnel working on the Clinton investigation also signed a “Case Briefing Acknowledgement,” agreeing that “due to the nature and sensitivity of this investigation, compliance with these restrictions may be subject to verification by polygraph examination.”

Lie detectors!

Wednesday, November 2

Less than a week before Election Day, another FBI leak produced a new bombshell. Bret Baier of Fox News cited “two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations” for what turned out to be a bogus report. He said that the Clinton investigations would likely to lead to an indictment. You milked that one. As rally crowds responded with “Lock her up” even more loudly than before, some members of your mob added, “Execute her!”

By Thursday, Baier admitted that he’d spoken “inartfully” about the false FBI report. By Friday, he was in full retreat: “That just wasn’t inartful, it was a mistake and for that I’m sorry.”

When MSNBC’s Brian Williams grilled your campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on whether you would stop using the earlier false report in your stump speech, she smiled and said, “Well, the damage is done to Hillary Clinton…”

Sunday, November 6

Then Comey sent another letter confirming that his earlier missive had been a false alarm. But by then, early voters had cast 40 million ballots — almost 30 million of which came after his October 30 letter. Meanwhile, you’d spent the week telling crowds that Clinton’s problems were “bigger than Watergate” and that criminal investigations into her dealings would continue for years into her presidency.

When confronted with Comey’s latest exoneration of Clinton, Kellyanne Conway kept her smile as she told MSNBC, “We have not made this a centerpiece of our messaging… This has not been front and center of our campaign.”

Sessions could put Rudy Giuliani under oath and ask him to name his FBI sources — active or retired. After all, if this had happened to you, hearings in the Republican Congress would already be underway. Now they’ll never happen. To “Make America Great Again,” start with the FBI, if you dare.

OPEN LETTER #2 TO PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP: YOUR ELECTORAL COLLEGE RANT

Posted on November 16, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Dear President-elect Trump,

Well, that was quick. Within 24 hours of my first open letter pledging to hold you accountable for missteps, you fired up another twitter storm. Your topic was the Electoral College. It’s easy to see why.

Hillary Clinton’s popular win by more than 1 million votes makes you only the fourth president in history to gain an Electoral College victory without support from at least a plurality of the people you will govern. In fact, tiny popular vote margins in three key states tipped the Electoral College balance in your favor: Michigan (12,000 out of almost 5 million votes cast), Wisconsin (27,000 out of 3 million), and Pennsylvania (68,000 out of 6 million).

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but did you see the tweet from John Dean, former White House counsel to President Nixon?

“What happens when we discover that the Russians rigged just enough votes in Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania for Trump?” he wrote.

Don’t Believe Everything Newt Tells You

Now you’re turning to the Electoral College for help. But four years ago, you despised it.

On November 6, 2012, you tweeted: “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”

Back then, you thought President Obama would lose the popular vote, but win in the Electoral College. You called for “a march on Washington” to “stop this travesty.” In tweets that you have since deleted, you even urged a “revolution.”

Now you need the Electoral College to override the popular vote that you lost decisively. Throughout the media, critics are asking, “Is it time to eliminate the Electoral College?”

At 5:30 am on November 15, 2016, you provided your new answer, starting with this: “If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily.”

Including Florida on that list projects panic. You spent more time there than in almost any other state. As for New York, it defies credulity to suggest that fellow New Yorkers don’t know you by now.

With respect to California, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told CBS News’ John Dickerson that you would have picked up “at least 2 million votes,” if you’d campaigned there. No evidence supports that claim. Even so, it doesn’t answer the overriding point that yours is only the fourth election in American history where the popular and electoral vote diverged. (The others were George W. Bush in 2000, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876.)

But there’s a bigger trap in Speaker Gingrich’s argument that you have now echoed in a tweet. It reinforces the budding false narrative that you have a popular mandate. For the reasons explained in my first letter, you don’t.

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

Your second tweet at 5:30 am on November 15 was: “The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!”

Your tweet gives ammunition to those who focus on the speed with which you decry rules that appear to be working against you, only to embrace them when they turn in your favor. The Electoral College that you described as a “disaster for democracy” in 2012 is now “genius.” For your latest flip-flop, The Washington Post awarded you an “Upside-Down Pinocchio for an unacknowledged change in position.”

Perhaps the inspiration for your second tweet came from reading Dr. Larry Arnn’s Wall Street Journal op-ed that morning. He’s president of Hillside College and defends the Electoral College as “anything but outdated.” His conservative credentials include board membership on the Heritage Foundation and, in 1996, founding chairman of the California Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibited racial preferences in state hiring, contracting, and admissions. Stated simply, he’s one of your growing circle of new best friends.

Alexander Hamilton Is More Than A Hit Play

“Consider for a minute why the Electoral College was invented,” Dr. Arnn writes.

Characterizing your million-plus vote loss as a “whisker,” Dr. Arnn’s historical discussion ignores the most important source of contemporaneous insight into the origin and purpose of the Electoral College: Alexander Hamilton. Conservatives regularly cite The Federalist Papers in defending an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. (You’ve said that you want your Supreme Court nominee adhering to that approach.) In Federalist No. 68, Hamilton explained some of the concerns that led to creation of the Electoral College.

On one hand, Hamilton observed, the framers believed that the will of the people deserved respect. But they also worried that citizens were vulnerable to an unqualified demagogue — someone with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” lacking “a different kind of merit to establish him in the esteem and confidence…necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.” The Electoral College became the nation’s safety valve.

What If Every Vote Counted?

Dr. Arnn concludes that binding electors to support the candidate who wins the national popular vote would be a “disaster.” He worries about the 10 states and the District of Columbia — representing 165 electoral votes — that have already signed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It binds each signatory state’s electors to vote for the national popular winner. If a handful of states accounting for another 105 electoral votes sign on and bring the total to at least 270, the Compact will become effective without a Constitutional amendment.

Among the remaining states that in various combinations could put the Compact into effect are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Don’t be surprised if those who voted against you now turn their attention to state legislatures that could render the Electoral College irrelevant by 2020. At some point, the constitutionality of the Compact would probably be litigated, but serious scholars believe it would survive.

What Would Hamilton Do?

You can see the irony of your precarious situation. In an unprecedented bipartisan display, the most respected leaders of your own Republican party outlined publicly and repeatedly the dangers that you — their nominee — would pose to America and the world. But the story of the 2016 election is that the people could be trusted. Most voters did not buy your “low intrigue” from someone versed in the “little arts of popularity.” And they reached their decisions, even as FBI Director James Comey, unnamed Bureau leakers of false information, Russian hackers, and Wikileaks distorted the election in your favor. Those clouds will always hang over you.

Dr. Arrn glossed over the fact that on December 19, the Electoral College could still approve the nation’s collective decision and deprive you of the Presidency. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia impose some type of requirement that electors vote in accordance with their states’ individual voter totals. But the penalties for noncompliance typically are insignificant. And in the remaining 21 states — including Pennsylvania — electors are free to vote as they see fit.

Would Alexander Hamilton be among the more than 4 million signatories to a current petition urging electors to do what they believe best for the country, rather than blindly follow their individual states’ voting results? We’ll never know. But you’re making a mistake by inviting a focus on the original motivations for the Electoral College. They work against you now.

OPEN LETTER #1 TO PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP

Posted on November 14, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Dear Mr. President-elect,

Congratulations.

This is the first in a series of open letters that you’re not likely to read. The ultimate goal is simple: accountability. As you speak and act, these letters will try to set the factual record straight in our post-factual world that you now dominate. Your words and deeds will determine the scope and duration of this exercise.

The Responsibility of Attorneys and the Press

I didn’t vote for you, but this isn’t a partisan crusade. Lawyers across the political spectrum are concerned about what you might do as President. We listened with concern to your campaign rhetoric. Repeatedly, you professed disrespect for the rule of law. (Along the way, I wrote about your transgressions here, here, here, here, and here.)

Now we watch and wait for any sign of disquieting conduct matching the words that helped propel you into office. When you err, we will speak. You may say that such vigilance is un-American. It’s not. Holding elected officials accountable to the law and the truth is the essence of democracy.

You’ll start with functional control over two branches of government. Senate confirmation of your Supreme Court nominee will deliver the third. So it becomes the task of those outside your orbit to identify and spotlight your missteps. More than at any time in our nation’s history, attorneys and the press have a special responsibility to remain on high alert.

Open letters like this one will arrive whenever the circumstances require it. Two have already arisen: the false claim that you have a mandate and your early post-election tweets.

The Illusory Mandate

Contrary to the narrative that you and your supporters are pushing, Republicans do not have a mandate to pursue whatever the Trump agenda turns out to be. You benefitted from a disquieting confluence of events and circumstances. And even at that, you lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by the widest margin of any elected President in history.

Start with the FBI. As voters were casting more than 46 million early ballots, FBI Director James Comey’s profound misstep on October 28 compounded his July 5 press conference error in handling the Clinton email investigation. Stated simply, he pushed votes your way.

Four days later, the Bureau used a twitter account that had been dormant for more than a year to release documents relating to the Clinton Foundation. On November 2, Fox News’ Bret Baier aired a false report from FBI sources that there would likely be indictments involving the Clinton Foundation. Two days after that, Baier apologized for that “mistake” and retracted his story.

But as your campaign manager Kellyanne Conway acknowledged to MSNBC’s Brian Williams shortly after Baier’s retraction, “The damage has been done to Hillary Clinton.”

Responding to a post-election report that Clinton thought the FBI’s unprecedented actions had affected the election, Conway did a slick about-face on November 13: “I just can’t believe it’s always somebody else’s fault. Sometimes you just have to take a look in the mirror and reflect on what went wrong.”

The Russian Vote

Likewise, you alone benefitted from Russian hackers and Wikileaks. They put their thumbs on the Trump side of the election scale. The fact that the Russian parliament burst into applause when Vladimir Putin announced your victory should not please you. It should cause you and all American citizens grave concern.

Yet even with all of that help, as well as Republican-sponsored state voter suppression laws in North Carolina, Wisconsin and elsewhere, your opponent beat you by more than 2.5 million votes.

About That Republican Congress

Some voters split their tickets. They were heeding the call of leading Republicans in Congress and elsewhere who shunned you. Outraged at your behavior, concerned about your lack of knowledge and intellectual depth, and fearful of your erratic temperament, they made the case that a Republican Senate was essential to check President Hillary Clinton. Unwittingly, they have now empowered you beyond their wildest fears.

From the standpoint of popular support, you begin your first term from a position of unprecedented weakness. Ironically, you entered politics with a frivolous “birther” claim that questioned the legitimacy of your predecessor’s right to the Oval Office. Yet real shadows hover over yours.

Dubious Tweets

A second circumstance that already requires voices of accountability to speak involves your post-election tweets. Less than 48 hours after your subdued acceptance speech, you responded to nationwide street protests with a two-pronged attack against the dissenters and the media.

“Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

No facts supported your claims. As always, your response to any hint of criticism was to find a scapegoat or a distraction. We’ll be watching for that tendency, too. When you fail to fulfill your most unrealistic campaign promises, the anger of those who voted for you will intensify. In Ohio, when the steel mills don’t fire up again in Youngstown and your border wall doesn’t solve the opioid epidemic in Columbus, will you follow your lifelong impulse to blame someone else?

Continuing Attacks on the Press

On Sunday morning, November 13, you renewed your pre-election attack on The New York Times:

“Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena’.”

That wasn’t true, either. The Times reported a post-election surge in new subscriptions — four times the pre-election rate.

A few hours later, you went after the Times again: “The @nytimes states today that DJT believes “more countries should acquire nuclear weapons.” How dishonest are they. I never said this!”

But you did say it. When Mike Pence denied in his vice-presidential debate that you’d taken such a position, nonpartisan Politifact rated his statement as “Mostly false” and listed all of the instances that you’d said what the Times reported — the first of which was in March 2016 to reporters for The New York Times.

On April 3, 2016, you had this exchange with Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

Trump: “It’s not like, gee whiz, nobody has them. So, North Korea has nukes. Japan has a problem with that. I mean, they have a big problem with that. Maybe they would in fact be better off if they defend themselves from North Korea.”

Wallace: “With nukes?”

Trump: “Including with nukes, yes, including with nukes.”

Most people are too busy with life’s daily demands to scrutinize your torrent of sometimes conflicting words. But many of us will make the time necessary to stand guard against your demonstrated capacity to take advantage of the post-factual world in which we live. No President possesses a mandate to lie without getting caught.

JAMES COMEY AND THE FBI

Posted on November 2, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

I hadn’t planned to write another post until after the November 8 election. But on Tuesday, November 1, lightning struck twice.

First, the FBI used its twitter account to post documents relating to President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich back in 2001. For those who are too young to remember, that presidential action 15 years ago was so controversial that it led prosecutors in the Bush administration to investigate potential criminal wrongdoing. They came up empty.

The second strike came Tuesday evening: the Chicago Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians and sent the World Series to Game 7.

This post concerns the first bolt from the blue.

Beyond Strange

Taken alone, the FBI’s release of the March Rich documents might have seemed relatively innocuous. But it came on the heels of FBI Director James Comey’s unprecedented letter to Congress on Friday, October 28. Contrary to Donald Trump’s subsequent false assertions, Comey was not “reopening” the Bureau’s closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Rather, Comey said only that “the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.”

Then it turned out that the emails in question were on former congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer. Reportedly, the emails were to or from his now-estranged wife, Huma Abedin. Then it turned out that the FBI hadn’t even obtained a search warrant to look at any of those Huma Abedin emails that, to Comey, “appeared to be pertinent.” A judge issued the warrant two days after Comey’s explosive letter. Perhaps the FBI director is clairvoyant.

Backlash

The bipartisan outrage against Comey was fast and furious. More than 100 former prosecutors and high-ranking Justice Department officials in Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter chastising Comey for his breach of longstanding Justice Department guidelines relating both to the confidentiality of investigations generally and, most especially, to any actions that could affect an imminent election.

In fact, The New York Times reported on November 1 that precisely those well-established guidelines stopped the FBI from taking overt actions to pursue its investigation of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The issues involve Manafort’s connections to pro-Russia officials and business leaders in Ukraine. The Times also reported that the FBI likewise delayed activities relating to a Clinton Foundation investigation.

Meanwhile, Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics counsel for George W. Bush, filed a formal complaint that Comey’s letter to Congress had violated the Hatch Act. It outlaws misuse of a public office by, for example, seeking to influencing an election.

Who Is James Comey?

Even Comey’s detractors have expressed admiration for his character and integrity. Perhaps that’s justified. But lawyers and judges know that the appearance of impropriety can be problematic. In that respect and as relates to Comey, some facts alone may speak for themselves. So without additional comment, here are some facts about James Comey.

1985: Graduated with a J.D. from the the University of Chicago Law School and clerked for Judge John Walker of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

1987: After a brief stint as an associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Comey was hired by then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Rudy Giuliani. He was an assistant U.S. Attorney until 1993.

1993-1996: Partner in private practice at McGuire Woods in Richmond, VA.

1996: Deputy special counsel for the Senate Committee investigating the Clintons and Whitewater. Eventually, the process led to appointment of a special prosecutor and President Clinton’s impeachment (for which the Senate acquitted him).

1996-2001: Managing assistant U.S. attorney for Richmond division.

2002-2003: U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where his tasks included supervising the criminal investigation of former President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich.

2003-2005: President George W. Bush’s appointee as deputy attorney general — the number two person at the Justice Department — reporting directly to John Ashcroft. He became known for his standoff over the no-warrant wiretapping program at Ashcroft’s hospital bedside. According to one report of that internecine Republican battle, “Comey rushed to the room of his bedridden boss to physically stop White House officials from trying to get an ailing Ashcroft to reauthorize the program.”

2005-2010: Vice president and general counsel for Lockheed Martin.

2010-2013: Executive at Bridgewater, reported to be the world’s largest hedge fund.

June 21, 2013: President Obama nominates Comey to head the FBI.

July 5, 2016: In a bizarre departure from an investigator’s role, Comey dons his prosecutor hat to announce his recommendation that Hillary Clinton not be indicted for her use of a private email server while Secretary of State. He then offers a similarly unprecedented description of her behavior as, among other things, “extremely careless.”

July 7, 2016: As Congressional Republicans began investigations into Comey’s recommendation, he testifies that he’d been a Republican for most of his adult life, but was no longer a registered member of the GOP.

July-September, 2016: Trump and his surrogates, including Rudy Giuliani, blast Comey for not recommending the indictment of Clinton. Calling the failure a “total outrage,” Giuliani said, “As associate attorney and as Jim Comey’s boss for two or three years, I was very disappointed in him. I think if you read it, it’s logically inconsistent. He contradicts himself at least three times.”

September 28, 2016: For four hours, Comey testifies before the House Oversight Committee, mostly about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and his recommendation not to indict her.

October 3, 2016: FBI agents seize Anthony Weiner’s laptop and learn quickly that they include some Huma Abedin emails.

October 28, 2016: Comey sends his letter to Congress about additional materials that “appear to be pertinent.” Two days later, the FBI obtains a search warrant to see what those emails actually say.

November 1, 2016: The FBI releases documents responsive to earlier Freedom of Information Act requests relating to President Clinton’s 2001 pardon of Marc Rich. When pressed, the official FBI comment was that its release of the Rich documents were posted “automatically and electronically to the FBI’s public reading room in accordance with the law and established procedures.” This happens, the statement said, on a “first-in, first-out” basis.

And the FBI twitter account that announced the release? Until October 30, it had been dormant for more than a year — since October 8, 2015.

To the FBI’s official comment that the timing of the release was a coincidence, CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin commented, “My official response is, ‘Give me a break.'”

I would add this: Sometimes even paranoid persons have real enemies.

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S ATTORNEY GENERAL? — PART 2

Posted on November 1, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Part 1 of this series discussed the possibility that, if Donald Trump wins the election, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie could become his attorney general of the United States. After all, he was the first major Republican presidential candidate to endorse Trump. With Christie’s popularity in his home state dropping to historic lows (now below 30 percent) and term limits foreclosing a run for another term as governor, he had to do something to salvage his political ambitions.

Sure, he didn’t get the vice-presidential nomination that he reportedly craved. But shouldn’t he reap some reward for his remarkable public scenes with Trump? In one, Christie appeared to be physically ill — or a hostage. In another, Trump mocked him to get a cheap laugh.

About That Bridgegate Thing

The prospect of Christie becoming the nation’s top law enforcement officer isn’t funny. The Bridgegate trial has resurrected old questions that a Christie-appointed independent investigator was supposed to answer almost three years ago. It has also raised new ones.

Christie has steadfastly denied having any knowledge about the George Washington Bridge lane closures before or during the 2013 scandal that culminated in criminal charges against his top aides. Some of those aides have now sworn that Christie knew more than he has admitted.

In that respect, they have confirmed Donald Trump’s declaration during a December 2015 Republican primary rally: “He knew about it. He totally knew about it.”

The Four Other Key Players

In a federal courtroom on September 27, 2016, a senior official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (and Christie’s high school classmate), David Wildstein, testified that Christie knew what was happening on the bridge during the days that traffic was backed up for hours. According to Wildstein, so did Bill Stepien (Christie’s then-gubernatorial re-election campaign manager) and Bill Baroni (the governor’s top appointee at the Port Authority, which runs the bridge).

Another courtroom bombshell exploded on October 21, 2016, when Bridget Anne Kelly — who had replaced Stepien as Christie’s deputy chief of staff — testified that on August 12, 2013, she’d told the governor about the contemplated lane closings a month before they occurred.

Someone is lying. Donald Trump cast his vote: the culprit is Christie, the person who now heads his presidential transition team.

The Investigation

I’ve written previously about the independent investigation that was supposed to put all of this to rest almost three years ago. In January 2014, Christie – a former federal prosecutor with eyes on a 2016 presidential bid – tried to contain the growing scandal by appointing a respected attorney to investigate. He chose Randy Mastro, another former prosecutor, who had served as Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s deputy from 1993 to 1998 before returning to the New York office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Mastro’s team included Debra Wong Yang, who had served as U.S. attorney for the central district of California. At a June 2011 event, she introduced Christie as her “very good friend” whom she had “known for ten years” – going back to their time together as federal prosecutors. Yang said he was “the real deal” and “doing a remarkable job as governor.” When Christie took the stage, he recalled how their families vacationed together at the game ranch of a fellow U.S. attorney in Texas.

“We are good and dear friends,” Christie said.

Only two months after the 2014 Gibson Dunn investigation began, Mastro released his final report. It identified Wildstein and Kelly as the Bridgegate villains, both of whom — along with Baroni and Stepien — had refused to speak with investigators.

The Moment

The report discussed briefly a key moment: the conversation that Wildstein said he’d had with Christie and Bill Baroni at a 9/11 memorial service in New York City – two days into the four-day lane closures. According to his attorney, Wildstein told Christie about the lane closures and resulting traffic problems in Fort Lee. Christie said he couldn’t recall any such conversation. The report dismissed Wildstein’s account as not credible.

The investigation was expensive, but not for Christie. Through August 2015, Gibson Dunn billed New Jersey taxpayers $8 million for its work. According to the Times, in December 2015, Debra Wong Yang, “co-hosted a $2,700-per-person fund-raiser in Los Angeles for Christie’s Republican presidential campaign.”

Days of Reckoning

Fast-forward to September 23, 2016, when prosecutors called Wildstein to the witness stand. Using photos showing Christie, Baroni, and Wildstein speaking together at the 9/11 event, Wildstein testified to their conversation. He said that Baroni began by telling the governor in a sardonic tone that “there was a tremendous amount of traffic in Fort Lee” and that Christie would be “very pleased to know” that the Democratic mayor of the city was “very frustrated.” According to Wildstein, Christie laughed at the news. Upon learning that Fort Lee’s mayor was placing urgent phone calls about the situation, Christie said sarcastically, “I imagine he wouldn’t get his calls returned.”

Christie responded immediately to Wildstein’s courtroom testimony.

“All kinds of stuff is going on up in a courtroom in Newark,” he said on September 27, 2016. “I have not and will not say anything different than I’ve been saying since January 2014. No matter what is said up there, I had no knowledge prior to or during these lane realignments.”

Subsequently, Bill Baroni took the stand and offered his version of the 9/11 memorial service conversation with Christie. He said that the photo of the three men laughing might have captured their joking about Governor Andrew Cuomo arriving at the event on a motorcycle with singer Billy Joel.

But then Bridget Anne Kelly testified to having informed Christie about the planned lane closings a month before they occurred in 2013. And she added a kicker: She said that the governor stopped by her office after the 9/11 event, and they discussed the ongoing Fort Lee traffic complaints. She swore that Christie told her that the Port Authority and Wildstein were handling the situation.

The Lesson

The judge instructed the Bridgegate jury that Chistie was among those about whom the jury had heard but would render no decision. Its verdicts can’t resolve the question of whether Christie has been telling the truth about what he knew and when he knew it.

But that open issue is less important than how all of this relates to Donald Trump. He believes Christie is lying. Yet Christie still chairs the Trump presidential transition team. And he could become Trump’s leading candidate for attorney general.

One more twist in the tale: On January 9, 2014, Christie announced that Bill Stepien’s conduct relating to Bridgegate had caused him to “lose confidence in Bill’s judgment,” so he fired him as gubernatorial re-election campaign manager. On August 26, 2016, NBC News reported that the Trump campaign hired Stepien as its national field director.

“I hire only the best people,” Trump says.

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S ATTORNEY GENERAL? — PART 1

Posted on October 25, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Last week, I discussed Trump’s threats to sue his critics and the possibility that, when it came actually to filing a lawsuit, his lawyers’ overriding duties of professional responsibility became a restraining influence. Even so, the threats themselves — like those Trump reiterated on October 22 to sue any and all accusers who have or will come forward to confirm his boasts about being a sexual predator — have a chilling impact. If an accuser with a truthful story remains quiet, Trump wins without firing a shot or paying a filing fee.

Anyone who doubts the effect of even an idle Trump threat should consider the American Bar Association’s recent actions. The New York Times reports:

“Alarmed by Donald J. Trump’s record of filing lawsuits to punish and silence his critics, a committee of media lawyers at the American Bar Association commissioned a report on Mr. Trump’s litigation history. The report concluded that Mr. Trump was a ‘libel bully’ who had filed many meritless suits attacking his opponents and had never won in court. But the bar association refused to publish the report, citing ‘the risk of the A.B.A. being sued by Mr. Trump.'”

The Media Law Research Center posted the report.

If candidate Trump can achieve that type of chilling effect on the nation’s largest professional association of attorneys, imagine the impact of a President Trump who would select the country’s top law enforcement officer, namely, the attorney general of the United States.

Even Worse Threats

“You’d be in jail.”

Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton to deliver that warning during their second debate. Moments earlier, he’d provided the context.

“If I win,” he said, “I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”

As Trump landed another blow against the rule of law, his supporters in the audience howled, “Lock her up” — a standard chant at Trump rallies.

The Gambit

The process for appointing a special counsel doesn’t give any president the power Trump says he’d wield. The last president to have any influence over a special prosecutor was Richard Nixon. Esteemed Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox had the job, and it didn’t end well for Nixon or the country.

When Cox subpoenaed the president’s Oval Office tape recordings, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson refused, so Nixon fired Richardson. When his successor, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, likewise refused to discharge Cox, Nixon fired him, too. After Solicitor General Robert Bork was sworn in to replace Ruckelshaus, he executed Nixon’s command.

Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Nixon to release the tapes. Nixon’s own voice proved his personal involvement in efforts to cover-up the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters – the Watergate break-in. The incriminating evidence led the House of Representatives to issue articles of impeachment. When it became clear that fellow Republicans in the Senate would provide enough votes to convict him, Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign his office.

The “Saturday Night Massacre” that cost Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Cox their jobs led Congress to enact the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 that removed the president from the independent prosecutor process. In 1999, the legislation lapsed under a sunset provision. Today, the Code of Federal Regulations – which has the force of law – governs. The decision to appoint a “special counsel” to conduct investigations or prosecutions of particular matters on behalf of the United States belongs to the attorney general, not the president.

The Executioner

Nixon’s appointees, Richardson and Ruckelshaus, lost their jobs because they refused to do Nixon’s bidding. Trump’s attorney general would have to embrace his illegal post-election assault on a political adversary. To fulfill his banana republic-like promise to imprison a political opponent, Trump would need someone who bowed unquestioningly to his wishes.

Who might use the power of high office for such retribution? There’s an obvious candidate: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. After all, at the Republican National Convention, he prosecuted the case against Hillary Clinton and invited the audience to roar, “Guilty.”

As for a willingness to use political power for payback, Trump has a favorable view of Christie, too.

“He knew about it,” Trump said during a Republican presidential primary rally in December 2015. “He totally knew about it.”

During a December 2013 news conference, Christie had staked out a different position: “I didn’t know anything about it.”

The “he” was Christie. The “it” was Bridgegate.

The Scandal

On September 9, 2013 – the first day of the school year in Fort Lee, New Jersey – commuters to New York City found themselves in a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge. Without advance notice to local officials, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reduced from three to one the number of lanes and tollbooths available to vehicles accessing the bridge from Fort Lee.

Even by New York standards, the resulting gridlock on the world’s busiest bridge was monumental. Some motorists were stranded for hours. Public health and safety became serious concerns. Was it just a coincidence that the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee had refused to endorse Christie for a second term as governor?

As the debacle developed, what did Governor Christie know and when did he know it? Senator Howard Baker had made a similar question famous during the Watergate hearings, and it still resonated.

The next installment in this series will take a deeper dive into the criminal trial that has inflicted significant collateral damage on Christie — the head of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team.

TRUMP’S THREATS

Posted on October 18, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Here’s the most important line from Melania Trump’s October 17 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper:

“Sometimes I say I have two boys at home — I have my young son and I have my husband.”

One of them is running for President of the United States. He loves winning. And he loves to blame anyone else — everyone else — when he isn’t.

Two months ago, polls following Trump’s verbal war with a gold star family showed him losing the election badly. As I wrote at the time, his response was to complain that the election system was rigged. But as his poll numbers rebounded in September, Trump’s cries of “rigging” became more subdued.

After Trump’s disastrous first debate and the revelation of his own vile behavior toward women, his poll numbers plummeted again. And so, once again, Trump rails against a system that, he claims, must be rigged against him. Otherwise he’d be winning.

He pursued a similar strategy when it looked like might not have enough delegates to win the Republican nomination. (Remember when he said there would be riots if he didn’t get it?) When a process makes him the winner, he embraces it; when he fears failure, he denounces it.

This time, Trump has merged his baseless election-rigging rhetoric with his ongoing assault on freedom of the press. For Trump, scorched earth apparently includes destroying two essential pillars of American democracy: a free press and public confidence in the election process itself.

A recent Politco poll suggests that Trump’s message is getting through: 41 percent of voters think that the November election could be “stolen” from him.

The Relentless Assault On The Press

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has threatened to sue journalists and the media more than a dozen times. Here’s a small sample:

— On April 27, 2016, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Cay Johnston later tweeted, Trump personally called and threatened to sue him “if he doesn’t like what I report” in discussing Johnston’s book about Trump.

— On May 18, 2016, Trump told reporters for The Washington Post: “I will be bringing more libel suits…maybe against you folks.”

— On July 20, 2016, The New Yorker reported that Trump had threatened to sue his former ghostwriter Tony Schwartz for supposedly “defamatory statements” Schwartz had made to Jane Mayer about the book he “co-wrote” with Trump, The Art of the Deal.

— When The New York Times reported on women claiming that they had been victims of Trump’s sexual assaults, he threatened to sue.

Responsible Lawyers

Why hasn’t Trump followed through? After all, he’s not reluctant to litigate. In June, USA Today reported that Trump and his businesses have been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits.

And Trump has plenty of advisers with JDs — including Kellyanne Conway (George Washington University, ’92), who replaced Paul Manafort (Georgetown ’74) as campaign manager, senior adviser Boris Epshteyn (Georgetown ’07), and ubiquitous surrogate Kayleigh McEnany (Harvard ’16), among others. So what’s holding him back?

In mid-September, Trump tweeted, “My lawyers want to sue the failing @nytimes so badly for irresponsible intent. I said no (for now), but they are watching. Really disgusting.”

As Trump himself might say in response to that tweet, “I don’t think so.”

A more plausible reason is the restraining influence of Trump’s outside attorneys. Although Trump and his surrogates with law degrees can say whatever they want, litigators marching into a courtroom cannot. A trial attorney’s professional responsibilities transcend the whims of a client. Trump may think that he’s beyond the rules applying to everyone else. But his attorneys know they are bound by court requirements governing all lawyers’ conduct. And they risk serious sanctions for violating them.

A Lawyer’s Duty

One of Trump’s outside attorneys, Marc Kasowitz, signed the recent demand letters to the Times about Trump’s tax returns and sex scandals. Attorneys can send letters threatening lots of things. But when a controversy moves into a courtroom, it’s a whole new ball game.

Kasowitz is an accomplished and respected trial lawyer. Appropriately, he represents clients zealously – and Donald Trump is no exception. Even so, when it comes to lawsuits, even the best attorneys face two immutable constraints: the facts and the law. Most states have rules embodying the principles of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11. It provides that by signing a court filing, an attorney certifies that “after reasonable inquiry” that there is factual and legal support for the assertions it contains.

For Trump’s latest threats against the Times, those obstacles are so great that noted attorney Theodore Boutrous, Jr. called Kasowitz’s demand letter a “stunt.” Boutrous suggests that Trump’s real aim is to chill aggressive reporting into his activities.

Rules? What Rules?

The legal restrictions governing the attorneys who would file a Trump lawsuit also explain his February outburst:

“I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money… We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”

At one level, such bombast reveals Trump’s ignorance. Libel is a state-law tort constrained by First Amendment principles. A president’s views don’t figure in its application. At another level, Trump’s comments reveal a deeper danger.

Conservative law Professor Ilya Somin of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University notes, “There are very few serious constitutional thinkers who believe public figures should be able to use libel as indiscriminately as Trump seems to think they should. He poses a serious threat to the press and the First Amendment.”

Baseless Conspiracy Theories

In his latest assault on the press, Trump asserts that the media is part of a larger conspiracy to rig the election. It extends, Trump claims, to rampant voter fraud that could rob him of victory. Vice presidential candidate Mike Pence tried to explain away Trump’s incendiary stance as referring only what he claims to be media bias.

But in his tweets, Trump himself set Pence and everyone else straight about his meaning:

“The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD.”

And: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!”

The evidence refutes Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud. As I noted previously, Professor Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School – Los Angeles tracked all claims of alleged voter ID fraud and found a grand total of 31 credible allegations – out of more than one billion ballots cast. But facts have never mattered to a Republican presidential campaign that has become the worst reality TV show ever.

As Benjamin Franklin left Independence Hall following the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman approached him.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got,” she asked, “a republic or a monarchy?”

“A republic,” Franklin answered, “if you can keep it.”

On November 8, we’ll find out.

TRUMP’S TAX RETURNS: PART 2 — FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

Posted on October 11, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

At an October 10 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump held up a document. Kurt Eichenwald describes what happened next:

“He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called ‘sleazy Sidney.’ ‘This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. ‘I have to tell you this.’ And then he read the words from my [Kurt Eichenwald’s October 21, 2015 Newsweek] article. “‘He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. ‘This just came out a little while ago.'”

As Eichenwald explains, the words weren’t Blumenthal’s. Trump read from a distorted summary of Eichenwald’s 10,000-word Newsweek article attached to an email to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. It resulted from a Russian disinformation campaign tied to a recent Wikileaks release. A Russian-controlled news agency — Sputnik — reported the false story.

Eichenwald asks, “So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?”

“This is not funny,” Eichenwald continues. “This is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth.”

Which Takes Us Back to Trump’s Income Tax Returns

Compared to Trump’s boast about being a sexual predator, his admission in the second debate that he paid no federal income taxes for years seems almost innocuous. So why does he still refuse to release his returns? Eichenwald’s latest revelation adds more evidence that the answer may be Russia. Like all things Trump, his words and deeds fit a pattern.

“He is not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand,” Trump declared in August. “He’s not going into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.”

“Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos corrected him immediately, referring to Vladimir Putin’s illegal seizure of Crimea.

“OK,” Trump answered. “Well, he’s there in a certain way.”

Worse Than Ignorance?

A month after Trump’s declaration about Putin in Ukraine, he made what Trump’s campaign later called a mistake. Trump appeared on Russian state-sponsored television to criticize America. Meanwhile, he has praised Vladimir Putin continuously: “If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.”

Never mind that Putin is a cruel dictator who crushes dissent, makes a mockery of human rights, and orders the invasion of sovereign countries. Political opponents and critical journalists disappear or get assassinated. And there’s growing evidence that he’s trying to influence the election in Trump’s favor.

During the first presidential debate, Trump reacted defensively to Hillary Clinton’s concerns about Russians hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s computers. Rejecting the U.S. law enforcement consensus that Russian intelligence agents were behind that cyberattack, Trump said:

“She keeps saying ‘Russia, Russia, Russia,’ and maybe it was. It could be Russia, but it could be China, could also be lots of other people. It could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

And at the second debate, he persisted: “[A]nytime anything wrong happens, they like to say the Russians are — she doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking. But they always blame Russia.”

He knows better. Back in mid-August, Trump and his team received intelligence briefings that directly contradict his recent statements. And 48 hours before the second debate, the intelligence community and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint statement that pointed directly to the Kremlin:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations… We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Why does Trump ignore undisputed evidence, defend Russia, and praise Putin? Here’s one possible answer: the personal financial self-interest of Trump and his top advisers.

Paul Manafort and Ukraine

When Georgetown Law School graduate Paul Manafort took over as campaign manager, the selection seemed to be the harbinger of an extreme makeover. Manafort would attempt for Trump what he’d accomplished for Ukrainian’s former president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort resurrected from disgrace to that nation’s highest office in only five years.

But Manafort’s ties to Ukraine’s pro-Putin former president led to accusations of secret cash payments to Manafort’s consulting firm. Then The Washington Post reported that the Trump campaign worked behind the scenes on a Republican convention platform plank that gutted the GOP’s longstanding support for Ukrainian resistance to the Russian-led intervention. Finally, the Associated Press reported that Manafort’s firm hired Washington, DC lobbyists to influence the American press and U.S. government officials on behalf of the pro-Putin Ukrainian Embassy. The cascading revelations of pro-Russian activity led to Manafort’s resignation.

Boris Epshteyn

After Manafort departed, another Georgetown Law graduate, Boris Epshteyn, became the most visible surrogate defending Trump’s continuing admiration for Russia’s top tyrant. Epshteyn was born in Russia and emigrated to the United States in 1993. Twenty years later, when New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg died in 2013, Epshteyn wrote,

“[I]t was the Lautenberg Amendment that allowed my family and me to emigrate to the United States of America in 1993. The Lautenberg Amendment, passed in 1990, loosened the restriction on refugee states and thereby allowed for tens of thousands of Jews like me from the former U.S.S.R. to come to America. The legislation was also applied to religious minorities from Iran, Vietnam and Burma, as well as other countries.”

Now that he is safely in the United States, Epshteyn supports a candidate who proposed a religious ban to keep others out. After receiving his JD in 2007, Epshteyn went to work at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCoy. According to his LinkedIn website page, a Russian theme has permeated his activities:

— June 2007 to present (overlapping with his time at Milbank from October 2007 to May 2009): Principal for Strategy International, providing “consulting and liaising services for domestic and international transactions with a focus on Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union.”

— June 2009 – July 2013: Managing director of business and legal affairs for West America Securities Corp. His duties were to “originate and locate funding for diverse domestic and international transactions, including private placements, public equity/debt offerings and mergers and acquisitions transactions.”

— July 2013 to present: Managing director of business and legal affairs for TGP Securities, Inc. In that position, he moderated an October 2013 panel discussion for a conference titled, “Invest in Moscow!”

In August 2016, Epshteyn became a senior adviser to the Trump-Pence campaign on “media, communications and foreign policy.” If Epshteyn is the important foreign policy adviser that he claims to be, it explains some of Trump’s bizarre denial about Putin.

Whose Party Line?

“First of all,” Epshteyn told a CNN interviewer on July 31 . “Russia did not seize Crimea. We can talk about the conflict that happened between Ukraine and the Crimea…But there was no seizure by Russia. That’s an incorrect statement, characterization, of what happened.”

That’s in line with Trump’s statement to George Stephanopoulos that Putin “is not going into Ukraine.” Observers dismissed Trump’s comment as a gaffe, but it’s the Kremlin’s position. And it’s blatantly false. The international community has condemned Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. Period.

Like Trump, Epshteyn also points to Putin’s 82 percent approval rating as proof that Putin is a strong leader. But as Tom Brokaw observed on the September 11 edition of Meet the Press, “He’s not saying the other 18 percent are on their way to a gulag somewhere.”

All Roads Lead To Trump’s Tax Returns

Trump’s tax returns should confirm what he has now admitted publicly: that he hasn’t owed any federal income tax for years. But a far more sinister explanation for his unwillingness to release the returns is that they could complete a picture of Trump’s business connections to Russia that journalists are piecing together.

David Cay Johnston’s August investigation reveals that Russians are partners with Trump in many American projects: “Trump has tried at least five times to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, including efforts he made during his 2013 trip there. His name is on a 47-story building in Georgia, formerly part of the Soviet empire… Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008 that ‘in terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.'”

Kurt Eichenwald — the same reporter who revealed Russia’s disinformation effort relating to his 2015 article — published a September analysis in Newsweek: “Hoping to start its branding business in Russia, the Trump Organization registered the Trump name in 2008 as a trademark for projects in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi… If the company sold its brand in Russia while Trump was in the White House, the world could be faced with the astonishing sight of hotels and office complexes going up in downtown Moscow with the name of the American president emblazoned in gold atop the buildings.”

Legal Eagles

Richard Painter and Norman Eisen are former chief ethics attorneys for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively. Their op-ed for The Washington Post listed the numerous conflicts that would make a Trump presidency “ethically compromised.” Among the most serious are his family organization’s undisclosed financial ties to Russia, China, India, South Korea, and Turkey.

Labeling Trump’s actual or apparent conflicts “as obscure, profound, and dangerous,” they conclude: “The ethics lawyer who would have President Trump as his or her client would face a far more daunting task than either of us — or any of our colleagues in recent years — has ever confronted.”

“Conflict-of-Interest Laws, You’re Fired!”

How would President Trump resolve the massive conflicts that haven’t been disclosed fully to voters? However he chose. All of those elaborate ethics laws and rules applicable to cabinet members and other high-level government officials don’t apply to the president.

As Norman Eisen elsewhere observes, “Because the President of the United States is the single most consequential decision maker on the planet, Congress has decided his hands shouldn’t be tied on any issue because of conflicts of interest over any potential financial or personal gain.”

In September, Kurt Eichenwald concluded, “Never before has an American candidate for president had so many financial ties with American allies and enemies, and never before has a business posed such a threat to the United States. If Donald Trump wins this election and his company is not immediately shut down or forever severed from the Trump family, the foreign policy of the United States of America could well be for sale.”

The Russians have chosen their candidate for president of the United States. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

TRUMP’S TAX RETURNS: PART I — INFERENCES AND EVIDENCE

Posted on September 28, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

[NOTE: On Friday, October 7, I’ll be appearing at the Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute’s “Law Firm Leaders Forum” in New York City. Our panel’s topic is “Long Day’s Journey Into Night: The Evolving Law Firm Partnership and Strategic Models.” Now, on to more important matters…]

Four months ago, I wrote that Donald Trump’s excuses for refusing to release his tax returns were silly. He said he was “under audit,” but his campaign had released a letter from his lawyers at Morgan Lewis & Bockius confirming that the IRS had closed its examination for years prior to 2008 “without assessment or payment, on a net basis, of any deficiency.”

Presumption: Trump Paid Little or No Federal Taxes

If the pending audit is an issue, why wasn’t he releasing returns through 2008? There was no good answer to that one. So in a September 14 interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Donald Trump, Jr. offered a new explanation:

“Because he’s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create … financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would distract from [his father’s] main message.”

(The next morning, Trump Jr. made an unfortunate reference to “gas chambers.” Five days later, he compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles, sprinkled with a few “that could kill you.”)

Eight hours before the first Presidential debate, Republican Congressman Chris Collins came up with an equally absurd reason for Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns:

“He does not want to give his competitors the advantage of knowing the money he makes or doesn’t make in every partnership he’s involved in… You don’t disclose that kind of information to competitors. That is bad business.”

For someone seeking the Presidency, that explanation is idiotic. In fact, the argument is so ridiculous that Trump himself gutted it during the debate, when he pledged to release his returns upon completion of the current IRS audit. The truth is that — win or lose — Trump will never release his tax returns. If the pendency of an audit mattered, he would have released his pre-2008 returns long ago.

Irresistible Inference from Limited Evidence: Trump Paid Little or Federal No Federal Taxes

In May, I suggested that Trump’s reluctance could stem from the fact that, like many real estate developers who can utilize favorable rules relating to that business, he probably has paid relatively little, if any, federal taxes for decades. In August, James B. Stewart of The New York Times picked up that baton and ran with it.

Paying little or no tax, Stewart notes, was consistent with Trump’s “returns from the late 1970s, which he filed with the New Jersey Casino Control Commission when applying for a casino license in 1981. Mr. Trump reported losses and paid no federal income tax in 1978 and 1979 and paid only modest sums — a total of less than $75,000 — for the prior three years.”

Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston wrote in The Daily Beast that Trump also paid no income tax in 1984, citing a New York State Division of Tax Appeals ruling.

More Evidence That Trump Paid No Taxes

During the first Presidential debate, Hillary Clinton pressed the issue again. Trump took the bait — and then some.

CLINTON: “Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.”

TRUMP (in one of his 25 interruptions of Clinton): “That makes me smart.”

In the law, Trump’s statement is called an admission. In a courtroom, the trier of fact would hear it. Admissions are the most damning form of evidence against a party. Juries weigh them heavily in deciding contested issues of fact.

Later in the debate, Trump interrupted Clinton again:

CLINTON: “And maybe because you haven’t paid any federal income tax for a lot of years.” [APPLAUSE] “And the other thing I think is important…”

TRUMP: “It would be squandered, too, believe me.”

That’s another admission. After the debate, an NBC reporter followed up directly with Trump in the “spin room,” and he dodged the question.

Conclusion: There’s More

“So if he’s paid zero,” Clinton said, “that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health. And I think probably he’s not all that enthusiastic about having the rest of our country see what the real reasons are, because it must be something really important, even terrible, that he’s trying to hide.”

What could that something terrible be? Clinton offered examples.

“First, maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is. Second, maybe he’s not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don’t know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks.”

Trump responded in a bizarre fashion. He offered to release a list of his banks, and said he that he’ll release his tax returns as soon as Clinton releases her 33,000 deleted emails — an obvious impossibility.

“So it’s negotiable,” moderator Lester Holt suggested, referring to the release of Trump’s returns.

“No, it’s not negotiable,” Trump responded, quickly backing away from his meaningless bluff.

Why does Trump fear transparency in a way that distinguishes him from every presidential candidate in the last four decades? Because, as Trump himself might say, there’s something there. And that something may go well beyond Clinton’s checklist of possibilities.

One reason that Donald Trump refuses to release his tax returns could be the most important of all to voters. In my next post, I’ll discuss it. Here’s a hint: the title of that installment will be “From Russia With Love.”

A CULTURE THAT MARGINALIZES RAPE

Posted on September 12, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Brock Turner is out of jail. Santa Clara, California County Judge Aaron Persky is fighting to keep his job. And Donald Trump is on the loose. All result from a culture that marginalizes rape.

The Stanford Rape Case

At the time of his crime, Turner was a Stanford student-athlete from Dayton, Ohio. The police report of January 18, 2015 describes in graphic detail the events resulting in his conviction.

At around one o’clock on Sunday morning, two graduate students were cycling on a path behind two houses on the Stanford University campus, when they noticed Turner and a woman on the ground having sex. But the woman appeared to be unconscious. As they got off their bikes and approached Turner, the first witness yelled, “Hey.”

Turner stood up and ran.

One of the cyclists chased, caught, and tackled Turner. Minutes later, the police arrived. As they interviewed one of the cyclists, he broke down and cried while describing the horrific incident he’d witnessed. The victim remained unconscious and curled in a fetal position. Paramedics took her to the hospital, where she was unresponsive for three hours. After regaining consciousness, she had no recollection of Turner or the assault.

The report notes that when the police questioned Turner, he said that he’d met the victim at a party that evening. He’d consumed seven cans of beer and two swigs of whiskey before kissing her. Then, he said, the two went outside, wound up on the ground, and he fondled her. He said he was having a good time with the victim, who seemed to be enjoying herself.

The Trial and Sentencing

When Turner took the witness stand at his March 2016 trial, he showed the opposite of remorse. He said the victim had consented to everything that happened. She was on the ground because she had fallen down. The bicyclists attacked him for unknown reasons.

A unanimous jury convicted him on all charges. In various statements included in the pre-sentencing probation report, Turner found plenty of culprits to blame.

Alcohol: “Being drunk, I just couldn’t make the best decisions and neither could she.”

Peer pressure: “One needs to recognize the influence that peer pressure and the attitude of having to fit in can have on someone.”

College culture: “I know I can impact and change people’s attitudes towards the culture surrounded by binge drinking and sexual promiscuity that protrudes through what people think is at the core of being a college student… I want to demolish the assumption that drinking and partying are what make up a college lifestyle.”

The defense’s pre-sentencing memorandum persisted in a bizarre variation of the consent theme that the jury had rejected: “[N]o one can pinpoint exactly when the victim went from being conscious to being unconscious.”

As he decided what to do, Judge Persky must have suffered through a period of intense cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, he had been captain of Stanford men’s lacrosse team. On the other hand, his campaign biography for election to the bench in 2002 boasted, “[I am] a criminal prosecutor for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, where I now prosecute sex crimes and hate crimes… In addition, I serve as an Executive Committee Member of the Support Network for Battered Women.”

Brock Turner’s victim sent an eloquent 12-page letter to the judge. She complained that probation would be “a soft timeout, a mockery of the seriousness of his assaults, and of the consequences of the pain I have been forced to endure.”

Turner could have received 14 years in prison. Judge Persky sentenced him to six months in the county jail. Public outrage followed. A petition to recall him has collected more than 1.3 million signatures. The Santa Clara County district attorney expressed publicly his lack of confidence in Persky and requested transfer of another sexual assault case to a different judge. A week before Turner’s release on September 2, Persky sought reassignment to the civil division.

Assessing the Damage

The economic modeling for this situation is straightforward. At a micro level, a criminal sentence is the price that the perpetrator pays for his or her wrongdoing — although the victim doesn’t receive anything of value in return.

The first step is the probability of detection and arrest. Two out of three sexual assaults go unreported. On college campuses, it’s worse: four out of five.

The next step is the likelihood of conviction. In Turner’s case, the victim’s letter describes in detail the hellish experience of pursuing a sexual assault charge through trial. That’s one reason only 13 out of 1,000 sexual assaults get referred to prosecutors, and only seven lead to a felony conviction.

The final step is the sentence. At a macro level, a prison sentence reflects the severity with which society views an offense.Time off for good behavior cut Turner’s jail time in half.

At Turner’s June 2 hearing, the victim read a condensed version of her 7,000-word letter to the judge. It included her feelings after a post-attack shower:

“I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it. I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.”

Which Takes Us To Trump

Five days after Brock Turner’s September 2 release, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump reaffirmed his 2013 tweet (the misspelling was Trump’s):

“26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”

“It is a correct tweet,” he told NBC interviewer Matt Lauer. “There are many people who think that that’s absolutely correct.”

Trump rambled on — complete with factual misstatements — to avoid the obvious implications of his original tweet, namely, that merely putting men and women together sets the scene for inevitable sexual assault. Rather than challenge Trump on his offensive premise, Lauer allowed him to dissemble without interruption.

Another line in the letter from Turner’s victim to Judge Persky connects the cultural dots from the Stanford case to Donald Trump’s tweet:

“The seriousness of rape has to be communicated clearly,” she wrote, “and we should not create a culture that suggests we learn that rape is wrong through trial and error.”

Unfortunately, that culture already exists. Trump’s full-throated defense of a tweet for which he refuses to express remorse embodies and emboldens it.

BIG LAW RESISTS THE ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY

Posted on August 24, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Call them unsung heroes.

When attorneys in big law firms get things right, they deserve more attention than they receive. Recently, some of them have won important victories in the profession’s noblest pursuit: protecting our republic. And they’re not getting paid anything to do it.

Start with North Carolina. On July 29, a unanimous court of appeals threw out that state’s voter ID law. In an 83-page opinion, the court wrote that the law had targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.”

Behind that monumental win was an enormous investment of money and manpower — all of it pro bono. Daniel Donovan led a team of lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis LLP through two trials over a four-week period. More than fifty witnesses testified. After losing in the trial court — which issued a 479-page opinion denying relief — the plaintiffs appealed. On July 29, they won. Think of it as Kirkland & Ellis’s multi-million dollar contribution to democracy.

On, Wisconsin!

The same day that the court of appeals threw out North Carolina’s unconstitutional voter ID law, a federal judge in Madison invalidated Wisconsin’s effort to disenfranchise African Americans and Latinos. Big law firm partner Bobbie Wilson at Perkins Coie LLP was at the center of that effort. A nine-day trial and more than 45 witnesses (including six experts) culminated in Judge James B. Peterson’s 119-page ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.

On August 22, the seventh circuit court of appeals denied the request of Governor Scott Walker’s administration to stay Judge Peterson’s ruling.

North Dakota

Three days later, Richard de Bodo of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP won a challenge to North Dakota’s voter ID laws. The targets of that legislation were Native Americans.

Like similar statutes enacted throughout the country since 2010, voter ID laws in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and North Dakota were products of a Republican-controlled legislature and governorship. The real motivation behind such restrictions on a fundamental right is as ugly as it is obvious.

Fighting Against the Demographic Tide of History

In 2014, the Brennan Justice Center noted that North Carolina and Wisconsin were in select company: “Of the 11 states with the highest African-American turnout in 2008, 7 have new restrictions in place: Mississippi (73.1 percent), South Carolina (72.5), Wisconsin (70.5), Ohio (70.0), Georgia (68.1), North Carolina (68.1), and Virginia (68.1).”

Of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth between 2000 and 2010, North Carolina was one of nine that made it harder to vote. The others were South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, Mississippi, South Dakota, Georgia, and Virginia.

Rigged Elections? Yes, But in Whose Favor?

Now that the Republican nominee for President of the United States is pushing a dangerous and destructive new theme, the battle to vote has now assumed a great significance.

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged,” Donald Trump warned at a rally in Columbus, Ohio on August 1, right after the North Carolina federal appeals court ruled.

That evening he told an interviewer: “I’m telling you, November 8, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”

Dedicated attorneys — especially those in big firms willing to donate enormous resources to the cause — have worked hard to protect the right of every eligible person to vote. If they hadn’t, then the North Carolina legislature might, indeed, have rigged the election in a key swing state that President Obama had won. But that’s not what Trump meant, was it?

No, he sees a different enemy.

“[P]eople are going to walk in, they are going to vote 10 times maybe. Who knows?” he said in an August 2 interview.

He now has a website page: “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election.” Such whining is actually much more than that. It’s a campaign tactic uniting two sinister and pervasive themes: racial division and attacks on the rule of law.

Facts Don’t Matter

Trump began stoking fear and division with a promise to build a wall to keep out Mexicans, whom he called rapists and drug dealers. He then coupled it with a “deportation force” to “round ’em up,” sending 11 million illegal immigrants “back where they came from.”

Then he professed ignorance about David Duke. (“I don’t know anything about David Duke… I know nothing about white supremacists.”) Before long, he unleashed hostility toward “Mexican” Judge Gonzalo Curiel. After scaring people, it was a short step for him to becoming their self-professed “law-and-order” savior.

Now he is wrapping his message in a long-discredited canard. Defenders of unconstitutional voter ID laws persist in fomenting “election fraud” paranoia, even though it lacks any factual basis. Professor Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles tracked all claims of alleged voter ID fraud and found a grand total of 31 credible allegations – out of more than one billion ballots cast.

In the North Dakota case, Judge Daniel L. Hovland wrote, “There is a total lack of any evidence to show voter fraud has ever been a problem in North Dakota.”

Likewise, in the Wisconsin case, the judge ruled. “The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities. To put it bluntly, Wisconsin’s strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease.”

And in the North Carolina case, a unanimous court of appeals concluded, “The record thus makes obvious that the ‘problem’ the majority in the General Assembly sought to remedy was emerging support for the minority party.”

Mob Mentality

The cry of phantom election fraud feeds Trump’s narratives, while taking them a perilous step farther: de-legitimizing an election that polls now show Trump is losing “hugely.” As his prospects sag, his vile rhetoric escalates.

Shortly after an August 10 poll showed Trump trailing in Pennsylvania by double digits, he went to that state and told an Altoona crowd, “Go down to certain areas and watch and study and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times… The only way we can lose, in my opinion – I really mean this, Pennsylvania – is if cheating goes on… ”

Never mind that Pennsylvania hasn’t voted for a Republican Presidential nominee since 1988. Even an incumbent, George H.W. Bush, couldn’t carry it in 1992.

Trump then continued waving his red herring: “Without voter ID there’s no way you’re going to be able to check in properly.”

Scorched Earth

The real danger to democracy isn’t election rigging or cheating. It’s Donald J. Trump. De-legitimization – the ultimate ad hominem attack on a process to undermine its outcome – is a standard tactic from his deal-making playbook. When it appeared that he might not arrive at the Republican convention with enough delegates to secure the nomination, he warned about “riots,” if someone else won.

Never mind the rules; they’re for losers. Anyone fearing that Trump will win should fear more that he won’t.

Trump knows that facts don’t matter because – true or false – the branding sticks. For example, there was never any evidence to support Trump’s wild “birther” claims about President Obama in 2011. But five years later, 20 percent of Americans still believe — today — that he was born outside the United States.

Some people will always believe anything Trump says, even as he contradicts himself from one moment to the next. His infamous line was pretty accurate: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Perhaps he is discovering that “any” was an overstatement. But his de-legitimization strategy worked against most Republican politicians, who folded like cheap suits rather than break from the man-baby who would be king. Now the stakes are higher. His targets are the rule of law, the essence of democracy, and the peaceful transfer of Presidential power that occurs every four years.

The Real Losers

The eventual victims of Trump’s scorched earth approach will be the American people. If, as with his false “birther” claims five years ago, 20 percent of voters – about half of his current supporters – believe that Trump’s defeat results from a “rigged” election that “cheaters” won, the collateral damage to the county will be profound.

Donald Trump lives in a simple binary world of winners and losers – and he’s all about winning at any cost. He measures success in dollars. His latest tactic makes democracy itself the loser. Try putting a price on that. And thank some big law firms and their attorneys who are willing to make the investment required to stand in his way.

TRUMP AND THE RULE OF LAW – MILITARY EDITION

Posted on August 17, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the fourth in what has become an endless series on Donald Trump’s continuing attacks on the rule of law. Those attacks seem to work for him in one respect. Every new one displaces an old one. He’s now relying on “Trump fatigue” — a condition that causes voters to say, essentially, “What stupid thing did he say today?”

Then they discount his offensive, false, or incoherent remark du jour. But his comments over time create a more complete picture and — in the case of the military — a recipe for disaster.

Recipe: Start With An Obnoxious Comment That People Forgive…

A year ago, Senator John McCain learned that he wasn’t a war hero after all.

“I like people who weren’t captured,” Donald Trump said on July 18, 2015, when asked about McCain’s critical comments about him.

He probably thought he was being witty. But it was quite a statement coming from someone who had avoided military service in Vietnam because of a still ambiguous medical condition. Trump said it was minor bone spurs in a foot. Which one? He couldn’t recall. Maybe both.

But don’t worry. His physician assured us in December, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

Dr. Harold N. Bornstein didn’t describe how his physical examination of Trump compared with those he’d performed on Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower.

Add Bigoted Cruelty That Troubled Some…

Having relegated McCain to the “loser” category in Trump’s binary world, he then revealed more completely his attitude about military sacrifice. U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan received the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart for saving the lives of fellow soldiers in Iraq. At the Democratic convention, Khan’s father delivered a tribute to his fallen son. Trump lashed out, invoking stereotypes and generalizations to reinforce his anti-Muslim campaign theme.

“His wife,” Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopolous, “if you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me, but plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet and it looked like she had nothing to say.”

Mix In Lawlessness That Has Been Lost In A Crowd Of Outrageous Comments…

Between those July 2015 and July 2016 bookends came a more disturbing episode. During the March 3, 2016 Republican debate, Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Trump about his advocacy of torture. If he made good on his threats, he would be ordering the military to commit illegal acts.

What if they refused?

“They won’t refuse. They’re not gonna refuse me. Believe me.”

“But they’re illegal,” Baier insisted.

“I’m a leader, I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”

Stir In Disrespect For The Military Generally…

Soldiers such as retired four-star General John Allen won’t do it. He made that clear in his address to the Democratic convention, and Trump didn’t like it one bit. Within minutes, he tweeted, “General John Allen, who I never met but spoke against me last night, failed badly in his fight against ISIS. His record = BAD.”

Then Trump followed up personally at a rally in Denver.

“They had a general named John Allen. I never met him, and he got up and started talking about Trump, Trump, Trump… You know who he is? He’s a failed general. He was the general fighting ISIS. I would say he hasn’t done so well, right?”

Earlier, Trump had declared, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.”

Then he claimed that President Obama had “founded” ISIS. For the next two days, he and his media surrogates defended the falsehood as literally true. Then he said he was being sarcastic — “but not that sarcastic, to be honest with you.”

Whatever his intent, the impact has been clear. Within days, Hezbollah’s leader was using Trump’s absurd charge against America. Hassan Nasrallah is a Shiite backer of Syria’s brutal Assad regime, an ISIS foe, and a critic of the U.S. position calling for Assad to step down.

“This is not simple speech,” Nasrallah said in a speech to followers. “This is an American presidential candidate. This was spoken on behalf of the American Republican Party. He has data and documents.”

As Vice-President Biden observed, Trump’s comments caused the danger to military lives in the Middle East to go “up a couple clicks.”

Bake Until Someone Sees The Resulting Danger To The Country…

General Allen explained why he was speaking up when he did: “He’s talked about needing to torture. He’s talked about needing to murder the families of alleged terrorists. He’s talked about carpet-bombing ISIL. Who do you think is going to carpet-bombed when all that occurs? It’s going to be innocent families.”

Allen feared that if Trump actually followed through on his threats, he would be ordering illegal actions.

“I think we would be facing a civil military crisis, the likes of which we’ve not seen in this country before,” he said. “What we need to do is ensure that we don’t create an environment that puts us on a track conceivably where the United States military finds itself in a civil military crisis with a commander in chief who would have us do illegal things.”

Top With Callous Disregard for the Constitution…

Which takes us back to Khizr Khan. The most powerful 90 seconds of his convention remarks occurred when he looked directly into the camera and addressed Trump.

“Let me ask you: have you even read the constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.”

It’s a serious question. Among legal scholars, Trump has achieved rare bipartisan consensus on his disregard for the rule of law and the limits of presidential power. From unfair “Mexican” judges (born in Indiana) to religion-based discrimination to brazen attacks on the press that include warnings of retribution to the owner of the Washington Post, Trump has been frighteningly consistent.

Everything around Trump exists to serve him and his whim of the moment, whatever it might be. The military is no exception. Fortunately, the men and women wearing the uniform answer to a higher calling.

As General Allen explained, “When we swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, which is a document and a set of principles and it supports the rule of law, one of those is to ensure that we do not obey illegal orders.”

The Final Product: Digest It If You Can

Trump doesn’t care that his orders would be illegal. In that respect, his world is eerily similar to the bubble in which President Richard Nixon lived. As I noted in an earlier post, three years after precipitating a constitutional crisis that forced him to resign from office, Nixon finally admitted, “Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”

At least Trump isn’t President… yet.

THE NHL, BRAINS, AND LAWYERLY DENIAL

Posted on July 28, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Back in 1988, the Surgeon General of the United States issued a report about the addictive qualities of tobacco. In summary form, its “Major Conclusions” were:

“1. Cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are addicting.

2. Nicotine is the drug in tobacco that causes addiction.

3. The pharmacologic and behavioral processes that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine.” — The Health Consequences of Smoking: Nicotine Addiction: A Report of the Surgeon General.

All of that had been obvious to many smokers who’d tried unsuccessfully to quit — and to many others who had watched their efforts. But six years later, the presidents and CEOs of the seven major tobacco companies faced a continuing avalanche of tobacco-related lawsuits. Appearing jointly before a congressional committee on the health effects of tobacco, Congressman Ron Wyden posed a question that he asked each of them to go down the line and answer:

“Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?”

With only minor variations in word choice, one-by-one they replied, “I believe nicotine is not addictive.”

It became an iconic scene of corporate denial. Three years later, the companies did an abrupt about-face and settled the largest class action and government cases against them.

Not Quite Today’s “Tobacco Moment”

The tobacco episode came to mind as I read Senator Richard Blumenthal’s first two questions to Gary Bettman, commissioner of the National Hockey League. But there’s a critical difference: The tobacco executives stood together as one against the onslaught; Bettman and the NHL are all alone.

In a March 2016 congressional hearing, Representative Jan Schakowsky asked Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice-president for health and safety, whether there was a link between football and degenerative brain disorders like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

“The answer to that is certainly, yes,” Miller said.

It seemed reasonable to ask similar questions about hockey, and Blumenthal posed these two (among others) in a letter to Bettman:

Do you believe there is a link between CTE and hockey? If you do not, please explain how head trauma in hockey differs from head trauma in football.
Do you dispute that the documented CTE of former NHL players, like Derek Boogaard, is linked to injuries sustained while playing in the NHL?

Bettman reframed the first question and ignored the second one.

A Lawyerly Treatment

Bettman is a graduate of NYU Law School. The league’s litigation attorneys probably drafted his 24-page response to Blumenthal. But he signed what is essentially a legal brief outlining the NHL’s defenses to former players’ pending litigation against the NHL.

Bettman’s reframing of the first question is subtle: “The core of your letter goes to the question of why the NHL has not acknowledged a ‘link’ between playing hockey and developing CTE if an NFL executive may have done so with respect to football.”

Then he recites in great detail the scientific community’s failure to reach consensus on the causation between concussions in contact sports and CTE. Scientific consensus is the way experts approach research issues. But it has never been the standard by which ordinary, everyday people decide whether to engage in an activity. For example, it takes far less than a reasonable degree of medical and scientific certainty — the legal standard implicit in Bettman’s letter — for a parent to make a decision about what is best for a child.

For starters, a scientific study requires a sufficiently large sample size. For CTE, the sample is tiny and will be for a long time. Confirmation of CTE occurs only by examination of a deceased person’s brain. To date, only 200 brains with CTE have been analyzed. As athletes die, the sample size will increase, but it’s a slow process. Even in brains found to have CTE, isolating all variables to identify the specific contribution of contact sports is a daunting task that will take years, assuming it happens at all.

Here’s another way of reframing Bettman’s position on this issue: The NFL shouldn’t have acknowledged the link, either.

And Another Thing…

Bettman then suggests that the key difference between football and hockey is the frequency of hits to the head. That’s why for years boxers were the exclusive subjects of brain injury studies. Interestingly, footnote 37 of his letter defends fighting as an essential element of hockey:

“Outside the context of ‘staged fighting,’ we note also that players (not just Club General Managers) believe that some types of fighting — though penalized — play a useful and worthwhile role in protecting ‘skilled players’ from being targeted by more aggressive opponents because any such ‘targeting’ activity is capable of being appropriately ‘policed’ by a teammate… [S]pontaneous fights — which, of course, are also penalized — provide a ‘safety valve’ that enables players to confront opposing players in a less dangerous fashion than they might otherwise engage in through dangerous ‘stick work’ or cheap shots.”

But not to worry. Bettman notes that only two of the league’s video-analyzed concussions resulted from fights. And please, let’s not discuss NHL Deputy Director Bill Daly’s 2011 email: “Fighting raises the incidence of head injuries/concussions, which raises the incidence of depression onset, which raises the incidence of personal tragedies.”

And Another Thing…

Finally, Bettman says that the NHL has educated players on the dangers of concussions. But he says it’s premature to provide a formal warning about CTE. In fact, he suggests, it could even be dangerous to do so. Players might decide they have an irreversible brain disease when they have only depression or other treatable disorders that have similar symptoms.

He concludes with an example. Rather than respond to Blumenthal’s question about Derek Boogaard, Bettman turns to another former player, Todd Ewen. After Ewen committed suicide. his autopsy showed no CTE. Because his widow said that she and Todd “were sure Todd must have had CTE,” Bettman leaps to an absurd conclusion: “This, sadly, is the type of tragedy that can result when plaintiffs’ lawyers and their media consultants jump ahead of the medical community.”

The Real Troublemakers

For Bettman, the villain in “the current public dialogue about concussions in professional sports (as well as youth sports)” seems to be “media hype driven in part by plaintiffs’ counsel.”

In December 1994, another NYU Law School graduate, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said: “On concussions, I think this is one of those pack journalism issues, frankly…The problem is a journalist issue.”

Twenty years later, what Bettman describes as the absence of medical consensus about the causal relationship between concussions and CTE didn’t stop the NFL from agreeing to a $1 billion class action settlement with 5,000 former players claiming brain injury. On the sliding scale of monetary awards to those victims, former players who died “with CTE” are in the second highest dollar recovery category — with a maximum of $4 million.

The NHL is only two decades behind.

LAW AND DISORDER, GUNS, AND LEADERSHIP

Posted on July 20, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Shortly after the Baton Rouge police shootings, Donald Trump tweeted: “How many law enforcement and people have to die because of lack of leadership in our country. We demand law and order.”

Baton Rouge is about a lot of things. But Trump’s latest branding initiative — “leadership on law and order” — isn’t among them.

Facts Should Matter

On July 17, Baton Rouge police officers responded to a call about a man carrying a gun. When they arrived, he used an AR-15 style semi-automatic weapon to kill three of them and injure three others. Earlier this month, a sniper killed five Dallas police officers and wounded seven more. In addition to his rifle, the shooter was armed with a pistol; he had a small arsenal in his home. Four weeks earlier, a lone killer used a semi-automatic rifle to end the lives of 49 people and wound another 53 as they partied in an Orlando nightclub.

One place to begin a meaningful discussion of these episodes — and an unfortunate number of others — might be the weapons of such mass destruction. Louisiana, Texas, and Florida permit the private ownership of assault weapons. When the NRA defends those firearms as essential to the sport of hunting, I’m reminded of my father’s line:

“If you want to call it a sport, make it a fair fight,” he would say. “Either arm the deer, or require the hunter to chase Bambi down and kill him with his bare hands.”

Lobbying Against Research To Find The Truth

Texas and Louisiana have open carry laws. Wear your gun with pride. Just hope that if you pull it out of the holster, you won’t hurt yourself or someone close to you. That’s no joke. The frequency of self-inflicted wounds and accidental shootings is one reason that the NRA has quietly blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from researching gun violence since 1996.

The last CDC-funded study on the subject appeared in the October 1993 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded: “Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member of intimate acquaintance.”

The study noted: “Previous case-control research has demonstrated a strong associate between the ownership of firearms and suicide in the home. Also, unintentional shooting deaths can occur when children play with firearms they have found at home. In the light of these observations and our present findings, people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes.”

Hello, NRA lobby; goodbye, CDC funds for research on gun violence — for 20 years! But facts are still facts. In 2010, almost 60 percent of all gun deaths were suicides. More than 600 deaths resulted from gun accidents. Eight percent of the lethal accidental shooters were under the age of six.

Shooting From The Hip

After the Orlando shootings, Trump told a radio interviewer, “It’s too bad that some of the young people that were killed over the weekend didn’t have guns attached to their hip, frankly, where bullets could have flown in the opposite direction…It would have been a much different deal… Had people been able to fire back it would have been a much different outcome.”

On Saturday, he reiterated the point at a rally in Las Vegas: “If there were a couple of folks — man, woman — had a gun strapped right here,” or a gun strapped very nicely to the ankle, this no good sick, sick, perverted, horrible terrorist — terrorist –was in there starting the shooting, one of those people would’ve had the bullets going the other way, folks, it would have been a whole different story.”

Even the NRA’s public face, Wayne LaPierre, was uncomfortable with that line of Trumpisms: “I don’t think you should have firearms where people are drinking,” he told a CBS “Face the Nation” interviewer the next day.

Less than 24 hours later, Trump reversed himself and lined up with LaPierre: “When I said that if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees.”

Obviously.

To appease the NRA, Trump also backed away from his “no fly-no buy” position that people on the terror watch list should not be able to buy guns.

The Police Get It

Trump uses Orlando, Dallas, and Baton Rouge to reinforce the NRA’s position on guns. But it’s an awkward fit. After the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012, the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Major City Chiefs pushed for tougher gun control laws, including an assault weapons ban. In the wake of the Dallas and Baton Rouge shootings, the president of the Cleveland Police Partolmen’s Association asked Ohio Governor John Kasich to suspend open carry laws for the area near the Republican party’s nominating convention.

According to his website, Trump opposes anything that would interfere with the right to bear arms, including “semi-automatic rifles and standard magazines that are owned by tens of millions of Americans. Law-abiding people should be allowed to own the firearm of their choice. The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own.”

When Trump pontificates about the need for “leadership” to establish “law and order,” what does he mean? Whatever the NRA wants. True leadership would take him away from pandering to Wayne LaPierre and toward protecting the police officers about whom he claims to care so deeply.

TRUMP AND THE RULE OF LAW — PART II

Posted on June 15, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Every week, Donald Trump intensifies his attack on the rule of law and the fundamental American values that underlie it. In the wake of the Orlando shootings, he added two more.

— Expanding his proposed ban on all Muslim immigrants, he added migrants from any part of the world “with a proven history of terrorism” against the United States or its allies.

— He withdrew The Washington Post’s press credentials to campaign access. That was the culmination of a crusade that Trump has pursued for a month against Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon and the paper.

Make no mistake. Trump’s actions are part of his “crazy-like-a-fox” campaign strategy. And they fit together neatly.

Why the Post?

Trump’s stated reason for banning The Washington Post stems from a headline that read: “Trump suggests President Obama was involved with the mass shooting in Orlando.”

Here’s Trump’s post-Orlando comment on Fox News that prompted the headline:

“Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind. And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”

In the same interview, Trump was asked to explain why he called for Obama to resign in light of the shooting and he answered, in part: “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.”

What does he mean by “gets it better than anybody understands”? What’s the “something else in mind” that “people can’t believe”? What’s the “something going on”?

A Familiar Ring

Innuendo is an enduring Trump technique. It feeds irrational conspiracy theories that linger. And irrationality combines with the absence of fact-based analysis to become Trump’s most potent voter weapon.

For example, in April 2011, Trump revived discredited “birther” claims that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

“We’re looking into it very, very strongly. At a certain point in time I’ll be revealing some interesting things,” he told CNN. “I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding.”

What “”unbelievable” things were Trump’s investigators in Hawaii finding? Nothing. But irrationality has allowed his false claim to live on in the hearts of his constituents. Even today, 20 percent of Americans still believe that President Obama was born outside the United States and fall into one of two categories: nine percent have “solid evidence” to prove it; eleven percent admit that it’s just their suspicion.

It gets worse. Twenty-nine percent of Americans — and 43 percent of Republicans — say they think the President is Muslim. So now you know what Trump really means when he says “something is going on” involving the President and Orlando. And you know to whom he is saying it. Which takes us to the link between Trump’s current dual assault: Muslims and the press.

Troubling Precedent

Apparently, it’s okay for Trump to imply vile and non-existent connections between the President, Muslims, and a terrorist rampage by an American citizen who wouldn’t have qualified for Trump’s proposed ban anyway. But apparently it’s not okay for the media to call him out on such dangerous demagoguery. It’s not sufficient for a widely respected newspaper to cover a story. It has to cover it precisely the way Trump wants it to read.

When he talks about “opening up our libel laws,” that’s what he really means. And when he says he thinks he’ll possess the presidential power to do so, he proves his ignorance and/or willful disregard of how individual states’ laws and the U. S. Supreme Court’s application of First Amendment principles shape that area of jurisprudence.

This pattern of revenge isn’t new for Trump, but his previous revocations of press credentials have received less attention: The Des Moines Register (after an editorial called on Trump to drop out of the race), The Huffington Post (too liberal), The Daily Beast (after an article citing Ivana Trump’s allegations against Trump that she later walked back), Politico (after writing an unflattering story about Trump’s then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski), and BuzzFeed (never credentialed, probably because of a lengthy and unflattering article about Trump in 2014).

Univision was initially banned after Trump filed a $500 million lawsuit against the company for canceling its broadcast of Trump’s Miss USA pageant. Since settling that litigation in February, Univision says the Trump campaign has credentialed its reporters only twice.

And More Precedent

Apart from Trump himself, his words and deeds have historical forebears. After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, fear led to Japanese internment camps. After the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic weapon and China fell to Communism in 1949, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade included attacks on the U. S. Army and baseless claims that Communist spies controlled the State Department.

McCarthy fed on fear and paranoia. He survived because others were reluctant to challenge a dangerous demagogue. His fellow Republicans — even President Eisenhower — remained silent as he ruined thousands of lives. Only a free press brought him down and returned the nation to its senses.

Televised hearings and Edward R. Murrow’s March 9, 1954 investigative program subjected McCarthy and his methods to the disinfectant of sunlight. But for the preceding five years, he left destruction in his wake. Trump is far more dangerous than McCarthy ever was. And we don’t have five years to let him run roughshod over our country’s most fundamental principles.

ONE LAWYER’S DILEMMA

Posted on June 7, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Paul Manafort is campaign chairman and chief strategist for Donald Trump. He also has a law degree from Georgetown. That combination has landed him in a tough spot.

The J.D. from Georgetown means Manafort can’t plead ignorance about the significance of Trump’s escalating attack on the rule of law. As The New York Times reported recently, reliably conservative legal scholars express deep concern over Trump’s failure to acknowledge the limits of presidential power. Uniformly, every high-level Republican has repudiated Trump’s criticisms of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the Indiana-born federal judge presiding over the cases against Trump University:

Senator Mitch McConnell: “I couldn’t disagree more with what he had to say.”

Representative Paul Ryan: “I completely disagree with the reasoning behind that.”

Former majority leader Newt Gingrich, who has made no secret of his vice-presidential ambitions on a Trump ticket: “This is one of the worst mistakes Trump has made. I think it’s inexcusable,”

And that backlash came before June 5, when Trump added all Muslims to his growing list of “possibly” biased judges who can’t give him a fair shake in a courtroom because their ethnicity collides with his most vile public policy pronouncements.

Manafort Knows Better, Even If His Client Doesn’t

Trump is no stranger to litigation. According to USA Today, his personal and business interests have been involved in more than 3,500 state and federal legal actions — 70 of them filed after announcing his presidential bid. Playing a game that’s worse than identity politics, he’s now engaged in a full frontal assault on the integrity of the judiciary for obvious personal gain in a private lawsuit. At best, it’s unseemly. At worst, it’s could be an unlawful attempt “to influence, intimidate or impede” a judge “in the discharge of his duty” (18 U.S.C. Section 1803) and/or “obstruct the administration of justice” (18 U.S.C. Section 401).

At Georgetown, Paul Manafort learned the legal rules governing every litigant’s right to challenge a judge’s fairness. Prevailing on a motion to recuse requires a factual showing, not a racist rant. The law is well settled that ethnicity or national origin is not a valid basis for disqualification. In fact, a recusal motion on those grounds would be on the receiving end of sanctions for frivolous pleading. It’s no accident that Trump’s outside lawyers — led by the widely respected Daniel Petrocelli at O’Melveny & Myers — haven’t pursued that path.

Enter Manafort

When Trump hired Manafort in April, Senator Ted Cruz was collecting more than his share of delegates from states where Trump had won the popular vote. Trump complained that the system was “rigged,” “corrupt” and “crooked.” Manafort’s assignment was to corral Trump delegates and keep them in line to avoid a contested convention.

In 1976, Manafort was involved in a similar task. Only two years out of law school, he was was President Gerald Ford successful “delegate-hunt coordinator” for eight states during Ronald Reagan’s attempt to wrest the nomination. After Ford lost the general election, Manafort spent three years working for a private law firm in Washington, D.C.

When Reagan prevailed in 1980, the president nominated him to the board of directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation — the government’s development finance institution. At that point, what would become Manafort’s lucrative career began. Since 1981, he’s been a lobbyist and consultant, sometimes for notorious international clients.

Master of Extreme Makeovers

In 2005, Manafort became an adviser to Viktor Yanukovych, whose political career seemed over after losing the Ukranian election for prime minister. With the help of Manafort, Yanukovych won in 2010 by exploiting popular frustration with government, exacerbating cultural divisions within the Ukranian electorate, and railing against NATO.

Sound familiar? History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. Cue the Trump assignment.

His Latest Client Makeover

On April 21, 2016, newly appointed Manafort assured members of the Republican National Committee that Trump’s rhetorical antics were just an act for the crowd.

“That’s what’s important for you to understand – that he gets it, and that the part he’s been playing is evolving now into the part you’ve been expecting…”

A month later, Manafort had accomplished his delegate mission and received a new title: campaign chairman and chief strategist. Since then, Trump’s attacks on the rule of law have intensified. It now appears that, in contrast to Manafort’s April 21 prediction, the only thing that Trump has “played” is Manafort as he dutifully lined up establishment Republicans who fell in line.

As uncomfortable as Trump’s statements have made those establishment Republicans, none has stepped forward to defend their candidate’s recent outbursts. None has repudiated his or her endorsement, either. Even as they decry Trump’s comments as deplorable, they implicitly suggest that his problem is speaking vile thoughts, not that he has them.

What Could Be Worse?

The same supporters rationalize their continuing support of Trump by assuring themselves that Hillary Clinton as president would be worse. They can’t possibly know that. Senator Bob Corker said that Trump — who turns 70 this month — “is going to have to change.” But change to what? Has anyone ever tried to change a 70-year-old billionaire’s fundamental beliefs, character, or behavior? Besides, Trump has made it clear that he has no desire to change. His approach has worked.

Corker’s position is a triumph of hope over reality. As for Trump’s positions, beyond divisive and destructive rants and branding tag lines –“We’ll make America great again” and “We’ll build a wall” — no one can state with confidence what they will be in five minutes, much less what they would become if he won the presidency.

Which takes us back to Paul Manafort, who assured RNC members in April that Trump was evolving. He went on to say, “Fixing personality negatives is a lot easier than fixing character negatives. You can’t change somebody’s character, but you can change the way a person presents himself.”

Either Manafort shares responsibility for encouraging Trump’s subsequent evolution, or he has an uncontrollable client. If it’s the former, he has put his candidate and his country on a treacherous course; he knows that from his legal training at Georgetown. If it’s the latter, his Trump-tarnished reputation will continue to deteriorate as he remains the campaign’s top strategist. Either way, he’s already lost. And so has the country.

THE REAL STORY OF THE NEW YORK PRIMARY

Posted on April 20, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

It was a “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment.

Shortly after the polls closed on primary election night in New York, CNN made a bold prediction. Its exit polling showed Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders locked in a tight Democratic primary race. Clinton’s win would be close, Wolf Blitzer said: 52 percent to 48 percent.

Less than an hour later, that prediction was as laughable as the famous November 3, 1948 Chicago Tribune headline announcing that voters had elected Thomas E. Dewey President of the United States.

Statistically, the CNN call was far worse. In the end, Truman beat Dewey 49 to 45 percent. Clinton won New York — 58 to 42 percent.

When the News is News

One interesting aspect of the CNN mistake is how quickly it disappeared from public sight. That’s because all major media outlets use exit polling to predict results as soon as they can. First-predictors are the first to attract viewers. There’s no incentive for any of them to throw mud on a process that they all use as a marketing gimmick.

Another aspect is the paucity of discussion over what went wrong at CNN. I don’t know the answer, but this article isn’t about that. It’s about the real lesson of the episode: The use of statistics can be a perilous exercise.

Law Schools

Data are important. It’s certainly wise to look at past results in weighing future decisions. But it’s also important to cut through the noise — and separate valid data from hype.

For example, if less than one-third of a particular law school’s recent graduates are finding full-time long-term jobs requiring a JD, prospective students are wise to consider carefully whether to attend that school. But it becomes more difficult when some law professor argues that the average value of a legal degree over the lifetime of all graduates is, say, a million dollars.

It’s even more challenging when law deans and professors repeat the trope as if it were sacrosanct with a universal application every new JD degree-holder from every school. And it sure doesn’t help when schools with dismal full-time long-term JD employment outcomes tout, “Now is the Time to Fulfill Your Dream of Becoming a Lawyer.”

Law Firms

Likewise, based on their unaudited assessments, leaders of big law firms confess that only about half of their lateral hires over the past five years have been breakeven at best. And that not-so-successful rate has been declining.

Law firms are prudent to consider carefully that data before pursuing aggressive lateral hiring as a growth strategy. But it becomes more difficult when managing partners seek to preside over expanding empires. And it doesn’t help when law firm management consultants keep overselling the strategy as the only means of survival.

Data should drive decisions. But the CNN misfire is a cautionary tale about the limits of statistical analysis. Sometimes numbers don’t tell the whole story. Sometimes they point people in the wrong direction. And sometimes they’re just plain wrong.

CRAVATH SURVIVES

Posted on April 6, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Partner defections from Cravath, Swaine & Moore are so rare that when they happen, it’s major news. Without exception, such events generate predictions that the firm’s lockstep compensation structure is doomed. Scott Barshay’s move to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison provides the latest fodder for such false prophets.

From The Wall Street Journal: “The move raises questions about the ability of law firms that tie partner compensation to seniority to retain top talent during an M&A boom.”

From The American Lawyer: The move “casts new doubts on the viability of Cravath’s pure lock-step model of compensation, an outlier in a market where rivals have a freer hand to invest in top talent.”

As Yogi Berra said, “It’s deja vu all over again.”

In 2010, Barshay Was a “Young Gun”

Six years ago, I wrote about three young partners featured prominently in The Wall Street Journal. In their late-30s and early-40s, they had “taken a more pro-active approach, building new relationships and handling much of the work that historically would have been taken on by partners in their 50s.”

This week, I went back and read the Journal article again. One of those partners was Scott Barshay, then 44-years-old.

“In the current big law world,” I wrote in June 2010, “Cravath’s experiment is risky. Will young partners remain loyal or use their newly gained client power to pursue financial self-interest elsewhere? Will Cravath be forced to modify or abandon lock-step so that it can retain young partners controlling clients and billings?”

“I don’t know. Equally significant, I suspect those most directly affected by what the article characterizes as a ‘sea change at one of the best-known and most conservative of white-shoe law firms’ don’t know, either.”

Six Years Later

Well, now there’s a record: no sea change yet. Cravath gave Barshay an opportunity to develop clients and a reputation. He’s now a “go-to” corporate dealmaker. And he’s picking up his marbles — if he can — and “going to” Paul Weiss.

“More significant, say legal experts, is the prospect that Barshay’s departure will weaken Cravath’s much-vaunted cultural ‘glue’,” reports The American Lawyer’s Julie Triedman.

Who are these “legal experts,” anyway? Probably the same consultants and headhunters who benefit most from two pervasive and dubious big law firm strategies: growth for the sake of growth and aggressive lateral partner hiring.

More Data to Come

The reports that Barshay’s move could affect Cravath’s compensation structure assume that he left for more money. Paul Weiss’s chairman fueled those rumors by describing his firm’s system as modified lockstep that provides “flexibility at the upper end for star performers.” At Cravath, the upper end of the pay structure is reportedly $4 million. Barshay will probably make more at Paul Weiss. But at some point, does the answer to how much is enough always have to be “more”?

Headhunters offer predictable analyses. According to The American Lawyer, Sharon Mahn, “a longtime legal recruiter and founder of Mahn Consulting in New York who frequently places top partners at elite firms,” said Barshay’s defection “really sends a message that no firm is immune, that old-school firms can no longer rest on their laurels. This is a game-changing move.”

Those words might scare some big law firm leaders. After all, the warning is a twofer: it feeds their fears along with their confirmation bias. But it won’t faze Cravath. Departures like Barshay’s are rare, but the firm has seen them before.

As Cravath’s current presiding partner C. Allen Parker noted, “Partners are in lockstep systems because they believe it’s the best system for their clients and provides the most satisfying partnership environment.”

The “Deja Vu” Part

In May 2007, a reporter for The American Lawyer asked Cravath’s then-presiding partner Evan R. Chesler whether partners would stick around if the firm made less money.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I think there is more glue than just money.”

We now know the answer. Most will stick around and the firm properly ignores the rest. Barshay wasn’t the first “young gun” featured in the May 2010 Wall Street Journal article to leave the firm. That distinction went to James Woolery. In January 2011, he went to JP Morgan Chase as a senior dealmaker.

Two years after that, Woolery negotiated a huge three-year pay package to join Cadwalader, Wickerhsam & Taft as the chairman’s heir apparent. On the eve of his elevation to the top spot, Woolery left to co-found an activist hedge fund. According to the Journal, Paul Weiss agreed to jettison its activist investor representations to make room for Barshay. So maybe the two Cravath young guns will meet again — on opposite sides of the table.

Motives and Outcomes

Only Barshay knows for sure why he left Cravath. According to Thomson Reuters, It ranked second worldwide in announced deals for 2015. Paul Weiss was nineteenth. Barshay offered the standard “great opportunity” rhetoric that always accompanies such moves.

“This was such an amazing opportunity for me and for our clients that I couldn’t say no,” Mr. Barshay told The New York Times. “Joining Paul, Weiss was like getting an invitation to join the dream team.”

Most of corporate America thought he was already on one. At Paul Weiss, he’ll have to develop his own — a task far more daunting than fielding the clients gravitating to Cravath. Talent can create value, but underestimating the value of a franchise is a big mistake.

The Cravath glue remains.

A FACT-FREE DIET

Posted on March 16, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

A political campaign that once looked like a reality-based television series has revealed a broader truth. It was never reality-based at all. Reality requires facts, and facts don’t matter. Not anymore.

Some people look at the Trump phenomenon and see disaffected citizens who have become alienated. The political class ignored them for years; now they think that the Donald as President won’t. Others view Trump as the repository of racists and bigots. In the past, such individuals responded to subtle dog whistles of intolerance. Now they’ve found a socially acceptable vehicle for expressing their views loudly, publicly, and sometimes violently. The list of proffered explanations for Trump’s appeal is long. Most are pretty ugly.

This is Huge!

The micro view ignores the big picture – the really, really big picture. Trump sees it: Americans have learned to dismiss facts as irrelevant. The universal phenomenon that psychologists call confirmation bias does the rest. We tend to see the world in a particular way and, when contrary facts get in the way, we ignore them. If like minded others to do the same, that’s a movement!

This problem didn’t arrive with Donald Trump. He’s just exploiting it to new heights — or depths. Consider the hand-held banners at early Tea Party rallies: “Keep the government out of my social security!”

Facts haven’t mattered to the Obama “birthers” – Trump’s signature issue in 2011 as he turned increasingly toward politics. More than four years after President Obama released a copy of his birth certificate, 20 percent of Americans still believe that he was born outside the United States. Twenty-nine percent think he is Muslim.

Trump University? No Problem

Facts haven’t mattered to the candidate’s handling of the Trump University issue. Founded in 2004, it was never a “university” under New York law. In 2010, it became the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative with a Better Business Bureau rating dropping to as low as a D-minus. According to Trump’s attorney, the program accepted no students after 2010. The BBB received few complaints thereafter.

The BBB tried to publicize the straightforward facts about all of this. When a business stops having customers, it stops generating complaints: “As a result, over time, Trump University’s BBB rating went to an A in July 2014 and then to an A+ in January 2015.”

In the March 3 debate, Trump boasted about his “A” rating from the BBB. But the Bureau responded that it “did not send a document of any kind to the Republican debate site last Thursday evening. The document presented to debate moderators did not come from BBB that night.” Since September 2015, the Trump enterprise has had no rating at all.

Undeterred, Trump tweeted a photo of a BBB report showing an “A” rating for Trump University. To that, the BBB offered more facts to be ignored:

“The document posted on social media on Thursday night was not a current BBB Business Review of Trump University. It appeared to be part of a Business Review from 2014.”

“I Can Make That Deal”

Then there are the facts that get woven into a Trump argument that makes no sense to anyone who understands them. Trump has referred repeatedly to America’s $58 billion trade deficit with Mexico. He juxtaposes that number with his infamous “wall” to keep illegal immigrants out of the country; it would cost $10 billion.

“That’s an easy deal. $58 billion deficit; $10 billion wall, I can make that deal,” he said in the March 3 debate.

Except that the $58 billion number has nothing to do with the $10 billion potential expense of Trump’s wall. The 2015 trade deficit resulted because Americans bought $294 billion in goods from Mexican companies, while Mexicans bought $58 billion less than that from United States companies. It’s not money that went to the Mexican government. It’s not a source of funds that Trump can tap to build a wall that gets higher every time a past or present Mexican president ridicules it. There’s no “deal” for him to make on his apples-to-oranges comparison of the $58 billion trade deficit to the $10 billion cost of a “really, really big wall.”

When Truth and Reason Become Casualties, Everyone Suffers

The list of Trump non-facts goes on and on and on.

“Thousands and thousands of Muslims cheered as the World Trade Center fell!” No evidence of that. But Trump says it, so it must be true. Who would tell such a big lie?

“The Mexican government is forcing criminals, drug dealers, and rapists into the United States!” False, offensive, and divisive.

“Obama plans to admit 250,000 Syrian refuges.” The real figure was 10,000.

“Islam hates America.” Absurd on its face, but only if facts matter to the listener.

For the final six months of 2015 alone, Trump led all other political candidates in The Washington Post’s compilation of the year’s most frequent recipients of “Four Pinocchios.” He notched eleven. But the Post’s more telling observation was this:

“Most politicians drop a claim after it has been fact-checked as false. But Trump is unusual in that he always insists he is right, no matter how little evidence he has for his claim.”

There’s unfortunate historical precedent for Trump’s use of hyperbolic rhetoric to exacerbate fear and generate divisions that spin out of control. In the world of “The Big Lie,” facts don’t matter – until they catch up with all of us.

At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, an interested spectator asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin responded immediately, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Keeping it requires citizens willing to allow facts and reason to produce informed decisions. Donald Trump – the master salesman and showman – has found a way to short-circuit that process in too many American minds. In November, we may all find out how many.

“LET THE PEOPLE SPEAK”?

Posted on March 9, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Lawyers parse words. But sometimes, even supposedly smart lawyers misuse them. Senator Ted Cruz’s March 7 editorial in The Wall Street Journal has examples of both phenomena.

Distinctions Without a Difference

First, the parsing.

“Seldom has a Supreme Court vacancy arisen before the election in a presidential year,” Cruz writes. “Benjamin Cardozo, whom the Senate confirmed in February 1932, was the last justice confirmed to fill such a vacancy before the election.” He then notes that Republicans controlled both the Senate and the presidency.

The parsed phrase is “vacancy arisen before the election in a presidential year.” His citation to Cardozo as “the last justice confirmed to fill such a vacancy” is accurate. But only because it excludes lots of justices whom the Senate confirmed in a presidential election year, but who filled seats that had opened earlier.

The most recent example of a presidential year confirmation is Justice Anthony Kennedy. But Cruz’s parsing eliminates that comparison because Justice Kennedy filled the seat that Justice Lewis Powell vacated in June 1987. President Reagan’s unsuccessful nominations of Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg in 1987 pushed Kennedy into a presidential election year — 1988.

If the point is whether the Senate should act on a President’s Supreme Court nominations, Cruz’s proffered distinction is both disingenuous and meaningless. Incidentally, a Democratic-controlled Senate approved Kennedy’s nomination — 97 to 0.

Even apart from Justice Kennedy, the facts undermine Cruz’s core argument that history is on his side of this debate. The SCOTUS blog has a factual summary leading to this conclusion: “The historical record does not reveal any instances since at least 1900 of the president failing to nominate and/or the Senate failing to confirm a nominee in a presidential election year because of the impending election. In that period, there were several nominations and confirmations of Justices during presidential election years.”

Rewriting the Constitution

The other aspect of Senator Cruz’s op-ed is more troubling. As an honors graduate of Harvard Law School, he knows what the constitution actually says about the President’s obligations and the Senate’s responsibilities:

“[H]e shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court….” (Article II, Section 2)

Senator Cruz reads the founding fathers’ command out of the document. He writes, “I believe the Senate should fulfill its constitutional duty by letting the American people be heard in selecting the next Supreme Court justice.”

The Senate has no such “constitutional duty.” The President has a duty to nominate and the Senate has a responsibility to act on that nomination. To be sure, it can vote up or down on the selection. Some states conduct popular elections for state court judges. But the “American people” don’t get to nominate or approve federal judicial appointments.

Let Your Imagination Run Wild

The irony of Senator Cruz’s argument would not be lost on Justice Scalia, who dedicated himself to originalism. Regardless of whether you agreed with him, Scalia urged an interpretation of the constitution that respected its text and meaning. Applying that philosophy, he strove for consistency in its application.

For the lawyers who appeared before the Court, Justice Scalia was also an active interrogator. Imagine the questions he might have posed to Senator Cruz:

“Show me where, in the constitution, it says the Senate has a duty to let the people select a Supreme Court justice?”

“You say the election year makes things different. Why? Where does the constitution say ‘delay, delay, delay’?”

“If I accept your argument about the election year exception — which is nowhere in the constitutional language — what’s the limiting principle? Once we move away from the command of the text — “the President shall nominate” — why not make the exception two years long? Or three?”

“Do you agree that the constitution gives the Senate a duty to act on the President’s Supreme Court nominations? If so, at what point does the Senate’s failure even to consider a nominee make it derelict in the performance of that duty?”

“In your Wall Street Journal piece, you say that the Senate should ‘not consider any Supreme Court nominee until the people have spoken and a new president is nominated.’ Please show me a single word in the United States constitution that supports your position.”

The silence in response to the last question would be deafening.

TRUMP, CHRISTIE, EDUCATION, AND STUDENT DEBT

Posted on March 2, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Did anyone else notice Governor Chris Christie’s expression as he stood behind Donald Trump on Super Tuesday evening? Perhaps he wasn’t feeling well. Or perhaps he was discovering more than he wanted to know about the man he’d endorsed for the presidency of the United States.

Monday night before the big primaries, Christie had told his New Jersey radio audience, “I am the highest level endorser that Donald Trump has had. I’m the person with the most experience in governing that is in his circle.” He said that there was “absolutely no question” that Trump listens to him.

Self-Delusion

“I’ve known him personally for 14 years,” Christie continued. If so, he should ask himself why Trump would listen to him. Now that Christie has dropped out of the primary race, why isn’t he just the latest addition to the Republican front-runner’s list of “losers”? That’s Trump’s world — winners (like him) and losers (like Sen. John McCain). Besides, Trump prides himself as an outsider who disdains almost anyone associated with government.

Maybe Christie will be an exception to Trump’s loser rule. The day after Super Tuesday, a Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll found that the dominant word that New Jersey voters used to describe their governor was “bully.” The next most frequent adjective was “arrogant.” Maybe Trump sees those as redeeming qualities. Perhaps he sees a bit of himself in the New Jersey governor.

Political Death Spiral

There’s another possible explanation for the odd look on Governor’s Christie’s face Tuesday evening: unhappy realization. The New Jersey “bully” had become a Trump “tool.” He’d played all-in with his political career and the impact was swift and certain.

Christie’s former national finance co-chair, Meg Whitman, slammed him:

“Chris Christie’s endorsement of Donald Trump is an astonishing display of political opportunism. Donald Trump is unfit to be president. He is a dishonest demagogue who plays to our worst fears. Trump would take America on a dangerous journey. Christie knows all that and indicated as much many times publicly. The governor is mistaken if he believes he can now count on my support, and I call on Christie’s donors and supporters to reject the governor and Donald Trump outright. I believe they will. For some of us, principle and country still matter.”

According to the Fairleigh Dickinson poll, after endorsing Trump, Christie’s New Jersey statewide approval rating dropped from 33 percent to 27 percent.

Desperate Measures

Christie said that he didn’t agree with Trump on everything, but he did on taxes, job creation, and strengthening America’s leadership in the world. How does he know where Trump stands on anything? The only Trump “positions” on those issues are sound bites that produce audience applause, not substantive debate. His positions change constantly — even on whether he knows certain people.

For example, on Sunday morning, he told Jake Tapper at CNN that he didn’t even know who David Duke, the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was:

“Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke…I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about White Supremacists. And so you’re asking me a question about people that I know nothing about….I just don’t know anything about him.”

The next day, Trump said he didn’t hear Tapper’s question: “I was sitting in a house in Florida, with a bad earpiece. I could hardly hear what he’s saying.”

Anyone who buys that explanation deserves everything that Trump is selling.

On more substantive policy issues, Trump is all over the map. He says whatever gets him through the moment. He says whatever his audience wants to hear. For Republican primary voters supporting him, substance has yielded to anger that has created a cult of celebrity. They cheer empty words.

Actions v. words

But glimmers of Trump’s real self emerge from his actions. Here’s an example of Trumpism at work. Last fall, he decried the government for making money on student loans. In a November 2915 forum in Iowa, he added that too many graduates are “borrowed up, and they can’t breathe, and they get through college and the worst thing is, they go through that whole process and they don’t have any job.” If elected, Trump said he planned “do something very big with student loans” — including providing refinancing “for people who have loans who literally can’t do anything.”

“Something very big.”

What could it be? Something “great”; something “huge.” Maybe there’s a clue in Trump University.

It used a Wall Street address that implicated New York registration requirements. As Steven Brill reported last November, “New York State law requires that anything calling itself a university must apply, be vetted, have all instructors vetted and then be certified, none of which Trump did. Despite repeated warnings from state education regulators beginning in 2005, Trump persisted in operating out of 40 Wall St. until winding down operations in 2010.”

Before folding, the “University” was renamed the “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.” It didn’t offer degrees. The course of study began with free seminars on insider real estate moneymaking techniques. It encouraged attendees to purchase additional sessions — up to one-on-one mentoring packages costing $35,000. It left many “students” in debt.

Measuring Success

But Trump’s program made money for Trump. According to Brill’s examination of public records, “Trump University collected approximately $40 million from its students – who included veterans, retired police officers and teachers – and that Trump personally received approximately $5 million of it, despite his claim, repeated in our interview, that he started Trump University as a charitable venture.”

Trump claims to have surveys showing a 98 percent satisfaction rate — “better than Harvard” — and is confident that he will win all of the pending lawsuits involving the now defunct “university” bearing his name. But perhaps what really bothers him about the government “making money on student loans” is that the money should be going to him instead.

By the way, because Trump University and its successor Trump Enterprise Initiative failed, maybe that makes him a loser, too.

SCALIA’S VACANCY — NEWS v. OPINION

Posted on February 16, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

The battle lines are drawn: President Obama will name his choice to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court; Senate Republicans are determined to block it. One aspect has become striking: Which side has the better argument that history supports its position? It turns out, there’s another battle happening there: news versus opinion.

On the same day, February 16, 2016, two of the most widely read newspapers in the world, carried these contradictory headlines:

“In Court Fight, History Backs Obama” appeared in The New York Times.

“No Clear Confirmation Parallels in Recent Court History,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Who’s Right?

Unless you read both newspapers, you wouldn’t think there was any disagreement on the question of historical precedent for filling the current Supreme Court vacancy. The Times article appears on the paper’s op-ed page. But here’s the real kicker: The WSJ carries its version as a straight news item.

The Journal’s readers saw “news” declaring “no clear confirmation parallels” to the present situation. It cites and purports to distinguish only two earlier precedents.

In 1968, the Senate prevented President Lyndon Johnson’s lame-duck appointment of Justice Abe Fortas to succeed the retiring Earl Warren as Chief Justice and the naming of Judge Homer Thornberry to the Fortas seat. Eventually, President Nixon filled those vacancies. (The Journal doesn’t mention that it took Nixon two unsuccessful nominations — Haynsworth and Carswell — before getting Blackmun over the hump.)

The other Journal example is the oft-cited case of Justice Anthony Kennedy. A Democratically-controlled Senate approved him unanimously in 1988. Apparently believing that distinctions without a difference matter, WSJ reporter Brent Kendall notes that prior to Kennedy’s confirmation, the Senate rejected President Reagan’s first choice, Judge Robert Bork, and that his second choice, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew.

At the end of his article, Kendall identifies Jess Bravin — Wall Street Journal Supreme Court reporter with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a J.D. from University of California-Berkeley — as having “contributed to this article.”

Another Opinion

At best, The Wall Street Journal article is incomplete. Ironically, The New York Times op-ed includes more facts than the Journal’s news item. Professor Timothy S. Huebner notes: “On 13 occasions, a vacancy on the nation’s highest court has occurred — through death, retirement or resignation — during a presidential election year. This does not include the most recent and frequently cited example, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan in November 1987 to fill a vacancy and won confirmation from a Democratic-controlled Senate in February 1988.”

Professor Huebner continues, “In 11 of these instances, the Senate took action on the president’s nomination. In all five cases in which a vacancy occurred during the first quarter of the year the president successfully nominated a replacement.”

What’s the Difference?

The distinction between news and opinion matters. Editors have a responsibility to make that difference clear, especially in our age of political polarization. Due to the power of confirmation bias, consumers of media tend to limit themselves to views they embrace. It keeps people comfortable in belligerent adherence to an understanding that may, in fact, be incomplete or even wrong.

In October 2014, PEW Research reported, “Those with consistently conservative political values are oriented around a single outlet — Fox News — to a much greater degree than those in any other ideological group: Nearly half (47%) of those who are consistently conservative name Fox News as their main source for government and political news.” Both Fox News and The Wall Street Journal are parts of the Rupert Murdoch family’s media empire.

Liberals tend to be, well, more liberal in their choices of news sources. According to the PEW study, “On the left of the political spectrum, no single outlet predominates. Among consistent liberals, CNN (15%), NPR (13%), MSNBC (12%) and the New York Times (10%) all rank near the top of the list….”

The predispositions of their constituencies create a special obligation for the media. There’s money in fomenting divisiveness. Blurring the line between “news” and “opinion” might advance a political agenda or sell advertising space, but it’s making the country’s problems worse.

In my opinion.

A DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Posted on February 10, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

The Wall Street Journal’s front page headline tells only part of story: “Legal Fees Cross New Mark: $1500.” The February 9 article lists the range of partner hourly rates at some big firms: Proskauer Rose from $925 to $1475; Ropes & Gray from $895 to $1450; Kirkland & Ellis from $875 to $1445; and so on and so on and so on.

That’s great if you can get it, but most firms can’t. The 2016 Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor “State of the Legal Profession” tells a second part of the story: realization and collection rates have plummeted. How much a firm bills doesn’t matter; what it actually brings in the door does. In 2005, collections totaled 93 percent of standard rates. By the end of 2015, it was down to 83 percent.

The Music Stopped, Almost

Annual standard hourly rate increases have blunted the profit impact of declining collections, but trees stopped growing to the sky about ten years ago. Except in bankruptcy courts. That’s the third element of the story and the profession’s dirty little secret: one of the most lucrative big law practice areas has no client accountability for its fees. Even worse, the process facilitates pricing behavior that spills over into other practice areas.

Take the recent Journal article. Where did the reporters get the detailed hourly rates for the firms it identified? A note at the bottom of the chart reveals the answer: “Source: Bankruptcy court filings.” If managing partners exchanged their firms’ hourly rates privately, it would raise serious antitrust issues. But in bankruptcy, publicly filed fee petitions do all of that work for them.

It gets worse. In bankruptcy, no one forces attorneys into the discounting that produces the current 83 percent overall average collections rate. Remember the infamous “Churn that bill, baby” email involving DLA Piper a few years ago? That was a bankruptcy case. Traditional mechanisms of accountability are ineffective. Unlike a solvent corporate client, a company in trouble has little leverage in dealing with its outside counsel. Until it emerges from a Chapter 11 reorganization, the days of minimizing legal expenses to maximize shareholder value are suspended. If it winds up in Chapter 7 liquidation, those days are gone forever.

At the same, time, the lawyers handling the bankruptcy have little risk. They get paid ahead of everyone else. Lawyers for creditor committees are a theoretical check only. They, too, get paid first and the members of the exclusive club of big law firm attorneys reappear. Their roles may change — debtor’s counsel in one bankruptcy may be creditors’ attorney in another and the liquidating trustee’s lawyer in yet another. In none of those capacities is there any incentive to rock the long-term, “paid-in-full hourly rate” boat.

More Theoretical Accountability

The U.S. Trustee receives all attorneys’ fees petitions before courts approve them. The Trustee can object, but it doesn’t have sufficient resources to analyze detailed line item time and expense entries on the thousands of pages that firms submit. The Trustee issued new guidelines that became effective for cases filed after November 1, 2013. Perhaps they will make a difference. But in the end, they are still guidelines and the final decision on attorneys fees resides with the bankruptcy judge.

As hourly rates have increased to the $1500 level that the Journal highlights, courts have given their rubber stamps of approval to the trend. Rather than challenge the high rates that all firms charge, bankruptcy judges determine merely that they are “reasonable and customary” because, after all, comparable firms are charging them for comparable work. The circularity is as obvious as the resulting payday for the lawyers. Someday, media attention and popular outrage may force meaningful change that has yet to occur.

Worse Than It Seems

Considering the 83 percent collection rate in the context of the nearly 100 percent rate for bankruptcy lawyers yields an insight relevant to the fourth and final part of the larger big law firm story. In particular, the current 83 percent collection rate is deceptively high. If a firm’s average is 83 percent and its bankruptcy lawyers collect close to 100 percent, then firms with large bankruptcy practices have non-bankruptcy clients pushing some practice areas into deep concessions off standard rates.

Likewise, combining this fact with two conclusions from the Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor Report produces ominous implications for such firms:

— “Demand for law firm services…was essentially flat in 2015,” and

— Bankruptcy experienced the largest negative growth rate in demand by practice area.

Unless the country heads into a recession that few economists expect, the continuing reduction in bankruptcies will drive overall average collections dramatically lower. That’s bad news for big law firms with significant bankruptcy practices.

Back in 2011, an icon of the bankruptcy bar, the late Harvey Miller of Weil, Gotshal and Manges, defended his firm’s approach to legal fees: “The underlying principle is, if you can get it, get it.”

Miller isn’t around anymore, but his unfortunate credo for a noble profession survives — for now.

[NOTE: The trade paperback edition of my book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis (Basic Books) — complete with an extensive new AFTERWORD — will be released on March 8, 2016 and is now available for pre-order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.]

DEWEY, THE D.A., AND SECRETS

Posted on December 9, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

“There aren’t too many secrets in this case,” said Judge Robert Stoltz on December 5. He was referring to the Dewey & LeBoeuf trial over which he presided. The multi-year effort to convict Steven Davis, Stephen DiCarmine, and Joel Sanders produced a raft of acquittals on many charges and a hung jury on the more serious offenses.

Actually, there are two big secrets in the case, but no one is talking about them.

Secret #1: Why Zachary Warren?

Former Dewey chairman Steven H. Davis won’t face a retrial. Assistant DA Peirce Moser has offered him a deferred prosecution agreement. As reported, he will not have to admit guilt and can continue practicing law. When my kids were young, they would have called this a “do-over.”

Judge Stoltz’s reference to secrets was in response to Moser’s suggestion that the retrial of executive director DiCarmine and finance director Sanders should precede the first trial of former low-level staffer Zachary Warren. The longer Warren dangled in a world of uncertainty, the more leverage it would give Moser in his relentless pursuit of someone who never should have been indicted in the first place. Appropriately, the judge denied Moser’s request.

That leads to secret number one: Why is the Manhattan DA’s office squandering its scarce resources to pursue Zachary Warren at all?

I’ve written extensively about Warren’s plight. At age 24, he worked at Dewey & LeBoeuf for about a year from mid-2008 to mid-2009 as a client relations specialist. His principal job was to pester Dewey & LeBoeuf partners into making sure clients paid their bills.

Apparently, his mistake of a lifetime came on December 30, 2008. That’s when he accepted an invitation to join 29-year-old finance director Frank Canellas and 53-year-old chief financial officer Sanders for dinner at Del Frisco’s steakhouse. There he allegedly witnessed the creation of what the DA’s office called a master plan of accounting fraud. As his price for that free dinner, Warren would get indicted five years later.

When Zachary Warren left Dewey & LeBoeuf in June 2009, did anyone in the world think that the firm was unlikely to repay its bills, much less collapse — ever? No.

In 2010, was Warren even at the firm as others worked on the bond offering at the center of the DA’s case? No, he was a one-L at Georgetown.

Even if obtained, would a conviction of Warren result in anything positive for anyone inside or outside our justice system? No.

Warren’s indictment was a travesty. The jury’s rejection of the DA’s case against his superiors is reason alone to drop the effort to prosecute him.

Unsatisfying Answers

So why is Moser so determined to try Zach Warren? One possibility is that the same phenomena contributing to Dewey & LeBoeuf’s downfall infects the DA’s office: hubris, ego, lack of accountability for mistakes, and an unwillingness to admit errors that would prompt thoughtful individuals to change course. Maybe it’s a lawyer personality thing.

Another possibility is the public servant manifestation of greed: the DA wants to put a Dewey & Le Boeuf notch — any Dewey & LeBoeuf notch — on its convictions holster. After Cyrus Vance, Jr. personally announced the indictments in a circus-like press conference on March 6, 2014, Moser suffered unambiguous defeat. In fact, even the plea agreements that the DA’s office squeezed from former firm staffers who later testified at trial now look silly. Unfortunately, the resulting penalties aren’t silly for those who are stuck with them.

To put the DA’s pursuit of Zachary Warren in context consider this. According to published reports, assistant DA Peirce Moser has offered him a plea deal, too. But it is more onerous than the DA’s deferred prosecution agreement with Davis.

There is no just world in which that makes any sense.

Secret #2: Where is the Money?

Prosecutors told the jury that it would not see a “smoking gun.” That’s because the DA didn’t know how to look for or describe it. But the gun was there. It was pervasive, insidious, and hiding in plain sight. It was the environment that caused staffers to fear for their jobs if powerful partners weren’t happy. That meant making sure they received millions more than the firm had available to distribute, even if it came from bank credit lines and outside investors in the firm’s 2010 bond offering.

That leads to secret number two: Why didn’t the DA follow the money?

The public could have reasonably expected Vance to direct the power of his office toward the most egregious offenders and offenses. That didn’t happen. Sure, Davis had a major responsibility for the strategy that brought the firm down. But the executive committee consisted of top partners who were supposed to be fiduciaries in running the firm for the benefit of all partners and the institution. Likewise, as most of the firm’s so-called leaders walked away with millions — far more than Davis, DiCarimine, Sanders, or Warren received — bankruptcy creditors got between five and fifteen cents for every dollar the firm owed them.

In a November 2012 bankruptcy court filing, Davis himself teed up what should have been the central issue in any attempt to assign blame for the firm’s problems:

“While ‘greed’ is a theme…, the litigation that eventually ensues will address the question of whose greed.”

The DA’s office never pursued that question.

Just Rewards

Shortly after Vance’s March 2014 press conference, assistant district attorney Peirce Moser received a promotion. He became chief of the tax crimes unit. The DA’s office announced that Moser’s new position would not preclude him from continuing to run the Dewey & LeBoeuf case. Based on his prominence at the most recent court hearing, it’s still Moser’s case.

If no good deed goes unpunished, sometimes it seems that no bad deed goes unrewarded.

HOW WILL THE FUTURE JUDGE YOU?

Posted on November 24, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

Woodrow Wilson is in trouble.

From the time Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. first surveyed historians and political scientists in 1948, Wilson has placed high on scholarly lists of the greatest U.S. presidents. In 1948, he was fourth — after Lincoln, Washington, and FDR. In 1962, his son Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. conducted another survey in which Wilson retained that spot.

In Schlesinger’s 1996 poll, Wilson dropped to seventh as Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson bumped him down three notches. (Jackson has since fallen to ninth.) Only in 2000 and 2005 polls by the Wall Street Journal did Wilson finish outside the top ten. In both, he finished eleventh.

But now Princeton University is contemplating a remarkable reversal of Wilson’s fortunes. The reason: he espoused racist views. A recent article in the New York Times reports that protesters want to distance his name from the institution over which he presided before becoming governor of New Jersey and then 28th President of the United States.

Protests and Goals

Among the protesters’ demands: acknowledge publicly Wilson’s racist legacy, take steps to rename the university’s internationally renown public policy school, remove a large mural from the dining hall of the residential college that bears his name (and remove his name from that residential college), adopt mandatory courses on “the history of marginalized peoples”, require “cultural competency training” for faculty and staff, and create a dedicated housing and meeting space for those interested in black culture.

Debate will continue over these demands. However reasonable some may be, linking them to the legacy of a great president seems odd, to say the least. It’s certainly ahistorical.

The issue is not whether Wilson said things that seem wildly out of place today. He did. His southern upbringing and the times in which he lived account for his most intolerant views about race. Some of his actions had a devastating personal impact on individuals, as a recent Times op-ed explains. That does not excuse them, but context should matter.

Wilson’s words and deeds occurred a century ago. Who decided that ultimate judgments about the past require us to measure yesterday’s greatness against today’s cultural and political standards?

Admitting its first black student in the 1940s, Princeton lagged behind other Ivy League schools, the Times reports. But Wilson left his university post in 1910. Is he to blame for whatever Princeton failed to do during the 30 years after he departed?

No End In Sight

No one should minimize the serious race problem that still permeates our society. Racism remains an infection that has survived all efforts to eliminate it. Scientists have enjoyed greater and quicker success eradicating the ebola virus than human beings have achieved in improving race relations in the United States.

But pulling the thread of retroactive judgment on history will leave us naked. George Washington owned slaves. Should we remove his name from our nation’s capital, a state, numerous cities and streets, and countless schools?

Abraham Lincoln — universally placed atop the presidential rankings — made numerous derogatory comments about blacks, whom he regard as an inferior race. And the Emancipation Proclamation freed only the slaves in the Confederacy. Should we wipe his likeness off Mount Rushmore?

And why limit the issue to race? How about religious intolerance? Protestant churches founded most colleges, and discrimination against Catholics continued well into the 20th century. The University of Chicago began as a Baptist school. Its first president, William Rainey Harper, tried to create a secular institution. But he also said that its purpose was to support a civilization that would be based on biblical principles. Is it time to rename the U of C’s William Rainey Harper Memorial Library?

For too long, Ivy League schools discriminated against Jews. Harvard College appointed its first Jewish faculty member in the 1700s — on condition that he convert to Christianity. Harvard’s president from 1909 to 1933, A. Lawrence Lowell, was a notorious anti-semite and one reason that Harvard didn’t have a Jewish full professor until 1939. No one is talking about removing his name from buildings and lecture halls.

Money Says and Does What It Wants

There’s an irony to the controversy over Wilson’s continuing presence at Princeton. Today, big donors to colleges and universities can buy the ability to see their names on buildings, classrooms, and athletic facilities. How often does the institution consider whether that donor has intolerant racial or religious views in deciding whether to accept such a gift?

What Wilson gave the country was far more valuable than money. He led the nation at a time of great peril though the “War to End All Wars.” His subsequent struggle to achieve lasting world peace through the League of Nations destroyed him physically. In the context of the challenges Wilson faced, his service was heroic.

Never mind all of that, says a current generation of protesters. Posthumously, Wilson should now become a victim of retroactive one-issue voting.

Judge Not…

Current students believe correctly that they should be at the center of a college or university’s mission. In the current environment, they wield enormous power. But with that power comes responsibility. Some students think that chipping away at Woodrow Wilson’s legacy is a good idea.

To those students, I pose this hypothetical: Assume that you spend the next 40 years leading a decent life. Or at least, most people conclude you’ve done so when measured by the standards of your time. Now assume that, one hundred years from now, others revisit and judge you based on new standards of that future period, but unknown to you now. In doing so, they emphasize everything you did wrong while ignoring whatever you did to make the world a better place.

Does that approach make any sense to you? If not, please leave Woodrow Wilson alone.

MIZZOU FOOTBALL LESSONS

Posted on November 11, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

The legal profession could learn something from the events culminating in Tim Wolfe’s resignation as president of the University of Missouri system. So could all of higher education. But those lessons have little to do with race.

Who is Tim Wolfe?

He’s a businessman.

Wolfe’s family moved to the Columbia, Missouri area when he was in fourth grade. For 30 years, his father was a communications professor at the University of Missouri. Wolfe quarterbacked his high school football team to a state championship. He earned an undergraduate degree from MU in personnel management.

After college, Wolfe became a sales rep for IBM where he worked his way up to vice president and general manager of its global distribution center. After 20 years at IBM, he became executive vice president of a consulting services company. From there, he moved to software maker Novell Americas, where he was president when another company acquired Novell and left him unemployed.

In December 2011, the University of Missouri’s board of curators announced Wolfe’s selection as its 23rd president. His base salary was $459,000.

What Happened? For a While, Not Much

As recently as August 2014, the board of curators thought that Wolfe’s performance had earned him a contract extension from February 2015 through June 2018. A year later, his troubles began.

On September 12, the president of the Missouri Student Association posted a Facebook item about vile racist slurs he’d received. By October 10, a group calling itself Concerned Student 1950 (the year Mizzou first admitted black students) staged a homecoming parade protest. On October 20, the group issued eight demands, including the ouster of Wolfe.

Exactly what he did to make such a shortlist is far from clear. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal put some blame on his proposal to close the university’s respected press as a cost saving measure. But he withdrew that proposal after hearing from objectors.

The Times and the Journal also implied that Wolfe was responsible for canceling health insurance for graduate students. But that situation is more complicated. As the graduate studies office announced in August, new Affordable Care Act requirements prevented the university from paying those premiums. Instead, the university would provide a one-time stipend to all qualified graduate students. Under the ACA, the university said, it was unable to link the stipend to health insurance or to ask whether recipients needed or planned to purchase a policy. Failure to implement the new IRS regulations would have resulted in fines of $100 per student.

Was It Race?

After a swastika with feces appeared in a campus bathroom on October 24, Concerned Student 1950 met with Wolfe personally. Three days later, one of the protest organizers announced a hunger strike. On November 6, a student posted a video in which protesters asked Wolfe to define systematic oppression.

“I’ll give you an answer, and I’m sure it will be a wrong answer,” he said. “Systematic oppression is because you don’t believe that you have the equal opportunity for success.”

“Did you just blame us for systematic oppression, Tim Wolfe?” shouted a protester. “Did you just blame black students?”

Wolfe’s insensitive comments were unfortunate. But they’re not the sort of thing that costs a university president his job. And they didn’t cost Wolfe his — until the football team weighed in.

And Then…

On Saturday, November 7, the entire Mizzou football team — 84 scholarship players and their coaches — proclaimed unanimous solidarity with the protest movement. Within 36 hours, Wolfe resigned.

Like many universities, the University of Missouri created the monster that can devour it. College football is big business, especially in the Southeastern Conference. The average SEC head football coach makes almost $4 million a year. President Wolfe’s base salary was about one-tenth of what the school pays coach Gary Pinkel. Throughout the country, college football generates enormous revenues that pay for coaches, athletic scholarships, and stunning athletic facilities.

Whether and to what extent this circle of riches makes its way back to support a school’s principal mission — educating young people — isn’t clear. Earlier this year during its dispute over whether college players could unionize, Northwestern University claimed that, considered as a whole with other sports that football subsidized, the athletic programs were money-losers for the school. On November 7, Northwestern broke ground on a new $260 million athletic facility.

Pocketbook Threat

The tipping point for Wolfe came when the football team — with a mediocre record of four wins and five losses — said it would boycott its November 14 game against BYU. That game alone would have cost the university $1 million. But the potential impact could be far greater if the team fails to win the two more games needed to qualify for a postseason bowl appearance.

Now we come to the lesson for big law firms. The internal gap between the highest and lowest paid equity partners at most firms is enormous and growing. Likewise, the frenzy to recruit lateral rainmakers continues unabated. Those trends have produced a “don’t-get-me-angry” group that is analogous to what many college football teams have become. A handful of individuals exerts disproportionate influence over an entire institution, but the resulting culture affects everyone.

Football Cognitive Dissonance

Society is conflicted about football. Every weekend, millions of people watch college games. I’m among them. Our behavior creates market demand that gives college football an outsized influence over higher education.

At the same time, we’ve become uncomfortable with some of the adverse individual consequences that the market doesn’t consider, such as lifelong brain damage from concussions. Economists call these externalities. It’s one reason that half of Americans don’t want their sons playing tackle football. When things get personal, they’re somehow different.

Big Law Cognitive Dissonance

Likewise, most law firm managing partners admit that recruiting high-powered rainmakers doesn’t usually improve their firms’ financial performance. Independent studies confirm that lateral hiring is dubious strategy. Yet the lateral frenzy continues as newly hired partners parachute into the top ranks of many firms.

Unfortunately, short-run disappointment with the financial impact of a lateral hire is the least of the problems associated with aggressive inorganic growth. The strategy can destroy a firm’s cohesion, impair its sense of professional mission, and increase its vulnerability to financial shocks. In the resulting environment, everyone in the institution suffers.

Living through the financial and cultural consequences of lateral hiring failures could have prompted law firm leaders to rethink their strategic plans. But that hasn’t happened. After all, such a reversal would require leaders to overcome their confirmation bias, transcend hubris, and admit mistakes. That’s less likely than a major university relegating football to its proper place in the institution’s broader educational mission.

By the way, Mizzou may also offer a lesson to some law school deans: make friends with your university’s football coach.

BASEBALL AND BIG LAW

Posted on October 14, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

Watching the Chicago Cubs make their way into the National League Championship Series causes me to reflect on one of my favorite themes: baseball as a metaphor for life. It might have something to tell big law firms, too.

I focus on the Chicago Cubs because I’ve watched the team since the season began. Before giving up on them several years ago, I was a fan for three decades that started with the birth of our first child in 1981. He and his siblings qualify as long-suffering lifetime fans. For many years, we had season tickets.

As an adult, I knew little of Cubs’ fan angst because I grew up in Minneapolis — an American League city where some of the best entertainment was watching then-Twins coach Billy Martin get thrown out of games during the team’s 1965 pennant run. (Famously, Sandy Koufax refused to pitch in game one of that World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. He then won games five and seven — pitching complete game shutouts in both.)

After years of Cubs’ frustration, what’s working now? That’s where parallels to big law emerge.

Talent

The Cubs have stars on their roster. Jake Arrieta, Jon Lester, Anthony Rizzo, Addison Russell, and Kris Bryant have become household names in Chicago and beyond. As in a law firm, talent is a necessary condition for success.

But talent alone is not sufficient. Just ask former partners of Dewey & LeBoeuf — a firm loaded with talent.

Depth

When shortstop Addison Russell went down with a pulled hamstring in game three of the National League Division Series, Cubs fans gasped. But the team didn’t fold. Javier Baez was ready to take the field. In game four of the series, Baez hit a three-run homer that turned the tide in the Cubs’ favor.

At shortstop — and every other position — the Cubs have a backup plan. According to Altman Weil’s 2015 Report, “Law Firms In Transition,” only 31 percent of law firms have a formal succession planning process in place.

Most big law firm partners resist transition because it vests younger attorneys with the power to claim a share of client billings. Likewise, most firms offer no financial incentive for partners to mentor young attorneys. There’s no way to bill that time.

Attitude

From July through September and into early October, Cubs ace pitcher Jake Arrieta seemed unstoppable. Then he gave up four runs in the fist five innings of League Division Series game 3. Relief pitchers stepped in and Cubs hitters stepped up. The Cubs won 8-6.

In post-game interviews following game four, the latest Cubs phenomenon, Kyle Schwarber, echoed what many other players said: “We pick each other up. When one guys is off, others step up. We have each other’s back.”

At many big firms, some partners seem determined to put sharp objects into the backs of their fellow partners.

Leadership

Cubs manager Joe Maddon doesn’t offer brash, self-aggrandizing remarks. He leads by quiet example. He expects players to do their best on the field, but he encourages balance in their lives. To emphasize his point, sometimes he cancels batting practice, especially if the team is in a hitting slump. He wants them thinking about other things.

Sometimes, he locks the clubhouse door until two or three hours before game time. Don’t show up early; you won’t have anything to do when you get there. Maddon wants them to develop lives beyond the field. Imagine a big law partner telling associates to go home at five or six o’clock — and not bill any time after they get there.

Maddon models behavior aimed at achieving balance. Before the season began, he took a dozen players to visit children at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Throughout the year, Anthony Rizzo, a cancer survivor, made similar trips to hospitals. So did Chris Coghlan and many of his teammates.

Culture

Maddon loves the game. He wants everyone around him to love it, too. He keeps the team loose. Sometimes he manages the team like a little league coach, moving players into different positions. Schwarber was behind the plate one game and in the outfield the next; Coghlan played five different positions in a single game; Bryant played four.

Humor is one of Maddon’s principal weapons. At the end of September, he brought exotic animals into the clubhouse. During the pregame media session, he talked to a flamingo named Warren.

“When is the last time you heard about 20-somethings who couldn’t wait to get to work?” Cubs President Theo Epstein asked one interviewer after the game that propelled the Cubs into the League Championship Series.

Perhaps most importantly, Maddon wants players to remember why they chose baseball as a career. Then they’ll realize that they should be enjoying themselves. Many lawyers could benefit from similar introspection.

On a personal note, I thoroughly enjoyed practicing law. But I’m sure glad that I spent time coaching all of my kids’ baseball and softball teams — more than 25 in all. Good luck to any young big law attorney who tries to replicate that feat today. Make the effort. It’s worth it.

YOGI BERRA

Posted on October 1, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

After Yogi Berra’s September 22, 2015 death, the New York Times ran a two-page obituary on him. That alone is a testament to his universal appeal and the sometimes hidden wisdom of his words.

As my tribute to Yogi, I’ve linked this post to the Convocation Address I gave five years ago to the Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences graduating class of 2010. As you’ll see, I organized my remarks around several of Yogi’s priceless comments, hence the title – “Gems from the Diamond.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP3Uhiol6Vs)

ANOTHER TRAGIC HAZING

Posted on September 16, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

In December 2013, Baruch College freshman Chun Hsien Deng accompanied his new fraternity brothers to the Poconos. He didn’t return.

At first, his death was a regional story in the New York Times, which reported on page A29 that law enforcement officials in Pennsylvania were investigating the incident. Deng had been involved in an outdoor game called “The Glass Ceiling” — a metaphor that his Asian-American fraternity used to depict the difficulty of breaking into the American mainstream.

“It involves blindfolding a person and placing a heavy item on his back,” the Times reported in December 2013. “He has to navigate to someone who is calling for him, and as he makes his way, others try to tackle him.”

Now that the investigation has led to murder charges, the story is front page news. I’m not going to repeat the gruesome details. But buried deep in the Times’ latest story is this item that caught my eye: As Deng was in obvious physical distress, his fellow students “reached out to the fraternity’s national president at the time.”

His name is Andy Meng.

Relative Blame

The prosecutor’s charges distinguish defendants based on levels of culpability for Deng’s death. Five people will face third-degree murder charges. How about Andy Meng, the supposed adult whom the students consulted for advice?

Apparently, the charges against Meng involve “hazing and hindering apprehension.” His lawyer proclaimed that Mr. Meng “was not in Pennsylvania at the time of [Deng’s] death, had no role in his medical treatment and did not commit any wrongdoing.”

As you’ll see, silence would have been a better approach.

Role Model Extraordinaire

What did Andy Meng allegedly do?

According to the Times article about the grand jury report, Meng “told [the students] by phone to hide everything showing the group’s symbol.” Evidently, one member told police, established protocol was to “first put away fraternity letters, paddles, banners, etc.”

Maybe the evidence at trial will show that Meng’s first and foremost concern was not to protect the fraternity. Perhaps he urged the students seeking his advice to do the right thing and do it quickly — seek professional medical attention; call an ambulance; get help ASAP. If so, his lawyer hasn’t included anything to that effect in his statement.

More importantly, if Deng gave that advice, the students didn’t follow it. Instead, they wasted valuable time. They fretted about the cost of an ambulance. One member talked to a friend whose grandfather had fallen and died recently. None of them did the obvious — call 9-1-1.

An hour passed before three fraternity members took Deng to the hospital. By then, he was “mumbling, shivering and snoring.” It was too late to save him.

Lessons Never Learned

All of this has now devolved into the ultimate lose-lose-lose situation. Deng died. The cover-up effort to protect the fraternity failed because the police found paddles, signs, and notebooks bearing the fraternity’s logo. And now 37 people face criminal charges, including five young men for third-degree murder.

Andy Meng isn’t among those charged with murder. His alleged response to the students’ plea for guidance produced charges of “hazing and hindering apprehension.”

Meng’s alleged behavior suggests that he wasn’t around to learn the lesson from President Richard Nixon’s fate: If the crime doesn’t get you, the cover-up will. It’s so much easier to the right thing at the outset, but that requires knowing what the right thing is.

For Andy Meng, the correct response to a frantic call from young fraternity brothers in the Poconos on that December night should have been clear — even for someone who “was not in Pennsylvania at the time.”

LABOR DAY

Posted on September 2, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

Labor Day marks the end of summer. It’s also a time to reflect on our relationship with work. Lawyers should do that more often. In that regard, some big law leaders will find false comfort in their 2015 Am Law Midlevel Associates Survey ranking.

In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, “Rethinking Work,” Swarthmore College Professor Barry Schwartz suggests that the long-held belief that people “work to live” dates to Adam Smith’s 1776 statement in “Wealth of Nations”: “It is in the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can.”

Schwartz notes that Smith’s idea helped to shape the scientific management movement that created systems to minimize the need for skill and judgment. As a result, workers found their jobs less meaningful. Over generations, Smith’s words became a self-fulfilling prophecy as worker disengagement became pervasive.

“Rather than exploiting a fact about human nature,” Schwartz writes, “[Smith and his descendants] were creating a fact about human nature.”

The result has been a world in which managers structure tasks so that most workers will never satisfy aspirations essential for job satisfaction. Widespread workplace disengagement — afflicting more than two-thirds of all workers, according to the most recent Gallup poll — has become an accepted fact of life.

Lawyers Take Note

Schwartz’s observations start with those performing menial tasks: “Maybe you’re a call center employee who wants to help customers solve their problems — but you find out that all that matters is how quickly you terminate each call.”

“Or you’re a teacher who wants to educate kids — but you discover that only their test scores matter,” he continues.

And then he takes us to the legal profession: “Or you’re a corporate lawyer who wants to serve his client with care and professionalism — but you learn that racking up billable hours is all that really counts.”

More than Money

Many Americans — especially lawyers who make decent incomes — have the luxury of thinking beyond how they’ll pay for their next meal. But relative affluence is no excuse to avoid the implications of short-term thinking that has taken the legal profession and other noble pursuits to an unfortunate place.

You might think that short-term profit-maximizing managers would heed the studies demonstrating that worker disengagement has a financial cost. But in most big law firms, that hasn’t happened. There’s a reason: Those at the top of the pyramid make a lot of money on eat-what-you-kill business models. They can’t see beyond their own short-term self-interest — which takes them only to their retirement age.

Maintaining their wealth has also been a straightforward proposition: Pull up the ladder while increasing the income gap within equity partnerships. The doubling of big firm leverage ratios since 1985 means that it’s now twice as difficult to become an equity partner in an Am Law 50 firm. Top-to-bottom compensation spreads within most equity partnerships have exploded from three- or four-to-one in 1990 to more than 10-to-1 today. At some firms, it’s 20-to-1.

What Problem?

Then again, maybe things aren’t so bad after all. The most recent Am Law Survey of mid-level associates reports that overall satisfaction among third- through fifth-level associates is its highest in a decade. But here’s the underlying and problematic truth: Big law associates have adjusted to the new normal.

Thirty-one percent of Am Law Survey respondents said they didn’t know what they’d be doing in five years. Only 14 percent expected to make non-equity partner by then. They see the future and have reconciled themselves to the harsh reality that their firms have no place for them in it.

No one feels sorry for big firm associates earning six-figure incomes, but perhaps someone should. As Professor Schwartz observes, work is about much more than the money. In that respect, he offers suggestions that few large firms will adopt: “giving employees more of a say in how they do their jobs… making sure we offer them opportunities to learn and grow… encouraging them to suggest improvements to the work process and listening to what they say.”

I’ll add one specially applicable to big law firms: Provide meaningful career paths that reward talent and don’t make advancement dependent upon the application of arbitrary short-term metrics, such as leverage ratios, billable hours, and client billings.

What’s the Mission?

Schwartz’s suggestions are a sharp contrast to the way most big law firm partners operate. They exclude their young attorneys from firm decision-making processes (other than recruiting new blood to the ranks of those who will leave within five years of their arrival). Compensation structures reward partners who hoard clients rather than mentor and develop talent for the eventual transition of firm business to the next generation. The behavior of partners and the processes of the firm discourage dissent.

“But most important,” Schwartz concludes, “we need to emphasize the ways in which an employee’s work makes other people’s lives at least a little bit better.”

Compare that to the dominant message that most big law firm leaders convey to their associates and fellow partners: We need to emphasize the ways in which an attorney’s work makes current equity partners wealthier.

Law firm leaders can develop solutions, or they can perpetuate the problem. It all starts from the top.

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The Belly of the Beast

Steven J. Harper, Esq.

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