Who, indeed? I believe it may have been Captain Tupolev, or his equivalent in the progressive-elite circles that shrieked for Congress to force the issue. Now the same people have the same sinking (heh) feeling as this luckless first officer from The Hunt for Red October:
Perhaps we can use a milder analogy for this featured op-ed at the New York Times today: buyer's remorse. Democrats and the Protection Racket Media hyped up the Epstein Files, promoted the victims demanding full disclosure except when it came to their own information, and kept insinuating that Donald Trump was hiding the Information That Would Finally Stop Him. Instead, progressive elites in Academia, Hollywood, Wall Street, and even the royal family and the UK government have seen their lives torpedoed.
Having bought and used the Epstein Monkey's Paw, Democrats and the progressive elite are deep in regret. Former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman wags his finger at all of them from the pages of the NYT, and a few Republicans too, for violating investigative norms that exist for good reason – as we are all discovering now (via Instapundit's Stephen Green).
Richman starts off by blaming the Trump administration and DoJ for a lack of trust among the public, a point to which we'll return shortly. He finally gets to the meat of the issue about halfway through:
The tools we give the government are justified not only by the importance of the criminal enforcement mission but by the care and professional judgment prosecutors and agents are required to exercise with the information they obtain with those tools. Government secrecy may conceal misconduct or atrocious judgment. We have yet to understand the decision by U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, almost two decades ago, not to charge Mr. Epstein. (Mr. Epstein was ultimately convicted in state court in 2008, after taking a plea deal.) Still, prosecutors’ use of the materials they collect is ordinarily bounded by their mission — to charge individuals (or not to charge them), to satisfy disclosure obligations after a case is brought and, if possible, to convince a jury or to obtain a guilty plea.
When materials collected in a criminal investigation get released in bulk for public consumption, the justification for the coercive and privacy-invading tools we give investigators gets a lot weaker. Institutions claiming to protect user or customer privacy might be more likely to resist valid uses of these tools. Witnesses who would otherwise speak to investigators about sensitive matters might start to rethink whether they want to provide grist for internet searches.
We have to reckon with what happens when a huge investigative haul — with its swirling mix of gossip, casual association and possible criminal misconduct — is opened up for public viewing. The justice system should never be the only means of holding people accountable. The power of shame can be a good thing, and some reputations deserve to be tarnished. But informal accountability processes can easily slide into misuse of unfiltered source material.
Allow me to offer another cinematic reference at this point: Welcome to the party, pal. Some of us made these very same points before Congress mandated the release of the files. The New York Times and Richman had plenty of time to make that argument when it actually counted. Perhaps Richman made that argument elsewhere while Congress debated their bill, but the NYT was foursquare behind the push to expose every jot and tittle to public scrutiny, no matter how reliable the information may have been. Alan Dershowitz had spent the past year screaming this from the rooftops, and in return got treated like someone defending the accused at the Salem Witch Trials – people assumed he still had something to hide.
Furthermore, anyone with half a brain could have predicted the outcome in terms of damage. Epstein spent decades sucking up to elite circles in global finance, Academia, and Hollywood. Who did people think would emerge as Epstein's buddies and accomplices?
Let's return to the idea of trust in the Department of Justice. Richman laments the actions taken against James Comey by the current DoJ and the targeting of Jack Smith as reasons for this mistrust. Richman somehow skips over Comey's attempts to push the Russia-collusion hoax in Trump's first term, which turned out to be nothing more than a baseless campaign hit job by Hillary Clinton's team that fell apart under close scrutiny, but was nonetheless weaponized by the DoJ, a special prosecutor, Democrats in Congress, and – wait for it – the New York Times, which won a Pultizer for its Russia-collusion coverage (along with the Washington Post). Joe Biden's DoJ then launched multiple attempts to prosecute Trump after he left office on nonsense allegations as a means to keep him from running again.
Richman just gleeps over those episodes, even though they provide important context for the current DoJ's scrutiny of both Comey and Jack Smith. And now he wants to know why people don't trust the DoJ to make charging decisions when those involve opponents of the progressive-elite cliques, and more importantly, charging decisions that involve members of those cliques. His column answers its own questions.
Update: I thought the name on this column sounded familiar. Richman is a friend of Comey's who had possession of memos by Comey that the former FBI Director had leaked through him as a way to force the appointment of a special counsel in 2017. Judicial Watch discovered the deception in 2019 after going to court over a FOIA demand:
On June 8, 2017, Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he leaked memos of his conversations with President Trump “because (he) thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” Columbia University Law professor Daniel Richman, a friend of Comey’s, reportedly“turned over copies of the former FBI director’s explosive memos … to the FBI, sidestepping a request by congressional committees to deliver the materials to Capitol Hill.”
The Justice Department previously argued to the court in a separate case that Comey’s leak of the memo regarding former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was unauthorized and compared it to WikiLeaks. Comey admitted to Congress regarding the “Flynn” memo, “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter [for The New York Times] … I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” The New York Times published a report about the memo on May 16, 2017. Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed the following day.
Interestingly, neither Richman nor Comey disclose this connection in this column, even though Richman specifically cites the Comey prosecution in his argument. Hmmmmmmmmmm.
Editor's note: If we thought our job in pushing back against the Academia/media/Democrat censorship complex was over with the election, think again. This is going to be a long fight.
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