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Forgive Me if I Don't Trust the Woman Prosecutor Interviewing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford |
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Thursday, 27 September 2018 12:37 |
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Osberg writes: "What's been largely left out of this narrative are the wide-ranging institutional failures of Maricopa County when it has come to reporting, investigating, and prosecuting sexual assault, particularly when reported in Latinx and immigrant communities."
Prosecutor Rachel Mitchell. (photo: AP)
Forgive Me if I Don't Trust the Woman Prosecutor Interviewing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford
By Molly Osberg, Jezebel
27 September 18
 oday Rachel Mitchell, a career prosecutor who has worked in Maricopa County, Arizona, since 1993, is interviewing Christine Blasey Ford on behalf of the Republican Party. Since her role was first announced, Mitchell has been the subject of intense national scrutiny, though she has declined to speak publicly about her role in today’s interview. Mitchell, a Republican, has called investigating sex crimes her “life’s work.” Most of what we know about her positions, in her own words, come from an interview with FrontLine magazine, a publication associated with the Foundations Baptist Fellowship International targeted at the Religious Right. In the interview, she offers support for the victims most often supported, particularly in recent years, by conservatives: the very young.
Mitchell is on leave from her current role as the county’s deputy attorney and chief of its Special Victims Division. Prior to that, she spent 12 years running the bureau responsible for prosecuting sex crimes, including child molestation and sexual assault. The FrontLine article, like many right-wing discussions of sexual violence, focuses on the innocence of young children in assault cases and clergy scandals: “False accusations are very rare,” said Mitchell. In her first major case, Mitchell sentenced the Reverend Paul LeBrun to 111 years in prison for molesting boys in the 1980s. This week, FrontLine wrote on its blog that false accusations do happen, in the context of #MeToo.
Since her career became the subject of national attention, two failures have been repeatedly mentioned: In 2003, Mitchell’s office was criticized after it declined to prosecute a man for abusing his quadriplegic wife. (The woman went on to write a harrowing memoir about her experience.) In 2011, Mitchell granted a plea deal of only six months to a Jehovah’s Witness who was found guilty of assaulting a teenaged boy. What’s been largely left out of this narrative are the wide-ranging institutional failures of Maricopa County when it has come to reporting, investigating, and prosecuting sexual assault, particularly when reported in Latinx and immigrant communities.
Mitchell has worked under several different bosses, and the stark failures of the bureaucracies are never the fault of a single person. That said, her career trajectory raises significant questions about her role in advocating for victims and correcting the problems that plagued these offices.
Mitchell was promoted to lead the sex crimes unit in 2005, unseating a longstanding and well-liked prosecutor. The person who promoted her, Andrew Thomas, was then only a week into his tenure. A close ally of Joe Arpaio, America’s most racist sheriff, Thomas used his office to open criminal investigations against his political opponents, especially those who questioned his immigration policies. He was disbarred in 2011 for, among other things, incompetence, erroneously pursuing civil and criminal cases without probable cause and, in one case, forcing a sheriff to swear to a false affidavit.
Mitchell’s next boss, Bill Montgomery, has held the office since a special election in 2010. He’s been giving glowing endorsements of Mitchell to the press ahead of her appearance in Washington, DC. As Joe Arpaio’s enforcer, Montgomery aided in the rounding up of immigrants at work sites, charging them with identity fraud, a practice that came to require federal intervention. This year, Montgomery got directly involved in negotiating a plea deal for two women associated with the Patriot Movement who burglarized a mosque. He also quite recently threatened police departments with financial consequences should they not comply with rules he invented about when and under what circumstances they should comply with public records requests.
In 2011, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office was the subject of a federal civil rights investigation for discriminatory police practices and, specifically in the case of sex crimes, a failure to investigate or charge incidents reported by immigrants. In the three years leading up to 2007, Arpaio’s office received 400 reports of sex crimes that were either inadequately investigated or not worked at all. “If established, this may constitute a failure to provide police services in a manner that constitutes gender and/or national origin discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection guarantee,” wrote the Department of Civil Rights in its 22-page letter to Bill Montgomery.
Recently, supporters have said that Mitchell was partially responsible for cleaning up this particular mess, going through the cases and deciding which to prosecute. At the end of the re-investigation process, 115 of those cases were determined to be “unfounded;” 221 were cleared without arrest, and only 19 went to the court.
Mitchell and her office did not respond to a request for comment by press time. Though Maricopa County isn’t publishing its clearance rate for sexual assault cases these days, the state of Arizona at large saw a clearance rate of about 10% of sexual assault reports. The nation average is around 34%.
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RSN: The Kneeling Protest |
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Thursday, 27 September 2018 11:21 |
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Cory writes: "When you protest, the same old tropes echo down the decades: This is not the time - This is not the place - It's un-American - Real patriots don't protest - You dishonor America."
Colin Kaepernick. (photo: Ed Clemente/MGN)
The Kneeling Protest
By John Cory, Reader Supported News
27 September 18
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
– Let America Be America Again (1936) by Langston Hughes
 hen you protest, the same old tropes echo down the decades: This is not the time – This is not the place – It’s un-American – Real patriots don’t protest – You dishonor America.
When Nike announced its partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the anti-protest citizenry became flaming protesters calling for boycotts of Nike and burning Nike products. The anti-protesters protested the protesters. Welcome to America, friend.
The Nike print ad I saw was a simple black and white photo of Colin Kaepernick with this slogan: Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
How beautifully powerful and important is that affirmation? Very.
Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
In October of 1968, three athletes mounted the medals podium in Mexico City. Two of those young men raised their fists in what became the frenzied media story of the black power salute. Forgotten in all that frenzy was the fact that all three men – Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Peter Norman – wore buttons on their uniforms as a protest in violation of Olympic rules. That protest was to support the Olympic Project for Human Rights Campaign, a movement fighting racial inequality around the world.
All three men paid a steep price for their actions. None of them would ever be in the Olympics again. Tommie Smith and John Carlos were immediately expelled from the Olympic Village and sent home, where they received death threats and monitoring and interference by the FBI. They became pariahs and suffered great personal and financial loss.
Peter Norman would face criticism and exile in his native Australia. At his funeral in 2006, both Smith and Carlos were pallbearers. Over all those years, Peter Norman maintained that the proudest moment of his life was that day in Mexico City in 1968.
In 2012, the Australian government issued a formal apology to Peter Norman, and it was reported that in a speech before Parliament, an MP said that Norman’s gesture was “a moment of heroism and humility that advanced international awareness of racial inequality.”
Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
At the 45th Academy Awards Ceremony in March of 1973, Marlon Brando won the Oscar for his role in The Godfather. Appearing on his behalf, Sacheen Littlefeather spoke politely and respectfully, saying that Mr. Brando regretfully declined to accept the award because of the treatment of Native Peoples by the film and television industry and also to call attention to the happenings at Wounded Knee.
Some of the audience booed and jeered at having their beautiful night of awards for beautiful people spoiled. This was not the place for ugly politics. A lot of the audience gave her rousing applause and cheers.
Sacheen had to be protected backstage by security as people made obscene war hoops and tomahawk chop gestures and shouted threats at her. John Wayne was so angry he had to be restrained by six security guards while she was escorted to the pressroom. A short time after the Academy Awards, she was at Brando’s house and while they were visiting, someone fired several gunshots into the front door.
Her acting career came to a grinding halt. People would tell her they just couldn’t hire her for fear of having production shut down because of that Oscar thing and her politics and association with AIM. Nobody liked militant Indians.
When Jada Pinkett-Smith boycotted the 2016 Oscars over the lack of diversity in Academy nominees, she acknowledged Sacheen Littlefeather as inspiration and validation of her own protest.
Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
Humping the Big Green in 1969 was a hard walk in hell. Don’t mean nothin’ was the motto that got you through the day. It was not a good year in the Central Highlands outside Quang Ngai and Vin Loc and LZ Stinson and so many other places.
Hillbillies and Hippies slogged the paddies side by side, laughed and argued over sports teams and cars, Donut Dollies, and life back in the World; traded cans of beans and franks for peaches and pound cake, Lucky Strikes for Pall Malls and other goodies in C-Rats. The disc-shaped Hershey Bars were a unique creation in the annals of combat chow. The chocolate never seemed to melt in the heat and had the hardness of a Kevlar vest and was laughingly called “a John Wayne Bar” with the satirical advice to stuff your shirt pockets with them to deflect VC bullets.
But this wasn’t your father’s war. Everywhere you looked some grunt had drawn a peace symbol on his helmet or wore an Another Mother for Peace pendant with his dog tags. And every USO show band played We Gotta Get Out of This Place.
The FNG shook his head. “You’ll get in trouble. Serious trouble.”
Texas Jerry grinned. “What are they gonna do, send us to Nam? We’re already here.”
“They could send you to Leavenworth.”
“Well then, I guess we’ll have to live with the disappointment of not getting to die in a combat zone,” Texas Jerry said.
Career officers and lifer-NCOs up and down the line suddenly had to deal with news of a coming protest right there in the battlefield. Word had spread that back in the World there was going to be a huge anti-war Moratorium Day on October 15th across the country and hopefully around the world. It was a demonstration to end the war and to pay tribute to American lives lost in Viet Nam by wearing black armbands and marching for peace.
Some commanders said that soldiers don’t protest, period. That’s an order. Others were more flexible and willing to turn a blind eye. And still others left it up to the men in their unit to decide.
From Tra Bong to Chu Lai to Nha Trang, from the Mekong to Marble Mountain, lots of grunts and ground-pounders wore black armbands in solidarity with the Moratorium back home. Charlie Company even made Life Magazine they said and other units were photographed for other publications. Unprecedented. Unheard of.
Some of those black armbands lost limbs to booby traps and others lost hunks of flesh and muscle to shrapnel and many others lost their lives before, during, and after October 15, 1969.
Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
If you believe in something, then where you stand or kneel or sit is the right place and the right time to fight for that belief, whether it is a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. for civil rights, Mount Rushmore and Alcatraz for Native rights, a rice paddy in Viet Nam for peace, or a football arena for equal justice.
There is a line in the last stanza of that song that folks demand Colin Kaepernick stand for instead of kneeling: “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just.”
Sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
– Peace –
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Trump Is the Laughingstock of the World |
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Thursday, 27 September 2018 08:25 |
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Milbank writes: "'The world is laughing at us,' Donald Trump often said during the campaign. The claim was not obviously true then, but Trump has made it so. The world is now laughing at us - specifically, at our president."
United States President Donald Trump speaks during the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters. (photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
Trump Is the Laughingstock of the World
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
27 September 18
 romise made, promise kept.
“The world is laughing at us,” Donald Trump often said during the campaign.
The claim was not obviously true then, but Trump has made it so. The world is now laughing at us — specifically, at our president.
“In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country,” Trump boasted, in typical fashion, to world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. “So true,” he added, as if addressing a campaign rally.
The world leaders chuckled at the braggart before them.
“Didn’t expect that reaction,” Trump acknowledged, “but that’s okay.”
In fairness to those who chortled, Trump’s speech was funny, in a way: a kind of rhetorical blitzkrieg. Trump spoke as though he had accepted a dare to see how much of the world he could offend in the span of a 35-minute address. It felt as though Triumph the Insult Comic Dog had been unleashed in the General Assembly.
Not only did Trump criticize the usual suspects — Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and particularly Iran — but he also attacked China, the 15-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the 164-nation World Trade Organization, the U.N. Human Rights Council, Germany, the International Criminal Court, socialist countries (what did the Scandinavians ever do to him?), and the United Nations’ two-month-old Global Compact on Migration. He threatened recipients of U.S. foreign aid — almost all of South America, Africa, Eastern Europe and South Asia — and reiterated his vow to cut payments for peacekeeping.
By the end of the barrage, he had taunted nations that are home to perhaps 90 percent of the world’s population. Billions of people dissed in half an hour? Even for Trump that’s huge.
“The United States will not be taken advantage of any longer,” proclaimed the leader of the richest nation on Earth. “America will never apologize for protecting its citizens,” he said of his protectionist trade policies.
Each time he used the word “global,” it was as an epithet, disparaging the very principle on which the world body was founded amid the ashes of World War II. America rejects “global governance, control and domination,” he said, and “we will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy,” and “we reject the ideology of globalism and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.”
He stuck to his teleprompter, squinting and using a sing-song delivery to read the words adviser Stephen Miller had written for him, adding occasional banal grace notes: “Far greater!” “Just can’t do it!” “Not good!” The foreign leaders in the room shook their heads, shrugged, smiled and whispered to each other. They applauded other leaders when introduced and during their addresses; Trump didn’t get any (except at the moment when they were laughing at him) until the polite ovation when he finished.
But this address was for domestic consumption, a campaign speech against the world to appeal to his nationalist base. Trump already alienated the world; Tuesday alone brought reports that Europe was devising ways around U.S. sanctions on Iran, Chinese state media was whipping up popular sentiment to fight the trade war Trump started, and the administration was about to miss the deadline for a trade agreement with Canada and Mexico. Trump’s speech did to the world what he does to domestic opponents: name-calling and humiliation.
OPEC: “We defend many of these nations for nothing and then they take advantage of us.”
Trade: “We will no longer tolerate such abuse.”
Mexico: “We’ve started the construction of a major border wall.” (Congress just sent him a spending bill without funds for the wall.)
The Human Rights Council: “a grave embarrassment.”
Germany: “will become totally dependent on Russian energy.”
The WTO: Member countries “rig the system in their favor.”
The ICC: “has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy and no authority.”
Socialism: “It has produced suffering, corruption and decay .?.?. incursion and oppression. All nations of the world should resist socialism and the misery that it brings to everyone.”
While trashing these and other institutions, Trump hailed the “courage” of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and praised the nationalist governments of Poland and Israel, both of which have made recent moves to restrict democracy. He offered no criticism, and barely a mention, of Russia.
Trump, rejecting the U.N. plan to address the migrant crisis, instead suggested that other nations embrace a familiar-sounding theme. “Make Their Countries Great Again,” he proposed.
MTCGA!
An American president, devoting half an hour before the world body to insulting friend and foe alike and trashing all efforts at international cooperation? Sad.
The same American president then suggesting that the solution to the world’s problems is for other nations to adopt his campaign slogan? Now that’s funny.
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Former Girlfriend of Mark Judge, Named in Numerous Kavanaugh Accusations, Ready to Talk to FBI |
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Thursday, 27 September 2018 08:25 |
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Sargent writes: "The onetime girlfriend of Mark Judge, who is alleged by Christine Blasey Ford to have been present while Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, has emerged as a pivotal if hidden figure in this whole affair - and now she's prepared to speak to the FBI and the Judiciary Committee about what she knows, according to a letter from her lawyer that I've obtained."
Mark Judge in Bethany Beach, Del. His whereabouts had been unknown since he was named as a witness to Brett M. Kavanaugh's alleged sexual assault on Christine Blasey Ford when they were teenagers. (photo: Gabriel Pogrund/The Washington Post)
Former Girlfriend of Mark Judge, Named in Numerous Kavanaugh Accusations, Ready to Talk to FBI
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
27 September 18
he onetime girlfriend of Mark Judge, who is alleged by Christine Blasey Ford to have been present while Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, has emerged as a pivotal if hidden figure in this whole affair — and now she’s prepared to speak to the FBI and the Judiciary Committee about what she knows, according to a letter from her lawyer that I’ve obtained.
Judge’s college girlfriend, Elizabeth Rasor, is represented by lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who sent a letter to the Judiciary Committee today. The letter, which was provided to me by a senior Senate Democratic aide on the committee, says that Rasor “would welcome the opportunity” to speak to “agents of the FBI as part of a reopened background investigation” into Kavanaugh’s conduct.
After Ford alleged to The Post that Kavanaugh and Judge had assaulted her — something Kavanaugh and Judge have both denied — Rasor and what she knows became a subject of interest in this whole affair when she spoke to the New Yorker. In that piece — which was primarily about the second Kavanaugh accuser, Deborah Ramirez, who claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at Yale in the 1980s — Rasor did not make any allegations about Kavanaugh.
But Rasor did say that Judge had confided in her about a group sex incident at the time. As the New Yorker piece put it:
Rasor recalled that Judge had told her ashamedly of an incident that involved him and other boys taking turns having sex with a drunk woman. Rasor said that Judge seemed to regard it as fully consensual. She said that Judge did not name others involved in the incident, and she has no knowledge that Kavanaugh participated in it.
The letter from Rasor’s attorney confirms that this account faithfully reflects what she recalls — and, now, what she is prepared to tell the FBI. The letter says:
Ms. Rasor’s recollection of what occurred is stated accurately in the New Yorker piece and she would welcome the opportunity to share this information with agents of the FBI as part of a re-opened background investigation.
In recounting this particular episode to the New Yorker, Rasor did not name Kavanaugh.
[Brett Kavanaugh and the moral ugliness of casual lying]
But Judge’s role — and whatever Rasor is prepared to say about it — has suddenly taken on a lot more potential significance, now that lawyer Michael Avenatti has produced a sworn statement from a third woman, which claims that Judge did conspire with Kavanaugh to get women drunk so they could be assaulted by numerous young men.
As the statement from Avenatti’s client, Julia Swetnick, put it, recounting incidents that sound like the one Rasor recounted in the New Yorker:
I also witnessed efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh and others to cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys. I have a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms and many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room. These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh. …
In approximately 1982, I became the victim of one of these ‘gang’ or ‘train’ rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present. … I believe I was drugged using Quaaludes or something similar placed in what I was drinking.
The New Yorker piece quotes Rasor saying Judge confessed to a similar episode, but without implicating Kavanaugh in it.
The letter from Rasor’s lawyer does not address this separate set of allegations from this third woman, and it’s unclear whether she’d be willing to address them. So it’s possible, if this additional woman’s account is false, that Rasor might end up failing to confirm it or saying that she knows nothing of these particular episodes which are alleged to have also involved Kavanaugh.
Still, Democrats are likely to cite Rasor’s willingness to share what she knows to increase the pressure on Judiciary Committee Republicans to call for a re-opened FBI investigation or, barring that, to allow her to speak to the Committee.
“Ms. Rasor’s statement that Mark Judge told her about his participation in a gang rape when he was in high school is powerful corroborating evidence,” the senior Democratic aide to the Judiciary Committee told me. “She is willing to cooperate with the Judiciary Committee and the FBI.” The aide added that this raises further questions about why “Mark Judge is hiding out in Bethany Beach and Republicans refuse to call him as a witness.”
It is not clear whether Kavanaugh would ultimately be implicated even if Rasor did testify, but her willingness to do so does highlight just how limited the hearing — at which only Ford and Kavanaugh are expected to testify — is shaping up to be.
Rasor is also willing to speak to the hearing, if Republicans don’t call for a reopened FBI background check, her lawyer’s letter says. “Although Ms. Rasor does not welcome the unwanted attention that would inevitably result if she were to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee,” it says, “she believes that it is her duty as a citizen to tell the truth about what happened.”
Rasor’s willingness to speak would also seem to increase pressure on Republicans to subpoena Judge to testify, though there’s no indication that they will give ground on that point.
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unday evening, the 
