Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 27m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1832, Black Hawk’s escape across the Mississippi is blocked:
On this date the armed steamboat the Warrior reached the British Band on the Mississippi where they hoped to cross the river and escape the American troops. After being guided by a Sioux Indian, the ship which held an artillery piece, dropped anchor, making the Sauk escape virtually impossible. Black Hawk attempted to surrender to the Warrior, waving a white cloth, but the crew either did not understand or did not accept the message. The ship and its men opened fire, killing a number of unprepared Indians. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 140-141]
Recommended for reading in full —
Jim Acosta shows the sad scene at a Trump rally in Tampa:Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018
(The scientific case against the existence of a ‘master race’ is overwhelming, but even as anecdotal evidence this video is a powerful refutation of the ludicrous claim of white superiority.)
Philip Bump asks Is Bannon right that white, college-educated women have given up on Republicans?:“The Republican college-educated woman is done,” Bannon replied. “They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”
I spend a decent amount of time looking at polls and data, and Bannon’s comments struck me as accurate. On Monday, I looked at how women broadly were lining up in opposition to Trump and the Republican Party at unusual levels; the idea that white, college-educated women might be out of play rings largely true.
(Bannon uses the condescending Trumpist term ‘triggered’ for how these women feel about Trump. They’re not triggered, they’re repulsed and infuriated, as any reasonable person would be by Trump’s bigoted, autocratic self-dealing.)
Noah Feldman writes Collusion Isn’t a Crime, But Aiding and Abetting Is (“Trump’s 2016 call for the Russians to hack Clinton’s email should worry his lawyer more”):
Along similar lines, Randall D. Eliason writes Collusion is not a crime? Not so fast:Rudy Giuliani can’t seem to get the law right. The president’s lawyer suggested Monday on CNN and Fox News that Donald Trump didn’t commit a crime even if he colluded with Russians during the 2016 campaign by encouraging them to hack Hillary Clinton’s email server. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Giuliani put it. “You start analyzing the crime – the hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay them for hacking.”
That’s just wrong. Although there is no formal charge known as “collusion,” federal criminal law covers anyone who “aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures” a felony. The elements of the crime need to be broken down to see how they might potentially apply to Trump’s actions during the campaign. And to be sure, not all the facts that would bring Trump under the federal statute have been proved.
But the law definitely doesn’t require Trump to have hacked himself or to have paid the Russians to do the hacking, as Giuliani argued. And the First Amendment wouldn’t protect Trump if the facts showed that he counseled the Russians to commit a federal hacking crime.
Maddie About Science describes Building A Probe That Will Survive A Trip To The Sun:It’s true there is no crime called “collusion.” It’s also irrelevant. What matters in criminal law is the facts, not the precise terms used to describe what happened. Saying the president is off the hook because there is no crime called “collusion” is akin to claiming the president could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and escape prosecution because the criminal statutes prohibit “homicide” not “shooting.”
Collusion is generally defined as a secret agreement to work together towards some illicit end. As I pointed out more than a year ago when this argument first surfaced, in criminal law this describes a potential conspiracy. A criminal conspiracy exists when two or more people form an agreement to pursue an unlawful goal and at least one of them takes some action in furtherance of that agreement. The federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371, prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States and conspiracies to commit an offense against the United States. Both charges are potentially relevant here — and Mueller has already deployed both.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States includes an agreement to impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful functions of the federal government. This could include, for example, an agreement with the Russians to interfere with the Federal Election Commission’s administration of federal election laws. Indeed, this type of conspiracy was the lead charge in February’s indictment of 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies for interfering with the election largely through social media. That indictment charges the defendants “intentionally conspired to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions” of the FEC, the State Department and the Justice Department by making illegal campaign contributions, obtaining visas under false pretenses and failing to register as foreign agents.