Denver radio personality named David Mueller. At issue is a brief encounter in June 2013. Mueller and his girlfriend took a picture with Swift after a concert. Swift said that Mueller groped her by putting his hand on her behind.
.. Incredibly — and in spite of the awkward pictorial evidence — Mueller sued Swift, attempting to hold her responsible for his lost salary and other business opportunities. Rather than settle the case quietly, Swift did something unusual. She countersued — asking for only $1 in damages — and demanded a jury trial.
.. Swift is showing America — in the most public way possible — that when it comes to adjudicating claims of sexual assault, the choice isn’t a binary one between criminal prosecution and campus kangaroo courts. There’s a third option: civil litigation.
.. Accused students are often denied any substantial legal assistance, access to witnesses, full information about the charges against them, the power to conduct legal discovery, and the ability to effectively question their accusers.
.. completely ignore standard rules of evidence.
.. Civil litigation requires plaintiffs to prove their case only by a “preponderance of the evidence.” Moreover, a plaintiff runs her own case. She can choose to file, she can choose her lawyers, and she can choose to settle. Courts also have far more power than campus tribunals. Unlike a campus court, they can issue injunctions and order defendants to pay compensatory and monetary damages.
.. At the same time, however, the accused enjoys the full array of due-process rights. He can use a lawyer. He has a right to see the evidence against him, a right to question witnesses, and a right confront his accuser. Oh, and the case goes before an impartial judge and a jury of his peers, not an ideologically stacked tribunal of social-justice warriors. The civil-litigation system corrects all the due-process flaws of campus kangaroo courts while also granting the accuser far more power to seek justice for wrongdoing.
.. when the court case is over, the university could take action based on the results — results obtained through the use of full and appropriate due process.
.. There’s simply no way to easily, cheaply, and justly adjudicate sexual-misconduct claims. And there’s certainly no way to painlessly try these cases. It took bravery for Swift to make her claims. But bravery can be contagious ..
The predawn raid of Paul Manafort’s home adds huge intrigue to Russia probe
One anonymous adviser close to the White House seemed exasperated that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III saw fit to spring the search warrant on Manafort. “If the FBI wanted the documents, they could just ask him and he would have turned them over,” the adviser told Leonnig. But Mueller’s team told a federal judge that they, for some reason, believed Manafort couldn’t be trusted to turn over the records it needed if subpoenaed.
.. What seems clear is that Manafort is looking like an increasingly major wild card in this whole investigation. After leaving the Trump campaign months before Trump was elected, he’s been lurking largely in the background of a series of revelations about possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia. Most notably, he attended that meeting Donald Trump Jr. organized with a Russian lawyer who had promised compromising information about Hillary Clinton and Democrats.
.. Manafort’s contemporaneous notes from that meeting, the existence of which The Post previously reported, seem to be one of the few windows we have into what exactly transpired. And given the shifting explanations from Trump Jr., they could be hugely significant to any questions about possible collusion emanating from it. (But, again, copies of these had already been turned over to Congress, and we don’t know if these notes are the reason for the search warrant.)
.. The suspected operatives relayed what they claimed were conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians.
When Does All That Evidence of Collusion Arrive?
Imagine a scenario where the FBI and prosecutors eventually can prove some underling violated the law — obstruction of justice? Lying to investigators? — but not Trump. Will Democrats accept that?
Pity the FBI and intelligence community. They have to get to the bottom of this in a world where just under half of Capitol Hill, most of the media, almost all of academia, a good portion of the think-tank world and “intellectual class” etc., believe that the real mission of the investigation is to correct the “error” of the 2016 election.
If you talk to Democrats lately, they speak not as if the voters merely made a mistake, but that somehow history itself has gone wrong. They speak we’re living in an alternative timeline, experiencing events that “weren’t supposed” to happen. In their eyes, Hillary Clinton was obviously so much more appealing that Trump. She led in the polls! She had so many more campaign offices! She spent so much more money! She ran so many more ads! Surely, a result like this must be the result of someone cheating.
Because so many Democrats associate Trump with apocalyptic threats — global warming, the sudden establishment of a repressive theocracy like The Handmaid’s Tale, nuclear confrontation, race wars — they all see themselves as their own personal Kyle Reeses, on a mission to save the future.
.. Mr. Trump’s presence is an opportunity for [Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman] to show off his modernization effort. An extravaganza featuring something for everyone — the Harlem Globetrotters taking on a Saudi basketball team, car races, country singer Toby Keith — is intended to convince Americans there is a new, open Saudi Arabia and Saudis that mixing cultures and sexes isn’t evil.
Report: House Intel Committee to See ‘Smoking Gun’ Evidence Obama Admin Spied on Trump Team
James Rosen of Fox News reports that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee will be presented with “smoking gun” evidence that “the Obama administration, in its closing days, was using the cover of legitimate surveillance on foreign targets to spy on President-elect Trump.”
.. it should be duly noted that the Fox News report relies heavily upon a single source, without a single clue to this person’s identity or position. It’s not clear if this individual is connected to the intelligence community, or to the House Intelligence Committee.
.. Perhaps the material coming from the NSA will positively establish which, if any, Trump transition team members were caught up in the “incidental surveillance” Nunes described on Wednesday.