Category: Rule of Law

Posted on

Ghislaine’s Life at Club Fed—And an Observation on Minimum Security Prisons and Flight Risk Inmates

A Flight Risk

Ghislaine asked the judge for bail, before her sex trafficking trial. The judge said no, describing Maxwell as “the very definition of a flight risk,” citing

  • prior evasion of law enforcement,
  • vast wealth, from undisclosed sources,
  • multiple passports, and
  • the seriousness of the charges.
A Minimum Security Prison

Club Fed—the women’s prison camp at Bryan, Texas, is a minimum security facility. There are fences, but they aren’t very high. Sometimes the inmates, or at least the well behaved ones, are allowed outside. 

I would not be shocked if Ghislaine just disappears, after a time. 

Meanwhile, her life will be greatly improved. Thanks to Drudge for referring is to this reporting from The Telegraph:

Puppy prison: Inside Ghislaine Maxwell’s new home

British socialite will have freedom to roam expansive grounds, earn money to spend on cosmetics and train dogs to become service animals

When Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking underage girls to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein in December 2021, her victims rejoiced, no doubt imagining the British socialite under lock and key, wearing orange overalls.

But the reality of Maxwell’s life behind bars is very different.

Having been transferred to a minimum security prison in Texas from Florida, Epstein’s ex-girlfriend can spend the rest of her 20-year sentence cuddling puppies and pampering herself with anti-ageing face creams.

Similar to the upmarket retreats she no doubt grew accustomed to during her former life of luxury, the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) Bryan in Texas offers yoga classes and a fully-stocked gym.

Described as a “luxury” facility by her victims, Maxwell will be rubbing shoulders with other wealthy inmates and can spend the earnings from her prison jobs on cosmetics.

Bryan grants its female prisoners the freedom to roam the facility’s expansive grounds with limited to no perimeter fencing to pen them in. There are gardening opportunities for the green-fingered criminals.

The 37-acre all-female facility, located 100 miles outside of Houston, is home to 635 inmates, according to the prison’s website, most of whom are serving time for non-violent offences and white-collar crimes.

Inmates sleep in bunk beds with four people per room.

Julie Howell, 44, who self-surrendered in July to serve time at Bryan, said that the prison is “nothing like you see on TV or in the movies because it’s a camp, which only houses non-violent offenders”.

Since arriving, she has enroled in the “puppy programme”, which involves playing with a 12-week old Labrador all day and even sleeping in the same room as each other, she wrote on Facebook.

The prison has a partnership with Canine Companions for Independence, which allows prisoners to train dogs to become service animals and is said to “boost the inmates’ morale, provide them with a sense of responsibility and improve overall behaviour”, according to the programme’s website.

“We do water and mud play and keep them busy from morning until night with some kennel rests in between,” Mrs Howell said.

“This is my ‘job’ while I’m here and it’s literally 24/7 as the puppies stay in the room with us. It’s me, my bunkie, and a puppy and we have to supervise the puppy at all times…I absolutely love it.”

Besides Maxwell, the prison’s celebrity clientele includes Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, who is serving an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors by falsely claiming her company’s blood-testing technology was revolutionary.

Jen Shah, the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star, is also doing a six-year stretch for conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Other high-profile inmates include Michelle Janavs, the Hot Pockets heiress, who served five months in Bryan for bribing university officials to inflate her daughters’ exam scores.

Lea Fastow, the wife of Enron chief executive and fellow convicted felon Andrew Fastow, also spent 11 months at the facility in 2005 for tax fraud after the Texas energy company collapsed.

Holmes and Shah have each been pictured exercising in the prison camp’s grounds, with the latter’s team sharing an image of her skipping in May while wearing grey workout gear.

“I am in great spirits and well,” she captioned the post. “I wanted to share a personal image that I mailed to my team of one of my shah-mazing workouts.”

The facility is among the best in the country for convicts to serve time in, according to multiple lists compiled by inmates’ rights groups.

According to the prison handbook, life at the prison is centred around work, with prisoners earning up to $1.15 an hour for their jobs – many of which involve food service and factory work. These can even be off-site opportunities, for the best behaved prisoners.

They can spend up to $360 a month of their earnings during assigned shopping days at a commissary, which sells beauty products including L’oreal Revita anti-ageing cream for $26.00, a Kerasal nailcare product for $20, and chest binders for trans prisoners for $26.

Beyond work, inmates may take classes on foreign languages, gardening and beautification. They can play sports, watch television and attend religious services. They are also granted freedoms not available in most low security prisons, including more relaxed visiting hours and more time outside, and lower guard-to-inmate ratios.

For inmates trying to trim down, the prison has a gym kitted out with treadmills, elliptical trainers, stairmasters and a range of weights.

Outside, convicts can take part in sports including football, table tennis, softball, volleyball, weightlifting, yoga, Pilates and the Jumpstart weight loss programme. There are also picnic tables, bleachers and televisions available for prisoners to wind down.

The Bryan prison camp also subscribes to rehabilitation programmes, such as one called “assert yourself for female offenders”, where “women learn to be assertive without trampling the rights of others”, according to a DoJ document from 2020.

As she embarks on life at the new facility, Maxwell will rise at 6am each day for a roll-call with the other female inmates and will have to dress in a prison-issue khaki shirt and fatigues, according to the handbook.

Inmates are permitted to have one approved radio or MP3 player and can wear minimal jewellery, such as a plain wedding band or a chain worth under $100.

Breakfast consists of a choice of a hot or continental-style breakfast, while the lunch and dinner menu offers standard federal prison fare consisting of chicken, hamburgers, hotdogs, macaroni and tacos.

Inmates are also allowed visitors during weekends and holidays, but along with other inmates, Maxwell would be allowed only limited physical contact with friends and family.

Maxwell’s victims blasted the decision to allow her to move prisons, saying the move “smacks of a cover up”.

“Ghislaine Maxwell is a sexual predator who physically assaulted minor children on multiple occasions, and she should never be shown any leniency. Yet, without any notification to the Maxwell victims, the government overnight has moved Maxwell to a minimum security luxury prison in Texas,” the statement said.

“The American public should be enraged by the preferential treatment being given to a pedophile and a criminally charged child sex offender.

“The Trump administration should not credit a word Maxwell says, as the government itself sought charges against Maxwell for being a serial liar. This move smacks of a cover up. The victims deserve better.”

The reason for her move to the less secure facility remains unclear, but comes a week after she was interviewed by Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s deputy attorney general, about information she holds on the Epstein Files.

Capitalising on the recent attention her case has drawn, Maxwell’s legal team have said she is willing to testify before Congress in exchange for a presidential pardon or having her sentence commuted – a possibility Mr Trump has not ruled out.

Posted on

The Manosphere Speaks—and So Does Mike Johnson

My Hot Take

Several people advised Nixon just to burn the Watergate tapes. Looking back after he left office, Nixon concluded that the “lesson of Watergate” is “burn the tapes.”

From the perspective of Mango Mussolini, the least bad alternative for him would be to have a bonfire on the White House lawn and burn all the Epstein files. It would be a terrible alternative for him, but it would nevertheless be the least bad alternative for him. 

Right now, he’s just flailing—bleating random bullshit and throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Posted on

Like a Guilty Thing Surprised

Wall Street Journal, Justice Department Told Trump in May That His Name Is Among Many in the Epstein Files

N.Y. Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Attorney General Alerted Trump His Name Appeared in Epstein Files

Jonathan Chait (The Atlantic), Trump’s Epstein Denials Are Ever So Slightly Unconvincing: The president is not behaving like an innocent man with nothing to hide

The two news articles are from this afternoon. The Chait opinion piece is from this morning. 

So, here’s my top list of things I’d like to know.

  1. I’d like to see the whole 2003 Epstein birthday book. By the way, someone almost surely has the original. Who has it, how can we get it, whose messages does it contain, and what do the messages say? (And if, perchance, the original has been misplaced, there are bound to be copies of the book.)
  2. There are said to be thousands of pages of investigative files. Do those thousands of pages enlighten us about who, if anyone, other than Jeffrey and Ghislaine were using the girls? And, were there blackmail materials on these other people, if there were other people? Was blackmail being paid, and, if so, by whom? 
  3. And was Trump among the customers, assuming there were any customers? (The FBI, we are told, has had a host of minions examine the files, marking references to Trump. What kind of work product did the minions produce? Just lists of references to specific documents and pages? Annotated lists? Memos? How can we get the work product, and what will we learn from it?)

In advance of knowing these things, I would like to know why, if Trump is not as guilty as homemade sin, why he is acting as if he were as guilty as homemade sin. Like a guilty thing surprised.

Jonathan Chait would like to know these things, too. He writes,

Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. You’d probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. You’d demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly.

Donald Trump’s behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is … not that.

The latest cycle of frantic evasions began last week, after The Wall Street Journal reportedthat Trump had submitted a suggestive message and drawing to a scrapbook celebrating Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, in 2003. This fact alone added only incrementally to the public understanding of the two men’s friendship. Rather than brush the report off, however, Trump denied authorship. “I never wrote a picture in my life,” he told the Journal—an oddly narrow defense for a man reported to have written “may every day be another wonderful secret” to a criminal whose secret was systematically abusing girls, and one that was instantly falsified by Trump’s well-documented penchant for doodling.

On Truth Social, Trump complained that he had asked Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, to spike the story, and received an encouraging answer, only for the story to run. Under normal circumstances, a president confessing that he tried to kill an incriminating report would amount to a major scandal. But Trump has so deeply internalized his own critique of the media, according to which any organ beyond his control is “fake news,” that he believed the episode reflected badly on Murdoch’s ethics rather than his own.

Having failed to prevent the article from being published, Trump shifted into distraction mode. In a transparent attempt to offer his wavering loyalists the scent of fresh meat, Trump began to attack their standby list of enemies. On Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, renewed charges that the Obama administration had ginned up the Russia scandal to damage Trump. None of the facts she provided supported this claim remotely. The entire sleight of hand relied on conflating the question of whether Russia had hacked into voting machines (the Obama administration said publicly and privately it hadn’t) with the very different question of whether Russia had attempted to influence voters by hacking and leaking Democratic emails (which the Obama administration, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and a subsequent bipartisan Senate-committee investigation all concluded it had done).

Why did Gabbard suddenly pick this moment to release and misconstrue 2016 intelligence comprising facts that the Obama administration had already acknowledged in public? Trump made the answer perfectly clear when he used a press availability with the president of the Philippines to deflect questions about Epstein into a rant about the need to arrest Obama.

“I don’t really follow that too much,” he said of the Epstein matter. “It’s sort of a witch hunt. Just a continuation of the witch hunt. The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold.” Trump has yet to specify why the “witch hunt” he’s been stewing over nonstop for nearly a decade remains fascinating, while the new “witch hunt” he just revealed to the world is too tedious to address.

In fact, Trump himself suggested that the two matters were related. He described the Epstein witch hunt as part of a continuous plot that culminated in Joe Biden stealing the 2020 presidential election. (“And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race. And the 2020 race was rigged.”) You might think that this link would increase Trump’s curiosity about the Epstein matter, given his inexhaustible interest in vindicating his claim to have won in 2020. Not this time!

By invoking 2020, Trump managed to make the Epstein conspiracy theory sound moreworld-historically important—while attaching his protestations of innocence to claims that were hardly settled in his favor. Again, imagine you were in Trump’s position and were completely innocent of any involvement with Epstein’s crimes. You would probably not try to compare the Epstein case to the scandal in which eight of your associates were sentenced to prison, or to the other time when you tried to steal an election and then got impeached. Instead, Trump is leaning into the parallels between the Epstein case and his own long record of criminal associations and proven lies, arguing in essence that the Epstein witch hunt is as fake as the claim that Biden won the 2020 election (i.e., 100 percent real). …

Perhaps Trump is simply so habituated to lying that he has no playbook for handling a matter in which he has nothing to hide. Or maybe, as seems more plausible by the day, he is acting guilty because he is.

Posted on

What Trump Means When He Says “It’s a Hoax”

I was writing this post in my head when the Wall Street Journal served up this treat today at dinner time.

Donald Trump is, and has been for a long time, a bully, a liar, a con man, and a sociopath. Now he is something else as well—a doddering old fool. Whatever coherence his ramblings once had is disappearing fast. That said, one can construct something out of his disjointed utterings.

When Trump says that Thing X is a “hoax,” he means that 

  1. Thing X actually occurred or is now occurring, and that
  2. Public knowledge about Thing X would reflect very badly on him—worse even than public knowledge that he routinely grabbed adult women by their genitalia, and bragged about this behavior.

I won’t regurgitate the whole sordid business. But it seems clear beyond peradventure of doubt that Trump is in the voluminous Epstein investigatory files, and that he is drenched in flop sweat. 

To address this predicament, Trump now wants everyone to believe that Epstein was not in fact a pedophile; that he should not have been prosecuted (during Trump’s first administration) because Epstein did nothing wrong; and—by implication—that Epstein’s lover and co-conspirator, now in jail, did nothing wrong either; and that these wrongful prosecutions were the result of evil Democrats, just like the January 6 prosecutions. 

To this end, Trump will cast James Comey’s daughter and career federal prosecutor, Maureen Comey, as chief villainess in the purportedly unjust prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. That’s why he fired her yesterday.

From Team Trump’s perspective, firing Ms. Comey was a very bad idea.

As a former corporate advisor, I always told people to be careful about firing unsatisfactory employees who had dirt on you. 

Firing Ms. Comey is mistake number 796. She has dirt on Trump.

Meanwhile, In Late Evening Developments

Trump says he is suing the Wall Street Journal, and all its corporate uncles, cousins, and aunts, for publishing the Epstein birthday letter.

It is widely reported that MAGA influencers—trying to play both ends against the middle—are asserting that the WSJ story about the birthday letter is fake news. 

And Trump says he’s ordered the Justice Department to go to court to seek public disclosure of grand jury materials relating to Epstein.

And a final nightcap:

Posted on

Trump, the Supreme Court, and Government Employee Firings: Let Us Now Rend Our Garments and Clothe Ourselves in Sackcloth and Ashes!

Washington Post, White House preps for legal fight over firings—despite court victory: A Supreme Court ruling last week means planned reductions in force can continue, but unions and other groups will battle the administration at each step.

N.Y. Times, Supreme Court Keeps Ruling in Trump’s Favor, but Doesn’t Say Why: In a series of terse, unsigned orders, the court has often been giving the green light to President Trump’s agenda without a murmur of explanation.

I’m Sorry, but to Understand Anything About What’s Going On, You Need to Know a Little Something About Preliminary Injunctions

Smith sues Jones, and asks the court for a preliminary injunction, claiming that Jones is quickly, and illegally, creating “facts on the ground” that cannot easily be reversed after a final decision finally arrives. How does the court decide whether to grant the preliminary injunction? Answer: by trying to answer four specific questions:

1. Which side is more likely to win the case, on the facts and the law?

2. If there is no injunction, and if the plaintiff, Smith, ultimately wins the case, can Smith still get justice, for example, by collecting damages? Or are Jones’s current actions doing harm to Smith that is “irreparable”?

3. If Smith is going to suffer “irreparable harm,” is that harm nevertheless outweighed by the harm that Jones will suffer if the court forbids acts that may ultimately be found to be lawful?

4. Apart from Smith’s interests, and apart from Jones’s interests, what is the public interest?

Whenever a legal rule requires a court to pour a bunch of factors into a pot, stir them around, and then see what the resulting brew tastes like, the process is likely to be somewhat messy and somewhat unpredictable. That said, most lawyers understand that the first factor—we call it “likelihood of success on the merits”—tends to be dispositive.

Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees

In this case, decided a week ago, eight of the nine justices joined in a short opinion saying that the government employees union should not get a preliminary injunction, because it was unlikely, at the end of the day, to prevail on its claim that Team Trump was illegally planning to fire lots of workers. I wrote about the case last week. 

McMahon v. New York

The McMahon Supreme Court ruling came a few days later, on Monday of this week. As in the American Federation case, the Court ruled for Team Trump. (The case was about whether mass firings at the Department of Education could continue, while the courts were dealing with the case on the merits.) Unlike the American Federation case, this was a 6 to 3 decision, not an 8 to 1 decision. And, unlike the American Federation case, the majority offered no explanation whatsoever about how it applied the four factor test, and about why it reached the result that it reached. 

In many quarters, McMahon engendered a noisy wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a call for all law-abiding citizens to rend their garments and dress in sackcloth and ashes—because the Supreme Court has gone over to Darth Vader. 

They may be right. But my view is that the catastrophists are a little premature. I shaved with Occam’s razor this morning, and Occam and I both submit that, having explained their reasoning in the union case, the majority probably acted differently in McMahon because there were not six justices who were willing to say in black and white that they thought the government would be proven right on the merits. 

And, if Occam and I are speculating correctly, the assumed caution is a reason for cautious optimism. And the assumed caution would be fully justified. Certainly, as to the massive government firings, there is one hell of a lot of litigation yet to come. 

Justice Sotomayor’s Dissent in McMahon (Joined by the Other Two Liberals)

I promised a friend that I would reproduce the dissent. So here it is.

24a1203_pol1Download
Posted on

As Predictable as Day Follows Night, As Friday is the Day After Thursday

Politico, ‘This is why people don’t trust government’: Nikki Haley pushes for Epstein files: The former ambassador to the U.N. called on the Trump administration to release the documents “and let the chips fall where they may.”

I had already written this post in my mind before I read the Politico story, published about an hour ago. 

Trump Has Scored a Famous Victory Over the MAGA Influencers. Or Has He?

Today, the talking heads are talking nonstop about how Trump seams to have beat the Epstein conspiracist MAGA influencers into submission—and how they’re singing a different tune from the one they sung on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and part of Monday.

And whether or not Trump’s effort to tell his base to forget about Epstein will work or not. 

The answer is that it all depends. It depends on whether the lunatic part of our American brethren and sistern will choose to believe Trump or whether they will choose to believe what they have believed about the pedophile ring coverup for the past decade. And a basement full of trafficked children in a Washington pizza restaurant that doesn’t have a basement.

That’s because the term “influencer” is inaccurate and misleading. The MAGA influencers don’t really influence. What they are good at spouting back to their listeners and viewers what their listeners and viewers want to hear. 

As I would have said back when I was practicing antitrust law and relying on forensic microeconomists, the influencer competition for market share is fierce, the market is dynamic, and entry is easy. Just video yourself on your smartphone, post the video on YouTube, and start making money.

Given the market structure, given the incentives, and given the Zeitgeist, it is inevitable that some would-be influencers are going to come along spouting the theory that the pedophile ring has got to Trump and that he has gone over to the dark side. 

I didn’t predict—though I should have predicted—that Nikki Haley would be among the first to stride across the stage in her high heels and begin the competition to sell alternative conspiracy theories.

Others will follow. Many others.

Game on. Now it’s up to the base to see which competing conspiracy appeals to their deformed, paranoid minds.