Iran’s terror-enabling supreme leader only opens the door for Israel to hit back hard
By Mark Dubowitz and Behnam Ben Taleblu from Foundation for Defense of Democracy (FDD)
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The Trump Trial Spectacle Begins
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s hush-money case is a legal stretch that should not have been brought.
By The Editorial Board
Donald Trump on Monday will become the first former U.S. President, and the first leading presidential candidate, to be put on criminal trial. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will try to prove to a jury that Mr. Trump is guilty of 34 felonies related to his 2016 hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Eight years later, and seven months before the 2024 election, it’s a trial that shouldn’t happen in a case Mr. Bragg shouldn’t have brought. The Stormy affair was sordid business, but the DA’s argument is a legal stretch, in ways that might bother a skeptical juror or an appeals court.
The facts are these: Ms. Daniels has said that in 2006 she and Mr. Trump had one, er, intimate encounter. A decade later, as the 2016 election neared, Mr. Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. A nondisclosure agreement isn’t illegal. Mr. Bragg’s complaint is about the paperwork. Mr. Cohen was reimbursed through 2017 via a monthly retainer “disguised as a payment for legal services,” the DA said. He padded his indictment by separately charging each invoice, check and ledger entry to get 34 counts.
Falsifying business records in New York can be a misdemeanor, but the statute of limitations on that has expired. Mr. Bragg therefore must charge felonies, which under New York law means showing that Mr. Trump cooked the books with “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”
Even that requires special dispensation. The 2017 payments are outside the five-year felony window, but state judge Juan Merchan ruled that Mr. Bragg enjoys an extra year of leeway after emergency Covid-19 executive orders stopped the clock on legal cases.
The crucial question is Mr. Trump’s alleged second crime. To bring bookkeeping felonies, Mr. Bragg needs an underlying offense that Mr. Trump intended to commit or conceal, even if it isn’t prosecuted.
Mr. Bragg didn’t charge the second crime and didn’t clearly identify it in last year’s indictment. His court filings since have advanced four theories of what that crime might be, three of which the judge blessed.
One theory is that the Stormy payoff was effectively a donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign, in excess of federal limits. Two, he says the payment broke a New York law against promoting a candidate “by unlawful means.” Yet this loops back to No 1., since the “unlawful means,” Mr. Bragg said, include busting the federal donation cap.
It’s a dubious argument. Is paying a mistress a bona fide campaign expense? Brad Smith, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, has argued persuasively that the answer is no.
“The underlying obligation wasn’t created by the act of campaigning,” Mr. Smith wrote in these pages last year. Had Mr. Trump wired campaign funds to Stormy, prosecutors might now be accusing him of illegally converting donor money to personal use. On appeal this could go all the way to the Supreme Court.
The DA’s third theory: Since the reimbursement was treated as payment for services, the amount was “grossed up” to ensure Mr. Cohen would “be left whole after paying approximately 50% in income taxes,” as Mr. Bragg told the court. Filing a false return, he added, is tax fraud. But it’s an odd kind of fraud if the result was Mr. Cohen overpaying taxes on illusory income. Perhaps such a distinction is legally irrelevant, as the judge suggested, though it matters to whether the case is worth bringing.
Such problems help explain why this case wasn’t pursued by the feds or Mr. Bragg’s predecessor. Yet the newly elected Democratic DA was under political pressure to do something. His top Trump prosecutors quit in a huff, and the media scorched him for failing to charge Mr. Trump in his first months on the job.
Now the country is on the brink of an extraordinary moment, as Mr. Bragg uses a weak and untested legal premise to put the other party’s presidential nominee on trial during the 2024 campaign.
The New York jury pool is unlikely to favor Mr. Trump. Still, Mr. Bragg must prove his case, amid what is sure to be a media spectacle, with Mr. Trump fulminating at every opportunity for viewers and the voters. Will Mr. Cohen testify credibly? He pleaded guilty to making an excessive campaign contribution. Then again, he recently said under oath that he lied to the federal judge during his plea. What a star witness.
A single doubting juror could hold out for a mistrial, vindicating Mr. Trump as he turns toward November. If he’s found guilty, is the judge ready to order him behind bars? What if Mr. Trump succeeds on appeal after the election, win or lose? Mr. Bragg is making history all right, in the worst way.
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Trump’s New Way on Abortion
He embraces states’ rights and aims to show that Democrats are the radical ones.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
If 235 years of federal elections have shown anything, it’s that outcomes rarely hinge on single issues or events. Bear that in mind amid this week’s Beltway acclamation that Donald Trump’s Monday abortion message just sealed Joe Biden’s re-election.
Donald Trump Says Leave Abortion to the States
Mr. Trump kicked off the week with a video laying out his position that abortion should be left to the states, subject to “the will of the people.” He restated that his party is on the side of “the miracle of life” and fertility treatment, and that he is “strongly in favor of exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.” The press decreed that in four minutes Mr. Trump had blown his campaign, with a divisive “earthquake” that had left his party “reeling” and put Team Biden on offense.
Don’t tell the media (or even Mr. Trump), but what he did on Monday was position himself similarly to a former rival, Nikki Haley. Ms. Haley distanced herself from a 15-week national abortion ban—on grounds that it is unattainable and divisive—which won her plaudits for political honesty and a recognition that a majority of Americans describe themselves as pro-choice and that Republicans can’t alienate them and win elections. The Monday video was a Trumpian version of the same.
As tough decisions go, it was likely the right approach in the longer term. Democrats immediately capitalized on rulings from the Florida and Arizona supreme courts upholding abortion bans, seeking to equate Mr. Trump’s support for states’ rights with support for draconian state restrictions. Mr. Trump also had to contend with the inevitable conservative blowback, as pro-life groups and politicians who support a national ban accused him of faithlessness.
But Democrats were always going to berate and misstate Mr. Trump’s views on abortion; he could announce he’s the new head of Planned Parenthood and they’d still claim he wants women in chains. Any Trump position was destined to be treated to a liberal and media hammering. Meanwhile, and notably, accompanying every major pro-life group’s statement of frustration was a recommitment to beating the radically pro-abortion Mr. Biden. Here’s betting Sen. Lindsey Graham—leading proponent of nationwide restrictions—is out campaigning for Mr. Trump this fall.
The Trump message was aimed at swing-state and pro-choice voters, a reassurance that it isn’t Republicans who are the radicals on this issue, that the party is open to each state being “different.” That isn’t important only for the presidential election but in races for the Senate—and thus to a would-be President Trump’s ability to win confirmation of executive and judicial nominees. His position gives cover to Republican nominees in competitive states like Pennsylvania, Maryland and Nevada, where the law allows abortion after 15 weeks.
It’s true that in refusing to articulate his own cutoff date, Mr. Trump has left GOP down-ballot candidates on their own to navigate specifics. His statement did, however, offer a few lead-by-example messages for his party. One was a reminder that Republicans must be brave enough to risk some friction with single-issue groups in the base if they want to reassure a wider voting audience.
They might even spell out political reality to those interest groups. Ms. Haley was correct that the GOP has no hope of obtaining the filibuster-proof Senate majority necessary to enact a national ban. But if Republicans alienate enough voters on abortion, Democrats have every chance at getting the 50-odd votes they need to eliminate the filibuster altogether, pack the Supreme Court and either revive Roe v. Wade or enact an equivalent statute—eliminating any progress pro-life groups have made at the state level.
The other message was the need to go on offense, contained in Mr. Trump’s reminder that to the extent that there is any area of national abortion consensus, it’s a position articulated by Republicans. “Having an abortion in the later months, and even execution after birth,” Mr. Trump said, “is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.” Republicans should offer to provide specifics on their abortion views only after a hounding media have clarified Democratic tolerance of late-term abortion on demand.
The manic energy with which Democrats seized on Mr. Trump’s abortion statement this week was a reminder of their electoral weakness—and ought to have Republicans eager to get on top of the issue. Even if abortion favors Democrats, it’s all they have. They are hoping it will matter more to voters than border chaos, inflation, wages, crime, squatters, college tuition, car bans or a president in visible cognitive decline.
The Democrats have benefited from the GOP’s fear of being exposed on the issue. Mr. Trump chose to rip off the Band-Aid, and he did so early enough to give candidates down the ballot time to sort it out. Republicans are perfectly capable of blowing it, especially in swing states where Democrats are teeing up ballot measures that aim to keep abortion front and center. But they no longer have an excuse to let Democrats define the issue for them.
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Democrats Want the IRS to Do Your Taxes
President Biden touts the IRS's new Direct File pilot program in 12 states, after Sen. Elizabeth Warren stuck it into the Inflation Reduction Act. But do Americans trust the agency to get it right? And if the complexity of the tax code is the reason that people turn to expert tax preparers, why isn't the answer just to simplify? Plus, the House passes a reauthorization of the Section 702 surveillance program, as FBI Director Christopher Wray warns about elevated threats to public safety.
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.
Kyle Peterson: Tax Day is almost here, but does the IRS's new Direct File program look like a bust as a new poll shows how much Americans know and don't know about the income tax? Meantime, the House at last passes a bill on Friday to reauthorize the Section 702 surveillance program. Welcome. I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my colleagues, columnist Kim Strassel, and editorial board member Mene Ukueberuwa. America's least favorite holiday, April 15th. The deadline for filing federal income taxes is just around the corner on Monday. So consider this a friendly reminder to any procrastinators who have not yet finished the job themselves or who might still owe a final sign-off to their tax advisors. But the IRS's latest promise to the public is that life could be a little bit easier with the IRS Direct File program. This is a pilot program that has been launched for people in 12 states, part of an effort put into the Inflation Reduction Act. Kim, can you give us more of a sense of what this program does and how is it going?
Kim Strassel: Yeah, and just to be clear, the history of this is worth going through. So as you said, $15 million was inserted into the Inflation Reduction Act by Elizabeth Warren. She has taken credit for that. So the progressive Senator for Massachusetts, and that money was supposed to be meant for the IRS to do an independent study of this idea of the IRS creating a direct e-file system that would, in theory, be free to people, although government always pays for this stuff, but it would be free to you to file your taxes to the IRS except for not just filing them. You would give the IRS your information, and the IRS would then do your taxes for you, essentially, and then you'd hit the button and pay whatever you owed instead of actually studying this. First of all, they hired a liberal think tank that was always going to have a preordained, "Yay. This is a great idea." Approach to this. But even as they were doing this study, they secretly made a prototype, and they unleashed it on the country before even going back to Congress with the results of this survey. So this is up and running in 12 states, as you said, available to about 19 million people. The problem with this, Kyle, is that America has long, long, had and proudly had what we call a voluntary tax system, and it's one of which it's on Americans, and it's an American right to figure their own taxes to calculate what they believe is owed to the IRS, and it's the burden on the IRS to tell you if that number is wrong. Progressives don't like this. Obviously, they hate the fact that people have business deductions, whatever it may be. So this is a small-scale attempt that they would like to increase over the years to essentially make the IRS not just the tax collector and the tax enforcer, but the tax preparer, and essentially give you a bill telling you what you owe, and you have no role in that.
Kyle Peterson: I do have some sympathy for the idea that the compliance costs of the current income tax are enormous, and this is from the 2022 report to Congress by the Taxpayer Advocate Service. It says the Internal Revenue Code contains 9,834 code sections, many containing detailed subsections and a six volume set of corresponding regulations. Individual taxpayers estimated to spend 13 hours and $240 out-of-pocket costs just to prepare and file one annual tax return. If you add all those individual taxpayers up, according to this report in fiscal 2022, those taxpayers spent about 900 million hours on record keeping plus 1.15 billion hours spent on tax preparation. For business entities, that's another 1.14 billion hours and about $50 billion. Mene, I'm sympathetic to the idea that that is not a great way of doing business, but to my mind, the right answer is not to say that the IRS is going to do your taxes for you. We will make this more of a direct to the IRS program. The correct answer is to simplify so that we don't have almost 10,000 code sections in the Internal Revenue Code and a six-volume set of regulations explaining to tax professionals, who are the only people who can digest that much information, how this stuff is supposed to be applied.
Mene Ukueberuwa: There's no argument against that here. I think it's obvious to just about anyone that the tax code for individuals as well as for businesses has become far too complicated. The argument that folks like us often make against those changes, all of the deductions and credits that have been inserted into the code by legislators over the years, is that they're economically unproductive. They compel individuals to devote their resources into unproductive directions rather than a tax code that was relatively neutral on the expenses that people make in a way that would lead people to invest in the most productive possible ways. So I think that's the biggest reason why we should be constantly pushing legislators to simplify the tax code. But you're right that the compliance costs are also extremely burdensome. I think that just about everyone listening right now has been through that process year after year of taking more time than they hoped to devote to getting that return prepared, having to go through document after document and look through their receipts and make sure that they aren't missing out on any deductions, and that is time that could be better devoted to a whole variety of things. But from Elizabeth Warren's perspective, all of this is an opportunity to insert the IRS into this new line of business in preparing people's returns. I think it's very consistent with the approach that she usually takes to financial regulation. You've seen this exact same thing in other fields, like payday lending, for example. Her first step is always to criticize the private providers for being extortionary. So in the case of payday lending, the idea is that low-income people who end up borrowing on short term are having to pay punitive interest in taxes. She's attacking preparers like TurboTax and FreeTaxUSA, saying that they're taking a cut from low-income. People who have no other choice. They're not really adding value. But they're just playing an extortionary middleman role. So the first step, again, attack the private providers, and then the second step is always to say, "Government can step in and provide this service." That she would love to get to the IRS in this business because, as Kim implied, them being able to prepare the taxes is just one step away from presenting a bill which taxpayers won't be able to dispute. So it comes in under the guise of simplifying and reducing the fees for individual consumers, but the end goal is always to increase government power and put the IRS in a position where it's going to be able to demand full compliance and make it impossible for taxpayers to dispute what they actually owe when they're filing the returns.
Kyle Peterson: Another statistic from that National Taxpayer Advocate Service report is, 33% of people surveyed say they completely or mostly disagree that they trust the IRS to help them understand their tax obligations, which is one reason that people rely on these outside services. Another thing that's notable about this Direct File pilot program, Kim, is how limited it is. So the website says you may be eligible to participate if you have wage income, if you have Social Security income, if you have unemployment compensation, and interest income of $1,500 or less. But if you have business income, if you participated in the gig economy, then you're out. Similar on the tax credit. So you can apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and credits for other dependents through this Direct File program, but not for other credits. The Child and Dependent Care Credit, the Saver's Credit, the Premium Tax Credit, you also cannot file through this direct program if you itemize deductions. Kim, this gets back to the basic point, which is, lawmakers look at each of these tax credits individually and think, "Wow, we should really have a tax credit for child and dependent care or for savers or for whatnot." Each of those they think sounds good on its own terms, and they vote on some bill to put it in, and lo and behold, then you end up with those 10,000 pieces of the IRS code that we actually have. In reality, I'm not unrealistic. I don't think that even if you got some real simplification through, that it would cover everybody because there are always going to be complications, especially with people who have closely held businesses and so forth, but it could cover a lot of people if you had the vaunted idea of being able to file your taxes on a postcard or something like that. You can imagine a tax system that covers an awful lot of people and gets them out of this tax prep industry that they're now relying on.
Kim Strassel: If it was simple, sure. That's my argument to people like Elizabeth Warren, "Oh, are you unhappy that people have to pay to have their taxes produced? Fine, make it really easy." By the way, we could also get rid of most of the IRS if all they were doing was collecting that kind of postcard-type income tax. To be clear, yes, right now, Direct File is only encompassing a certain number of people with more simple tax returns. But the goal of this, and progressives have been very clear, is for it to cover everyone. That also gets to a really interesting point. There was actually an op-ed last year by the former Chief Information Officer for the Obama administration, Tony Scott, and he pointed out that the success of these outside tax prep firms, and I know Elizabeth Warren loves to beat on TurboTax or H&R Block, but these guys have put decades and decades into and have huge staffs and all of this back technology to keep up with these tax changes so that when people come to use them, yeah, it might cost you 50 bucks, 100 bucks, but when you come to use them, if the information is inputted correctly, you're going to get a valid tax return out of this. He wrote an op-ed saying that there is simply no way that the federal government can compete with that kind of experience, features, or the support. By the way, you need huge numbers of people that can walk you through this and help you when you have a tech problem or when there's a bit of information you don't know how to input. He said that, as a result, that the government simply cannot compete with that. This service, Direct File, as a result, was virtually guaranteed to fail because it was unnecessary and ill-conceived, meaning there's a private option that works a lot better, and this gets to the cost of this program. The IRS said it had budgeted 114 million for Direct File in fiscal 2024 in this pilot. It has said that if it wanted to do it an ongoing basis, it would be more like 64 million to 250 million a year, depending on how many people used it. But there was an outside consulting analysis that warned that in fact, if you wanted to do it well, the way that Tony Scott was saying that you have to do it to truly compete with those outside rivals, that the cost of doing that would likely rival, if not surpass, those needed to develop and administer HealthCare.gov, which is that Obamacare online health exchange so far has cost us more than 21 billion to operate. So that's the other joke of this is that it's not free. You might not be paying upfront for your TurboTax equipment, but you'll be paying for it somewhere, at least if you're a taxpayer. All of this might help explain why a mere 60,000 people have tried this pilot, a small fraction of the 19 million, because they're finding it cumbersome and difficult, and they're wary of the IRS.
Kyle Peterson: Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. Welcome back. Another reason that many Americans rely on these tax prep companies is because the code is complicated and many of them, it seems, don't understand it. I would point to a poll by Public Policy Polling and sponsored by the Tax Foundation recently. That is a survey of nearly 2,800 Americans. This is one interesting question. Suppose you're being taxed at a rate of 10% on $10,000 of income. Which do you think is more valuable to you, a $1,000 income tax deduction or a $1,000 income tax credit? Or do you think these are the same thing? And the result of this survey is, 20% think that a tax deduction is more valuable, 25% think they're the same, and 19% are not sure, and those answers are not correct. Just as a reminder, a tax deduction is a reduction in your taxable income. So the actual savings on your tax bill depends on the rate at which you are being taxed, whereas a tax credit is money that is lopped off the final amount that you owe. So if you owe, let's say, $2,500 in taxes to the IRS, a $1,000 tax credit reduces that by $1,000. So Mene, that's just a small example of the difficulty that people who are not experts in this. They don't think about their taxes on a day-to-day basis. The difficulty of this idea is that everybody is going to be able to navigate the current tax system as it stands and do it well.
Mene Ukueberuwa: Absolutely, and I think that that is something that should remind folks watching the whole Direct File boondoggle of how much we've actually gained from the private providers that have grown over the past few years in terms of simplifying the process of filing taxes. I think that companies like TurboTax, for example, of course, nobody likes to have a fee deducted, but having a system that makes it easy to upload your W-2, any additional income that you might have, asks you direct simple questions in the way that a professional preparer might do about your expenses and your household that might lead to additional deductions actually has been a huge innovation, and it's very comparable to the innovation that we've seen in fields like investing, where it used to be a complicated process that could only be handled by a professional broker who you had to call up and pay exorbitant fees. It now is very easy to do, can be done very quickly from your home, and is relatively low-cost compared with what it would be to pay an individual to do it. So again, the root cause of the problem is the fact that the tax code has become much too complicated. But I do think that we have seen a lot of progress in terms of the systems that allow people to navigate that relatively inexpensively and relatively simply. Again, the solution from those in government should not be to step into that field, but rather to find ways to simplify the system in a way that will help compliance costs to continue to fall.
Kyle Peterson: Kim. The other question in this poll that jumped out to me is this, to the best of your knowledge, how much do you think the top 1% of taxpayers by income account for in terms of the share of total federal income taxes paid, 1%, 12%, 42%, or 64%? And 22% of respondents, more than a fifth, and more than a third of Democratic respondents guessed that the top 1% of taxpayers are contributing only 1% of the income tax revenue. The correct answer as of the year 2020 was 42%, so nearly half of the income tax revenue is coming from the top 1%. It seems like many people wildly underestimate that, and I think that helps shed some light on why President Biden and other Democrats keep using this language of the fair share. The rich have to pay their fair share. One reason maybe that works is that many people, many voters, many Americans don't realize that about half of income taxes right now are being paid by the top 1%.
Kim Strassel: It's really scary, this poll. Just the lack of knowledge. Yes, it completely explains why such a wildly inaccurate statement by the president in this White House that somehow the tax system isn't fair and the top 1% don't pay their fair share gets such traction when it's so at odds with the reality on the ground. If you look at this poll, as you said, 22% said they thought it was 1%, but by the way, another 25% said they thought it was 12%. They paid 12% of all the taxes. 19% said they didn't even know. So the number of people that actually got the right number was diminishingly small. Depressingly small. You have to wonder. It's fascinating. Now, we've had a long discussion in this country about the number of people that don't actually pay income taxes. They might pay payroll taxes, Social Security, Medicare. There's a certain chunk of people that don't really pay any, especially if they're unemployed, but I think it says something. There's long been discussions about the worries of having a tax system that is so convoluted, just to bring it back to what we've been talking about, where people don't really have any skin in the game, and it makes them less aware of what's really going on out there. And then it makes it more susceptible to these arguments. There's somehow is some grave injustice in the system. And I don't know how you would change that exactly, but it does say a lot and explains a lot about certain politics we see and the continued prevalence of beliefs that just simply aren't rooted in reality.
Kyle Peterson: Hang tight. We'll be right back after one more break. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, "Play the Opinion: Potomac Watch podcast."
Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. This is Potomac Watch.
Kyle Peterson: Welcome back. 19 Republicans on Wednesday voted against Speaker Mike Johnson and blocked a bill to reauthorize Section 702 surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from coming to the Florida debate. But on Friday, Speaker Johnson had managed to flip that, and this bill has now passed with a 273 to 147 bipartisan majority, 88 Republicans, however, voting no. One piece of the debate on Friday was whether to add a warrant requirement to any searches of this database of foreign communications that may impinge on US persons. That amendment failed 212 to 212. Let's listen to the piece of the debate on this. First here is Congressman Jim Jordan, and then Dan Crenshaw.
Jim Jordan: This is the second amendment in a row where they're going to expand FISA. Can't have a warrant for the existing program. No, no. This giant haystack of information can't have a warrant when you go search American citizens there, but now they want to expand it and tell us you still can't have a warrant. Holy cow. Pretty soon this is going to be, everybody gets to get searched for any darn reason they want. That's not how it works in America, at least not how it's supposed to work.
Dan Crenshaw: Never before have I actually been frightened about what could happen if FISA is not reauthorized or this warrant amendment is passed, which effectively kills our ability to detect and connect the dots between foreign terrorists and what they might do here domestically. I have never been more concerned. I spent the last 20 years of my life fighting for this country and lost an eye doing it, and I don't think we actually disagree very much on principle. There's always a balance between civil liberties, privacy, and security. I don't think me and my colleagues are very far apart on that.
Kyle Peterson: Kim, what do you make of this reauthorization by the House, which is now going over to the Senate? It does shorten the period of reauthorization from two years, whereas the bill that failed on Wednesday would've been five years. But am I wrong in thinking that this is more or less the proposal that these 19 Republicans derailed earlier this week?
Kim Strassel: It is. As you said, the kind of covering change that Johnson decided to make in the end so that they all agreed to hide behind was the fact that it was shortened and also that there was a vote on some of these amendments, which they wanted to see happen. Now they lost the main one that they wanted, and that is what inspired a number of Republicans to vote against the bill in the end. But the holdup here was that they needed to go through a procedural vote to get it to the floor. It is not customary for the minority party to help in that. With such a small majority at the moment, Johnson couldn't really lose anyone. So he struggled with that. Look, I think the dynamic that changed here, and I think people need to give some credit to Speaker Johnson for this, is, he's headed into Florida to have a discussion and an event with Donald Trump. It would appear that he got Donald Trump's tacit agreement that this was a compromise. It would work. People seem to, maybe, take their cue from that. That's what managed to get on the floor. Look, I believe that Donald Trump's team has campaigned, has belatedly come to realize that this is not helpful to them having a House majority that is constantly in disarray, and it looks like it can't get anything done. Not exactly in advertisement as you are headed into an election and you are saying, "Hey, yeah, also give us control of the presidency and the Senate. Just don't pay attention to the fact that we're in constant turmoil in the House." So these victories, there does seem to be suddenly some awareness at the top of the party that maybe Donald Trump needs to be doing something other than just tweeting out that, "Kill the FISA bill." And that seems to have helped focus a few minds.
Kyle Peterson: But I'm hard-pressed to see any strategic rationale for President Trump's intervention in this FISA proposal this week. Just to repeat what he put on Truth Social, he said, "Kill FISA. It was illegally used against me and many others. They spied on my campaign." And in the wake of the defeat in the House of this bill, initially, people were pointing toward many things, one of which was this tweet by Donald Trump on January 19th, 2018, in which he said, "Just signed 702 bill to reauthorize foreign intelligence collection. This is not the same FISA law that was so wrongly abused during the election. I will always do the right thing for our country and put the safety of the American people first." So, Mene, Donald Trump decided to weigh into this. I can only imagine helped induce some of those 19 Republicans to block this bill on Wednesday. It seems to me, it was really without a strategy. If he went back in time only a few years, he could remember that he also signed a 702 reauthorization, arguing that this was needed in order to root out terrorist plots and so forth. Meantime, you had the FBI director up on Capitol Hill this week, and here is part of what he said, "As I look back over my career in law enforcement, I would be hard-pressed to think of a time where so many threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once." Unquote.
Mene Ukueberuwa: Yeah, I definitely do think that in the way that Kim was describing. President Trump is still making up his mind about the role that he wants to play in the House Republicans many votes. Basically, I think you saw very recently that he opined on whether or not they should pass a compromise bill that included border funding. Obviously, he very much opposed that deal, and he enjoys showing that he has influence over these members. But at the same time, I do think that Kim is exactly right in saying that he understands that the disarray has gotten to an unsustainable level and doesn't want the caucus to be that divided going into November because they're all going to be on the same ballot together. He understands that the prospects of the Republican Party at large do have some connection to his ability to win and, in theory, his ability to govern. I do think that the Republican Party at large and Donald Trump in particular are genuinely divided and trying to make up their minds about what they think about the intelligence community and the authorities that it should have. But it was helpful to have Christopher Wray testify and to have Merrick Garland calling members, informing them and reminding them of how important these authorities actually are, the ability to surveil these foreign threats. I think a lot of Americans have taken for granted the amount of progress that we've made over the past couple of decades in terms of eliminating some of these domestic threats. A lot of that comes from the ability, when we do identify foreign individuals who are involved in terror planning and conspiracies, that we've given broad power to the FBI to be able to track that. Certainly, Americans will sometimes be dragged into that net when they're going through the call records and trying to trace the connections. But I think, in the way that Dan Crenshaw was suggesting on that clip, that's a trade-off that makes a lot of sense in terms of giving these investigators the ability to actually track these threats to their root. When it is misused, that often does eventually come into the light, and hopefully the people who are responsible for those abuses end up being punished. But it is clear that this bill also does include a provision that is going to limit the number of FBI agents who have the authority to conduct these sorts of searches in the first place and other tweaks that are meant to address some of the concerns of the civil libertarian skeptics. So it does make sense that ultimately House Republicans, not a majority of them, but a large enough group, got on board and decided to reauthorize this at a shorter timeframe, and hopefully, as the debate continues, you'll see more of them continue to coalesce around the idea that these authorities are important and we can continue to fine-tune it to make sure that the abuses can be curtailed as well.
Kyle Peterson: Thank you, Mene and Kim. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast@wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button and we'll be back next week with another edition of Potomac Watch.
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I have consistently been convinced, Trump has the potential for accomplishing an overwhelming victory and must do everything to avoid blowing this glorious opportunity.
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https://redstate.com/bonchie/2
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