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Ruth King

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Sex, lies and terrorism Ruthie Blum

By on August 5th, 2017

A Nablus resident who confessed this week to having strangled, bashed in the head of, and buried his Israeli girlfriend two months ago told reporters on Wednesday that he had done so to “help free Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.”

Mohammed Kharouf made this statement to the press after the Jerusalem Magistrates’ Court lifted a gag order on his case: the killing of 29-year-old Michal Halimi, a married, pregnant Jewish woman from the settlement of Adam. Halimi, whose body was discovered last week, had left her husband several months ago to move in with Kharouf, her Palestinian lover. It has not yet been established which of the men fathered the baby she was carrying.

Because this is the stuff novels are made of — a story that includes inter-ethnic intrigue, lust and the spilling of blood — the tragic tale has garnered much attention. But the perpetrator’s declaration that his motive was nationalistic, even though this is clearly a lie, is just as worthy of note.

Kharouf knew that his affair with a Jewish woman — let alone one carrying a child of dubious origin — would be sufficient to blacken his family’s reputation in Palestinian society, even if he “rectified” the situation by slaughtering the source of the shame. The wrath of his parents and their peers would make imprisonment in Israel seem like a holiday in comparison. Killing a Jewish Israeli in the name of the Palestinian cause, however, would turn Kharouf into a hero in the Palestinian Authority, which would provide him and his family with a lifelong stipend of more than $3,000 per month, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

It is this travesty, the monetary incentive for Palestinians to commit acts of terrorism, that spurred U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Dan Coats (R-‎Indiana) and Roy Blunt (R-Mississippi) last February to sponsor the Taylor Force Act. Named after ‎the former U.S. Army officer who was ‎stabbed to death on a trip to Israel in March 2016 by a knife-wielding Palestinian on a rampage in Tel Aviv, the bill aimed to halt American aid to the PA until it ‎stops paying salaries to imprisoned terrorists and the families of ‎those “martyred” while murdering innocent people.

On Thursday, a day after Kharouf declared in Jerusalem that he had killed his girlfriend on behalf of the Palestinian people, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened in Washington to pass the Taylor Force Act, which received bipartisan support after being amended several times in recent weeks. The adjustments were made to enable the transfer of funds to the PA for hospitals and other humanitarian projects, and to give the Palestinian leadership the opportunity to receive more money if and when it proves it has stopped rewarding terrorists.

This is a good symbolic move, but the PA is about as likely to cease its practice of paying terrorists as Kharouf is to retract his lie about killing Halimi for Palestinian nationalist reasons.

Mere weeks ago, at the end of June, PA President Mahmoud Abbas announced that he would not stop paying stipends to terrorists and their families, which he referred to as a “social responsibility.” After meeting in Jerusalem on June 21 with Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, and with Jason Greenblatt, the president’s special Middle East envoy, and U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem Donald Blome, Abbas still would not succumb.

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Losing and winning the Temple Mount Caroline Glick

By on August 5th, 2017

Last week, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his security cabinet caved in to the demands of the PLO and its partners in Hamas, the Islamic Movement, Jordan, Iran and Turkey by agreeing to remove metal detectors and other security screening equipment from the Temple Mount. The equipment was installed last month in response to Palestinian incitement and acts of jihadist violence against Israelis, including the murder of two policemen, at Judaism’s holiest site.http://carolineglick.com/losing-and-winning-the-temple-mount/

After polls showed 77% of Israelis felt he and his cabinet members capitulated to terrorism, Netanyahu issued a statement thanking US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner and Trump’s senior negotiator Jason Greenblatt for their help in resolving the crisis.

The underlying message of Netanyahu’s statement was that he and his ministers folded like a cheap suit to our enemies’ demands, effectively ceding Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount to our enemies because Kushner and Greenblatt pressured them to do so.

But then this week, a congressional intern did us the favor of surreptitiously recording and leaking remarks Kushner made on the issue in off-record remarks to interns at the White House. Kushner’s remarks, which came in response to a question about his role in mediating the Palestinian conflict with Israel, were fairly detailed.

Regarding the Temple Mount crisis, Kushner justified Israel’s decision to place metal detectors at the entrance of the Temple Mount. In his words, following the murder of the policemen by terrorists armed with guns smuggled onto the Mount, “putting up metal detectors on the Temple Mount… is not an irrational thing to do.”

Kushner also emphasized several times the central role that Palestinian incitement played in fomenting the violence on the Temple Mount. He drew the logical conclusion that the same incitement which fomented the violence on the Temple Mount led to the massacre of the Saloman family in their home in Halamish two weeks ago.

Unlike all previous US mediators, Kushner didn’t blame “both sides” for causing the violence. He placed the blame squarely on the Palestinians who incited and committed murder.

In speaking this way, Kushner made clear that he isn’t the type of person who will apply bone-breaking pressure on Israel to capitulate to the demands of terrorist murderers. Certainly Netanyahu and his ministers are strong enough to withstand whatever pressure Kushner and Greenblatt may have brought to bear on them last week.

Indeed, as one administration official put it, “The idea that the same Netanyahu who withstood eight years of unrelenting pressure from the Obama administration crumpled under pressure from Kushner and Greenblatt is simply ridiculous.”

So if it wasn’t American pressure that convinced Netanyahu, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and their colleagues in the security cabinet to crumple, why did they do it?

All of their instincts were pointing them down the opposite path.

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Sophisticated Australian Airplane Bombing Plot a Warning To the West by Abigail R. Esman

By on August 5th, 2017

Australia’s arrest Saturday of four men suspected of plotting a terrorist attack on a commercial airliner signals more than a resurgent terror threat to airplanes. Because the alleged weapon involved smuggling explosives and poison gasses in a standard kitchen utensil – a meat grinder or mincer – it demonstrates, too, the rapidly increasing sophistication of these plots and the development of new means of attack.

It also exposes what international intelligence agencies, but few others, have known for some time: in a recent ranking of countries where radical Islam is a significant security threat, Australia stands in third place.

This may surprise most people, who think of Australia as a land of laid-back surfers and cuddly koalas, but a different side of Australia has emerged in recent years – one where radical Islam is rising. And it’s not just among immigrant populations; there, as elsewhere, converts also play a large role. The large percentage of Australian Muslims who have joined the Islamic State also has been little noticed. With an estimated 476,000 Muslims among 24.13 million Australians, the country has one of the highest per capita rates of Muslims who have made hijrah, or the journey to the caliphate. The ratio is about on par with France.

According to a BBC report, the majority of Australia’s radicals were born in that country. Sixty percent of them are of Lebanese heritage – another distinction from European ISIS members, most of whom appear to come from Northern Africa. And a 2010 report from Monash University’s Global Terrorism Research Centre noted that, unlike other jihadists in the West, radical Muslims in Australia tend to be married (77 percent, as opposed to 38 percent in the UK).

The four men arrested in conjunction with the latest plot all were Lebanese-Australian, according to the Daily Mail. Khaled and Mahmoud Khayat, alleged to be father and son, are believed to be related to a senior ISIS figure; Khaled and Abdul Merhi are said to be related to Ahmed Merhi, who has been in Syria since 2014 and is a popular ISIS recruiter. According to the Australian, while Ahmed Merhi’s mother is Lebanese and a practicing Muslim, his Syrian father Faraj claims to have abandoned religion.

Abdul Merhi was released Monday without charges. According to press reports, despite extensive questioning, officials found no evidence he was involved.

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‘Unmasking’ Investigation Leading Straight To Obama White House Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power added to House Intelligence Committee’s investigation list. Joseph Klein

By on August 4th, 2017

A mounting unmasking scandal investigation is leading right to the Obama White House and to a former Obama administration United Nations ambassador. Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, which is handling the investigation, has blown the lid off of what could well turn out to be one of the most egregious violations of Americans’ 4th Amendment privacy rights in the nation’s history.

In a July 27th letter to Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, Rep. Nunes expressed the concern of his committee that government officials may have abused their authority to request the unmasking of U.S. person identities sourced from raw intelligence reports. The raw intelligence, which included the names of some Americans, focused on foreign individuals’ communications of interest to intelligence agencies. Some of those communications may have been with Americans caught up in the intelligence surveillance.

Rep. Nunes said in his letter that “Obama-era officials sought the identities of Trump transition officials within intelligence reports.” One official, the letter said, “whose position had no apparent intelligence-related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration” (emphasis in the original). Rep. Nunes added that in the absence of individual, fact-based justifications for such unmasking, “the Committee is left with the impression that these officials may have used this information for improper purposes, including the possibility of leaking. More pointedly, some of the requests for unminimized U.S. person information were followed by anonymous leaks of those names to the media.”

During the final days of the Obama presidency, Obama administration officials widely disseminated information across government agencies regarding intelligence purportedly linking Trump officials to Russian contacts. Some of that information has been leaked to the press, most notably leaked transcripts of retired General and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

Rep. Nunes’ July 27th letter did not provide any specific names of Obama-era officials who allegedly made the unmasking requests, including unmasking of the identities of Trump transition officials. However, in a letter sent Tuesday by the House Intelligence Committee to the National Security Agency (NSA), former Obama White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes was specifically named as a person of interest.

Circa’s Sara Carter has reported that Rhodes’ name was added “to the growing list of top Obama government officials who may have improperly unmasked Americans in communications intercepted overseas by the NSA.” The intelligence committee, Sara Carter wrote, is “requesting the number of unmaskings made by Rhodes from Jan. 1, 2016 to Jan. 20, 2017.”

Rhodes was the Obama-era official who boasted about creating “an echo chamber” in the press to sell the Obama administration’s disastrous Iran nuclear deal. Rhodes was subsequently reported to be part of “a small task force of Obama loyalists who deluged media outlets with stories aimed at eroding Flynn’s credibility,” according to multiple sources cited by the Washington Free Beacon. Their purpose was to preserve Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which Flynn strongly opposed. They did not want to risk Flynn’s disclosure of “secret details of the nuclear deal with Iran that had been long hidden by the Obama administration,” according to the Washington Free Beacon report.

Thus, Rhodes had both motive and opportunity to abuse his authority to request the unmasking of the identities of Americans while still serving as deputy national security adviser during the waning days of the Obama administration, particularly if they involved the identities of Trump campaign and transition officials such as Flynn.

Ben Rhodes’ involvement in the actual leaking of the Flynn transcript has not yet been definitively established. However, in a tweet on March 2, 2017, after the leak occurred, Rhodes revealed how he felt about the public exposure of the Russian contacts: “Flynn, Kushner, Manafort, Page, Sessions all meet with Russians pre-inauguration. Why? And why go to such lengths to conceal these contacts?”

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

An Immigration System That Puts America First Trump’s common-sense reforms will make U.S. immigration policy sane again. Matthew Vadum

By on August 4th, 2017

President Trump’s newly-unveiled immigration reforms represent an earth-shattering, fundamental change in U.S. immigration policy that is desperately needed after the never-ending waves of poorly educated, hard-to-assimilate immigrants from unenlightened corners of the earth unleashed by Democrats in the Sixties.

“Our question as a government is, to whom is our duty [owed]?” said White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller. “Our duty is to U.S. citizens and U.S. workers to promote rising wages for them.”

The proposal is “a major historic change to U.S. immigration policy,” he said.

“The effect of this, switching to a skills-based system and ending unfettered chain migration, would be, over time, you would cut net migration in half, which polling shows is supported overwhelmingly by the American people in very large numbers.”

“This is what President Trump campaigned on,” Miller said. “He talked about it throughout the campaign, throughout the transition, and since coming into office.”

Miller added: “It’s been my experience in the legislative process that there’s two kinds of proposals. There’s proposals that can only succeed in the dark of night and proposals that can only succeed in the light of day. This is the latter of those two.”

“The more that we as a country have a national conversation about what kind of immigration system we want and to whom we want to give green cards,” Miller said, “the more unstoppable the momentum for something like this becomes.”

The Trump administration’s long overdue revamping of America’s antiquated immigration laws, reverses the systemic discrimination against well-rounded would-be immigrants who speak English. Trump wants the immigration system to emphasize merit and employability, as opposed to familial relationships.

The new immigration system puts the interests of America first, so naturally, the Left is fighting it. It has been axiomatic in the Trump era that the better the president’s proposals are, the more fiercely the Left opposes them. Take President Trump’s intensifying crackdown on the transnational crime gang MS-13. No matter how horrifying and brutal the group’s crimes against innocent Americans may be, the Left denounces the law-and-order push as racist button-pushing that won’t accomplish anything good. Left-wingers promote so-called sanctuary cities which are magnets for illegal aliens and the crime that accompanies them. They don’t care about the damage such policies do to American society. It is enough that Trump is taking aim at these havens of seditious lawlessness for leftists to defend sanctuary cities.

Trump advisor Miller coherently and forcefully laid out the rationale for the proposed immigration law changes on Wednesday in a much-watched press conference in which he did battle with the insufferably arrogant left-wing journalist Jim Acosta of CNN. Acosta accused the Trump administration of racism, even white-supremacism, because the proposed “Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act” (RAISE Act) will make would-be immigrants in the Third World compete against better skilled workers who speak English.

Miller correctly referred to the plan as “the largest proposed reform to our immigration policy in half a century.” (Lyman Stone has a useful summary of the RAISE Act at the Federalist.)

“The most important question when it comes to the U.S. immigration system is who gets a green card,” he said. “A green card is the golden ticket of U.S. immigration.”

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McMaster’s NSC Coup Against Trump Purges Critics of Islam and Obama The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat. Daniel Greenfield

By on August 4th, 2017

Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it.

The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from.

It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser at the National Security Council than a man who had been on the ground in Iraq and who had seen it all.

Just like in Iraq, Harvey began digging at the NSC. He came up with a list of Obama holdovers who were leaking to the press. McMaster, the new head of the NSC, refused to fire any of them.

McMaster had a different list of people he wanted to fire. It was easy to make the list. Harvey was on it.

All you had to do was name Islamic terrorism as the problem and oppose the Iran Deal. If you came in with Flynn, you would be out. If you were loyal to Trump, your days were numbered.

And if you warned about Obama holdovers undermining the new administration, you were a target.

One of McMaster’s first acts at the NSC was to ban any mention of “Obama holdovers.” Not only did the McMaster coup purge Harvey, who had assembled the holdover list, but his biggest target was Ezra Watnick-Cohen, who had exposed the eavesdropping on Trump officials by Obama personnel.

Ezra Watnick-Cohen had provided proof of the Obama surveillance to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. McMaster, however, was desperately working to fire him and replace him with Linda Weissgold. McMaster’s choice to replace Watnick-Cohen was the woman who helped draft the Benghazi talking points which blamed the Islamic terrorist attack on a video protest.

After protests by Bannon and Kushner, President Trump overruled McMaster. Watnick-Cohen stayed. For a while. Now Ezra Watnick-Cohen has been fired anyway.

According to the media, Watnick-Cohen was guilty of “anti-Muslim fervor” and “hardline views.” And there’s no room for anyone telling the truth about Islamic terrorism at McMaster’s NSC.

McMaster had even demanded that President Trump refrain from telling the truth about Islamic terrorism.

Another of his targets was Rich Higgins, who had written a memo warning of the role of the left in undermining counterterrorism. Higgins had served as a director for strategic planning at the NSC. He had warned in plain language about the threat of Islamic terrorism, of Sharia law, of the Hijrah colonization by Islamic migrants, of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of its alliance with the left as strategic threats.

Higgins had stood by Trump during the Khizr Khan attacks. And he had written a memo warning that “the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels” and that “they operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies.”

Like Harvey and Ezra Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had warned of an enemy within. And paid the price.

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A Leak That Really Hurts The Washington Post’s publication of transcripts detailing President Trump’s calls with foreign leaders sets a dangerous precedent. By Elliot Kaufman

By on August 4th, 2017

This morning, the Washington Post published leaked transcripts of President Trump’s January phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. At the time of the calls, many of their key details were leaked to the Post, which reported on them extensively. So why release the full transcripts now?

One reason is that they show Trump saying all sorts of embarrassing things. He calls New Hampshire a “drug-infested den.” He acknowledges that his promise to get Mexico to pay for a border wall has left him cornered, and he describes the wall as, in actuality, “the least important thing that we are talking about.” It is worth noting that Trump did not threaten to send troops to Mexico, as had been previously reported. But he did tell President Enrique Pena Nieto that America was “willing to help” Mexico fight the “pretty tough hombres” who run its powerful drug cartels.

This could all have been reported in a regular article. Publishing full transcripts of phone calls including the comments of foreign leaders, however, is bad for the country. They should not have been leaked — that is the first, most egregious problem — and they should not have been published. Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council during President Obama’s second term, wrote on Twitter that, “I would’ve lost my mind if transcripts of Obama’s calls to foreign leaders leaked.” And he would have been well within his rights to do so.

Presidents need to be able to converse openly, honestly, and bluntly with foreign leaders. They sometimes need to reveal things that they cannot say publicly. This allows them to develop both personal and working relationships. Though it can be unpleasant to contemplate, politicians need this kind of flexibility to move past public pronouncements and get down to their nations’ real interests.

Neither Trump nor his foreign counterparts can have such flexibility in their mutual dealings if they fear that their remarks will be leaked to the press and then to the public.

For example, the Post’s transcript shows that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia told President Trump that he thinks the Germans made a huge mistake in letting in so many refugees. Turnbull even linked that decision to the Brexit vote in Britain. He’ll now have to answer for that comment at home and whenever he next meets with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. Similarly, the Post quotes President Peña Nieto musing about “creative ways” to pay for Trump’s border wall. In public, Nieto’s position is far more intransigent, but it is a good thing that he was able to level with our president and explain the constraints of his own political situation. In the future, Turnbull, Nieto, and every other foreign leader will think twice before opening up.

There is also another risk. Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, speculated on Twitter that President Trump may now “refuse notetakers at other major phone calls/meetings.” This would not be unreasonable of him. After all, he can only tolerate so many leaks that damage his ability to do his job before he says enough is enough.

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Why Doesn’t Trump Just Unmask the Unmasking? Trump has the authority to decide what intelligence information, and intelligence abuses, can be declassified and made public. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on August 4th, 2017

Is “unmasking” the Republican version of “collusion”: dramatic huffing and puffing in lieu of something truly worth huffing and puffing about?

I wonder. I’ve watched the story closely but I haven’t written about it for a while because I can’t get past a nagging question: Why must we speculate about whether the Obama administration abusively exploited its foreign-intelligence-collection powers in order to spy on Donald Trump’s political campaign? After all, Trump is president now. If he was victimized, he’s in a position to tell us all about it.

The president is in charge of the executive branch, including its intelligence agencies. He has the authority to decide what intelligence information, and intelligence abuses, can be declassified and made public.

When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, he bashed the Bush administration’s “enhanced” interrogation techniques for high-value terrorist detainees. His campaign promised that there would be a public accounting. When he became president, Obama promptly ordered the declassification and public dissemination of government memos outlining the techniques.

Like many Obama critics, I disagreed with the merits of this decision. But there was no denying the president’s authority to reveal the information. He had objected to what he argued were abusive practices by the intelligence agencies under the guise of national security. As president, he was in a position to expose evidence of the practices, both to back up his allegations and to push for policy changes.

So, why hasn’t Trump taken a page out of this book? Why are we still guessing whether political spying occurred when the alleged victim is now in a position to tell us one way or the other?

New reporting on the subject by Circa’s Sara A. Carter injects confusion while adding to the unnecessary suspense. Its headline breathlessly proclaims, “Former Obama aide Ben Rhodes is now a person of interest in the unmasking investigation.” Not to pick on Ms. Carter, but . . . no he’s not.

There is no unmasking “investigation” in the commonly understood sense of a law-enforcement probe to determine if criminal laws were broken. The inquiry into unmasking — i.e., the exposure in intelligence reporting of the identities of Americans incidentally picked up in foreign-intelligence collections — is an exercise in congressional oversight. Its principal purpose is to determine whether there should be legislative changes in the laws that govern intelligence-gathering (e.g., Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is up for reauthorization soon).

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The DOJ Takes on Campus Discrimination

By on August 4th, 2017

The Justice Department plans to invest more resources in investigating a complaint of racial discrimination at American universities. Naturally, so-called liberals are dismayed.

One of the results of the increasing diversity of the United States is that questions involving race and ethnicity no longer amount to whites vs. blacks or whites vs. everybody else — there are more players at the table. But don’t tell that to the editors of the New York Times, who immediately tried to present the question as the Trump administration working to stir up white racial resentment. The Times reported that the DOJ would target “affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants,” even as it concedes three paragraphs later that relevant policy document “does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions.”

The Times talks a good game about diversity, but one wonders whether any of the Asian editors on its staff were given the opportunity to consider that sentence.

In reality, as the DOJ itself has now confirmed, the directive involves a complaint filed by a group of 64 Asian-American organizations, a complaint made during the Obama administration, which never got around to resolving it. The DOJ has not received any new policy direction on affirmative action as a general practice, much less as it specifically relates to white students.

It should.

There are questions — legitimate ones — about the ways in which affirmative-action policies in college admissions disadvantage white applicants relative to their black and Hispanic counterparts, questions that are of particular interest when applied to affirmative-action programs that disproportionately benefit wealthy black and Hispanic applicants from abroad rather than the members of struggling domestic minority populations these policies are intended, in theory, to serve.

But the children of white working-class families who pay a racial penalty when competing for college spots against the children of Nigerian college professors and Colombian oil executives are not the only ones with a legitimate complaint. The de facto discrimination against Asian and Asian-American students is spectacular, undeniable, and shameful. They are in effect subjected to the same quota system that the Ivy League once used to keep down its Jewish population — the “bamboo ceiling,” some call it. Asian-American groups pursuing litigation against these policies have demonstrated that students of Asian background on average have to score 140 points above white students to have similar chances of college admission — and 270 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than black students. The “Asian penalty” is especially heavy in places such as California’s prestigious state universities.

The DOJ is absolutely in the right to take up this question.

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Mueller’s Grand Jury: What It Means And what it doesn’t mean By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on August 4th, 2017

The most significant conclusion we can draw from news that a grand jury has been impaneled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller is that the so-called Russia investigation, officially, is a criminal investigation.

The purpose of a grand jury is to investigate a factual transaction or series of transactions to determine whether criminal charges should be filed. That makes it categorically different from a counterintelligence investigation. The latter, we have noted many times, is an information-gathering exercise geared toward understanding and thwarting the intentions and actions of foreign powers.

There is no need for a grand jury in a counterintelligence probe.

All that said, the fact that there is a criminal investigation does not mean charges are imminent, or indeed that they will ever be filed. There are virtually no limits on the investigative powers of the grand jury. Under our law, a grand jury may conduct a probe simply to satisfy itself that no crimes have been committed. That is to say, there is no evidentiary threshold that must be crossed before a grand jury can begin investigating. Contrast that with, for example, a search warrant or an eavesdropping warrant; those investigative techniques may not be used unless a court has first been satisfied that there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed.

It is frequently observed that grand-jury proceedings are secret. That is not quite accurate. The obligation of secrecy applies to the grand jurors and government personnel who examine witnesses and collect evidence through subpoenas. But subjects of the investigation, witnesses, and their lawyers are under no duty to remain silent – even though it is usually a good idea to do so, since statements can be used as evidence. Of course, there are often government leaks. Putting that inevitability aside, though, it is worth noting who is permitted to speak and who is not. Media coverage of an investigation tends to rely on the people most at liberty to discuss it. That means coverage skews in favor of lawyers for the subjects, who obviously have a motive to minimize the prosecution’s proof.

The principal advantage of the grand jury for prosecutors is the ability to issue subpoenas to compel testimony and the production of documentary or other physical evidence. No investigation of any complexity can be advanced without this capacity. When I say “advanced,” I do not mean a progression toward the filing of criminal charges – at least not necessarily. An investigation should be a search for the truth, which means getting to the bottom of what happened, regardless of whether crimes can be proven.

Thus, the fact that we now have a grand jury does not mean a crime has been committed, much less that the filing of charges must be imminent. Still, the impaneling of a grand jury is a highly significant development. Prosecutors do not seek the assistance of the grand jury’s subpoena power, and do not contemplate presenting evidence to a grand jury, unless they see a realistic possibility of filing criminal charges.

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