RUTHFULLY YOURS

Loretta Lynch did herself, the Department of Justice and Hillary Clinton no favors on Friday when she tried to repair the damage she had done by meeting privately with Bill Clinton this week.

In a televised interview from Aspen, Colorado, with the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, the Attorney General struggled to defend her department’s ability to make an honest decision about whether to indict Mrs. Clinton over her handling of classified information on her personal email server. “I fully expect” to accept the recommendations of FBI investigators and career Justice officials, she said, in damage-control mode.

Ms. Lynch created this mess when she welcomed the former President onto her plane in Phoenix for a 30-minute private meeting—while her department is investigating his spouse. The public might not even have known about the meeting if someone hadn’t tipped off a reporter. When first asked about the propriety of the meeting earlier this week, Ms. Lynch explained it was “primarily” social.

That didn’t satisfy anyone, and the pressure built. Prosecutors don’t meet privately with the spouses of people who are under investigation, and even White House spokesman Josh Earnest admitted that questions about Ms. Lynch’s meeting are “entirely legitimate.” Ms. Lynch said Friday at Aspen that she understands why her behavior has “cast a shadow” over the integrity of the Justice Department.

Yet her Clintonian answers show as much bad judgment as the original meeting. She is now passing the buck to career officials while still retaining the ability to overrule them. This is trying to have it both ways. She knows there will be a political price to pay no matter what the decision. Her ethical straddle allows her to say she had nothing to do with a decision not to indict while retaining the authority to overrule an FBI recommendation to indict. CONTINUE AT SITE

On July 4, 1900, Samuel Hoffman and his father, Moshe, walked across the gangplank of a ferryboat that unceremoniously dumped them, along with a large group of fellow immigrants, at a dock on 14th Street in Manhattan. Independence Day for these newcomers meant liberation from czarist Russia.

New Yorkers were used to seeing confused, freshly arrived immigrants walking through lower Manhattan, but these two stood out. It was a searing-hot summer day and both father and son wore winter overcoats and boots.
“Our clothing and awkward bundles on our backs, as we walked along 14th Street, drew everyone’s attention to us,” Samuel Hoffman wrote at age 83 in an account for his family. “I was 15 years old, bewildered and almost overcome by the alien and unfamiliar scenes that stretched and throbbed all around father and me.”

Like most immigrants, they couldn’t speak the language. Coming from a small village in Russia, they had never seen anything even remotely like New York City. They could have arrived from another planet. All they had to guide them was a piece of paper with the address of a distant relative who lived on the Lower East Side.

After generations of extreme poverty and religious persecution, Moshe and his more savvy wife, Yetta, had decided to sell their house and borrow enough money to pay for two tickets to America. The plan was that father and son would then earn enough money in the New World to bring over the rest of the family. Constant hunger was a hallmark of Samuel’s childhood in Russia. His daily diet had consisted of one piece of black bread and a potato dipped in herring sauce for flavor. Occasionally there were onions and radishes and a glass of milk for the children. It had been that way for generations and there was little chance it would ever change.

Breaking with tradition, Yetta chose to send Samuel instead of her eldest son. Although Samuel looked even younger than 15, Yetta believed that he would fare better than his older brother. She knew her son.

There was no government assistance for the giant wave of immigrants to America at the turn of the 20th century. Instead, like all the immigrants that had come before, they would fend for themselves. They also helped each other. The distant relative on the Lower East Side took in Samuel and Moshe, even though, with three children and two boarders in only three rooms, that was a challenge. Another distant cousin, with a larger home in Brooklyn, soon took them in until they could afford a room of their own.

After a series of jobs that brought in more money, and going to school at night to learn English, Samuel started his own business. He bought nine sewing machines on credit and hired employees. Many trades were closed to Jews, but the garment industry seemed to belong to them.

The ill-fated prosecution of six Baltimore police officers for the accidental death of Freddie Gray in April 2015 was the spawn of the Black Lives Matter movement. The preposterously unjustified charges against the officers grew out of the BLM conceit that cops are racist murderers. On May 1, 2015, state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby invoked Al Sharpton’s extortionist chant of “No Justice, No Peace” as a motivation for her charging decisions, after rioters had destroyed the livelihoods of dozens of Baltimore’s workers and small businessmen.

It is therefore fitting that Mosby’s vendetta is collapsing all around her, based as it is on an ideology composed of demonstrable lies about law enforcement. Judge Barry Williams handed Mosby her third and most devastating defeat on June 23, acquitting Officer Caesar Goodson of all seven counts against him, including the ludicrous second-degree murder charge.

Gray, a 25-year-old drug dealer with a long criminal record, had been arrested for possession of an illegal knife on April 1, 2015, after running from a bike patrol officer who had made eye contact with him. During transport in a police van driven by Officer Goodson, Gray suffered a spinal cord injury that led to his death a week later. The exact timing and cause of that injury are still in dispute.

A hostile crowd was forming at the site of Gray’s arrest, so the arresting officers put Gray in Goodson’s van and instructed Goodson to drive to another location where they could complete the paperwork without interference. Goodson would make five more stops thereafter; he never spoke to Gray. Gray’s injury occurred at some still unknown point during that journey. At stop two, the three arresting officers removed Gray from the wagon, placed leg shackles and flexicuffs on him, documented the arrest, put him back in the wagon on his stomach, and left. Gray had been going limp and passively resisting the officers during that second stop; once they left him in the van he began screaming, kicking, and throwing himself around so violently that outside observers saw the van rocking. At stop three, Goodson went to the back of the van for less than 11 seconds, and then called for assistance. Judge Williams found that there was not enough time at stop three for Goodson to actually check and assess Gray. Officer William Porter answered Goodson’s call for assistance at stop four. Porter asked Gray, who was on the floor on his stomach as at stop two, how he was doing; Gray answered: “Help.” Porter asked him what he wanted help with, and Gray responded: “Help me up,” according to Porter’s testimony. Porter helped Gray get on the bench inside the van. Porter asked Gray if he wanted to go to the hospital; Gray answered yes. Porter did not believe that Gray was in need of medical treatment, but told Goodson after stop four that he did not think that Gray would be admitted to Central Booking, and that for purely administrative reasons they should take him to the hospital instead. Goodson did not call for medical assistance but proceeded to stop five to pick up another arrestee, Donta Allen. At stop five, Porter saw Gray kneeling on the floor and leaning on the bench. Porter again asked Gray if he wanted to go to the hospital; Gray again answered yes. Gray seemed lethargic but was otherwise breathing normally and showed no other signs of distress. By the final, sixth stop, Gray was unconscious, not breathing, and in visible need of urgent medical care. Goodson called for help and took him to the hospital.