Justice Dept. watch: If You Don’t Indict, You Can’t Incite
Contrary to what The New York Times and (allegedly) some members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team believe, the job of prosecutors is not “to pen ‘damaging’ narratives about people they couldn’t indict,” asserts The Hill’s John Solomon. Nor is it their job “to air those people’s dirty laundry, or that of suspects, outside of a grand jury room or a courtroom.” This “isn’t a game of horseshoes or hand grenades where prosecutors get to score points or inflict damage without indicting the target.” That’s why there are grand juries — and strict secrecy rules governing them. That’s also why the Justice Department admonished James Comey for publicly criticizing Hillary Clinton after the probe of her e-mails resulted in no criminal charges. Team Mueller, says Solomon, “might have taken note.”
Foreign desk: Do Dems Want a US-Saudi Alliance on Not?
Does it matter which side wins the civil war in Yemen? It “most certainly does,” says Bloomberg’s Eli Lake — though Democrats need to be reminded why. Congress, with near-unanimous Democratic support, has passed a resolution ending US support for Saudi Arabia in that conflict. Though not entirely unjustified, Lake admits, “this approach is shortsighted.” Because focusing “solely on Saudi Arabia’s role in the Yemen conflict is to give Iran a pass for making it worse” — by giving its Houthi clients missiles capable of reaching Riyadh. That’s “what the Saudis are concerned about” and why President Trump has promised to veto the resolution. But it signals what Democrats’ policy toward Saudi Arabia will be if they win the White House. Still, for all Riyadh’s “depravities,” it’s better for the US if the Saudis “prevail in Yemen and help contain Iran.”
From the right: Chicago Faces a Political Sea Change
With the election of Lori Lightfoot, an African-American woman, as mayor, Chicago “is heading into a period of transition” not experienced in three decades, contends City Journal’s Aaron Renn. Mayor Richard Daley and his successor and protégé, Rahm Emanuel, have run the city since 1989. Now along comes Lightfoot, a political outsider who had never run for office or been especially involved in Democratic politics. In giving her a landslide win over an opponent who was “the consummate political insider,” Chicago “clearly voted for change.” But though she ran as a reformer, Lightfoot “comes from a pragmatic, big-business background.” She faces “enormous financial problems, headlined by unfunded pensions and high levels of debt.” But her biggest challenge will be repairing “Chicago’s battered reputation.”
Security beat: Universities Waking Up to China Threat
This week, two major American universities “independently took steps to disentangle their cooperation with Chinese entities,” reports The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin. MIT cut its ties to the Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE, which stand accused of sanctions-busting. And Indiana University decided to close its Confucius Institute, one of 90 US language and culture schools that are part of Beijing’s foreign-influence operations. When security professionals “first sounded the alarm about Chinese partnerships in U.S. universities,” most academic officials were “skeptical and resistant.” Now, more colleges “are taking a sober look at the Chinese government’s presence on their campuses” and “deciding to curtail it.”
Academics: ID Laws Don’t Suppress Minority Voters
Democratic opponents of strict voter-ID laws accuse them of being tools of minority-voter suppression. But as Ben Pryor, James David and Rebekah Herrick point out at The Conversation, “a growing body of evidence” (including their own new study) “finds that strict voter-ID laws do not appear to disproportionately suppress voter turnout among African Americans, Asian Americans or people of mixed races.” Moreover, they note, most voting-fraud claims “turn out to be inadvertent errors by voters or polling officials.” But the authors’ comprehensive study found no relationship, as has long been claimed, “between strict voter-ID laws and lower turnout” by minority voters. In fact, another study notes, there is evidence “to suggest the laws actually act as a catalyst, inspiring and mobilizing minority voters.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
