Last Call For Cashing In On Khashoggi

Our fragile diplomatic relationship with Saudi Arabia would apparently be jeopardized if the Biden administration actually leveled travel sanctions against Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan for ordering of the death of US journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

President Biden has decided that the price of directly penalizing Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is too high, according to senior administration officials, despite a detailed American intelligence finding that he directly approved the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and Washington Post columnist who was drugged and dismembered in October 2018.

The decision by Mr. Biden, who during the 2020 campaign called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value,” came after weeks of debate in which his newly formed national security team advised him that there was no way to formally bar the heir to the Saudi crown from entering the United States, or to weigh criminal charges against him, without breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies.

Officials said a consensus developed inside the White House that the price of that breach, in Saudi cooperation on counterterrorism and in confronting Iran, was simply too high.

For Mr. Biden, the decision was a telling indication of how his more cautious instincts kicked in, and it will deeply disappoint the human rights community and members of his own party who complained during the Trump administration that the United States was failing to hold the crown prince, known by his initials M.B.S., accountable for his role.

Many organizations were pressing Mr. Biden to, at a minimum, impose the same travel sanctions against the crown prince as the Trump administration imposed on others involved in the plot.

Mr. Biden’s aides said that as a practical matter, Prince Mohammed would not be invited to the United States anytime soon, and they denied that they were giving Saudi Arabia a pass, describing series of new actions on lower-level officials intended to penalize elite elements of the Saudi military and impose new deterrents to human rights abuses.

Those actions, approved by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, include a travel ban on Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, who was deeply involved in the Khashoggi operation, and on the Rapid Intervention Force, a unit of the Saudi Royal Guard.

The declassified intelligence report concluded that the intervention force, which operates under the crown prince, directed the operation against Mr. Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Mr. Khashoggi entered the consulate on Oct. 2, 2018, to get papers he needed for his forthcoming marriage, and, with his fiancée waiting outside the gates, was instead met by an assassination team.

An effort by the Saudi government to issue a cover story, contending that Mr. Khashoggi had left the consulate unharmed, collapsed in days.

 

So what will Joe Biden actually do about it?

President Joe Biden on Saturday said his administration would make an announcement on Saudi Arabia on Monday, following a U.S. intelligence report that found Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The Biden administration has faced some criticism, notably an editorial in the Washington Post, that the president should have been tougher on the crown prince, who was not sanctioned despite being blamed for approving Khashoggi’s murder.

Asked about punishing the crown prince, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, who is also known as MbS, Biden said: “There will be an announcement on Monday as to what we are going to be doing with Saudi Arabia generally.”

 

So we'll find out soon.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorist Problem, Con't

 Richard Holzer, who plead guilty to an attempt to firebomb a Colorado synagogue in 2019, has been sentenced to 20 years.

Although the plot was thwarted, U.S. District Judge Raymond Moore said Holzer had sought “to terrorize the Jewish community” of Pueblo, a city of 112,000 residents about 100 miles south of Denver.

“It is one of the most vulgar ... evil crimes that can be committed against an entire group of people,” Moore said while imposing the sentence sought by prosecutors.

Holzer declined to speak at the hearing.

The defendant pleaded guilty in October to one count of trying to obstruct religious services by force, and one count of attempting to destroy a building used in interstate commerce, according to his plea agreement.

Holzer, who lived in Pueblo, was arrested in November 2019 following an undercover sting by federal agents tracking his social media postings, in which he professed a hatred of Jews, according to an FBI arrest warrant affidavit.

Posing as fellow racists, undercover agents reached out to Holzer and later met with him as he broached the idea of blowing up the synagogue, the affidavit said. Ultimately, the agents provided him with inert pipe bombs and sticks of dynamite before arresting him, court documents showed.

The judge rejected arguments by defense lawyers that Holzer has renounced his racist views, noting that since his arrest he has reached out to other white supremacists and continued to invoke Nazi imagery.

“The notion that he’s turned some corner is fantasy,” Moore said.

 

Radicalized here in the States and unleashed upon the populace. This was somebody so awful even the Trump-era FBI brought him in.

And yes, he's a terrorist and he's going to jail. It's the slightly less stupid ones at large we have to worry about.

A sitting member of Congress appeared at a white nationalist convention Friday night, marking new GOP support for the racist movement. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) spoke in Orlando, Florida, at the America First Political Action conference, a far-right event meant to mimic the establishment Republican Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

After Gosar’s speech, AFPAC organizer Nick Fuentes, who marched in the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and was outside the Capitol with his supporters during the Jan. 6 riot, took the podium that warned that “white people are done being bullied.” Fuentes praised the fatal riot as “awesome,” describing it as “light-hearted mischief.” He also mocked Gosar’s colleague, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), for needing a wheelchair, saying Cawthorn couldn’t “stand up” for his constituents.

“‘I’m gonna take a stand?’” Fuentes said. “How? How are you gonna do that?”

Gosar was joined at the event by former Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who lost his congressional committee seats after defending white nationalism.

Gosar attempted to distance himself from the white nationalist event Saturday morning at a panel on CPAC. Without mentioning what he was specifically referring to, Gosar said, “I want to tell you—I denounce when we talk about white racism. That’s not appropriate.”

The FBI is reportedly investigating a large bitcoin payment Fuentes and other far-right figures received ahead of the riot. A former Fuentes associate has claimed the white nationalist leader, who has also attempted to downplay the number of Jewish people who died in the Holocaust by comparing them to cookies made by Cookie Monster, has had his bank accounts frozen by federal authorities in the aftermath of the riot.

Even now, even after January 6, Republican members of Congress still show up at events with avowed white supremacist domestic terrorists. They have learned nothing, and still don't care.

Don't Care Where You Go But You Can't Stay Here

A federal judge has struck down the CDC moratorium on evictions, siding with Texas landlords in a dangerous decision that could mean the end of the Fair Housing Act and the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development. Vox's Ian Milihiser explains:

For nearly a year, millions of Americans who are unable to pay their rent due to the economic crisis triggered by Covid-19 have had some protections against eviction. Both the CARES Act, which became law last March, and the second Covid-19 relief bill, which was signed in December, included temporary moratoriums on many evictions.

In the interim periods when these statutory safeguards against eviction are not in effect — the CARES Act’s moratorium expired after 120 days, and the second relief bill’s moratorium expired on January 31 — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed a similar moratorium using its own authority, citing a federal law that permits the CDC director to “make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases.”

On Thursday evening, a Trump-appointed judge on a federal court in Texas handed down a decision that calls into question the legality of these moratoriums. Currently, there is no congressional moratorium on evictions in place, only the CDC moratorium, although it is likely that the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill currently being negotiated in Congress will implement a new statutory moratorium.

Though Judge J. Campbell Barker’s order in Terkel v. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only explicitly strikes down the CDC’s moratorium, Barker’s opinion is fairly broad and suggests that congressional regulation of evictions may also be unconstitutional. His opinion, if embraced by higher courts, could endanger any federal regulation of the housing market, including bans on discrimination in housing.

The opinion is a mélange of libertarian tropes, long-discarded constitutional theory, and statements that are entirely at odds with binding Supreme Court decisions.

The thrust of Barker’s Terkel opinion is that the Constitution’s commerce clause, which provides that Congress may “regulate commerce ... among the several states,” is not broad enough to permit federal regulation of evictions.

But, as the Supreme Court explained in United States v. Lopez (1995), the commerce clause gives Congress broad authority to regulate the national economy — including any activity that “‘substantially affects’ interstate commerce.” Though Lopez struck down a federal law prohibiting individuals from bringing guns near school zones, the Lopez opinion emphasizes the breadth of Congress’s power to regulate the economy. “Where economic activity substantially affects interstate commerce,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the Court, “legislation regulating that activity will be sustained.”

To get around decisions like Lopez, Barker argues that evicting someone from a home that they pay thousands of dollars a year to rent is not an “economic activity.”

“The law at issue in Lopez criminalized the possession of one’s handgun when in a covered area,” Barker wrote. “The order at issue here criminalizes the possession of one’s property when inhabited by a covered person. Neither regulated activity is economic in material respect.”

Merely quoting this argument is enough to refute it. Again, Barker claims that removing someone from a home that they rent, for money, because that individual failed to pay the agreed-upon sum of money, is not an economic activity.

But just in case it isn’t obvious that Barker is wrong, the Supreme Court’s decision in Russell v. United States (1985) directly contradicts him. Russell held that “the congressional power to regulate the class of activities that constitute the rental market for real estate includes the power to regulate individual activity within that class.”

Barker’s opinion is still wrong even if you accept his claim that evicting someone from a rental home is not an economic activity.

 

It is wrong, but if five of the Supreme Court decide it's not wrong, that housing is solely the domain of the states and that it cannot be federally regulated, well that's basically the end of the Civil Rights era. We go right back to Jim Crow if that's true. If Lopez and Russell are thrown out, then the vast majority of federal oversight vanishes.

And that brings back the worst of the bad old days.