When I was a freshman at Fordham University in 1973, one of the records played most often in the dorms was the newly released Allman Brothers record Brothers and Sisters. Other top choices in the stack were Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, The Grateful Dead’s Wake of the Flood, Earth, Wind and Fire’s Keep Your Head to More
Former President Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Bedminster, N.J., on June 13, 2023.
Photo: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
Ben Shapiro, conservative commentator and lead singer of an Alvin and the Chipmunks tribute band, has some thoughts about former President Donald Trump’s arraignment yesterday on federal charges in Florida.
“When the Justice Department gets reduced to pure politics, you have a problem,” said Shapiro on his eponymous show. He continued:
Now I hear people screaming, ‘But you just said that Trump may have committed criminal activity here, the allegations against him are very strong.’ That’s true [but] the only way that you actually restore the credibility of the justice system is to have Republicans prosecute Republicans and Democrats prosecute Democrats. … If the basic line here is the Republicans are just supposed to accept that Republicans who are guilty of crimes get indicted, and Democrats who are guilty of crimes get slots on CNN and MSNBC, that is not a workable solution for anyone. … The double standard is what is going to destroy the credibility of the institution.
Shapiro is correct that there is a stunning double standard in the investigation and prosecution of prominent U.S. politicians. Where he went wrong was in claiming that up is down and black is white — i.e., that this double standard favors Democrats.
Ben Shapiro: Trump “may have committed criminal activity here, the allegations against him here are very strong,” but “the only way that you actually restore the credibility of the justice system is to have Republicans prosecute Republicans and Democrats prosecute Democrats” pic.twitter.com/1TNBYThIsG
That’s because Democrats seem to be somehow, for all intents and purposes, barred from several key roles in the U.S. justice system, even under Democratic presidents. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was established in 1935 and has had eight directors in the subsequent 88 years. Literally none of them has been a Democrat. (This does not include figures who’ve served as acting director, generally for short periods.)
Similarly, no Democrat has been named as a special counsel (or special prosecutor or independent counsel, the names for similar earlier positions) for a significant investigation for 50 years. As The Associated Press puts it, special counsels are outside attorneys appointed by the attorney general when the AG perceives the Justice Department as “having a conflict or where it’s deemed to be in the public interest to have someone outside the government come in and take responsibility for a matter.”
It’s impossible to know exactly why Democrats aren’t permitted to fill these positions. But Democrats of recent generations seem to be diehard institutionalists, desperately yearning for Republicans to accept that a “fair” system can find Republicans guilty, so they never appoint a Democrat. Meanwhile, Republicans couldn’t care less what Democrats think, so they also never appoint a Democrat.
Take special counsels first. Jack Smith, who leads the prosecution of Trump, is a registered independent. One of his previous jobs was overseeing the Justice Department’s public integrity section. There he unsuccessfully prosecuted John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate, in a campaign finance case with some similarities to the charges Trump has been indicted for in New York state. The most Democratic thing about Smith is that his wife was one of three producers of a positive documentary about Michelle Obama.
The most recent Democratic special prosecutors for a prominent investigation date from the Watergate scandal. Archibald Cox, who’d been solicitor general in the Kennedy administration, was appointed in May 1973 and then fired by Richard Nixon five months later. According to New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, “the Washington mill dismissed Archibald Cox as too soft.”
Cox was replaced by Leon Jaworski, a Texas Democrat — i.e., the kind of Democrat who’d voted for Nixon in 1960 and 1968, and in 1980 founded “Democrats for Reagan.”
As far as Democratic special counsels go, that’s pretty much it. Arthur Christy, who investigated President Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, was a Republican. Gerald Gallinghouse, who investigated Carter’s 1980 campaign manager Timothy Kraft, was a former Democrat who’d become a Republican a decade before his appointment.
Next up was Lawrence Walsh, who ran the Iran–Contra inquiry during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. Walsh was a lifetime Republican, who’d been deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration and an early Ronald Reagan supporter. Republicans went absolutely berserk attacking Walsh and did everything possible to obstruct his work. (Interestingly, as of this writing, the Wikipedia page for Walsh falsely claims he was a Democrat.)
During the same period, Whitney North Seymour Jr. investigated Reagan deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver. Seymour was a Republican.
During the Clinton administration, the inquiry into the Whitewater affair was first run by Robert Fiske, a Republican. He concluded that White House aide Vince Foster had indeed committed suicide, rather than being taken out by one of the many assassins on Bill and Hillary’s payroll. Republicans believed this raised “questions about Fiske,” so he was replaced by Kenneth Starr. Starr, a Republican, somehow investigated Whitewater by digging into Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which led to Clinton’s impeachment. The Whitewater assignment was wrapped up in 2003 by Robert Ray, a Republican.
Another independent counsel was appointed during the Clinton administration to look into the FBI’s siege of Waco, Texas. The man chosen for the job (by Clinton’s attorney general) was John Danforth, a Republican.
Shockingly, the streak of Republicans was broken during the George W. Bush administration when Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed in 2003 to look into the Valerie Plame affair. Fitzgerald was a self-declared independent.
Then it was back to Republicans. Robert Mueller, who was picked to head the investigation into any intersection between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, is a Republican. John Durham, appointed by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr to look at the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia, is a Republican. Robert Hur, chosen by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, is a Republican.
Other Republican figures who’ve held the position include Alexia Morrison, Larry Thompson, Arlin Adams, and Joseph diGenova — who’s such a big Republican that he was was hired by Trump to help overturn the 2020 election. But to be clear, it is not the case that literally no Democrat has been appointed to run such an investigation in the last five decades. There is definitely at least one: Curtis Emery von Kann, who was in charge of the crucial inquiry into Eli Segal, a White House assistant to Bill Clinton. Segal was in charge of AmeriCorps while simultaneously helping a nonprofit called Partnership for Public Service raise money, for free. Von Kann, who was a registered Democrat as of 1985, found that Segal had committed no wrongdoing.
Everything is crystal clear, however, when it comes to directors of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover, who served in the position for 36 years, was formally an independent but privately a staunch Republican. His immediate successor Clarence Kelley, appointed by Nixon, was a Republican.
Then Carter appointed William Webster, a Republican. Reagan appointed William Sessions, a Republican. Clinton appointed Louis Freeh, a Republican. George W. Bush appointed Robert Mueller, a Republican. Barack Obama appointed James Comey, at the time a Republican. (He’s now officially unaffiliated.)
Then Trump fired Comey and appointed the current FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Republican. When Biden took office, he kept Wray in place.
Democrats appear to have accepted that the rules forbid any Democrat from holding one of these positions because it just wouldn’t be fair.
Incredibly enough, these basic facts are rarely discussed in the corporate media. Democrats appear to have accepted that the rules forbid any Democrat from holding one of these positions because it just wouldn’t be fair. Meanwhile, Shapiro and other right-wing figures who cry out to the heavens about the inequity of our justice system somehow leave these facts out of their presentation. It’s enough to make a cynic suspect that even-handed justice is not their agenda at all.
Religious and civil organizations representing Vietnam’s Montagnard people said they weren’t involved in armed attacks on two police stations that left nine people dead over the weekend.
Sunday’s attack took place in Dak Lak province in the remote Central Highlands – a region that’s home to some 30 tribes of indigenous peoples known collectively as Montagnards.
Two state newspapers, VnExpress and Cong Thuong, published detailed information about the incident, saying that at dawn on Sunday, around 40 people wearing camouflage vests split into two groups to attack the two police stations in the Ea Tieu and Ea Ktur communes.
Police on Tuesday updated the number of people arrested in the attacks to 45. Two people surrendered to police and 10 others were arrested on Monday night, according to a Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security update.
The ministry used the phrase “the group causing insecurity and disorder at the People’s Committees of Ea Tieu and Ea Ktur communes” to refer to the attackers.
A joint letter issued Monday night by a group of Dak Lak government agencies and organizations strongly condemned the attacks and called on the public “not to post or share related information that has not been verified.”
It also urged people “to stay vigilant and not ‘listen to, believe in, or follow” reactionary elements and hostile forces who take advantage of the situation to create distortion and entice people to oppose local authorities, causing political security in the area.”
‘Montagnard people are commoners’
The Bangkok-based Montagnard Stands for Justice group said on Facebook that the organization had no connection with the incident and wasn’t affiliated with any groups or individuals assisting in the use of violence.
The organization, whose founders are political refugees in Thailand and the United States, also said they were concerned that any armed uprising would hinder their efforts to advocate for religious freedom in Vietnam.
Frustration in the region has grown after decades of government surveillance, land disputes, economic hardship and crackdowns on unofficial churches.
Pastor Nguyen Cong Chinh, the U.S.-based co-founder of the Vietnam Evangelical Church of Christ, told Radio Free Asia that he didn’t think any Montagnards were involved in the attacks.
“Montagnard people are commoners who live with their religious faith,” he said. “When their religious faith or land is violated, they, of course, will have to voice up. However, I don’t think Montagnard people in Dak Lak province were capable enough to organize such an armed force of 30 to 40 people.”
He said he was able to contact church members in the area where the attacks occurred on Sunday. They expressed confusion and said they didn’t know what was happening, he said.
The executive director of North Carolina-based Dega Central Highlands Organization, Y-Duen Buondap, told RFA that his organization also wasn’t involved in the attacks.
“We don’t have any members involved in these incidents,” he said. “However, we have the information that the Montagnard people have rioted to demand their rights and interests, as they could not bear further suffering. They are suppressed, beaten, arrested and cornered daily.”
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Matt Reed.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.
For some, it began by overhearing an offhand comment. Others found out from someone with firsthand knowledge. Some even had personal connections to those involved.
However they first learned about the June 4, 1989, massacre of students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the young people were motivated to learn more, driven by a sense that the truth had been hidden from them, a Twitter inquiry of Chinese young people collected by Radio Free Asia shows.
Their instincts were not wrong.
China’s Communist Party has done its utmost to stymie any form of public discussion of the incident 34 years ago.
Authorities have worked tirelessly to scrub the affair from history books, online discussions and the media. Every June, police descend on the homes of dissidents, placing them under house arrest and banning them from posting on the topic or speaking to the media.
And with the student protesters now well into their 50s, and children born since the massacre being raised with virtually no knowledge of the event, the passage of time is helping the Communist Party erase memories.
But China’s youth are technologically savvy and have figured out ways to get around the country’s Great Firewall of internet censorship. Many use VPNs, or virtual private networks, to mask their IP addresses, which are illegal in China, but still used widely.
How did you find out?
Ahead of this year’s anniversary, RFA sent out a query on Twitter, asking Chinese netizens born after the year 2000 – essentially those age 22 and younger – to share how they first learned about the Tiananmen massacre.
RFA received nearly 1,400 responses. Twitter is banned in China, but can be accessed via VPNs.
A student protester tosses debris into the flames of a burning armored personnel carrier that rammed through student lines during an army attack on demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, early June 4, 1989. Credit: Jeff Widener/Associated Press
Most respondents declined to give their full names, citing a fear of reprisal. Many openly expressed shock at what they discovered, some saying it had changed them forever.
Tanzhang first heard about the crackdown in 2020, when he was in junior high school, while watching a video describing cameras on Bilibili, the popular content sharing platform.
“When they mentioned [the brand] Leica, the video creator added a comment saying, ‘Leica recently filmed an ad that insulted China,’” he said, referring to acommercial in which a photographer appears to be taking photos of the People’s Liberation Army advance on students on the square, only to be confronted by authorities in his hotel.
“The comments were all cryptic, which piqued my curiosity, so I searched for more information. Later, when I revisited the video on Bilibili, I found that the comment had been deleted,” he said.
‘Deeply shocked’
A high school student who gave his name as Liang said he learned about Twitter and Facebook in October 2021 while browsing Douyin, a Chinese TikTok-style video platform. He got a VPN account and started following a few accounts of nationalistic Chinese officials known as “wolf warriors.”
“I saw someone mentioning the Tiananmen Square massacre in the comments under a tweet by [Foreign Ministry spokesperson] Hua Chunying, so I searched for it on Google and was deeply shocked,” he said.
A man blocks a line of tanks heading east on Beijing’s Chang’an Boulevard by Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. The man, calling for an end to the recent violence and bloodshed against pro-democracy demonstrators, was pulled away by bystanders, and the tanks continued on their way. Credit: Jeff Widener/Associated Press
Several students said instructors put themselves at risk by teaching about the crackdown in class or that they managed to access censored educational materials during their studies.
“In a university elective course many years ago, the teacher secretly played a video [about the massacre] for us with the door closed, without saying a word,” said a student who gave their name as “Y.” “Nowadays it’s impossible that such a thing could happen.”
Another respondent who gave his name as Guan Fu said that while in eighth grade, his modern Chinese history teacher “dedicated a whole class to explain everything about the Tiananmen Square incident.”
“That day, the beliefs that had been instilled in me since childhood collapsed,” he said. “I went back home and asked my elders about it. It turns out they all knew, but in the face of that bloody purge at the time, they chose silence.”
A respondent who identified themselves as “Student A” said a teacher had mentioned that university students in the square had been “suppressed by the government,” and that the reference was enough to make them want to dig further.
‘Tank Man’ image
At an international school in China, teachers sealed off sections of history textbooks deemed politically sensitive before handing them back to the class for studies, said a respondent who gave their name as “Classmate S.”
“Driven by curiosity, my classmates and I cautiously tore open the seals and saw a picture in the content about China – a man blocking a tank,” he said, referring to the iconic image of an unarmed protester standing in the way of a tank on a major boulevard.
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) tanks and soldiers guard the strategic Chang’an Boulevard leading to Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 6, 1989, two days after their crackdown on pro-democracy students. Credit: Manuel Ceneta/AFP
The student said that he and his classmates were taken to the principal’s office and made to write self-criticisms.
“I don’t understand why I am being punished for seeking the truth about history,” he said. “Why does our government conceal the facts? I am truly disappointed in my government and deeply disgusted by their hypocrisy.”
Some described personal connections to the crackdown that they said had prompted them to investigate.
Another respondent told RFA that a classmate “told me that his father and grandfather were soldiers and had shot Beijing students.”
“He spoke with great pride,” the student said. “I went home on the weekend and searched the internet by bypassing the Great Firewall.”
A student named Lin said he was watching a film called “The Curse of the Golden Flower” about a failed rebellion against the Chinese empire with his parents in 2006 when he first heard of the incident.
“During the ending, after Prince Jie’s rebellion fails and the eunuchs and maids in the palace are cleaning the bloodstains from the rebels while arranging chrysanthemums,” he said. “My mom then said, ‘Isn’t this just like 64?’” – a common, cryptic way to refer to June 4.
“My dad nervously signaled my mom to stop,” he said. “I had never seen such expressions on my parents’ faces, so I went online to find answers.”
Edited by Josh Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Mandarin.
Yaxue Cao, editor-in-chief of the U.S.-based website China Change, has been tracking human rights issues in China for years. With the help of human rights attorneys in China, dissident artist Ai Weiwei, professor and film-maker Ai Xiaoming and overseas-based rights activist, she recently released an hour-long film about the crucial role played by Chinese lawyers in defending people’s basic rights. The documentary, titled “The Defenders — 20 Years of Human Rights Lawyers in China,” offers rarely-seen footage of top rights attorneys including Li Heping, Jiang Tianyong and Pu Zhiqiang to an overseas audience. Cao spoke to RFA’s Mandarin Service about the project:
RFA: How long did the film take to make?
Yaxue Cao: There were only two of us [making the documentary]. I wrote the script and collected and selected the material, while video editor cut it all together and added subtitles. Production started last year, and it took us three months in all.
RFA: This documentary spans a long period of time. How did you find all of the footage and the interviewees?
Yaxue Cao: The main point about this film is that it is based on existing footage. Half of the footage we use comes from interviews carried out for China Change, while we also collected a lot of footage, still photos and audio from news organizations and other films, including [two] made by Ai Xiaoming and Ai Weiwei’s long interview with lawyers Li Heping and Jiang Tianyong in 2011. There were also some images of lawyer Pu Zhiqiang in [another] documentary. The fact that they were willing to share this material with us was a huge help.
RFA: According to my calculations, at least 33 lawyers appear in this film in some form. What kind of people are they?
Yaxue Cao: Well first of all, there should be more than 300,000 lawyers in China, but even at the peak [of legal representation], when human rights lawyers were most active, there were only about 300 of them. But people have quit or stopped speaking out under successive rounds of repression, while others do the work but don’t want to be referred to as a human rights attorney. For example, more than 20 lawyers defended [pro-democracy agribusiness mogul] Sun Dawu, but none of them were in contact with us, or with the Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group. Nonetheless, to me, they were still human rights lawyers.
The main thing that makes human rights lawyers special is their bravery. They make up just one in every thousand lawyers [in China], maybe not even that much nowadays. These one-in-a-thousand lawyers dare to take on these cases and go to court to uphold justice according to the law, yet they are risking their livelihoods and putting themselves in personal danger, through arrest or being beaten up, to do so.
The other thing is that some people criticize them, saying they are unskilled lawyers, which is a term commonly used by the authorities. But I think they’re the most skilled lawyers of all. A lawyer who can defend their client in a country that lacks rule of law, with a number of other things against them as well, has reached a very high level, both morally and legally.
‘Chilling effect’
RFA: How has the situation of Chinese human rights lawyers changed in the past 20 years?
Yaxue Cao: The suppression started as soon as they started working. For example, at the beginning of my film, I mentioned the disappearance of Gao Zhisheng, who has been “disappeared” for three out of the last five years. We don’t know whether he is alive or dead. Then we have Li Heping, who was kidnapped and beaten up, then the [jailing of] Xu Zhiyong of the New Citizens Movement. He’s not a practicing lawyer, but he played an important role in the development of human rights lawyers [as a profession].
In 2008, a group of human rights lawyers who had defended Tibetans, defended families in Sichuan, or fought for direct elections to the Beijing Lawyers’ Association had their licenses revoked back in 2009 and 2010.
Kidnapping, torture, detention, and revocation of licenses has been used against human rights lawyers all along, but the turning point was the mass arrests of July 2015. Before that, it was more a question of focused and individual attacks. But in the years since the 2015 crackdown, they have been wiping out the whole profession.
This group consists both of the lawyers who were arrested during the July 2015 crackdown, and the lawyers who defended them. In all, more than 40 lawyers have had their licenses suspended or removed since 2017. The authorities want to eliminate them altogether.
There are other things that also create a chilling effect, like banning media interviews, forcing people to switch their lawyer in favor of a government attorney, and the use of non-disclosure agreements. So a lot of lawyers, while they may be working human rights cases, daren’t talk about them. There are far fewer new human rights lawyers joining their ranks now, which is the result of continual suppression ever since July 2015.
RFA: That makes records like this film all the more important.
Yaxue Cao: Yes, it does. During the production process, as the person who wrote the screenplay, I felt somewhat numb and dull about the whole thing, but just imagine how someone who isn’t really familiar with the topic, with what human rights lawyers in China do, who they are, would feel. I think it would be quite shocking.
There were many layers to this film while I was writing the script. Some lawyers liked to talk about defending clients in court; others talked more about their ideas. Jiang Tianyong talked about suffering extreme abuse in detention, and the despair he felt then. But he also said the situation was totally unacceptable. And the way to break that pattern is to make sure more people know about it.
That’s why we made this film … so more people will get to know these lawyers, to hear about what they said or did, and want to support them, at least morally.
Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jane Tang.
Workers detained for striking against the NagaWorld Casino in Phnom Penh said they are being held in squalid conditions and must agree to stop gathering in protest as a condition of their release.
A copy of a document Cambodian authorities are pressuring the detained workers to sign was shared with RFA. It says that if the workers continue their “illegal activities,” government officials will take additional administrative and legal measures against them, without exception.
“They tried to force me to sign the document, [but] I didn’t sign it because I didn’t do anything wrong,” said worker Meach Srey Oun. “It is very unjust.”
Meach Srey Oun was one of 51 striking workers detained by City Hall officials on Wednesday. The workers, who are striking against the NagaWorld Casino, were put on a bus by officials from City Hall at about 2 p.m., the workers said.
The workers said they are forced to sleep on the dirty ground and do not have access to clean water but so far have refused to sign the document, despite pressure from authorities.
Thousands of NagaWorld employees walked off their jobs in mid-December, demanding higher wages and the reinstatement of eight jailed union leaders and nearly 370 others they said were unjustly fired from the casino, which is owned by a company based in Hong Kong.
Cambodian authorities said the strike is illegal and allege that it was supported by foreign donors as a plot to topple the government. Phnom Penh City Hall later ordered the workers to stop the strike to protect, it said, against the spread of the coronavirus.
That order was followed by a number of detentions and labor activists see the City Hall directive as a means of breaking up the strike. Authorities detained more than 100 striking workers on Monday and Tuesday for allegedly violating the COVID-19 protocols and said they would have to pay heavy fines to be released.
Siek Kanha is one of the 51 workers detained Wednesday who add to the total detained. She said four employees have tested positive for the COVID-19 virus and were taken to a hospital. She also said that conditions at the holding center are miserable.
“This is an abandoned place, [and] there is no water,” she told RFA. “I haven’t gotten a chance to take a shower.”
Siek Kanha said the 51 workers have been kept apart from another 39 casino workers who remain detained from previous roundups.
The group she is in was not given food until 8 p.m., and authorities didn’t allow their family members to deliver clean clothes to them, she added.
“I don’t have the money to pay the fine,” she said, adding that she and others have twice tested negative for COVID. “We don’t have jobs now.”
RFA could not reach City Hall officials for contact.
Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
