Legal beat: Unmasking the Unmaskers
Ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn didn’t commit a crime — but whoever “leaked the classified details of his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak” did, notes The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation plainly committed a major “miscarriage of justice” by setting up a “perjury trap” for Flynn. And whoever leaked information about Flynn’s call to the media committed “a serious felony” — and the leaker had to be one of just a handful of Obama administration officials. Appallingly, that person went “unpunished for three years” while Flynn “endured a legal hell.” Justice is long overdue.
Libertarian: Fear a Zombie Economy
Politicians who want to “keep the country’s economy in suspended animation until we can return to pre-pandemic normality” risk “creating a zombie economy,” warns Reason’s Christian Britschgi. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), for example, wants the government to “effectively nationalize the payrolls of businesses affected by the coronavirus,” while Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) want feds to “pay firms 120 percent of the wage costs of workers they rehire.” While we are “a long way off from a return to pre-crisis economic normality,” both plans would “stymie markets’ ability to adjust to COVID-19,” preventing workers from switching into jobs that “can be productive during a pandemic.” In this crisis, after all, the “innovation-breeding creative destruction of free markets” is not only “important” but “essential.”
Pandemic journal: COVID-19’s True Death Rate
White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx’s reported inability to trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 “numbers and case count” is “a real concern,” John Fund and Phil Kerpen worry at National Review. Colorado recently started publishing “two different numbers” of deaths from the virus, one based on a CDC definition that includes all cases where “the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death,” the other “limited to people who actually died of the disease.” Those numbers “differ considerably,” so “the official COVID-19 death tally” is only part of the truth the public needs. Other states should adopt Colorado’s example — lest “the tallies . . . lose all contact with reality, with attendant public panic and additional economic hardship.”
Media critic: Farrow’s Follies
Ronan Farrow “may now be the most famous investigative reporter in America,” observes The New York Times’ Ben Smith. Yet the Pulitzer-winning “boy wonder” might have been flying “a little too close to the sun.” Look behind his work’s gleaming façade, and “you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic.” One of his explosive New Yorker stories alleged that a federal civil servant had leaked US financial reports pertaining to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in order to draw attention to the alleged vanishing of other government records on Cohen. Yet “two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents. The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went ‘missing.’ That was merely the story put forward by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry, who later pleaded guilty to illegally leaking confidential information.” That and similar mistakes expose “the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump,” with many reporters believing the old rules don’t apply if their targets are unpopular.
Religion beat: Happy Birthday, JPII!
First Things’ Julia Yost recalls that John Paul II was “the only pope who occupied the throne from long before I reached the age of reason until his death during my junior year of college.” The canonized Polish pontiff, born 100 years ago Monday, was at once “philosopher, poet, statesman, athlete, actor, master of languages and terribly telegenic” — “a figure colossal enough to knock the world off its axis for a few news cycles.” Happy birthday!
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab Ahmari