Politics

When Cockburn heard the news of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show staffers being arrested at the Capitol, he knew this case was no joke (unlike Colbert's show). On June 16, seven of them were arrested for trespassing in the Longworth House Office Building. The Washington Examiner reports that the Capitol Police said, “Responding officers observed seven individuals, unescorted and without Congressional ID, in a sixth-floor hallway. ...The building was closed to visitors, and these individuals were determined to be a part of a group that had been directed by the USCP to leave the building earlier in the day.” However, this testimony contradicts what Stephen Colbert himself said when he brought it up on his show Monday night.

Ban TikTok BuzzFeed News published an explosive report on TikTok Friday. The Chinese-owned social media company has always batted away privacy concerns by insisting that information gathered by US users of the platform has stayed in America. But BuzzFeed’s Emily Baker-White reports that “according to leaked audio from more than eighty internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users.” In other words, TikTok’s assurances appear to have been lies. Per BuzzFeed’s story, one member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department said, “Everything is seen in China,” in a September 2021 meeting.

Cockburn spent his long weekend the same way most Americans did: reading the Functional Government Initiative’s recent report. It found that “on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working.” Government inefficiency is nothing new, but in this case teleworking is exacerbating the problem. And that isn’t about to improve — at least not under this administration. Biden continues to push for more teleworking options, even as the pandemic finally begins to fade. The Washington Free Beacon reports that Brian Harrison, the former HHS chief of staff who commissioned the investigation of telework participation, speculates that many recent federal agency errors may be due to an inactive teleworkforce.

Cockburn has done his fair share of jail time, mostly on overblown bootlegging charges. Yet after paying his dues to society, he decided to venture to a recent press conference on the situation of those imprisoned after the January 6 riot. The Patriot Freedom Project helps aid the families of the January 6 prisoners with legal costs and living expenses. Now, the organization is advocating for a review of the prison conditions of the inmates. One inmate’s mother said, “The conditions at the DC jail are horrendous. His rations often smelled like cleaning fluid. There were pubic hairs included in the small portions of his food. The drinking water, visibly dirty. Mold was visible in cells, and roaches lived amongst [the prisoners].

Lessons from Watergate Today marks fifty years since the Watergate break-in. Given that the scandal is something of a founding myth for modern Washington journalism, there is no shortage of reflections on the meaning of the story half a century later — and what has changed between 1972 and 2022. One popular parallel is between Nixon and Trump, with contemporary commentators claiming that the big change between then and now is a level of partisanship that makes the successful ousting of a sitting president practically impossible. Witness, for instance, the one-sided proceedings of the House’s January 6 Committee. Away from this rather tired and often overstated analogy, more mischievous comparisons are possible.

The recent controversy over prominent legal commentator Ilya Shapiro's employment at Georgetown University Law Center ended last week. In a Wall Street Journal column on a Friday, Shapiro declared that his cancel culture nightmare was over, vindicated after a four-month investigation into a troublesome tweet. On Monday, the WSJ ran the rare immediate follow-up column, where Shapiro announced his decision to quit the university rather than subject himself to an inevitable future cancelation. Shapiro's experience was astounding in how much it reveals about the insanity of the woke left brigades, and how much their heckler's veto is empowered by the administrators at universities like Georgetown.

Senator Marco Rubio today sent a strongly worded letter to Harvard president Lawrence Bacow expressing concerns prompted by a Spectator magazine investigation by this reporter that Harvard may be “actively supporting [America’s] principal adversary,” the Chinese Communist Party. “Throughout the pandemic, we were told to trust the experts," Rubio told The Spectator exclusively. "But what we increasingly see is so-called trusted experts and institutions engaged in highly questionable behavior. This looks really bad, and if it turns out to be true, any last shred of faith that the American people had in these ‘experts’ will be deservedly stamped out.

Biden’s geopolitical reality check Joe Biden’s plan to visit Saudi Arabia in July, announced this week, marks one of the most clear-cut foreign policy U-turns of his presidency. On the campaign trail, Biden boasted about his plans to “make a pariah” out of the kingdom. In his first few months in office, the president outlined a foreign policy that drew clear lines between the world’s democracies and autocracies — with Saudi Arabia on the wrong side of that divide, of course. But the interconnected realities of global and domestic politics, as well as soaring prices, have forced Biden to rethink such a clear-cut approach and seek some level of cooperation with the Gulf petrostate. The president has been criticized for a move that many in his own party are uneasy about.