Justice watch: John Bolton’s Real ‘Crime’
“President Trump may hate being the target of lawfare, but he sure knows how to wield it against anyone who crosses him,” snipe The Wall Street Journal’s editors. Consider “John Bolton, his former national security adviser,” now taking “a plea deal essentially for the sin of writing a critical book about his time advising Mr. Trump.” The charges aren’t about taking any documents, but “for keeping diary notes on a home computer that included ‘national defense information.’” Bolton will “plead guilty to a single felony count for retaining classified information” and “pay a $2.5 million fine,” easily consuming any profits from the book. The Trump Justice Department wanted him to “go to prison” — though he surely wouldn’t “have been prosecuted had he written a book that was favorable to Donald Trump.”
Conservative: AI’s Dark Take on US History
As America approaches its 250th, anyone relying on AI to learn about the nation’s founding will “encounter a history that does not celebrate the brilliance and bravery of the colonists,” warns Liz Peek at The Hill. Asking Anthropic or ChatGPT can “lead down a dark tunnel of negativity,” and ruin “the American story for generations to come.” Ask them why, and these AI will admit to offering an account “heavier on failure, guilt and conflict than on courage, sacrifice and triumph.” AI models “are trained on material readily available on the internet,” which is “an information flow . . . dominated by liberal media.” Schools with “leftist faculties” and the Web’s general negativity teach AI to undermine “confidence and pride in our nation.”
From the right: Propagandist Pelley
CBS-axed Scott Pelley always “was a high paid propagandist masquerading as a journalist,” thunders Brianna Lyman at The Federalist. His recent lowlights include “a 2019 interview with Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director who leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and then lied about it under oath multiple times,” where Pelley “accepted McCabe’s excuse that he was merely ‘confused’ by the investigators’ questions when he lied not once, not twice, but three times,” a “2023 interview with then-Attorney General Merrick Garland” where Pelley interrupted to give “Garland the defense he should have made to sound less politically motivated,” and a segment with the “Moms for Liberty co-founders” that edited out one of them reading “portions of books that were available in elementary school libraries,” making her look “irrational,” “objecting to books for no reason.”
Eye on Mexico: Claudia’s Time for Choosing
By indicting Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha Moya, the United States “crossed a line both countries had tiptoed around for decades,” notes Carlos Bravo Regidor at The New York Times, namely Mexico’s deep-rooted narcopolitics. This case suggests “cartel power may have contaminated the ranks of Mexico’s governing party,” handing President Claudia Sheinbaum an “impossible dilemma”: Letting Rocha’s extradition proceed will expose “rifts inside her coalition and invite accusations that she is yielding” to US bullying; stopping it will “deepen doubts in the United States about her willingness to go after cartel corruption within her own ranks.” If Sheinbaum doesn’t use this “fraught moment” to help Mexico reclaim its fight against corruption, “Mexico may face something worse than an externally imposed reckoning: no reckoning at all.”
Brooklyn beat: Co-op Joins the Antisemitic Wave
“The decade-long effort to align the Park Slope Food Co-op to the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement” at last triumphed with the recent vote to stop selling Israeli products, notes City Journal’s Adam Lehodey — after a rules change to “remove the supermajority requirement for boycotts.” The “wave of antisemitism and religious intolerance” around the city includes “ugly incidents” of forthright antisemitism at the co-op, which had always stood for “collaboration toward shared goals” despite disagreements. It remains to be seen if “New Yorkers will continue to be able to set their differences aside.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
