Everything Is Coming Up Rosies – A St. Patrick’s Day Update

This week’s History, Rinse, & Repeat is a holiday version, where we do updates to prior pieces. For those checking their federal or ecclesiastical calendars to determine what holiday falls in March of this year, the answer is not the Ides of March, though that might be appropriate for a student of the classics like me, nor is it Pi Day, a holiday which only A.H. among us on this site is qualified to celebrate. Instead, we are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, a day where everyone who celebrates, like those who visit Disney World, is in exceptionally good humor, and which is also, as it happens, the day I met my wife. So, apologies to our readers as I celebrate 41 years together with my wife at the expense of writing a longer piece.

However, St. Patrick’s Day provides more than an excuse to relax. There are numerous stories that call to mind prior pieces that we have written, not limited to the especially timely story of Rosie O’Donnell, but the first story to address is that of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Kahlil who is threatened with deportation by the Trump administration.

Columbia and Free Speech

The saga of Mahmoud Kahlil touches upon several stories which we have published on H,R, & R, most notably Roar [Z]ion, Roar , in which I discussed the long history of antisemitism at Columbia University, and A.H.’s article, How Elon Musk is Becoming the Modern Oliver Wendell Holmes, about how former Chief Justice Holmes came to write his famous dissent in Abrams v. United States, which is the intellectual cornerstone of Kahlil’s defense and that of free speech advocacy more generally.

As a strong advocate of free speech yet a supporter of Israel, I am, like many, torn by the actions of the Trump administration in seeking to deport Kahlil. My wife, a native of Denmark, was a green card holder for decades, and it is odd to think that she could arguably have been subject to deportation if she had made a public statement critical of President Trump’s suggestion that the United States might acquire Greenland forcibly, and such statement was deemed by the Secretary of State to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” the legal basis for the Department of Homeland Security’s institution of removal proceedings against Kahlil. Ironically, the predecessor to the statute at issue was deemed to be unconstitutional by none other than Donald Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, while she was still a judge in the District Court of New Jersey, although her decision was overruled on procedural grounds.

An even-handed discussion of the Kahlil case is presented by Yale Professor of Law Jed Rosenfeld, who notes that there is a significant distinction between a criminal prosecution for unlawful speech, the posture the Abrams case discussed by A.H., and a deportation proceeding, as residency in this country is a privilege, not a right. Personally, I am swayed by the argument that the conduct of Kahlil and other pro-Hamas protesters went beyond mere advocacy, but involved the unlawful interference with the operations of the university and the harassment of Jewish students, making the environment unsafe for them.

While the legal issues around the First Amendment are of interest to me as a lawyer, I am equally intrigued by Kahlil’s association with an organization, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, whose goals include the “total eradication of Western civilization.” Kahlil is reported to have fled Syria before that country’s civil war to Lebanon. There, he attended the Lebanese American University, a university founded by western missionaries and accredited in the United States, receiving an undergraduate degree in computer science before obtaining a master’s degree at Columbia, another institution, at least until recently, grounded in western civilization. He married an American citizen, and now, in opposing his deportation, he relies upon one of western civilization’s greatest political documents, the Bill of Rights. Mr. Kahlil either has an utter lack of self-awareness or a keen sense of irony.

Perkins Coie and Free Speech

Another item in the news involves Democratic attorneys at Perkins Coie. The Trump administration has revoked the security clearance of that law firm. Many commentators have characterized this as another assault on free speech, or upon the right of law firms to represent unpopular clients. However, I believe it more closely relates to another story we previously published, The Trump Prosecution May Be Unprecedented, But Political Prosecutions Are Not, which compared the Franklin Roosevelt’s prosecution of Andrew Mellon to Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump for his alleged election interference resulting from his characterization of a payment, to porn star Stormy Daniels, as a legal expense. It is because of this mischaracterization that Trump has been labeled a “convicted felon.”

Perkins Coie, if anything, was guilty of a worse offense. It acted as a funnel for the Clinton campaign to pay for the so-called Steele Dossier. The campaign, like Trump, labeled the payment a “legal expense,” even though it was intended to be forwarded to Fusion GPS, and, as a result, was far more clearly a campaign expense than was the payment of hush money to hide an extra-marital affair by the President. Christopher Steele passed the dossier onto the FBI providing, at a minimum, a pretext to investigate then candidate Trump on the basis of so-called Russian collusion. One may also recall that a Perkins Coie partner, Michael Sussman, was charged with misleading the FBI when he shared allegations about internet data purportedly linking the Trump Organization and a Russian-based bank while falsely informing the agency that he was not representing any client. While Sussman was acquitted of the criminal charge, there was no dispute that Perkins Coie was working with the Clinton campaign to manufacture the dossier and that Sussman did not disclose that he was representing the campaign. According to his lawyer, “There is a difference between having a client, and doing something on their behalf.” While the jury may have found that difference to be persuasive, I suspect many reasonable people would not.

Like US residency, a security clearance is a privilege, not a right. Misleading a law enforcement agency, even if it does not rise to the level of a criminal offense, seems to me to be legitimate grounds for revoking such privilege.

Rosie Departs for Ireland

Our final update concerns our article, America: Love It or Leave It, in which we mocked celebrities for announcing they would leave the country in the event of a Trump victory but never did. Well, one celebrity, Rosie O’Donnell, has left finally left, appropriately for its timing, for Ireland.

Ordinarily, one of the features of Donald Trump that I find the least attractive is his rudeness, name-calling, and frequent personal nastiness. In that regard, some might consider me a squish, but like the philosopher Eric Hoffer, I believe that "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength." Nevertheless, the child in me found Donald Trump’s joke about Rosie O’Donnell in the first Republican debate of 2016 to be the funniest line of the campaign. Whether Rosie O’Donnell moved to Ireland for political or personal reasons is beyond my ken, but whatever the reason, it had to be her.