The National Review Is Still Lying To You About The Fraud Charge Against Trump

There are two ways to be a public legal commentator. One is to describe, to the best of your ability, what you believe the state of the law is, how and where courts might agree or disagree with you, and how your view of what the law should be differs from how courts currently interpret it. That’s what I aspire to. I fall short all the time, I’m sure.

The other way to be a public legal commenter is to be an advocate pretending to be a fair reporter — to take what you think the law should be based on your sympathies or politics and present it deceitfully as what the law inarguably is. I’ve often criticized Alan Dershowitz for doing this — for instance, for telling the public “you can’t convict someone of lying to the federal government if the federal government knew they were lying,” even though every modern court to consider that argument has rejected it.

Andrew C. McCarthy and the Editors of the National Review are choosing the Alan Dershowitz path of legal commentary. Well, at least it’s an ethos.

Last Week: The National Review Misrepresented Federal Fraud Law

Last week I explained how the National Review was flat-out lying about the state of the law on the latest charges against Donald Trump. Among other things, the Editors claimed that the Supreme Court has recently ruled that “fraud in federal criminal law is a scheme to swindle victims out of money or tangible property” and that therefore the Special Counsel is wrong to charge Donald Trump with violation of 18 U.S.C. section 371. I pointed out that this was a lie — the cases National Review is talking about recent cases interpreting the mail and wire fraud statutes, both of which have specific language in the statute requiring a scheme to take money and property. By contrast, for the last hundred years courts from the Supreme Court down have repeatedly ruled that Section 371 makes it a crime to defraud the United States in a way to interfere with its operations, even without money and property as a goal.

This Week: The National Review Misrepresents Federal Fraud Law, But In New And Different Ways

The National Review, through Andrew C. McCarthy, has doubled down and lied some more. Would you like to hear how? Of course you would.

Naturally Mr. McCarthy did not ...