The original draft of this email was sent to NPR Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg when her reporting on a significant First Amendment case omitted mention of former California attorney general and current Vice President Kamala Harris. It was during Ms. Harris’s tenure as attorney general that private information about donors to disfavored conservative-leaning nonprofits was first demanded and then “inadvertently” exposed by the state, which led to death threats against donors and the nonprofits’ subsequent refusal to provide such information.
Dear Nina,
I couldn’t help but notice that your reporting this morning failed to note that Vice President Kamala Harris was the hyper-partisan California attorney general when conservative donor information was “inadvertently” (read: maliciously) leaked last decade. In any case, while the First Amendment lets one of your progressive sources say it’s “nonsense” for conservative-leaning nonprofits before the high court today to compare their case to the NAACP’s of the 1950s, smart money is on an Alito-Barrett-Gorsuch-Kavanaugh-Thomas majority again slapping down the incorrigibly silly Ninth Circuit and thwarting the totalitarian left’s appetite for evermore doxing and speech suppression.
I was also struck by your coverage’s inclusion of the Orwellian argument by Public Citizen’s Scott Nelson, claiming states need an all-seeing, all-knowing database like California’s to determine which nonprofits should be investigated for fraud. Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence and waiting for at least a whiff of probable cause in the form of a whistleblower complaint, a media exposé or something before commencing an investigation which, by the way, can always rely on subpoenas and search warrants if it comes to that?
BTW, it’s interesting to note that many of the same folks arguing that California and other states should effectively be free to stop and frisk conservative nonprofits for donor information routinely denouce police efforts to interdict illegal guns and reduce muredrous violence on our streets as “profiling” without sufficient probable cause.
Anyhoo, it’s bad enough you were duped by anti-Trump members of Justice Ginsburg’s family and gullibly reported that nonsense about her purported deathbed wish last year – as if such a regal gentlelady would spend so much as moment among her final few in this world trifling with filthy politics. So, all the more reason to guard against the perception that you’re winding down your own stellar career as a tool for would-be totalitarians. They’ll flatter you and invite you to their ruling-class parties as long as you’re useful to them, but don’t kid yourself. They’ll whisk you off to the gulag just as soon as you’re not.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.