MOTHER WHO KEEPS WITHDRAWING HER AUTISTIC CHILD FROM SCHOOL GETS UPSET THAT THE CHILD ISN’T IN SCHOOL: If you want a window onto the complicated, over-lawyered world of special education, this article is worth a look. It’s not that the article really gets the story right. To the contrary, insofar as the article sheds light on the problems of special education, it does so by inspiring skepticism on the part of the reader.

We are introduced to 7-year-old Jazmiah, who has been diagnosed with autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.   In addition, she has a variety of other behavioral and motor skills problems. She lives in public housing with her mother and another disabled sibling. The key fact is that Jazmiah hasn’t attended school since 2017.

That’s an outrage, right? Why isn’t she at school? The article suggests it’s complicated, but it doesn’t really seem all that complicated. Jazmiah’s mother, who appears to have problems of her own, took her out of the award-winning Success Academy charter schools, despite assurances by the staff that Jazmiah was happy there and that her teachers loved her.

This was by no means the first time the mother had withdrawn her daughter from a school.

The article is vague about her motivation, but it appears she was upset that Success had held Jazmiah back a grade, which is hardly surprising given that the girl had been chronically absent from school during the period she was enrolled. The mother also believed that her daughter required a one-on-one teacher. After she withdraw Jazmiah from Success, she also wasn’t pleased with the schools the school district has suggested that her daughter attend instead.

At some point following the withdrawal from the Success Academy, Jazmiah’s mother evidently lawyered up with a 12-member law firm that specializes almost exclusively in representing parents against schools in connection with special education issues. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t realize there were whole law firms devoted to special education. The article is vague, but it seems that the law firm (or somebody) got some sort of “legal ruling” last October that somehow “faulted the [New York] education department for failing to find a school placement for Jazmiah.”

Whatever the nature of that ruling, it apparently did not result in any immediate action. Jazmiah is still at home playing with shaving cream and Elmer’s glue. Towards the end of the article, however, we learn for the first time that Jazmiah has been receiving individualized tutoring in reading and occupational and speech therapy at home at the school district’s expense. This was deemed insufficient by the mother, though we aren’t told much about why.

One thing that struck me is that a significant portion of the article is spent criticizing the Success Academy charter schools. The author of the article wrote to the head of the Success Academy asking for comment on Jazmiah’s mother’s various accusations against the school. Some of the accusations were provably false, and the Success Academy indeed was able to prove them false.

In a grand display of chutzpah, the author then criticized the school for disclosing the information. This was something I’d never seen before—a journalist attacking his own source for disclosing information to him. The article reads as if the author was angry at Success for messing up his preferred narrative. Without Success’s input, he could have characterized Success and charter schools generally as failing to educate students properly.

Under FERPA, schools do have a duty of confidentiality. On the other hand, under the doctrine of implied consent, most legal duties of confidentiality work the way the attorney-client privilege works: The duty doesn’t apply when the client is defaming the attorney in public. In general, the attorney is permitted set the record straight rather than have to sit back and be defamed.

I don’t claim to know whether FERPA has been held to contain such an exception, but if it hasn’t been it should. The alternative is to acquiesce to biased media coverage of this issue. Parents who are understandably upset that their children have problems tend lash out at schools. Sometimes they do so unfairly.  Schools, charter schools in particular, will be unable to defend themselves. The public will be left with the impression that it’s all the school’s fault. But it won’t be true.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Spy vs. Spy Euphemism at the FBI. “While Washington pols and pundits angrily debate who and what counts as a spy, and whether any such exotic creatures have ever been employed by the FBI, new evidence is emerging that the FBI not only uses spies, but has done so extensively, including in the Trump-Russia investigation.”

Related: Victor Davis Hanson on how Brennan and Clapper are turning on each other.

Note well: none of the leveraged targets of Robert Mueller turned state’s evidence to accuse Donald Trump of “collusion,” the object of the special counsel’s investigation, although to have done so would have mightily helped their cause and given them John Dean iconic status among leftists. In contrast, we have scarcely begun to investigate wrongdoing at the intelligence and justice departments and already the suspects are fingering each other.

James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey are now all accusing one another of being culpable for inserting the unverified dossier, the font of the effort to destroy Trump, into a presidential intelligence assessment—as if suddenly and mysteriously the prior seeding of the Steele dossier is now seen as a bad thing. And how did the dossier transmogrify from being passed around the Obama Administration as a supposedly top-secret and devastating condemnation of candidate and then president-elect Trump to a rank embarrassment of ridiculous stories and fibs?

Given the narratives of the last three years, and the protestations that the dossier was accurate or at least was not proven to be unproven, why are these former officials arguing at all? Did not implanting the dossier into the presidential briefing give it the necessary imprimatur that allowed the serial leaks to the press at least to be passed on to the public and thereby apprise the people of the existential danger that they faced?

Why would not they still be vying to take credit for warning President Obama that Donald J. Trump was a likely sexual pervert, with a pathological hatred of Obama, as manifested in Trump’s alleged Moscow debauchery—a reprobate who used his subordinates to steal the election from Hillary Clinton and who still must somehow be stopped at all costs?

That entire bought fantasy was the subtext of why Mueller was appointed in the first place. It was the basis for the persistent support to this day among the media and progressives for the now discredited notion of “collusion.”

If our noble public servants really believed all that to be true, would not Comey and Brennan instead now be arguing that each, not the other, was bold and smart enough to have included the seminal dossier into a presidential briefing? Comey in public still insists that the dossier is not discredited, though in all his sanctimonious televised sermons, he never has provided any details that support the supposed veracity of Steele’s charges. Why then is Comey not demanding that the FBI take credit for bringing this key piece of intelligence to Obama’s attention rather than fobbing off such an important feat to the rival CIA?

Why, for that matter, are Andrew McCabe and James Comey at odds?

Because they know what’s coming.

BLUE CITY BLUES: L.A. County juvenile halls are so chaotic, officers are afraid to come to work.

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Footage shows hundreds of migrants occupying French airport terminal. “France does not belong to the French! Everyone has a right to be here!”

WHY ARE LEFTIST-DOMINATED POLITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF OPPRESSION? San Francisco’s mayor shows the country what a real attack on the free press looks like.

For all the screaming about President Trump’s rhetorical attacks on the news media, nothing he has done comes close to what is happening now in San Francisco.

Oddly enough, many of the same journalists who have spent the last three years resisting the White House’s supposed war on the newsroom (which, incidentally, has landed them plush media profiles and lucrative book deals and speaking gigs) have not had a lot to say this week about San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s endorsement of her police department’s flagrant violations of freelancer Bryan Carmody’s First Amendment rights. . . .

Carmody claims he was restrained in handcuffs for nearly six hours as the authorities ransacked his home, seizing “laptops, phones and hard drives — including all the images and documents he had archived from his 29-year career as a reporter and cameraman,” the report adds.

Law enforcement officials have neither denied nor contradicted the freelancer’s version of events. The San Francisco Police Department has not yet returned Carmody’s equipment. The raid, which was approved by two trial court judges, also included agents from the FBI.

And all because Carmody refused to give up a confidential source, as is his right. The mayor sees it differently, though, and she is digging in. . . .

In the words of Iranian American freelancer Yashar Ali, who has done a lot of work drawing attention to Carmody’s predicament, the actions taken by San Francisco law enforcement and Breed’s subsequent “endorsement are no different than what you would see in an autocratic regime. Raiding a [journalists’] home and seizing his equipment!!”

Ali also makes a good point about the deafening silence from national reporters who are normally Johnny-on-the-spot with ultra-somber warnings about the perils of Trump hurling insults in their general direction. (I guess those reporters are too busy with the really important stuff, like retweeting their fans and recording audiobooks.)

“Some of you who are ready to march on Washington when a reporter gets a rude reply from the White House are not showing concern for the story in the thread below,” Ali noted. “It’s really pissing me off how many people are silent about it or have shown little concern. You’re hypocrites.”

By keeping quiet on this they’re setting a precedent, no matter what they think.

REVOLUTIONARY STATUS QUO: Bernie Sanders rolls out education plan that cracks down on charter schools.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Congressional Progressive Caucus & Justice Democrats Move to Purge the Party: If You’re Pro-Life, ‘You Can’t Say You’re a Democrat.’

ELI LAKE: John Bolton Is Exactly What Trump’s Iran Policy Needs.

Iran has historically attacked U.S. targets with its proxies when it assesses it will not face direct military reprisals. Iran used proxy forces to lay roadside bombs during the U.S. war in Iraq, for example, because its judgment at the time was that Bush lacked the support, in Congress or with the public, to respond with a strike inside Iranian territory. (In retrospect, this assessment was correct.) When Iran believes the U.S. will use force, however, it backs off. Iran has not mined the Persian Gulf, despite occasional threats to do so, because the U.S demonstrated three decades ago that it will destroy the Iranian navy if it tries.

This is where Bolton comes in: He’s kind of a one-man psychological warfare operation. If Iran’s leaders believe Trump’s advisers are trying to constrain him, they may assess they can get away with a proxy attack on U.S. positions. If they think Trump is trying to constrain his national security adviser, they may decide not to.

It’s generally beneficial to your diplomatic efforts if you have a pit bull straining at the leash.

COCAINE DEALER ENJOYS LUXURY SPA BREAK HALF WAY THROUGH HIS NINE-YEAR PRISON SENTENCE.

Hey, when did Michael Dukakis move to England?

BYRON YORK: Mueller Changed Everything.

From now on, the Trump-Russia affair, the investigation that dominated the first years of Donald Trump’s presidency, will be divided into two parts: before and after the release of the Mueller report. Before the special counsel’s findings were made public last month, the president’s adversaries were on the offensive. Now, they are playing defense.

The change is due to one simple fact: Mueller could not establish that there was a conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to fix the 2016 election. The special counsel’s office interviewed 500 witnesses, issued 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants, and obtained nearly 300 records of electronic communications, and still could not establish the one thing that mattered most in the investigation.

Without a judgment that a conspiracy — or collusion, in the popular phrase — took place, everything else in the Trump-Russia affair began to shrink in significance. . . .

Of course, TV talking heads are still arguing over obstruction. But with the report’s release, the investigation moved from the legal realm to the political realm. And in the political realm, the president has a simple and effective case to make to the 99.6% of Americans who are not lawyers: They say I obstructed an investigation into something that didn’t happen? And they want to impeach me for that?

The ground has shifted in the month since the report became public. Before the release, many Democrats adopted a “wait for Mueller” stance, basing their anti-Trump strategy on the hope that Mueller would find the much-anticipated conspiracy.

Then Mueller did not deliver. And not only that, Mueller’s report stretched to 448 pages, with long stretches of minutia and arcane legal argument that the public would never read. Democrats searched for a way to convince Americans that the president was still guilty of something serious.

They devised a plan to turn the Mueller report into a TV show, accessible to millions of viewers who have not read even a page of the report itself. They would call key witnesses to give dramatic testimony in televised hearings that would build support for possible impeachment.

At the same time, they would insist that Attorney General William Barr, who has allowed top lawmakers to see the full Mueller report with the exception of a small amount of grand jury material, was hiding something, and that the hidden material might reveal presidential wrongdoing.

So far, the strategy has not worked. The White House, which provided Mueller testimony and documents that might easily have been withheld as privileged, has not been so forthcoming with Congress. We gave the criminal investigator, Mueller, what he needed, the White House said, but we are not obligated to do the same for Congress.

Nope.

UH-HUH: SNL’s Leslie Jones: Alabama Abortion Bill Is a ‘War on Women,’ Beginning of the ‘Handmaid’s Tale.’

ANN ALTHOUSE: “The failure of Congress to provide the statutory right to abortion isn’t a mere oversight. It’s a political choice.”

Plus: “I do not think Warren’s call will get that statute passed any time soon, but it will create the occasion for questioning abortion rights proponents in Congress about why they are not using their legislative power right now to secure the right. They are in default!”