PUT THE CROOKED PIG IN JAIL

 

If Mr. Garland decides to pursue prosecution, a message that the Justice Department must send early and often is that even if Mr. Trump genuinely believed, as he claimed, that the election had been marred by fraud, his schemes to interfere in the certification of the vote would still be crimes. And even though Mr. Trump’s efforts failed, these efforts would still be crimes.

Donald Trump Is Not Above the Law

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By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Aug. 26, 2022

Over the course of this summer, the nation has been transfixed by the House select committee’s hearings on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and how or whether Donald Trump might face accountability for what happened that day. The Justice Department remained largely silent about its investigations of the former president until this month, when the F.B.I. searched his home in Palm Beach, Fla., in a case related to his handling of classified documents. The spectacle of a former president facing criminal investigation raises profound questions about American democracy, and these questions demand answers.

Mr. Trump’s unprecedented assault on the integrity of American democracy requires a criminal investigation. The disturbing details of his postelection misfeasance, meticulously assembled by the Jan. 6 committee, leave little doubt that Mr. Trump sought to subvert the Constitution and overturn the will of the American people. The president, defeated at the polls in 2020, tried to enlist federal law enforcement authorities, state officials and administrators of the nation’s electoral system in a furious effort to remain in power. When all else failed, he roused an armed mob that stormed the Capitol and threatened lawmakers.

The Justice Department is reportedly examining Mr. Trump’s conduct, including his role in trying to overturn the election and in taking home classified documents. If Attorney General Merrick Garland and his staff conclude that there is sufficient evidence to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt on a serious charge in a court of law, then they must seek an indictment too. 

This board is aware that in deciding how Mr. Trump should be held accountable under the law it is necessary to consider not just whether criminal prosecution would be warranted but whether it would be wise. No American president has ever been criminally prosecuted after leaving office. When President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, he ensured that Nixon would not be prosecuted for crimes committed during the Watergate scandal; Ford explained this decision with the warning that such a prosecution posed grave risks of rousing “ugly passions” and worsening political polarization.

That warning is just as salient today. Pursuing prosecution of Mr. Trump could further entrench support for him and play into the conspiracy theories he has sought to stoke. It could inflame the bitter partisan divide, even to the point of civil unrest. A trial, if it is viewed as illegitimate, could also further undermine confidence in the rule of law, whatever the eventual outcome.

The risks of political escalation are obvious. The Democratic and Republican parties are already in the thick of a cycle of retribution that could last generations. There is a substantial risk that, if the Justice Department does prosecute Mr. Trump, future presidents — whether Mr. Trump himself or someone of his ilk — could misuse the precedent to punish political rivals. If their party takes a majority in the House of Representatives after the midterm elections, some Republicans have already threatened to impeach President Biden.

There is an even more immediate threat of further violence, and it is a possibility that Americans should, sadly, be prepared for. In the hours after federal agents began a court-approved search of Mr. Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, based on a warrant investigating possible violations of three federal laws, including one that governs the handling of defense information under the Espionage Act, his most fervent supporters escalated their rhetoric to the language of warfare. As The Times noted, “The aggressive, widespread response was arguably the clearest outburst of violent public rhetoric since the days leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”

Mr. Garland has been deliberate, methodical and scrupulous in his leadership of the Justice Department’s investigations of the Jan. 6 attack and the transfer of documents to Mr. Trump’s home. On Friday a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the warrant was released, revealing that the Justice Department asked to search the premises to recover documents because of concerns that their disclosure could compromise “clandestine human sources” of intelligence and because it had probable cause to believe it would find “evidence of obstruction” at the premises.

No matter how careful Mr. Garland is or how measured the prosecution might be, there is a real and significant risk from those who believe that any criticism of Mr. Trump justifies an extreme response.

Yet it is a far greater risk to do nothing when action is called for. Aside from letting Mr. Trump escape punishment, doing nothing to hold him accountable for his actions in the months leading up to Jan. 6 could set an irresistible precedent for future presidents. Why not attempt to stay in power by any means necessary or use the power of the office to enrich oneself or punish one’s enemies, knowing that the law does not apply to presidents in or out of office?

More important, democratic government is an ideal that must constantly be made real. America is not sustained by a set of principles; it is sustained by resolute action to defend those principles.

Immediately after the Jan. 6 insurrection, cabinet members reportedly debated privately whether to remove Mr. Trump from power under the authority of the 25th Amendment. A week after the attack, the House impeached Mr. Trump for the second time. This editorial board supported his impeachment and removal from office; we also suggested that the former president and lawmakers who participated in the Jan. 6 plot could be permanently barred from holding office under a provision of the 14th Amendment that applies to any official who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or given “aid or comfort” to those who have done so. But most Republicans in the Senate refused to convict Mr. Trump, and Congress has yet to invoke that section of the 14th Amendment against him. As a result, the threat that Mr. Trump and his most ardent supporters pose to American democracy has metastasized.

Even now, the former president continues to spread lies about the 2020 election and denounce his vice president, Mike Pence, for not breaking the law on his behalf. Meanwhile, dozens of people who believe Mr. Trump’s lies are running for state and national elected office. Many have already won, some of them elevated to positions that give them control over how elections are conducted. In June the Republican Party in Texas approved measures in its platform declaring that Mr. Biden’s election was illegitimate. And Mr. Trump appears prepared to start a bid for a second term as president.

Mr. Trump’s actions as a public official, like no others since the Civil War, attacked the heart of our system of government. He used the power of his office to subvert the rule of law. If we hesitate to call those actions and their perpetrator criminal, then we are saying he is above the law and giving license to future presidents to do whatever they want.

In addition to a federal investigation by the Justice Department, Mr. Trump is facing a swirl of civil and criminal liability in several other cases: a lawsuit by the attorney general for the District of Columbia over payments during his inauguration ceremonies; a criminal investigation in Westchester County, N.Y., over taxes on one of his golf courses; a criminal case in Fulton County, Ga., over interference in the 2020 election; a criminal case by the Manhattan district attorney over the valuation of Mr. Trump’s properties; and a civil inquiry by New York’s attorney general into Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization.

The specific crimes the Justice Department could consider would likely involve Mr. Trump’s fraudulent efforts to get election officials in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere to declare him the winner even though he lost their states; to get Mr. Pence, at the Jan. 6 congressional certification of the election, to throw out slates of electors from states he lost and replace them with electors loyal to Mr. Trump; and to enlist officials from the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense to persuade officials in certain states to swing the election to him and ultimately stir up a mob that attacked the Capitol. The government could also charge Mr. Trump with seditious conspiracy, a serious charge that federal prosecutors have already brought against leaders of far-right militia groups who participated in the Capitol invasion.

The committee hearings make it clear: Mr. Trump must have known he was at the center of a frantic, sprawling and knowingly fraudulent effort that led directly to the Capitol siege. For hours, Mr. Trump refused to call off the mob.

The testimony from hundreds of witnesses, many of them high-ranking Republican officials from his own administration, reveals Mr. Trump’s unrelenting efforts, beginning months before Election Day and continuing through Jan. 6, to sow doubt about the election, to refuse to accept the result of that election and then to pursue what he must have known were illegal and unconstitutional means to overturn it. Many participants sought pre-emptive pardons for their conduct — an indication they knew they were violating the law.

Other evidence points to other crimes, like obstruction of Congress, defined as a corrupt obstruction of the “proper administration of the law.” The fake-elector scheme that Mr. Trump and his associates pushed before Jan. 6 appears to meet this definition. That may explain why at least three of Mr. Trump’s campaign lawyers were unwilling to participate in the plot. People involved in it were told it was not “legally sound” by White House lawyers, but they moved forward with it anyway.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, provided powerful evidence that could be used to charge Mr. Trump with seditious conspiracy. In her public testimony at a Jan. 6 committee hearing, she said that Mr. Trump was informed that many in the throng of supporters waiting to hear him speak on the Ellipse that day were armed but that he demanded they be allowed to skip the metal detectors that had been installed for his security. “They’re not here to hurt me,” he said, according to Ms. Hutchinson. “Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”

If Mr. Garland decides to pursue prosecution, a message that the Justice Department must send early and often is that even if Mr. Trump genuinely believed, as he claimed, that the election had been marred by fraud, his schemes to interfere in the certification of the vote would still be crimes. And even though Mr. Trump’s efforts failed, these efforts would still be crimes. More than 850 other Americans have already been charged with crimes for their roles in the Capitol attack. Well-meaning intentions did not shield them from the consequences of their actions. It would be unjust if Mr. Trump, the man who inspired them, faced no consequences.

No one should revel in the prospect of this or any former president facing criminal prosecution. Mr. Trump’s actions have brought shame on one of the world’s oldest democracies and destabilized its future. Even justice before the law will not erase that stain. Nor will prosecuting Mr. Trump fix the structural problems that led to the greatest crisis in American democracy since the Civil War. But it is a necessary first step toward doing so.

THE NOOSE IS TIGHTENING AROUND THIS FILTHY PIG'S NECK

 

3 big things we learned from the Mar-a-Lago affidavit

 

By Greg Sargent

Columnist|Following

August 26, 2022 at 3:56 p.m. EDT

 

In the Mar-a-Lago saga, Donald Trump has offered several big defenses. First, the former president has reportedly insisted to aides that he primarily took from the White House documents that were “mine.” Second, he has suggested he always intended to do the right thing and turn over government documents in his possession. Third, he has said in many ways that the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of his Florida estate amounted to illegitimate jackbooted tyranny.

Now that the Justice Department has released a redacted version of the affidavit the FBI filed before getting a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, those arguments look even shakier.

The affidavit was released on Friday after federal Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart ordered the Justice Department to produce a redacted version, and then approved those redactions as reasonable to protect the investigation and the identities of witnesses. Here are three things the affidavit tells us:

Trump improperly hoarded a large amount of documents, including ones potentially identifying human intelligence sources

The affidavit describes in detail what the FBI found when it reviewed 15 boxes of documents that Trump provided to the National Archives in January, after archives officials had sounded the alarm about missing materials. (The Archives subsequently referred the matter to the Justice Department. 

Those included 184 documents that were marked as classified, including some as highly classified. The affidavit suggests these contained classified National Defense Information, or potentially very sensitive top-secret information relevant to national security. Some appeared to bear Trump’s “handwritten notes.”

The affidavit also says markings on the documents included “HCS,” or human intelligence sources. Experts tell me it’s not clear whether this refers to information about people who are intelligence sources or information provided by such sources. Either way, they said, failure to secure such documents could compromise the identities of people providing the United States with important information from sensitive positions.

This badly undermines the notion that Trump merely kept a bunch of documents for sentimental reasons, such as his letter from the North Korean leader, because they were “mine. 

Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman says the government typically treats documents about confidential national security sources as “among its most valuable and protected secrets.”

“Because they involve references to confidential sources, particularly in the national security area, they are not the type of things anyone can maintain as souvenirs of service,” Richman told me.

Remember, it’s been reported that Trump’s own aides tried to get this information handed over to the National Archives but that Trump resisted. We now have a clearer picture of what he did not want to give back.

This could get much bigger

At one point, the affidavit requests that a judge keep the document sealed because it could compromise the ongoing investigation and because “the FBI has not yet identified all potential criminal confederates.”

Obviously, the document has been unsealed, with redactions. But that passage strongly suggests that the investigation could broaden out to more criminal suspects.

National security lawyer Bradley Moss says this raises questions about who the FBI’s true target is right now. “Is it just Donald Trump?” Moss asked rhetorically. “Or some of his staff?”

We don’t know whether Trump or anyone around him will be charged with any crimes. But we do know that in approving this warrant, a federal judge concluded that evidence presented amounted to “probable cause” to conclude three statutes may have been violated.

Those statutes are the Espionage Act, a law against destroying or concealing documents with intent to obstruct an investigation or administration of other U.S. government matters, and a third involving mistreatment of government documents.

We now know the pool of potential suspects for these crimes could grow. As Moss told me: “The full scope of what this could result in is not yet defined.”

Trump’s conspiracy-theorizing is baloney

Trump is already seizing on the redactions to imply that more illegitimate law enforcement targeting of him is being covered up. He raged on Truth Social: “Affidavit heavily redacted!!!”

But what was disclosed in the affidavit has already confirmed that Trump had enormous piles of highly sensitive documents in his possession long after the National Archives wanted them back.

The affidavit also reveals that as late as June 8, the Justice Department sent a letter to Trump’s counsel suggesting that classified documents were still at Mar-a-Lago and still not being secured. The fact that the subsequent search found a large number of highly sensitive documents confirms that the department was right to suspect that.

“Over and over, the concerns about Trump’s conduct have been substantiated,” Moss told me.

And remember, a judge read these redactions and agreed that they were essential to preserve the integrity of the investigation.

“We don’t know what’s under the redactions,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “But the judge thought they were appropriate.”

 

 

How the redacted FBI affidavit reveals depth of Trump’s legal peril

 

By Jennifer Rubin

Columnist|Following

August 26, 2022 at 3:12 p.m. EDT

The redacted FBI affidavit released on Friday regarding the Aug. 8 search of the defeated former president’s Florida estate reveals many things about Donald Trump’s legal peril. It confirmed, for example, that the government is “conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records.”

To state it more plainly: The defeated former president is being investigated for potential violation of several statutes pertaining to his illegal retention and storage of official documents containing sensitive secrets.

Brookings Institution scholar Norman Ornstein points out that we quickly learned from the redacted affidavit that there was no lock on Trump’s storage area. Beyond that, Ornstein says, “There is no revelation here beyond what we knew — which is just devastating to Trump.” The former president had “documents, including the most sensitive national security secrets, handled in a slapdash fashion, kept in multiple unsecured locations, intermixed with photos and family stuff.” Ornstein observes the plethora of “lies about what had and had not been returned [and] laughable assertions about Trump’s ability to declassify unilaterally.”

He concludes, “It reinforces how dangerous Trump is to the nation, and that is without any information yet about what malign reasons he had for grabbing these documents.”

Here are five takeaways from the redacted affidavit:

 

There were a LOT of documents

Of the 15 boxes Trump staffers returned to government possession in January, 14 contained super-secret information. “A preliminary triage of the documents with classification markings revealed the following approximate numbers: 184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.” The preliminary review, conducted in May, found additional markings such as “HCS, FISA, ORCON, NOFORN, and SI.” These notations relate to national security secrets — one, HCS, indicates a category of highly classified government information; another refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — including human and signals intelligence 

Trump had no right to retain these documents, the affidavit asserts, because “Classified information of any designation may be shared only with persons determined by an appropriate United States Government official to be eligible for access, and who possess a ‘need to know.’ ” These were government documents, not Trump’s personal papers 

In citing 18 USC 793(e), the government asserts that Trump had no right to refuse to return any document “relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” He was no longer authorized to receive or retain such documents. Hence, his legal liability is acute.

 

The claim of declassification is evidence against Trump

It is telling that the government wants to highlight the argument from Trump’s team, raised in particular by Kash Patel, that Trump had a standing order to declassify the materials. (“FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 asked DOJ to consider a few ‘principles,’ which include FPOTUS COUNSEL 1′s claim that a President has absolute authority to declassify documents.” This is nonsense both factually and legally. It is also irrelevant to the retention of any government documents. There are no such principles that would help Trump here.

In a damning footnote, the government points out that “18 U.S.C. § 793(e) does not use the term ‘classified information,’ but rather criminalizes the unlawful retention of ‘information relating to the national defense.’ ” In other words, the notion that Trump could declassify documents at will is a fantasy. Classification is beside the point.

 

We don’t know how the government knew Trump still had more documents

This portion of the affidavit is redacted, a necessary (and expected) measure to protect the investigation and identity of witnesses. If the Trump brain trust thought they were going to get the name of a “mole,” they really are living in fantasy land.

 

Trump had no right to keep top-secret documents in an unsecured location

Quoting from a June 8 letter the Justice Department sent to Trump’s lawyer, the affidavit states, “As I previously indicated to you, Mar-a-Lago does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information. As such, it appears that since the time classified documents [redacted] were removed from the secure facilities at the White House and moved to Mar-a-Lago on or around January 20, 2021, they have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location.” That’s damning evidence of Trump’s violations of statutes. (The affidavit notes: “Pursuant to Executive Order 13526, classified information contained on automated information systems, including networks and telecommunications systems, that collect, create, communicate, compute, disseminate, process, or store classified information must be maintained in a manner that: (1) prevents access by unauthorized persons; and (2) ensures the integrity of the information.”)

 

We don’t know what actions might have violated the obstruction statute (Section 1519) and the mutilation statute (Section 2071)

The latter subjects to criminal punishment “Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing ...”). We know from news reports that certain documents were torn. But we do not know whether Trump attempted to destroy or alter other documents. (His handwriting was found on some.) The New York Times previously reported that subpoenaed surveillance “footage showed that, after one instance in which Justice Department officials were in contact with Mr. Trump’s team, boxes were moved in and out of the room.”

In sum, Trump is in heap of trouble. “The chilling reality is setting in,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. "In seeking this search warrant, the government had obviously exhausted every less intrusive way of protecting national defense information and other extremely sensitive top-secret material from those who illegally removed it to Mar-a-Lago, lied to government agencies about its being there, and kept it there for reasons that cannot have been entirely innocent and might have been unimaginably dangerous to our nation.”

Tribe adds: “Mr. Trump must regret having bragged that this search was baseless rather than coming up with some less easily refuted account of what he had been up to, because no rational person, after reading the affidavit even with its redactions, could doubt that there was more than just probable cause to believe that federal crimes of the most serious kind ... had been committed and, in some instances, were still being committed at the Mar-a-Lago premises.” In other words: The government caught Trump with top-secret documents and appears to have found that he hadn’t turned over all of them as his lawyer represented. Trump’s apologists might want to disentangle themselves from him before they thoroughly embarrass themselves.

 

Rump - America’s Oval Office Embarrassment

 

      America’s Oval Office Embarrassment

        

So….Donald Trump actually stole over 300 documents from the American people, some of them of the highest security classifications posing inestimable dangers to agents, operatives, assets and allies around the world — not to mention exposing sources and methods to any and all hostile foreign nations — and kept them in ill-secured storerooms above one of the ballrooms, a storage closet next to one of the outdoor pools, and in the basement at his golf club with hundreds of paid members who have unchallenged access along with their guests and others who stroll onto the property from time to time, including adventurous teenagers and at least one now-tried, convicted, jailed and deported Chinese spy, with random people going in and out all the time and inadequate locks on the doors.

How many more travesties can we be expected to absorb. Over the course of his terrifying reign, the U.S. was exposed to years of international embarrassment and possibly far, far worse than mere global humiliation. His conducting of an emergency security meeting and strategy session in full view of scores of paying guests at Mar-a-Lago was an early breach of so many security protocols, and presented clear evidence for impeachment on grounds of mental unfitness.

As has now been widely publicized to the shame and woe of security experts everywhere, one of the Mar-a-Lago paying guests had their picture taken with the High Security military staff person who carries the ‘Nuclear Football, the president’s portable nuclear launch trigger, and posted it on Facebook, thus identifying the top secret attache and his briefcase full of payload and its triggering device. Presumably, selfie opportunities are part of what Mar-a-Lago guests are paying for? (Also, RE: the emergency situation of N. Korea having launched their new ground to air missile device in the general direction of Japan — Does anyone remember that Trump specifically encouraged N. Korea and Japan to ‘get into it’ in terms of nuclear hostilities during the campaign? ’Cause I sure do! Being a sociopathic malignant narcissist, he probably not-so-secretly congratulated himself that someone actually took his advice.)

Allowing his ‘guests’/customers to take selfies with top secret security personnel, photograph and post on Facebook the High Security meeting conducted in full view of the diners at an outdoor party, is just plain nuts.

For someone who cruised to power claiming to improve America’s national security, and committed heinous and unlawful acts ever since assuming office in the increasingly mocked and degraded name of national security, the Scary Fool’s current state of national ‘security’ affairs was left glaringly insecure, in the extreme, with the joker’s National Security Advisor, Flynn, having ‘resigned,’ under a thick, dark, Russian-hued cloud. Terms used in the press to describe the Fool and his administration included: “psychosis” “sociopathy” “malignant” “fascist” and “Misprision of Treason.”

As Will Drabold announced on Valentine’s Day 2017 in Policy.Mic, “In Donald Trump’s Washington, it’s not the crime that gets you fired. It’s getting caught for it.” The evident malfeasance of Trump’s administration within its first two weeks was beyond what any rational democratic process could be expected to tolerate. The ongoing daily shit show blasted into obscurity legitimate news stories such as the fact that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s estranged half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, once the North Korean despotic heir-apparent, was killed under mysterious circumstances in Malaysia, as reported in the wall Street Journal (February 15, 2017), or the significant protests staged by ‘A Day Without Immigrants’ initiative that crippled business, arts and culture industries and services across the nation.

How is some stupid and dangerous-for-the-whole-world mishegoss like this avoided in future, given that the American Public evidently can not be relied upon to elect a decent human being to highest office?

It seems absurd to posit but, given the Trump example, should not candidates for the American presidency, the most powerful political office on Earth — militarily, economically, ideologically — every way money can buy, be vetted for basic competency (at the very least) in future — by the parties elevating them to the contest, if no one else? A nation so powerful and with such destructive potential has no right to be so lax about who it allows to be elevated to the position of ‘leader of the free world.’ It’s negligence, reckless endangerment of the planet, dereliction of duty, wholly irresponsible.

Basic competency requirements would preclude a serial bankrupt from assuming highest office, one would think. If he couldn’t even get a bank loan or a line of credit except via Deutsche Bank, the Russian oligarch money launderer’s bank of choice, how on earth could he serve as president of the U.S.? It’s ridiculous, needs an overhaul, or it’s definitively ‘tits up’ for the American experiment. The writing’s already all over the wall — some standards, please. Donald Trump wouldn’t even have been able to get a mortgage or rent an apartment through normal channels; he would have failed the credit check.

How about a basic civics test, if only of the level given immigrants and candidates for American citizenship? Or a basic literacy and comprehension test, of the sort Trump would have failed most spectacularly? Knowledge and comprehension of the U.S. Constitution? Of Law? Ethics? Political principles? Something? ANYTHING?

Trump doesn’t know what anything is or signifies other than whether it accrues to his advantage or disadvantage. That’s it — his sole cognitive function.

And he held executive powers in the most powerful nation on Earth.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Fight Back Against Ageism

It's very real, but you don't have to make a meek exit. You've forgotten more than most of the youngsters know: learn how to turn yourself into a survivor. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

I just finished reading the latest in a series of posts by older folk who - much to their surprise and chagrin - were recently and abruptly laid off after what they described as decades of gainful and often exemplary employment. Some were at relatively new businesses which were retrenching, and others were at long-established firms that were seizing on the pandemic to streamline staffs that had grown too large. These things are always somewhat of an unpleasant surprise, but I'm not sure that all these events came as quite as much of a shock as they've been depicted, for two primary reasons.

First, because anyone over a certain age - call it 50 years old - in just about any business (whether it's growing or going slowly away) finds themselves regularly and somewhat worriedly looking over their shoulders at the people coming up behind them and alternatively looking somewhat longingly at the exit door and wondering if it's time to think about calling it a career. They wonder if they can still compete (or really want to) and they aren't sure that their painfully acquired skills still have value. Sadly, experience is sometimes what you get when you don't get what you want. And some experiences don't toughen you up or make you wiser, they just tire you out.

These moderately enervated folks are part of a growing, aging crowd who have come to understand that, while experience and expertise are regarded as valuable in any organization, the rules are changing. Especially in startup and tech environments, the driving vision of the organization is far less predicated on skill and execution and far more based on "creativity," which is to say buying into the vision that's driving the dream. If you're intent on changing the ways things have always been done, you don't really care about how well someone did it in the past. Talking a good game is sometimes more important today than walking the walk and getting the job done every day.

Blind faith in the bright future trumps brutal facts and frank realism, in many cases. As you age, some degree of cynicism and practicality slips in and necessarily replaces the unfettered and inexperienced idealism of your youth. Ideals are replaced by goals, which is logical. Rather than faith, you have experience, but this isn't a conversation that many people are interested in having these days. Caution, care, and patience aren't in high demand or always welcome in the rah-rah entrepreneurial world, where the prime mantra is often: "sometimes wrong, but never in doubt".

Second, it's increasingly difficult to comfort and console yourself as well as alleviate some of your anxieties based on your prior efforts, service, and even proven results. Your work still has meaning to you, but it's not necessarily appreciated or valued by the powers that be. You feel like the goal posts keep getting unfairly moved, the new metrics and measurements are somewhat foreign and a little too techy for you, not to mention the fact that the teams, players, and decision makers around you all keep getting younger.

But whether the layoffs were shocks, surprises, or maybe even overdue, they are part of a much larger and serious issue particularly for ill-equipped startups. Fast moving and quickly growing entrepreneurial businesses don't have the luxury of extensive historical processes to address these kinds of involuntary attrition issues. They don't have large HR departments to manage people into and out of the business. And, perhaps most importantly, they have relatively poor, anecdotal documentation regarding the actual contributions of individual employees which, if available, would clearly help senior management make the right hiring, promoting, and firing decisions.

Too many growth-stage businesses in today's scaling-back economy -- where definite cuts and aggressive belt tightening are now required -- are discarding seasoned professionals and dumping "theoretically" expensive and older talent for three primary reasons: (1) they're using age as a quick and dirty shorthand for assumed obsolescence because it's easier than looking more deeply into individuals' actual contributions; (2) they've never seen really hard times so they don't appreciate that the folks who get you through the rough patches aren't the newbies-; they're the ones who've seen the movie before; and (3) they're in such a hurry to cut their costs and reduce their burn rate that they're sacrificing years of customer connections, vendor relationships and legacy knowledge, which are even more meaningful right now as the business world is still shaky and remains relatively remote. In fearful times, clients, and customers fall back to friends and familiar faces - not five-year-olds.

But if you're in the hot seat, what specifically can you do to show your strengths and value, and try to discreetly slow the steamroller heading your way?

First, keep learning. Growth stage companies are so consumed by the day-to-day emergencies that they lose sight of the need to invest in the future, which means in part investing in their people. They don't like to hear about training, out of town conferences or extracurricular activities; they want everyone to be heads-down and working every day. But ultimately the keepers in any business are the ones who keep learning and growing rather than standing still. Only you can prevent forest fires.

Second, remember that computers and machines show us how powerful they are only when they stop working. It's almost always the gray hairs who get things going again because they have the institutional knowledge about the skeletons in the closet, and the willingness to wade through the legacy systems and the spaghetti code that the core of the business is still built on. Don't forget to discretely remind the boss that you fixed things the last time they broke. There's no compression algorithm for experience-- we learn and get better over time and through constant iteration as well as plenty of mistakes.

Third, the folks who are building the future technologies are vital, but the business today always depends on the teams that keep the trains on the tracks, and the clients and customers satisfied and secure in the knowledge that there are responsible grownups in the room at crunch time. Anyone in a new client meeting who hasn't watched the prospect immediately gravitate to the oldest person on the team simply doesn't appreciate how the world works.

Fourth, don't sell yourself short. If you're not invested in yourself and your future, why would anyone else? As you age, you either become your best or worst self. It's largely up to you. You've got a lot to share with the younger members of the team and frankly you're the most likely veteran to keep the kids from building the greatest software never sold or developing a new solution for no known problem.

Vision and wisdom are two radically different skill sets. The best teams take advantage of their people's relative strengths in each area.  Rampant activity may be a cure for an entrepreneur's anxiety, but busy-ness isn't the same as business. It's hard to preach patience in an impatient world. But planning and prudence still have a great deal to do with building a business that will be around for generations.

AUG 23, 2022